Lance stepped into the house from the garage, and Caitlin sprang out from the kitchen with a wild look in her eyes. She had been waiting for him. There was a time, early in their marriage, when such a greeting might have preceded a passionate lovemaking session, but those days of carnal spontaneity seemed to be behind them. He might not have been able to tell just what that look was in Caitlin’s eyes, but he knew it wasn’t lust.
“I’m surprised you didn’t decide to swing by to visit your mother on the way home,” Caitlin said.
Lance tried to decipher the remark. His mother and stepfather lived in Atkins, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t exactly a place he could swing by on his way home from work, nor had he ever done so. Was Caitlin suggesting he was late getting home? It was true he had been working some longer days lately, but he had texted her to let her know he was on the way.
“Sorry, the traffic was bad,” he said in an attempt to placate her. He still had his jacket on. He hadn’t taken more than two steps into the house.
“Don’t try to change the subject,” she said.
“And what exactly is the subject?” He managed to edge past her. He set his keys in the little dish on the hallway table and went to the coat closet. She followed so close on his heels that he had to take care not to elbow her as he slipped off his jacket. He hung it on a hanger and placed it in the closet, then turned to look at his fiery-eyed wife. He tried to defuse the situation by saying in a half joking, half serious way, “Hi, honey, how was your day?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’d love to know so you can give Raquel a full report.”
Damn it. His mother had called. He had specifically instructed her not to, but when had his mother ever done as he asked?
“She cares about you,” Lance said. His mother had been the subject of more than one argument, and a big part of the reason was that Caitlin seemed to think Raquel didn’t really like her. Perhaps at first his social-climbing mother had regrets about Lance’s choice of a partner, but she had come around and saw that Caitlin was a supportive wife and a good mother.
“Well, maybe that’s what I can tell Brittney when she asks where the project I was supposed to finish today is,” Caitlin said. “My mother-in-law cares about me. That should go over well.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Lance said. He slipped past her again and went into the kitchen. He flipped through the slim pile of mail on the counter while Caitlin watched him from the doorway. There were no pots on the stove, and the oven was cold.
“It’s like she doesn’t even understand that I work for a living. She must think I hang around here all day eating bonbons.”
“She doesn’t think that,” Lance said. “She just—”
“Loves to stick her nose in where it doesn’t belong?” Caitlin supplied. She saw him glancing around the kitchen. “Yeah, well, you can thank your mother for dinner not being ready. I’ve been trying to finish up that project I was working on when she interrupted me.”
“She shouldn’t have called you when you were working,” Lance said. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll talk to her.”
He hugged Caitlin and smoothed her hair with the palm of his hand. It had the desired effect. She softened in his arms, and he could feel some of the tension leave her body. He kissed her lightly on the lips and, when he pulled back, was surprised to see tears glistening on her cheeks. An uneasy feeling came over him without warning.
“Where’s Adam?” he asked. It suddenly seemed strange and worrisome that his son hadn’t come running to greet him when he arrived home.
For an instant there was a look of panic on his wife’s face, then she relaxed. “He’s up in his room playing with his trains.”
“I shouldn’t have texted her about Adam,” he said. “I’m worried about him, and I was just hoping she could help.”
Caitlin made a dismissive sort of snort noise. “She gave me the number of some shrink who belongs to her country club.”
“Well, maybe we could—” Lance began but didn’t get to finish.
“I’m not taking our son to a shrink,” she said, “and I’m not about to take parenting advice from a woman who sent her eleven-year-old son away to boarding school so she could shack up with her new boyfriend.”
“That’s not how it was,” Lance said, but he knew with Caitlin’s current mood it would be a waste of time to attempt any further explanation. “I’m going to go check on Adam.”
Caitlin didn’t know the full story about why his mother sent him to Ryerson Prep, mainly because Lance hadn’t told her. To do so, he would have to explain how he spent his first twelve years in Culver Creek. He would need to explain that strange summer—the way he and the rest of the kids in his small Pennsylvania town had been on a sort of house arrest. The bikes and skateboards stayed locked up in garages. Trampolines and above-ground swimming pools went unused. Everyone seemed to be waiting around with held breath. He could still remember his mother standing at their front window for what seemed like hours, chewing on her fingernails as if she expected the boogeyman to show up at their door.
Though never a fan of school, he had actually been looking forward to the start of classes that year, when his mother dropped her bombshell news on him. There was a pamphlet sitting by his place at the table that night. Boys in ties and blazers beamed at him against a backdrop of perfect fall foliage and old stone buildings. He stared at those pictures as she spoke her incomprehensible words.
“Private school?” Lance asked, confused. At the time, his biggest concern was the uniform. He wasn’t going to go around dressing in those dorky clothes like the boys in the brochure. He could already hear the taunts and jeers from the other kids in the neighborhood when they saw what he was wearing. He wasn’t exactly the most popular guy to begin with, but something like this would be a complete disaster. “Wait, will there be a different bus?” Lance asked. “Will I have the same bus stop?”
His mother sighed and shook her head. He recognized her look of impatience. It was the way she looked at him when she thought he was being dense.
“You won’t take a bus,” she said, and from the slow deliberate way she spoke, he guessed she had already explained this, that he had missed it while he stared at the stupid brochure. “Ryerson is a boarding school. You’ll live there.”
He crumpled up the brochure and threw it at the wall. He stormed off to his room.
A few short weeks later he sat in the passenger seat of his mother’s car as she drove through the wrought iron Ryerson gate. He thought it was the end of his life. It would take him a full year to recognize that it was the beginning.
Lance was painfully aware that he had nothing in common with his fellow Ryerson classmates. Fearing the ridicule that never really came, that first awkward semester he kept to himself, answered in monosyllables when spoken to, and more or less tried to be invisible. He hit the jackpot with his first-year roommate. Maxwell had allergy-related breathing issues and slept with a special air mask with a pump whirring away all night. To drown out the sound of the pump, Maxwell wore a pair of earplugs to bed each night. It meant Lance could have thrown a raucous party on his half of their shared room and his roommate would never have been the wiser. It meant Lance’s secret remained safe.
Lance had a vague plan that he would go home for Christmas break and simply never come back. That plan fell apart almost at once, when his mother picked him up at school and announced that she had rented a North Carolina beach house where they would spend their Christmas break.
“Remember that summer when we went to the Outer Banks?” his mom said in a perky voice as she steered her old, tired Volvo out of the Ryerson gates. “That was a lot of fun, wasn’t it? I thought we should go back, and you wouldn’t believe the deals you can get on a beach house during the winter.”
It turned out that maybe the reason his mother had gotten such a good deal on the beach house rental was because the Outer Banks were not nearly as fun to visit in the winter as the summer. A lot of places were shuttered for the season, and the weather was something short of desirable. Still, Lance was happy not to be at school, and he figured when the holidays were over, they would head on back home to Culver Creek.
It was the day after Christmas when his mother dropped her latest bombshell. They sat at the kitchen table while a furious rainstorm raged outside. His mother explained that she had sold their house and, even more shocking, she was going to marry Tucker Rixby in the spring. Lance thought she was trying to make some sort of joke, but when he looked into her eyes, he saw how serious she was.
“Your boss?” he asked. “The one with the bad breath?”
“Well, he’s not technically my direct supervisor, and anyway, I won’t be working there anymore. I’ll be leaving my job at the end of January.”
His mother had worked as a receptionist at the Rixby plant for as long as he could remember. It was part of her identity. She was his mother, and she was an administrative worker at Rixby. That was something she had always stressed with pride, making an effort to set herself apart from the lowly factory workers in their grubby coveralls.
“Isn’t Tucker Rixby old? Are you in love with him?” Lance asked.
His mother fake laughed. “Tucker’s barely ten years older than me, and he’s a sweet, caring man. He’s going to make a wonderful stepfather.”
He noticed she hadn’t answered his question about being in love with Tucker. He noticed something else as well, something that had escaped his notice before. The earrings and necklace his mother had been wearing were new and looked expensive, and he had never seen any of the clothes she had worn over the past few days. These too appeared to be expensive.
It was possible she had made money from selling their house and treated herself to new clothes and jewelry, but he also knew Tucker Rixby, one of the heirs to the Rixby fortune, was loaded, and Lance suspected that this and not love was his mother’s motivation for marrying the man.
Rain lashed the windows as Lance sat there trying to process all this information. Had this been his mother’s plan all along? Was this why she had sent him away to Ryerson? And where had the money come from to pay for his private education? Had Tucker Rixby paid for that as well? Maybe it was Tucker who had suggested the idea. Maybe he had sent Lance away so he could have Raquel all to himself.
On the surface, it looked like a plausible theory. It was what he had believed for a time, and so he could understand why Caitlin thought his mother had packed him up and shipped him off to school like he was some sort of pesky inconvenience. He knew now that it was love for him and not Tucker that drove her into that marriage and her decision to send him away to school, but there was no way he could easily convey this to his wife.
Lance poked his head into Adam’s room. The boy was sitting with his back to the door in the middle of the floor, surrounded by train tracks and his assorted Thomas toys.
“It’s okay, Ashima, I can help,” Adam said in a quiet voice as he pushed one of the train engines toward another, making chugging train noises along the way. Lance’s heart swelled with pride and love. He would do anything for this boy, and though it wasn’t his fate, if marrying his stinky-breathed old boss was the only way he could have given his son a better life, he would have done it.
He owed it to his mother to set things right with Caitlin, to make her see that sending him away to school had been a selfless act on the part of his mother, not a selfish one. Lance shifted, and a floorboard squeaked. Adam jerked his head up and spun around, then smiled when he saw his dad standing there.
“Daddy!” Adam yelled. He ran over and wrapped his little arms around Lance’s legs. “Want to play Thomas with me?”
“Sure thing, bud,” Lance said, and even though what he really wanted to do was change out of his work clothes, he joined Adam on the floor in the midst of the tracks, where his son brought him up to speed on the doings and antics of the various engines.
By the time Caitlin made her way upstairs twenty or so minutes later, Lance and Adam were embroiled in a massive effort to save poor Thomas from the yeti (a recruit from Adam’s Imaginext toys) who had him trapped in a cave. She smiled at the two of them crawling around on the floor.
“So do either of you two have any ideas what you might feel like for dinner?” she asked. “And keep in mind it’s after seven, so it’s not going to be anything complicated.”
Without looking up from his trains, Adam muttered, “Bananas and olives.”
“Interesting idea there, bud,” Lance said, “but I’ve got a better plan. How about we all go out to Chequers?”
The local burger joint wasn’t a usual weeknight destination for them, but he considered it a bit of a peace offering to Caitlin.
“Can I have curly fries?” Adam jumped up, having forgotten all about poor Thomas and his predicament with the yeti.
“Sure thing,” Lance said, and he raised his eyebrows in Caitlin’s direction. “Curly fries for all!”
“It’s pretty late,” she said. “I could make something quick.”
“You’ve already worked hard enough today.” He untangled himself from Adam’s toys to give his wife another hug. She kissed him on the cheek, and he knew his olive branch had been accepted, which in his opinion was much better than bananas and olives for dinner.