“She wouldn’t take him home?”
“Left him high and dry.”
“What did he say to her?”
Becca and Ben have just climbed into the king-sized bed and are reclined into a pile of body and throw pillows, pretending to read. Ben frictions his feet playfully under the goose-down comforter, trying to heat the sheets.
“I don’t know that he said a thing. Maybe he was just being himself. You know how Cecil is. Though he was pretty well worked up. Wouldn’t talk about it. Aura, this is his nurse, she was sitting right there next to him . . .”
“Like a proper date.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe this tripped his wire. Plus, she’s black.”
“Oh no,” Becca hides behind her People magazine, the cover of which features Nicole Simpson’s battered face under a headline shouting: WHY NOBODY HELPED NICOLE.
“Oh dear goodness. He didn’t . . .”
“Who knows. I was out on the floor with Mac and the Amazon for that shooting contest. Boy has Mac gotten fat, he . . .”
“She has a name, Ben.”
“I know it.”
“What is her name?”
“Aura.”
“Aura!” Becca reappears, her brow beetled with loving tenderness. “I love love love this name!”
“I had to give Cecil a ride home after the game.”
“It’s lucky for him you were there.”
Ben clamps his book shut and turns to Becca. He can’t believe how good she looks right now: sans makeup, hair falling lush and dusky about those dainty, pajama’d shoulders.
“What’s the secret to your beauty, missus Porter? True love? Vitamin B? Fountain of youth?”
Becca retreats back into her magazine and herself.
“Moisturizer.”
“What did I do?”
“Why does it always have to be about you?”
“It should be about someone else?”
“Cecil needs you,” Becca says, in a tone she typically reserves for disciplinary action.
“I know that. Look . . . I do. But he doesn’t. Or does and won’t admit it. I went over there again on Sunday and they’d already dispatched his new nurse, some namby-pamby white boy looks like he hasn’t even graduated Perkins High.”
“It’s good Aura found a replacement so quickly.”
“Good? She abandoned him, Becca.”
“What could he have said?”
“Any old thing at all. Sometimes tip-toeing around those moods of his is like having a toddler-bomb strapped to your back. Remember when Sarah was three? How she’d get at bedtime? There just wasn’t any reasoning with her.”
Becca abandons her magazine and burrows closer, spooning her hips into Ben with sudden urgency.
“Thank God those days are over.”
“You don’t miss it? Not even a little?”
“Not even a bit.”
“Really?”
“I always thought I was a pretty decent father . . .”
“You are a . . .”
“. . . until Sarah and Reese left the house.”
“What does that mean?”
“Twenty-four years we surrendered to those two,” Ben explains. “Fretting about naptimes and carpools and extracurricular activities and how best to micromanage their little lives. What should they eat and who should they be friends with and where should they go to sleepaway camp and then college and what career will make them happy and then one day it’s all over—poof!—just like a dream. And all I felt, if I’m honest, in that moment, was freedom. Relief. Free at last, I’m thinking, free at last!”
“We?”
“Okay, you. You were doing most of this work.”
“Most?”
“Okay. You were doing all of this work. I had the business to run. But we never had much time for . . . just this. Us. And now we do.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We have all of this time, you say. So why don’t you spend more of yours with me?”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t believe you believe you.”
After a considerable silence, a silence that tempts Ben to think he could still get lucky this evening, she says, “You really don’t think you’re a good father?”
“I don’t think I’m a bad one. But if I was good, or at least better, wouldn’t the kids be coming home? Wouldn’t they be calling?”
Becca can’t, or won’t, argue with this. Ben nuzzles her hair.
“I need a favor,” she says.
“Anything for you, m’dear,” he agrees immediately, hugging her closer.
“There’s this thing I’m doing with the kids down at the shelter. They need me to submit a background check.”
“You can’t be too careful around kids, I guess.”
“They’ll want one from you.”
“Don’t worry, honey. I am pure as the driven snow.”
Becca laughs.
“Is this about the deaf and dumb one? The little—whatshisface—Mexican boy of yours?”
Becca scootches back to her side of the bed, cold-shouldering Ben’s advances.
“His name is Caleb. And he’s not a Mexican, he’s a Choctaw Indian. And yes. It is about him.”
“What did I do now?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re not a very good liar.”
Becca switches off the lamp on her bedside table.
“Lucky for you.”
“Becca! I’m just . . .”
“Being yourself. I know.”