Along Came Trouble(39)

Ellen pulled a bunch of vegetables out of the fridge and called Jamie. When he didn’t answer, she sent him a text. Richard is back.

He called two minutes later, while she was still washing the lettuce.

“What does Dickhead want?”

“‘Hi, Ellen,’” she answered. “‘How are you? It sure is good to hear your voice.’”

“I’d barely even heard your voice yet.”

“But now you have.”

He sighed. “Hi, Ellen. How are you? Everything sucks here, and it’s really good to hear your voice.”

“That’s better. Richard is sober. He wants to make amends.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Apparently it means he gets to touch my arm and call me ‘Els’ again.”

Jamie made a sound of disgust. She’d never liked Richard’s nickname for her, but Jamie had taken it as a personal affront.

“Did you tell him where he could stick that idea?”

“More or less, yeah.”

She started peeling carrots and filling Jamie in on both encounters, trying to make it funnier than it had been in reality.

“I don’t see where he gets off suggesting you should let him see Henry more when he hardly ever bothers to show up for the visits he’s got,” her brother observed.

It was a fair point. Three times out of four, Richard missed his visits with Henry at Maureen’s house. He failed to show so often that she and Maureen had agreed not to tell the boy to expect him. They didn’t want Henry to spend his childhood waiting around for a father who didn’t turn up.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He is Henry’s father. If he’s sober, I suppose he has a right to get to know his son better.”

“Henry doesn’t need a father. He’s got me.” Jamie had done his best to be a decent stand-in dad, since both of them knew what it was like to grow up fatherless. Theirs had died before they were old enough to remember him. It was a phantom-limb situation: you got used to the absence, but you could always feel it, and sometimes it itched. Sometimes it ached. Always, it sucked.

“You live in Los Angeles.”

“True, but at least I’m not going to get bored with him and run off after some bimbo with a D-cup.”

The bra she’d found underneath the marital bed had actually been a 36C, but Ellen didn’t bother saying so. Henry had been the size of a kidney bean in her uterus at the time, an uninvited guest whom she’d already decided to let stick around. The bra was exactly what she’d needed to make up her mind that she wasn’t going to raise her child with an alcoholic serial adulterer. She couldn’t trust Richard not to wound their baby, and she’d understood what a bad role model she would be for her son or daughter if she continued to put up with the way her husband treated her.

What she hadn’t understood was that the harm had already been done. Or not done, exactly, but foreordained. Richard had fathered her son, and so he would always be her son’s father. Every month, her baby got older, and the day when he would fall under Richard’s spell drew closer. Sooner or later, Henry was going to decide his daddy was the most interesting, remarkable, amazing man alive, just like Ellen had. And then Richard was going to grind Henry’s heart to powder under the heel of his motorcycle boot, just like he’d ground up hers.

It turned out they grew back. Hers had, anyway. But she worried for her son, hoping he wouldn’t have to pay for her mistakes. Knowing that sooner or later, he almost certainly would.

She sliced celery up fine and tried to formulate any reply other than “Yeah.” Nothing came to her.

She’d given herself to Richard cheaply, putting a bargain-basement price tag on her love and devotion. Jamie had never been able to wrap his mind around why she’d let Richard woo her, why she’d stuck by him for three years when he’d valued her so little. But then, Jamie had grown up in the spotlight, with all the benefit of their mother’s unalloyed affection and the approval of every casting agent and director who’d seen him perform and told him he was brilliant and talented and special.

Ellen had been raised in the wings, charged by her mother with keeping Jamie’s stage outfits clean and complaining to the management when his dressing room didn’t have the required brand of bottled water. She’d spent her whole childhood in the shadow of her handsome, charismatic brother. What could have been more natural than marrying the first handsome, charismatic man who told her he needed her by his side? No one but Jamie had ever expected her to do more than play a supporting role.