The Wife Stalker(52)
34
Joanna
I watched her yesterday. Sitting there, pretending to be their mother, while completely ignoring them and typing on her iPad. She didn’t see me; she wasn’t paying attention to anyone, was just hammering away on her stupid tablet, likely writing more platitudinous tripe. I am incensed that she has the nerve to keep me away from the children when she clearly doesn’t even care about them herself.
As she sat ignoring them, I wanted to yell: Put down your damn iPad and watch the kids. I’d told Stelli time and time again he had to be older before using that tall slide—it was for sixth graders and up. But when he’d looked over and seen that Piper wasn’t watching, he’d tromped right toward it. I wanted to run over and stop him but couldn’t risk going against the court order. Before I could decide what to do, he went flying down on his stomach and hit the ground hard. It had taken everything in me not to run to him and sweep him up into my arms. I cried as I watched her finally get up off that bench. Another mom had run over, too, but I’m the one who should have been there comforting him.
Tears streamed silently down my face as she hustled them off to the car. I couldn’t tell how badly he was cut, or if he needed stitches. After they left, I sat in the car for another half hour, seething, then drove myself home.
When I got there, Mom was in bed and complained that she was too tired to get up for dinner. I took a bowl of soup up to her, then poured a glass of wine for myself and carried it outside to the tiny back porch, where there was barely enough room for two folding metal chairs. As I sat in one of them, I noticed that the plastic weaving was fraying in several places. A chain-link fence ran around the perimeter of the narrow yard, and untrimmed grass was a half foot high against its edges. My mother said you could always tell which houses in the neighborhood didn’t have a man around by how neglected they looked, and I guess our house was Exhibit A. I sat and sipped, watching the sun go lower into the sky, and thinking more about Stelli’s accident, and grew increasingly angry. He could have hit his head, gotten a concussion, broken an arm—the possibilities were terrifying. What if there was a next time and the injury was more serious?
The blood was pounding in my temples as I downed the rest of the wine, took the cell phone from my pocket, and called her. I had copied her number from Leo’s phone while we were still together. The minute I heard that soft tentative hello, I told her she needed to take better care with him, but she started yelling at me, telling me to leave them alone. I begged her to let me talk to Stelli, to make sure he was okay, but she refused, telling me he was just fine, and then the witch screamed at me not to call her, saying she would call the police if I bothered them again, and disconnected the call.
She’s got Leo right where she wants him, and he’s blind to her game. I recalled my conversation with Ava, when she’d told me Piper had hated her stepdaughter, and began to wonder if Piper’s intention had been to get rid of only Mia. Maybe Matthew had been collateral damage. Was she planning to kill Stelli and Evie, too, so she could have Leo all to herself? I went inside, my head still pounding, and lay down on the sofa as darkness began to fill the room.
I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, my mother was gently shaking my arm.
“You should go up to bed.”
I sat up and looked outside. The sun was just coming up. “Why are you up so early?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “My leg hurt, and I came down to get some aspirin. I called for you, but you didn’t hear me.” She sat down next to me. “Honey, you need to get yourself together. It isn’t like you to mope around this way.”
She was right. It was more like her, but I didn’t say so. “I had a bad day. Stelli got hurt.”
“Oh, honey. Is he . . . Wait, how do you know?”
I told her what I’d seen at the park. “I think I’m going to call Leo and tell him what she did.”
“Don’t bother, Joanna. She’s already told him her version of events, and he’s not going to listen to yours. You need to forget about him once and for all.”
“What are you talking about? I can’t forget about him. Leo and the children belong with me.”
She waved her hand dismissively and shook her head. “He married her. Men always get what they want, and we’re left with nothing.” She reached out and clasped my hand. “At least we have each other.”
I looked at her in her rumpled robe and matted hair, the forty extra pounds she carried on her doughy body, and thought, No wonder my father left, and then was immediately struck by guilt. She couldn’t help that she was sick—even if she may have milked her condition over the years—and that my father had turned out to be the liar she’d always claimed him to be.
I stood up. “I’m going to go get dressed.”
“Good. Maybe you ought to start looking for that job you talked about, now that I’m feeling better. Get your mind off things.”
On some level, I knew she was right, but I couldn’t devote my energy to job hunting right now. If only I’d listened to my head instead of my heart. Instead of taking care of Leo and the kids all these years, I should have followed my own dream. I could have been a good lawyer—at least as good as Leo, maybe even better. I took some pre-law courses in college. After I got my associate’s degree, I was ready to go on to get my bachelor’s, but problems with Mom always seemed to come up. Some emergency or other. It was too much, trying to work full-time, take care of her, and go to school all at once. I just couldn’t do it. I have always regretted it.