Finding Home

CHAPTER 7

“Here.”

Coming up behind her at the kitchen counter the following Monday morning, Brad placed two hundred-dollar bills next to her mug of coffee.

Lost in thought, she hadn’t even heard him walk into the room. Stacey turned from the counter, his breakfast—four scrambled egg whites and one slice of wheat toast, no butter—on the plate she was holding. She set it down before him.

“What’s this?” she asked.

Brad picked up the newspaper and gave her an amused look. “I know that you like doing everything by credit card or check, but I thought you could still recognize money when you saw it.”

Taking her coffee mug and leaving the bills where they were, Stacey sat down opposite her husband. She hated it when Brad got flippant. It always felt as if he was talking down to her.

She supposed that she was being overly sensitive, a holdover from her hurt feelings. Ordinarily, she didn’t allow things to fester, but Brad had been gone most of the weekend, attending a local conference. This was supposed to have been their weekend.

It took everything she had to bank down the frown that wanted to possess her lips. “I know it’s money, Brad. What was it doing next to my coffee mug?”

Brad moved his broad shoulders in a dismissive half shrug, uncomfortable with having to explain himself. He wasn’t a man of words. Didn’t she understand that? “I just thought you might want to go buy yourself something.”

Stacey stared at him, speechless. Dear God, when had this man gotten rooted in the fifties? Did he suddenly forget they had a joint checking account?

She took a long sip of the black coffee, letting the caffeine jolt through her system before commenting. Very carefully, she set the mug down before her, then curved her hands around it. She had this sudden need to anchor herself to something.

Stacey raised her eyes to his. “If I wanted to go buy myself ‘something,’ Brad, I would,” she informed him evenly. “I have all those credit cards and checks you just referred to a minute ago. And—” she underscored the word because it was important to her that she was earning her own way, that he didn’t think of her as just so much dead weight he was carrying “—I earn a pretty decent salary, so if I did buy myself ‘something,’ I wouldn’t feel as if I was dipping into ‘your’ money.”

Brad’s brow furrowed. He looked at her as if she’d just lapsed into a foreign language, one he was trying desperately to decode.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He jabbed at his eggs with his fork as if he expected resistance from that quarter as well. “It’s our money.”

Right. Until I want to do something with it. This morning, as she turned on the kitchen faucet, she could hear the toilet flush. Since there was no one in the house but the two of them and there was no resident ghost to speak of, that meant the water pressure was weak in the third bathroom. Something else that could be addressed if they renovated the house.

Stacey seized the term he used, cornering him. At least for a second. “If it’s ‘our’ money, why can’t I use it to renovate ‘our’ house.”

Finished with his eggs, Brad took a bite of his toast. He’d always been a compartmental eater, Stacey thought as she watched him.

“We’ve been over this, Stacey,” he told her wearily. “It’s not a wise move.”

She was willing to admit that she was the one who liked to dream, to make plans that weren’t always rooted in cold, hard reality and that he grounded her by being the logical one. It was what made them a good team, she’d once thought. But somewhere along the line, it felt as if their team had become a dictatorship, with Brad in the role of Il Duce. She was getting so damn tired of his practicality, his bare-bones approach to things.

It was all she could do not to roll her eyes as she listened to him.

“I don’t want to be wise, Brad, I want new cabinets. I want drains that don’t stop up and I want bathrooms that don’t look as if they were left over from the set of Leave It to Beaver.”

The toast eaten, Brad pushed back his plate, struggling with annoyance.

“You’re exaggerating again, Stacey.” Looking past her shoulder, he saw that the money was still lying on the counter. She hadn’t put it in her pocket the way he thought she would. “Look, all I wanted to do was make up for forgetting your anniversary.” The second the words were out, he realized his mistake and was quick to correct it. “I mean our anniversary.”

There, he’d said it in a nutshell, she thought. Her anniversary. Like he had phoned in his response to the priest when they’d taken their vows. Like it didn’t mean anything to him. The urge to cry was almost overwhelming.

“By throwing money at me?” Her voice cracked at the end of the question.

“I didn’t throw it.” Irritated, he pointed toward the money. “I placed it on the counter.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the two bills. He just didn’t get it, did he? Although she knew it was an exercise in futility, tantamount to banging her head against the wall, she tried to explain it to him, anyway.

“Brad, I can buy myself anything I want. That’s not the point.” When he made no response, she knew that he had no idea what the point was. So she spelled it out for him. “The point is you actually taking the time to buy something for me.”

He blew out a breath in disgust. “I’m not any good at that. You’re hard to shop for.”

Her eyes widened in complete mystification. She’d never made a secret of anything she liked. And she liked a broad spectrum of things. It was hard to find something she didn’t like.

“Hard to shop for?” Stacey echoed, stunned. “I’d accept anything you bought—as long as you thought I might like it.”

“That’s just it,” he declared as if she’d made his point for him. “I have no idea what you’d like.”

Sadness swiped through her like a rusted sword. “You used to.” Her mouth curved as a cherished memory whispered to her from across the pages of time. “I still have the trivia book you bought me for no reason that time we were browsing in the used bookstore.”

She saw by his expression that he had absolutely no recollection of what she was referring to. She took a stab at rousing his memory. “We’d just started going together. You were looking for used textbooks to buy for your anatomy class and the trivia book was misplaced. You didn’t have much money to spare, but you bought it for me. Because you knew I loved trivia.” He was nodding. Was that just to put her off or because he finally remembered? “I cried when you gave it to me.”

And then the light really did dawn on him. “Oh. Right.” He was nodding with feeling now. “I remember you crying.” Remembered because it had embarrassed him and he didn’t know how to get her to stop. “I thought I did something wrong.”

She laughed softly. She supposed in some ways he had always been clueless.

“No, you did something right. Something very right.” She searched Brad’s face for a sign that she’d managed to get through to him and finally asked, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He took a shot at it. “That you want another trivia book?”

Men had to be the most frustrating creatures on the face of the earth. “No, I want you to stop and think. About me. About us.”

In a general way, he knew what she was after. And it was foolish. “Stacey, you’re not a twenty-year-old girl anymore, you’re forty-seven, and I’m not a twenty-one-year-old premed student doing his damnedest to score points with you—”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” she cut in. “Maybe you should be.”

She’d lost him. “Be what? A twenty-one-year-old premed student?”

“No, doing your damnedest to score points with me.”

“Why?” he demanded, looking at her as if she’d lost her mind. “We’re married.” And then he sighed. “That didn’t come out right.”

“No,” she agreed. “It didn’t. Did you ever consider that maybe I’d like to feel special? That I still mattered to you?”

“Of course you still matter,” he retorted, his temper fraying. “I’m still here, aren’t I? Do you have any idea how many of the doctors who I work with have gotten a divorce?”

Was that supposed to make her feel better? That he hadn’t divorced her? Why did he always focus on the negative instead of the positive? Was it his profession that made him this way, or had he always been like this? She no longer knew. She just knew that she was unhappy and she didn’t want to be.

She shook her head, fighting another wave of sadness. “You wouldn’t be able to find the time to get a divorce,” she replied quietly.

He gave it one last try. “Stacey, we’ve been married for twenty-five years.”