Three Good Things Read online

  She had to admit, though, they had a point. Larry, with his hair down to his shoulders, was handsome in a hippie-rocker kind of way, with striking green eyes and a sense of humor that immediately set customers at ease. Erin was more refined, but quietly lovely. Most days she wore her long brown hair in a ponytail, high on the back of her head.

  “Busy day today,” Ellen warned as they began taking off their coats. “Better get your game face on.”

  “You mean you think we’ll actually get some customers besides Henry and Jack?” Larry asked and tied on his apron.

  Ellen slapped him on the arm.

  “Better be careful what you wish for,” said Henry.

  “We do have other customers in the store, you know.” She nodded to the undergrads and the two men in the corner, farmers in their hats and overalls huddled over steaming drinks and talking in hushed tones.

  When a fresh group of customers burst into the store, Larry shouted “Morning!” and hurried to help them with their jackets. She liked that about him; he always seemed to go the extra mile. She supposed when she was younger she would have been drawn to Larry since she’d always been a sucker for that rocker-poet mystique. It made her a little sad to think that he probably considered her old enough to be his mom. Ellen liked to think of herself as hip and attractive but knew better: She was a middle-aged divorcèe without so much as a sugar daddy. Indeed with nary a prospect in sight.

  As she twirled such depressing facts over in her mind, she noticed Erin’s eyes follow Larry, a slight smile gracing her lips. When she caught Ellen looking at her, she quickly turned away to refill the cream canisters. But Ellen was sure she had seen it: a crimson flare bursting onto the girl’s cheeks. Just for a moment, but long enough.

  She turned to ring up a customer’s order and smiled to hear the register’s old-fashioned bell echo her satisfaction. At a certain age, she had come to understand, a person made her peace with living vicariously. She’d have to tell Lanie about the new lovebirds. When the phone interrupted her thoughts, she picked it up expecting to hear her sister’s voice.

  “Hello, Singular Kringle,” she said with a smile. She would have never guessed in a million years who would return the hello.

  • • • •

  “Quiet!” Lanie rolled over and hit the snooze button for the second time that morning. Benjamin had woken three times last night, and the third time she’d been unable to get him back to sleep for an hour. She had tried all her tricks, rocking him, giving him an extra bottle, singing, then finally pulling him into bed with her and Rob. She loved the warm snuggle of his body close to hers, feeling his weight shift and get heavier in her arms as he finally drifted off to sleep. But it had made for a hell of a night.

  Rob groaned next to her. “How can it possibly be morning already?”

  It was seven thirty. Benjamin lay sound asleep between them, his belly going up and down between breaths. His round little face, slightly parted lips, and long, dark eyelashes, all the image of idyllic sleep.

  “Speak for yourself,” she quipped. Rob hadn’t gotten up once to help.

  “Someone’s a little cranky.” He rolled over and kissed her cheek. “If you haven’t noticed, I sleep in this bed, too.”

  “Shh . . . you’ll wake the baby.”

  Lanie’s eyelids felt like sandpaper. The muscles in her lower back ached. How she was going to win her plea in court today was beyond her.

  The radio alarm came on again, the disc jockey reminding folks to drive carefully.

  “Oh, no. I forgot about the snow.” They had been forecasting a spring blizzard last night, not so uncommon for this part of the country, but Lanie had hoped the meteorologists would get it wrong. “Perfect. Just perfect.”

  “I’ll scrape the windows, get the cars warmed up.” She could smell Rob’s breath, slightly sour. She knew this was the closest she’d get to an apology or a thanks for the fact that she’d had only a few hours’ sleep, while he’d had a blissful night.

  Benjamin stirred beside her, smacked his lips. He was still the cutest baby ever, even if he was responsible for the immense sleep deprivation in their lives over the past ten months. The pediatrician had assured her that eventually he’d fall into his own nocturnal rhythms after she’d asked, with swollen eyes, if she’d ever sleep again. And it was true, most nights the baby slept soundly now, but every so often came a night when he was inconsolable.

  “It’s probably his teeth, huh?” Rob tried.

  “That or he’s trying to kill us.” They were still waiting for his top front teeth to poke through. And true, it wasn’t until she’d smoothed some gel onto Benjamin’s gums last night that the baby had finally settled in her arms.

  She pushed herself out of bed and pulled the curtain back. At least three inches of snow coated the driveway. She groaned. “Doesn’t God know it’s April?”

  “Yeah, and he’s got an excellent sense of humor.”

  “Shh!” She shushed him again, then whispered, “Very funny.” Lanie could feel herself being crabby, but she couldn’t help it. She was too tired.

  “Watch Benjamin for a minute, will you?” She sleepwalked out of the bedroom, down the hall to the bathroom. The toothpaste tube still lay on the counter from last night, the blue gel oozing out in an unappealing zigzag. She squeezed a small dab onto her toothbrush and brushed, then splashed cool water onto her face.

  God, she looked awful. What was it that Ellen said? God made babies cute to distract everyone from looking at their exhausted mothers? Something like that. But Benjamin wouldn’t be in court with her today. The judge wouldn’t care that she’d been up half the night or that she’d more than likely have washed drool off her blouse minutes before entering the courtroom. She slathered on her trusty concealer, her one “can’t-go-without” make-up trick. She always laughed at the celebrities who said they wouldn’t step foot outside without curling their eyelashes or applying self-tanner. Lanie was lucky if she remembered to apply mascara. She did so this morning, though, the black liquid coming out in uneven clumps. She frowned. Already, faint lines were starting to show around her eyes and lips. Random sunspots bloomed on her fair skin.

  She brushed her hair behind her ears with her fingers. Shortly after Benjamin had been born, she’d acquiesced, done what she swore she’d never do but that Rob had predicted all along: cut off her long, curly auburn locks to tame them into something resembling the “mom bob.” Some days she missed the sexy feel of long hair, but mostly she was just glad not to have to bother with it. Practicality, she’d discovered, was highly underrated. She pulled silver loop earrings through her earlobes, added a touch of gloss to her lips. Ready to go.

  No time for a shower this morning, but nothing that her favorite navy suit wouldn’t fix. She was damned if she was going to lose this plea, a motion for a restraining order against a twenty-three-year-old loser who’d beaten both his ex-girlfriend and his toddler and was now making noises he’d do the same unless they moved back in with him. The woman had come to Lanie’s office in tears yesterday, saying she feared that the next time he beat her he’d kill her.

  It was almost impossible to believe that such things happened in the evolved city of Madison that prided itself on its bohemian, liberated culture. But they did on a daily basis. Lanie loved being able to help, but more often these days she found herself carrying her clients’ stories back home, despite her promises to Rob not to. Work was like a bruise that she couldn’t help pushing on again and again to see if it still hurt.

  Rob, however, was an architect who worked in the laws of right angles and degrees, in the language of square footage and arcs, levels and foyers, concrete and marble. It was not a job that required much of an emotional investment, as far as she could tell. Her husband left his work on the drawing table at the office, and when he was home with her and Benjamin, they got all of him, one hundred percent. For this, she loved him dearly, but she also envied him. He had chosen a profession that built the right-angled spaces pe
ople lived and worked in; she had chosen a career that plunged her into the messy lives inside them.

  She slipped into her skirt and a sheer white blouse. She’d leave the blazer off till she dropped Benjamin at day care. The baby stirred again as Rob got up to shower. His eyes opened briefly, then closed.

  “Good morning, sweet boy,” she whispered across the room. Her baby, now ten months, seemed to take up so much space. Once just a tiny infant whose feet she could barely find inside his sleeper, he had grown nearly into a toddler. Precious baby fat still coddled him in all the right places, but he was longer now, his head larger. Her little boy growing up. She felt a slight twinge in her chest at the thought. He was growing up every minute, while she spent the majority of his days working with other families. The irony did not escape her. She tried not to dwell on it.

  Now he stretched his arms above his head like an old man. It was a move he’d practiced ever since they’d brought him home from the hospital. The first time Rob called her into the room, laughing and pointing to Benjamin, who reached his fingertips to the sky, his yawning mouth stretched into a perfect O. It had been miraculous as so many of those baby firsts were. Now he looked around, rolled over, and pushed himself to sit up. He gave her a big gummy smile.

  “Well, hello there, sleepy boy. Did you have a good sleep in Mama and Dada’s bed?”

  She leaned over to sweep him up and give him a kiss, his body still warm with sleep.

  He looked at her, then pointed to the bedroom door. “Bah,” he said, his new favorite word. It was funny to her how he could go from zero to sixty in a heartbeat, ready to start the day almost as soon as he woke.

  “We’ll go get your bottle in a sec,” she said. “First, we have to change your diaper and get you dressed.”

  She gave him another kiss, smoothed his hair, and carried him into the nursery. She loved the cool colors of his room. She’d decorated it with a nautical theme, at odds with their Midwestern corner, but she couldn’t resist the happy blue whales that swam on the borders of a crib bumper they’d found when she was pregnant. From there an entire sea had been born. Bright tropical fish hanging from Benjamin’s mobile, a table lamp covered in starfish with smiley faces, stuffed whales for snuggling, and even a diaper holder embroidered with conch shells.

  The baby fussed as she changed him, something he never liked, but was happy again the moment she sat him on the floor, his fat belly sticking out over his diaper. She pulled out warm fleece pants, as tiny as a doll’s clothing, and a red sweatshirt to cover his pint-sized turtleneck. She managed to get it all on him without too much fuss. She could hear Rob singing in the shower down the hall, some Bruce Springsteen tune, and was surprised to find herself smiling. Benjamin bounced up and down on his knees, waving his arms, his signature dance.

  She hoisted him onto her hip and carried him down the stairs, twenty-three hardwood steps to be exact. She and Rob had counted them when they first moved in, after they’d made love at the top, christening the old windy farmhouse as their own.

  “Brr, baby,” she said and drew Benjamin closer now. The chill of the night had settled into the lofty spaces of the high-ceilinged first floor. She turned the thermostat to eighty to get the heat cranking.

  “Why don’t we live in California again?” she asked.

  The truth, she reminded herself, was that while both she and Rob had lived in California for a spell, each had returned to Wisconsin, as if a rubber band had pulled them back with a snap. Lanie had always thought that a certain sense of superiority lurked in the humbleness of Midwesterners, that they were a people who weathered the blistering cold, temperatures unimaginable to most, and so were able to endure more of life’s challenges than most.

  It was a mentality she’d tried to shake again and again, traveling first to Berkeley, then to a clerkship in Seattle, then to Boston, yet all roads had led back to Madison. She and Rob laughed about this peculiar fact on their first date over brats and beers on State Street: A Midwesterner spent his life trying to escape the cold winters but always ended up back home.

  Though she would never admit it, she’d loved coming home. She returned in late July, fresh from a tour of the Eastern seaboard, places like Portland, Maine; Gloucester, Massachusetts; a last hurrah in New York City. She and her housemate at the time, Julia, had packed their bags, sold the rest of their belongings in a yard sale, and set out for three weeks of carefree abandon. It was a fitting farewell to a coast that had served her well. She’d been working in tax law in Boston, a job that helped pay off her loans, but she jumped at the chance to join one of Madison’s top firms.

  While Lanie was expected to bill a certain number of hours at Brandt & Smith, she was in the fortunate position of being able to balance lucrative divorces with, to her mind, the more pressing family dispute and social restitution cases. When Ellen asked what compelled her to work with people whose lives were so depressing—beaten women and children, abandoned children in foster care—Lanie answered easily and with certainty: It was her calling. It was the reason she had gone to law school in the first place, to help those less fortunate. That she was able to return home to do so was only icing on the cake.

  When she arrived in midsummer, three suitcases and her briefcase sitting at her feet, Ellen greeted her at the terminal, her sleeveless shirt collared with perspiration, her brown hair frizzing in the humidity. Lanie had always envied her sister her heart-shaped face, her kind eyes, and over the years Ellen had come to embody the maternal role she’d always played in Lanie’s life. Her once slim figure had morphed into that of a woman who was comfortable with a few extra pounds, her formerly slender arms now round.

  When their own mom passed and Lanie was just six, Ellen had become like a second mother to her. Their father, on the edge of his own despair, was helpless to guide her. So Ellen, just sixteen, moved from her own room back into her sister’s. Ten years later it was Ellen who rode in the jolting car up and down the school parking lot when Lanie got her learner’s permit; Ellen who pressed their mother’s letter into her hands on the night of Lanie’s high school graduation, saying, “Mom wanted me to hold on to this until you graduated. I’ve done my best to preserve it. It’s a little battered around the edges, but it still has her scent.”

  And, indeed, when she held the envelope to her face, Lanie could detect the sweet aroma of lilacs, her mother’s perfume. Later, after a celebration under a sweeping white tent in their backyard, she opened the letter in the privacy of her bedroom and cried to see the faint pink of her mom’s lipstick on the edges of the inside seal. It was as if her mother were sitting there on her bed, rubbing her back again, and Lanie, still six.

  She had ridden home with Ellen from the airport that July day nearly six years ago. A thunderstorm had recently passed through, and she rolled down the window to open herself to the sweet scent of sugar corn and wild grass hovering over the fields in fat droplets of humidity.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “That smells nice.” She stretched her arm out the window, as if she could reach the dewy drops, bottle them up like the lemonade they’d sold in Mason jars when they were little girls. The stretches of country road brought her back to days of eating cherry popsicles on the front porch, so cold they’d stuck to her tongue, and of catching fireflies late into the night till the stars popped out and their mother called them in, once, twice, three times, her voice more insistent on her third trip to the door. Then she’d strip Lanie’s body of her sweaty clothes and throw her into the bathtub, right after Ellen, the dirt from her sister still ringing the tub.

  “There’s no sense in wasting water,” their mother always explained when they inquired why they shared the same water. Their mom, a farmer’s daughter, possessed a farm girl’s practicality when it came to husbanding resources.

  Lanie smiled at her memories while they drove along, the telephone poles ticking by, Queen Anne’s Lace and wild blue chicory dotting the roadside. She remembered many things about Harriet McClarety. Like the way she w
ould bite into a tomato, whole, like an apple, or the way she’d make lemonade with fresh lemons, never concentrate, but would add so much sugar that all they could taste was the sweetness, not the tart. Lanie remembered, too, the hot summer nights they’d sit on the front porch swing, her mom patiently combing through her wet tangles while they swung back and forth, Ellen acting out tales of great kingdoms on the porch’s grainy floor. Her mom would work out all the knots, one by one, as if it was the easiest thing in the world to do, and laugh her sweet laugh at her sister’s antics.

  On that hot summer day, her sister driving her back to her childhood town, Lanie knew she’d come home at last. It felt right. She wondered if she’d ever have her own child’s tangled hair to smooth out, her own little girl or boy to whisper to, “Now just sit still; this won’t hurt a lick.”

  • • • •

  Now she went to fix Benjamin’s bottle. They had switched to formula once she went back to work, three short months after he was born. The whole breast-pumping thing was beyond her. She couldn’t imagine toting a pump back and forth to work, having to pump behind closed doors, or even worse, in the bathroom stall at the courthouse every few hours. She knew that studies claimed breast-feeding up to a year was best for babies, but she tried to convince herself that Benjamin had gotten a full dose of antibodies in those first few months. Her pediatrician reassured her that it was okay, that the most important thing to remember was that “a happy mom meant a happy baby.”

  She threw the afghan around him now and watched as his lips fastened hungrily onto the bottle’s nipple. She rocked him gently and clicked on the news with the remote. Up to a foot of snow, maybe more, they were predicting. Rob came down the stairs whistling, dressed in a navy jacket, khaki pants, and the yellow tie that Lanie had laid out for him the night before. He seemed happy, as if all the snow was cause for celebration. She, on the other hand, fretted over the practicalities—getting Benjamin to day care safely, making it to court on time, her clients’ making it to court on time.