Rachel had somehow gotten through her work day, but she was furious with Bertha. She was furious with Carl. And she was furious with herself. There were so many bitter things she’d stored up to say to him. It was as though she had been having an ongoing conversation with him for most of her life and hadn’t realized it.
She grabbed an apron and tied it over her uniform to keep it clean while she cooked.
As a cop, there had been so many criminals over the years. She’d managed to be calm and cool in dealing with most of them. But finding herself face-to-face with Carl had choked her voice and driven the words right out of her head.
How dare he tell her that he wished she had pulled the trigger! Ex-cons were so skilled at manipulation. That comment had been nothing but a ploy to make her feel sorry for him, but it hadn’t worked.
She was busy slamming things around the kitchen, hating herself for her weakness, wishing she could go for a run to work the anger out of her system, and resenting the fact that she had to fix supper…when Joe and Bobby walked in.
“What are you making?” Joe asked.
“Supper.” She was in the process of chopping carrots, wielding the knife with a lot more force than necessary. “Isn’t that what good wives do?”
She hadn’t expected her words to sound so sarcastic, but they did and she couldn’t take them back. That upset her even more.
A small metal trash can was at her feet, the kind that opened when a lever was stepped on. Except, when she stomped on it to scrape some scraps into it, the lever broke.
“Stupid trash can!” She kicked it across the kitchen floor. It clanged against a lower cabinet, bounced off, and fell over on its side. She ignored it, grabbed a stalk of celery, and began chopping again.
“I like peanut butter,” Bobby offered softly, his big eyes even rounder at her anger.
Joe set the trash can upright. Then he came over and laid his hand over hers to still the violent chopping. “What’s wrong?”
She dropped the knife on the chopping block and turned to him. He put his arms around her waist.
“You went to see him, didn’t you?”
She leaned into him and nodded against his chest.
“What did he say?” Joe asked.
“He said he remembered the little girl in the pink dress.”
“And what did you say?”
“That I wished I had pulled the trigger.”
“Oh, Rachel.”
“I like peanut butter,” Bobby said, bringing their attention back to him.
“Are you hungry, buddy?” Joe asked.
Bobby bobbed his head.
“I’ll make you a sandwich,” Joe said.
“I’ll have supper ready in a half hour.” Rachel pulled away from him. “I’m making stir-fry. The rice is already cooked.”
“I want peanut butter,” Bobby insisted. “With purple jelly.”
“He needs to eat something besides peanut butter,” Rachel said. “He can’t live on peanut butter and hot dogs. He had peanut butter for lunch.”
Joe looked at her. Then he looked at Bobby.
“A peanut-butter sandwich it is,” Joe said. “With purple jelly.”
“Joe…”
He gave her a nearly imperceptible shake of his head. She wasn’t sure what that shake meant, but she wasn’t happy that he intended to give into Bobby’s demand. She had gone to a lot of trouble getting the ingredients for tonight’s dinner, and she didn’t appreciate him ruining Bobby’s appetite with yet another peanut-butter sandwich. It wasn’t good parenting. And besides that, it hurt her feelings.
She finished chopping the vegetables for the stir-fry while Joe set Bobby up with milk and a sandwich.
“Can I watch cartoons?” Bobby asked.
“Sure thing.”
Joe turned on the DVD player with some old Bugs Bunny cartoons. Then, as the little boy ate his sandwich and giggled at the cartoons, Joe took Rachel by the elbow and led her into the living room.
“Is there something you wanted to say to me?” he said. “Something about not catering to Bobby’s demands, for instance?”
“I think you’re making a mistake.”
“A peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich is Bobby’s comfort food.”
“So?”
“So, when he starts asking for peanut butter morning, noon, and night—which he’s been doing for the past couple of days—it’s a pretty good sign that he’s feeling stressed.”
“He’s six. Why would he be feeling stressed?” Rachel asked.
“When we walked through the door,” Joe tried to explain, “what we saw was a woman attacking a handful of carrots like she was killing snakes. Your fury was noticeable. Bobby hasn’t seen a whole lot of that kind of anger. It scared him. Heck, it scared me! He was hungry and frightened, and the child needed a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.”
The frustration and bitterness in her heart yet again spilled out of her mouth. “I don’t suppose Grace ever got angry, did she?”
It was a snarky thing to say, and she hated herself for saying it. The moment she heard the words come out of her mouth, she wished she could take them back.
Joe was silent in response, and Rachel knew him well enough to know that his own anger was rising. His patience was not without limits.
“Grace got angry, but she was a much better actress than you,” he said. “She made certain Bobby never, ever took the brunt of her anger.”
That hurt.
“Okay. I’m sorry,” she said. “But you have to understand, until I married you, I didn’t have to monitor my actions or tone of voice. I could chop carrots any way I wanted.”
The sound of Bobby’s laughter floated back to them from the kitchen.
“It sounds like he’s okay,” Joe said. “I’m going to ignore what you just said because I know you didn’t mean it. I know you love me and my son. Today is just a bad day. Now, tell me more about your confrontation with the ex-con.”
“Carl is an old man, and he looks it,” Rachel said. “He was holding two filled coffee cups when I startled him, and he spilled some. He looked scared. What hair he has left is gray. He wears glasses now.”
“In other words, he no longer looks like the monster you remember?”
“He doesn’t look like a monster,” Rachel conceded. “What he looks like is someone’s down-and-out grandfather. But he is recognizable. While I was at Bertha’s, it suddenly came to me that I saw him at the Fab Fifties. He was the one standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking at that Thunderbird. He was the ‘bad man’ I must have been warning Anna about in the hospital. I guess that seeing him was more than my subconscious wanted to acknowledge.”
“Well, at least that mystery is solved.” Joe released a sigh of relief. “What are you planning to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I don’t want to live with the thought that I might run into him at any moment. What I wish is that he would go back to prison where he belongs and I could continue to pretend that he doesn’t exist.”
“From what I remember,” Joe said, “you were never able to ignore his existence.”
“I tried to,” she said.
“You’re going to have to find a way to get over this if we’re going to feel like a family again,” Joe said. “It isn’t fair to Bobby to live with the kind of anger and emotional turmoil you’re going through right now. It’s toxic to all of us.”
“It would be lovely if I could just flip a switch and forget all about it, but I don’t know how to change my feelings,” she said. “I’m a simple person. I feel what I feel. And as you just pointed out, I’m not very good at acting like everything is okay when I’m bleeding inside.”
“Dad!” they heard Bobby call from the kitchen. “Dad! Can I have some more milk?”
“I’ll go get it.” Joe left the room to tend to his son.
Her behavior during the past half hour was not like her. It made her feel like an angry, miserable excuse of a mother. Having Joe upset with her too was just too much. It made her feel as if she were being punished even though she hadn’t done anything wrong.
She hadn’t robbed a bank. She hadn’t killed anyone. And yet today she’d had an argument with Bertha so severe that she had almost thrown up. She’d also been chastised by her husband for frightening their son and had been pretty useless at work.
This was Carl’s fault. Every last rotten thing that had happened today was Carl Bateman’s fault.
Rachel didn’t often get headaches, but when she did they were doozies…and she could feel one starting now. She went into the kitchen, pulled some ibuprofen out of the cabinet, and started to swallow two capsules with a glass of water. Then she stopped and spit them into the sink. Pregnant women weren’t supposed to take painkillers.
Joe started cleaning up the crumbs from Bobby’s snack and saw the bottle in her hand. “Headache?”
“A bad one,” she said.
“Go lay down,” he said. “I’ll finish supper.”
“Thank you.”
The day and the war of emotion she had been through had exhausted her to the point that Rachel fell into a deep sleep that didn’t end until about two o’clock in the morning. She awoke disoriented and thirsty. Joe was not with her. She wondered why he was still up at this time of night. Was he ill? Was he watching television? Reading? He still had the discipline of “early to bed and early to rise” that he had developed as an athlete. It was unlike him to stay up this late. She put on her robe and went to find her husband.
When she got to the kitchen, she found it clean. She glanced into the refrigerator and saw that Joe had been as good as his word. He had made the stir-fry, evidently eaten it alone, and then put it away.
Joe was not in the living room, but there were papers spread out on the coffee table where he’d been working. One was a handwritten list of their household expenses and a total. On another sheet were numbers involving their combined take-home pay. One thing was apparent: if she didn’t keep her job, or if Joe didn’t find one soon, they would be in serious financial trouble.
There was also a list of possible jobs. Some were in the area. Most involved the need to move away. Several involved commercial endorsements she knew he didn’t want to do.
It appeared he had given serious consideration to an offer from Ohio State University. The letters OSU were written in big letters and circled. Below that were the words “Pitching coach!” Apparently OSU had the same idea as the Dodgers. Next to that was a number she assumed was the potential salary. Assuming their expenses didn’t go up too significantly, it would be enough to live on. Underneath, he’d scribbled the words, “Small apartment during week?” Then he’d marked that out with a large X. Evidently he didn’t consider it a viable option to live in Columbus two hours away and only come home on the weekend. She agreed. There would be weekend games and travel. She and Bobby would seldom see him unless they moved there.
She could handle it, but Bobby? Not so much.
It looked like Joe had gotten an offer from Allstate too. He’d mentioned that one to her earlier, but she had been so obsessed with Carl’s release that she’d not listened closely. Now she read over the offer in its entirety. It would involve becoming an insurance broker and working as a front man for the office in Cleveland. It was more generous than the OSU salary. Obviously Allstate was banking on Joe’s reputation to bring in new clients. Getting to sit across the desk from the great Micah Mattias as he took care of their insurance needs would be quite a draw for a lot of baseball fans. But not only would their family have to move to Cleveland, Joe would hate every minute of it.
It broke Rachel’s heart.
She went back down the hallway and then to Bobby’s room—the only room in the small house she had not yet looked for Joe. She found him asleep, fully clothed, on his son’s bed, with his hand lying protectively on his little boy’s shoulder.
Quietly closing Bobby’s door, she went back to the bedroom she and Joe shared. It was the first time since they were married that Joe had chosen not to sleep by her side.