Marriage, Interrupted

He tapped a finger against the edge of the mug. “No,” he admitted quietly.

“And does Cassie know?”

“What do you think?”

The old woman sighed, her expression unreadable behind the huge sunglasses. Then she heaved herself to her feet, clumping in red plastic gardening clogs over to the tempered-glass patio table where she’d left the rest of the flowers.

“So tell me something…Cassie and Shaun have been living here for more than a year. How come this is the first time I’ve seen you?”

The swallow of coffee in his mouth turned acrid. “It seemed the more prudent course of action, considering Cass was married to another man and all.”

“Yeah, but your son wasn’t.” Before he could figure out what, if anything, to say to that, she said, “Which would lead to one of two conclusions. A, that you’re a slimeball. Or B, that you didn’t want to risk seeing her. So which is it?”

“You forgot C. All of the above.”

She batted at the air. “Nah. Believe me, I know from slime-balls. You don’t even come close. So I’m going with B. Okay, next subject—I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t seem more broken up over my son’s death.”

Blake doubted he had enough caffeine in his system to keep up with the woman, but as she didn’t appear interested in slowing down, the best he could do was hobble along behind. “I hadn’t… It isn’t my place to…”

But she wasn’t listening. Now kneeling on a bright yellow foam pad, she gouged the soil with probably more vehemence than necessary. “You bring a baby into the world,” she muttered to the dirt, “you think nothing can go wrong…”

She jerked her head up to Blake, several strata of makeup insufficient to mask the mixture of bafflement, anger and profound sorrow etched in what had once been, he decided, a beautiful face. “Why am I telling you this? A stranger? Except, maybe, who else can I tell?” she went on without waiting for a reply. “To keep all this locked inside…” She pressed one fist to her sternum, wagging her head. “Maybe this is why you’re here, so an old lady can vent her spleen.”

Blake leaned forward, gently removing the sunglasses to see turquoise-lidded green eyes shimmering with tears. “Vent away.”

She removed a tissue from a pocket tucked into the sweatshirt, then dabbed with extreme care at her eyes. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Lucille let out a great sigh, then said, more to the pansies than to Blake, “Before Cassie, Alan had never married. Dated, yes, but never married. When he hadn’t settled down by thirty-five, his father and I, we figured maybe he was…well, you know.”

She lowered her voice, as if the neighbors might hear. “It was a disappointment, but what could we say? A person’s gotta follow his own path, right? Anyway, after Alan’s father died—we’d been out here ten years already, we couldn’t take those awful winters back east anymore—Alan asks me if I’d like to move in with him, so I wouldn’t be alone. So I figure, why not? I mean, Wanda came in to do for me, sure—I’ve got a bunch of medical problems, you don’t want to know, Wanda’s a practical nurse but she doesn’t like telling people ’cause then they all start asking her for medical advice—but being by myself at night didn’t sit so well, it was true.

“But then, once I move in? He barely talks to me. Acts like I’m invisible or something. Always too busy, always away on some trip or something, especially once he sold his dry cleaning business, four, five years ago. So I ask you, what was the point of my being here, since I was alone at night, anyway? Or worse, when he was around…” Her lips pursed. “He’d get this look in his eyes, like I was some kind of huge embarrassment to him, like he couldn’t figure out how I was his mother. Nothing but criticisms, every time he saw me. I didn’t talk right, dress right, think right. All I was, was some stupid old woman.…”

Her sentence left hanging in midair, she dug in her sleeve for a tissue, then blew her nose, while Blake felt as though someone had stepped on his chest. “And it finally dawns on me,” she continued, “this is why my meshugah son never married. Never in my life did I see a man more wrapped up in himself! So I figure, the hell with this—I’m outta here, as the young people say.”

Blake couldn’t hold back a smile. “And?” he prodded.

“So I make up my mind to move out into one of those whaddyacallits, those gated communities—except it’s criminal how much they want for rent in those places, so I wasn’t going anywhere—when suddenly Alan brings home this lovely young woman and announces they’re getting married. Out of the blue, just like that, with him pushing fifty, already. Me, I’m thrilled, thinking maybe my son’s finally got his head on straight, that this woman’s performed some kind of miracle. So now, maybe, things will be better.” She hunched her shoulders in a helpless gesture. “I should have known, right?”

A frown pinched Blake’s brow, waiting for her explanation. To his chagrin, however, she veered off on one of her tangents, leaving her thought in the dust.

“That Cassie is a keeper, let me tell you,” she said instead. “Always treated me like gold. And at my age, listen—a daughter-in-law I could get along with…what more could I ask? Oh, sure, it would have been nice if she’d been Jewish, but you can’t have everything, right? But you know something, I love that girl from the bottom of my heart, like she was my own.” She went back to stabbing the dirt. “If anybody deserves good things, it’s her.”

A draft of cold air wriggled up Blake’s jacket, making him shiver.

“Lucille,” he said, “I don’t mean to push, but…what do you mean, you should have known? About Alan?”

It took her a second to find the dropped thread, but then she said, “Oh. That it couldn’t last. That Alan could no more be a real husband than I could fly to the moon.”

“You mean, he was—?”

“No, no. Not that. I told you. Alan only loved himself.” Her lips drew into a tight line, like a vivid, fresh scratch across her face. “But he did want a child. And Cassie, for reasons known only to her, God bless her, agreed.”

Several moments passed before the pieces fell into place. “Are you saying…this was a marriage of convenience?”

“On my son’s side, at least,” Lucille said, rearranging a pansy she’d just planted. “I frankly don’t know…well, Cassie and I never discussed things, exactly…” She hesitated, while Blake’s heart played racquetball inside his chest.

“What?”

Lucille got to her feet again, then clomped closer, perching on the arm of the chair across from his, near enough to lay her hand on his wrist. “Cassie doesn’t know that I know this, so don’t say anything, but, see, I had figured out a couple months ago that things weren’t exactly hunky-dory between them. So I wasn’t all that surprised when Cassie seemed more stunned than grief stricken when Alan died. But then, the day after he dies, after the lawyer leaves the house…” One eye squinted shut as she wagged a gardening-gloved finger. “Then she’s upset. Like someone had yanked the rug out from under her. So I call the lawyer myself, only he starts giving me this song and dance about how there’s nothing to worry about. As if I wouldn’t know telling me there’s nothing to worry about is always the first clue that there is. So I told him to cut the bull, already, and tell me what the hell was going on.” She shrugged. “So he did.”

Maddeningly, she chose that moment to have a sneezing fit that ate up the better part of two minutes. Finally, after another minute of indelicate nose blowing, amid profuse apologies about it being pollen season, she turned to Blake. “To cut a long story short, my son decides, a month after his marriage, to liquidate almost his entire estate and invest in some little up-and-coming computer technology company that, unfortunately, up and went.” She sneezed again, then sighed. “On top of that, there were credit cards. Had he lived, maybe he would’ve landed on his feet. But he didn’t. Which means his estate is worth, as that little Mercedes would say, nada—”

“Lucille!”

They both spun around—Blake snagging Lucille’s spindly arm before she fell off the arm of the chair—to catch Cass standing at the French door, her face ashen but her eyes sparking with embarrassed fury. Every instinct he possessed told him to get his butt out of there and let the two women duke it out. But one look from Cass told him if he so much as moved an eyelash, she’d knock him clear to the Arizona border.

* * *

Her cheeks stung with humiliation. This was her problem. Hers. The only thing in this whole stinkin’ mess she’d been able to control had been who knew and who didn’t. Now, thanks to her mother-in-law, she didn’t even have that.

“Cille, how could you?” Huddled into herself against the morning chill, Cass crossed to the older woman, refusing to look at Blake, to see the pity in his eyes. The baby was kicking her mercilessly this morning, so hard she felt bruised in spots. “How could you go behind my back, discussing family business—” She pressed her hand to her mouth, then lowered it enough to push out, “This was personal, for God’s sake. Is that so hard to understand?”

“And if Blake isn’t family, I’d like to know who is.” Never easily buffaloed, Lucille wagged the trowel at her. “He’s Shaun’s father. Anything that affects Shaun will ultimately affect him. So I thought he should know. And God knows we’d all be taking vacations to Mars before you got around to it.”

The lack of even a hint of remorse in her mother-in-law’s eyes made Cass’s voice—and undoubtedly, her blood pressure as well—rise several notches. “Well, I’m Shaun’s mother, and what and who I tell is my decision. Not yours.”

“Bubelah, calm down. It’s not good for the baby…”

“She’s right, Cass. You’re getting yourself in a state—”

“You stay out of this!” She hurled this in Blake’s direction quickly, so she didn’t really see him, then back at her mother-in-law. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Cille. I’m pregnant, my husband just died, and, as most of Bernalillo County probably knows by now, I am, as they say, financially embarrassed. A little hissy fit isn’t going to raise my blood pressure any more than it already is.” She looked around, saw the flowers. For some reason, that nearly took her over the edge. “And why are you planting flowers? It’s still freezing at night.”

“They’re just pansies, Cass,” Blake said in that even, reasonable tone of voice used on people who live in padded rooms. “They can live through cold weather, remember? We used to plant them in March all the time. So they’ll be fine. Which is more than I can say for you.”

“I am fine, Blake,” she retorted, wrapping her sweater more tightly around her protruding midsection. Her teeth were chattering, the baby was kicking, and right now life was about as far from good as she ever wanted it to get. “B-back off.”

“No, Cass. I’m not going to back off.” Stunned, she met an expression in those deep brown eyes she knew only too well. The this-is-for-your-own-good look. “You just admitted how much stress you’re under—”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t handle it.”

“Why are you being so hardheaded, woman?”

Because my very survival depends on it. “Because I didn’t ask for your interference, Blake,” she said, thinking that only a crazy person would attempt to reason with one being so unreasonable. Except, at the moment she wasn’t too sure which one of them was which. “Besides, after all this time, why are you suddenly so hot to stick your nose in my business?”

“Because maybe I can help, for crying out loud!”