Three Good Things Read online

  “I’ll get the car warmed up and ready,” Rob said as he slipped into his coat. “You guys will be toasty.”

  “Thanks,” she offered.

  “Benjamin, baby, when’s this snow going to stop?”

  He looked into her eyes, wide-eyed and knowing, but didn’t offer a word. His lips puckered around the nipple, sucking away.

  When Rob came back in, he seemed surprised by the strength of the storm.

  “Be careful out there. It’s pretty slick. I’ve sanded the driveway, but it looks like the plows came through a while ago.”

  “Okay.” She nodded, half-hearing. “Thanks, honey.”

  She could feel him hesitating by the front door. Benjamin sat up to look.

  “Do you think day care will even be open today?”

  “No cancellations yet.” Lanie had been watching the closings scroll across the bottom of the screen. Still just a few. There was a local joke that the schools in Wisconsin didn’t close unless the snow was piled so high that you couldn’t open your front door.

  “Do you want me to drive you guys this morning?” She could tell from the timbre of his voice that her husband was being kind.

  “No, you go. I know you’ve got a big day ahead of you, too. We’ll be fine.”

  He came to give her a kiss and picked up Benjamin. “Bye, buddy. Have fun at school today. Maybe you’ll go sledding, huh?”

  Benjamin kicked his feet, waved bye-bye. He’d come to know that these early-morning rituals, including a kiss on the forehead, meant daddy was going to work. “It’s a caffeine kind of day,” Rob said on his way out the door. “See you tonight.”

  “See you tonight,” Lanie said, but she’d already turned back to the news and was propping the baby up for a burp, wondering how on earth she was going to make it to court in time for her nine o’clock hearing.

  • • • •

  Rob couldn’t help it. As he negotiated the slippery roads on the way into the office, all he felt was relief. Relief to be going to work; relief to be leaving Benjamin’s tired cries of the night behind; relief to be free of Lanie’s guilt-inspiring looks. So what if he didn’t get up last night to help with the baby? He certainly had done his fair share during those first few months. And both he and Lanie knew that the only thing Benjamin wanted at two in the morning was his momma. As much as Rob tried to be supportive—offering to get up in the middle of the night to fetch a bottle, rubbing Lanie’s back when she fell back into bed, playing with Benjamin as soon as he got home from work—sometimes it just didn’t seem like enough.

  He was glad that Lanie had gone back to her firm after maternity leave. He supposed that made him a little unusual since most of his colleagues seemed to prefer that their wives stay home and raise the kids. But that was such an old-fashioned attitude, almost cavemanesque. He knew Lanie well enough to understand that she needed some kind of activity to get the wheels in her brain spinning again. She had read and reread all the baby books during the first few weeks of her maternity leave, highlighting sections, to the point where he’d taken to slipping them into the back of bookcases, hoping she’d put all that advice aside and just enjoy the mommy thing. But it was typical Lanie: wanting to get her arms around every detail she could about a case (or in this instance, their son), analyze them, and then come up with a game plan.

  Of course, as they’d both come to realize quickly, there was no such thing as a game plan for a three-week-old or even a seven-month-old. Having Benjamin had taught them that all the book smarts in the world couldn’t help them when it came to giving their baby the love he needed. And, once this realization sunk in, they breathed more easily, trusted themselves. They were the two people in the world who knew their little guy best—all his little quirks and baby pet peeves. It made Rob feel powerful and indispensable in a way he’d never fathomed possible. This little human being depended on him and Lanie totally and completely. They were it. They were whom Benjamin got in this life, take it or leave it.

  God, how he hoped he didn’t screw it up.

  As he drove into the office, he ticked through his mental to-do checklist: Get a reservation at someplace nice for their five-year anniversary that was coming up; pick up his dry cleaning (he was out of shirts); and get the final plans for the west wing of the art institute signed off on. He was tired of waiting around for Eli’s approval. Eli had only a few years on Rob at the firm, but he always seemed to weigh in at the most inopportune moment. Because he was the lead guy on the project, Eli had to sign off on every little thing. If he didn’t like it, Rob might as well start over.

  Rob pulled into the garage and turned into his assigned parking space, L01. It always looked to him like LOL, as if someone higher up knew what a joke his job was. As if Frank Hobbs himself, the president of their firm, were saying, “Poor Rob, all that hard work, and not much to show for it.” He knew he was being paranoid, but still. LOL? Really? Did he need a parking slot that mocked him each and every day?

  When he stepped out of the car, the cold stung his nose immediately. His breath came out in a white arc. He buttoned his top button and made for the elevator, hearing the thwack of his boots on the pavement. The mostly empty garage made it feel like a Saturday. He’d managed to push his guilt aside on the drive into work, but now it crept up on him again as he waited for the elevator. The roads had been pretty slick. He probably should have given Lanie and Benjamin a ride. He’d feel better if he called her to check in when he got into the office.

  When he stepped off the elevator into the lobby, a wall of white swirling just beyond the window greeted him. Choppy waves cut through the lake below. What was it that T. S. Eliot said about April? “April is the cruelest month”? Or was it March? Or was it Yeats who wrote that? He’d have to ask Lanie tonight. She would know and would laugh at him for pretending to know. But it would be a good laugh, one that was familiar to them, each trying to outsmart the other. It would be nice, he thought, as he headed toward his office, if they could get some of that back, even for one night.

  “Good morning, boss. Glad to see you made it in.”

  His assistant, Kate, was in a perpetually good mood. He found it to be an exceedingly rare quality the longer he worked in the business. Architects in general seemed to be a dour lot, always playing out worst-case scenarios. For Kate, though, the sky was unfailingly blue, even on a day like today, and while some might find her cheerfulness counterfeit, he was grateful for it. Plus, she always looked professional. He supposed that was a sexist thing to say, but again, another underrated quality as far as he could tell in the new wave of graduates coming out of the university. It was as if young women today felt they had to make a statement with their asymmetrical hairstyles, body piercings, and thrift-shop clothing. Kate, on the other hand, wore her thick black hair straight, in a neat shoulder-length cut. She wasn’t pretty in the usual way, yet everything about her exuded competence, helpfulness. He wondered for a brief moment if she had a small tattoo hidden somewhere discreet, like on her hip or the small of her back, then chided himself.

  It was none of his damn business.

  Once when Lanie had returned from a girls’ weekend with her college roommates, she’d asked Rob if she should get a tattoo. His name? A little bird? He’d laughed at the time. It seemed so unlike her. But maybe it had been her attempt to spice things up one last time before they started trying for a baby, a family?

  Would she do it now, if he asked?

  When he put the question to his buddies—was it typical for the passion to wane around year five—they assured him that he was experiencing the “baby blues.” “We’ve all been there, dude,” his friends commiserated with him. Things would get back to normal soon enough. “By the time Benjamin’s five, at the latest,” his buddy Tom joked. Rob couldn’t imagine a five-year stretch of sleep deprivation and next-to-no sex. Sometimes he felt as if Lanie had forgotten he even existed, and then he felt even smaller, like a petulant child hungry for attention.

  “It’s n
atural. She’s fallen in love with your son. Give her time. Once he hits the terrible twos, she’ll remember what a well-mannered guy you are and how much she loves a man who doesn’t throw his peas across the table.” Rob tried to take what comfort he could from those words.

  “Good morning to you, too,” Kate tried again.

  “Sorry. My mind’s somewhere else.” He brushed the snow from his overcoat, then rifled through the mail laid out on the ledge above her desk for his review. “Let it snow, let it snow, huh?”

  “I said to Mark yesterday, it smells like snow. I bet it’s going to snow.” She took a sip of her coffee, leaving maroon lipstick marks on the rim. “I can always tell. So, do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

  Rob sighed. “There’s already both?” He glanced at his watch. It was only eight thirty.

  She nodded. “Bad?”

  “Okay. The bad news is that Eli doesn’t like your latest tweaks to the west wing. Says it feels old-fashioned. He wants something more ‘in tune with kids today,’ whatever that means.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Shit,” Rob said under his breath. Kate had lost no time in telling him what she thought of Eli a few weeks after she’d been hired. “He’s a chauvinistic pig. Looks at my boobs every time he talks to me.” (Rob had stared intently at Kate’s face when she said this.)

  “It would be one thing if he was hot, but he’s just a nerdy guy.” Rob had wanted to ask how it would be different, how that would make it okay. But he bit his tongue.

  True, Eli was a little pathetic in the way those kids in school who never quite fit in were. He imagined Eli wearing button-down shirts in high school, no date at the prom. But Eli was also the kind of guy who was going to end up with a boatload of money, and he’d caught Hobbs’s eye out of the gate. Rob agreed he was a smart architect, anal in his calculations and drawings, but he lacked what Rob liked to think of as architectural intuition. No sense for how the space would work once people were actually in it. Their team had been struggling to refine the plans for Madison’s new art institute for weeks. Every time it seemed as if they were in the home stretch, Eli threw them a curve ball. “Let’s get Walter on the phone, shall we?”

  “I’ve already got a conference call set up for ten thirty.”

  Rob smiled. “Figures.”

  “Now for the good news: Lanie called. She says court is shutting down early today, and she’ll be able to pick up Benjamin from day care this afternoon. So you’re off the hook.”

  “Oh,” Rob’s heart sunk just a bit. Why hadn’t she just called his cell? Then he remembered he’d forgotten to charge it last night. It was dead in his pocket.

  “Not good news?” Kate asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “I was looking forward to cutting out early myself today, with this crap weather.”

  “Well, I’m not stopping you.” She turned back to her computer. “Don’t worry. I’ll cover for you, like I always do,” she added, her nails clicking away at the keys.

  “Your boss is such an ass. I don’t know how you stand him.”

  “You and me both,” Kate said matter-of-factly. Then, when Rob paused for a moment: “Well, are you going to do any work today?”

  “Probably not.” He grabbed his coffee and walked into his office, directly across the way. He dropped his briefcase on the cluttered desk, hung his coat on the hook behind the door, plugged in his cell. The snow outside the window was blowing hard now, almost horizontally, and when he touched his finger to the pane he pulled it quickly back from the cold. He sat down at his drawing board and retrieved the plans from the drawer. Etching upon etching detailed all the modifications they’d already made to the west wing, meant to be devoted to a children’s museum. He’d see what he could do to appease Eli without redrafting it completely. As with so much in life, it was a matter of two steps forward, one step back. Eventually, he had faith that they would get there.

  Then he remembered he’d meant to call Lanie, make sure she and Benjamin had made it in all right. He picked up his desk phone and started punching the numbers.

  When he heard her voice, he smiled. “Hey,” he began.

  “Apple? Apricot? Pecan? The magic of kringle lurks in the first bite. What fruity, nutty filling will blossom on the tongue? Will it be almond or something more tart, perhaps rhubarb? The surprises delight each time.”

  —The Book of Kringle

  “I’m eating ice cream out of the carton,” Ellen announced when Lanie walked through the door. She had put out her distress call an hour ago.

  “So, I see.” Her sister crossed the living room and laid her jacket on the sofa. Ellen hadn’t seen Lanie since the storm had hit and Madison had been buried for two days straight. Lanie looked around now, hands on her hips.

  “Well, if this isn’t the House of Mirth, I don’t know what is.”

  “No need to be fresh.” Ellen pulled up her feet in their fuzzy yellow slippers, leaned back against the sofa’s big cushions, and cinched her robe tightly around her waist. “You certainly look better than you did the other day.”

  “Thanks. I can’t remember the last time I was so tired. This baby thing can be brutal.” Then she paused, as if she’d realized her misstep. Ellen and Max had never been able to have kids, despite years of trying.

  “Anyway,” she quickly tried to change the subject. “I thought I was here to help you.”

  “You’re right.” Ellen sighed. “As they say, I’ve come undone.”

  “I doubt it’s that bad.” She gave Ellen a squeeze and reached for the bag she’d brought, pulling out some trashy magazines. It had become a tradition when they were kids: Whenever one of them felt lousy, they’d buy up a bunch of the weekly tabloids. Reading about the various celebrity emotional car wrecks always made them feel better about their own lives.

  “I assume we’re talking about Max?”

  Ellen nodded and sniffled.

  “He called the store. Out of the blue.” She blew her nose. “I told you that part already.”

  Lanie plopped down in the chair opposite her and nodded. “I didn’t know what to think or say. Thank goodness it was a bad connection.”

  Lanie looked at her wide-eyed. “Right . . . and you said he mentioned something about an e-mail?”

  “He sent it to my old account, one that I haven’t looked at for ages. But when I checked it, there it was, sitting on the screen, daring me to open it. I printed it out.”

  She retrieved a piece of paper from the floor and handed it over.

  Lanie began to read aloud:

  Dear Ellen,

  I won’t beat around the bush. I miss you—a lot. I wanted to let you know where I’ve landed in case your feeling the same way. I’ve moved to Sint Maarten, land of happiness! A buddy of mine invited me to join him on a little business venture down here.

  You would love it! Part of the island is Dutch/English. The other half is French. You could practice your French, if you came to visit! I know it’s been awhile since we’ve been in touch, but being down here gives a guy plenty of time to reflect. Lots of sand and sun! I always felt like the divorce was a rush thing. Maybe we should have taken more time to think things over? I’d hate myself if you’d had a change of heart and didn’t know how to reach me. My new e-mail address and number is at the top. Hope to here from you soon!

  Fondly,

  Max

  “Well, that’s unexpected, isn’t it?” Lanie looked up from the e-mail.

  “That’s putting it mildly.” Ellen paused. “I’d forgotten what a terrible speller he is.”

  “Hmm . . . it’s embarrassing, especially in the age of spell-check.” Lanie rolled her eyes.

  “Listen to me!” Ellen threw up her hands. “I sound ridiculous, don’t I?” She started to laugh, then cry. Her sister set down the paper and went to get more tissues from the bathroom. Of course Max had to write, “I miss you—a lot.” He knew their private code would get her worked up. After they’d dated only a few months and felt thei
r affections growing stronger, they’d whisper to each other, “I like you—a lot,” in lieu of the more frightening confession, “I love you.”

  Lanie handed her the tissue box, and Ellen helped herself, blew her nose. “I’m too old for this kind of nonsense.”

  “First of all, you’re not old. Okay? Forty-five is far from old. Second of all, I can’t believe you’re getting upset about a guy you’ve been divorced from for more than a year. I don’t need to remind you of all the reasons why, do I?”

  Ellen sniffled, raised her eyebrows expectantly.

  “Like he was always coming up with big schemes to make money but could never bring home a steady paycheck? Or that he had a wandering eye whenever you two went out. Or that he was more of a roommate than a supportive husband?”

  All true, Ellen knew. Initially, she had dismissed his flaws as charming, but she had come to see them for what they really were. The wandering eye, however, had always been tough to justify.

  “You’re right,” she said, crossing her arms. “He was a good-for-nothing.” She sighed. “But he was hot.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re not going to play that card again, are you?”

  Ellen looked at her sister.

  “Absolutely not. We’re not going there. Don’t even think about it,” Lanie warned. “Sure, he might look like a young Paul Newman, but where does that get you in life, unless he’s the real thing?”

  “A lot of salad dressing?”

  Lanie laughed. “And I haven’t even mentioned the annoying overuse of exclamation points in his e-mail.”

  Now it was Ellen’s turn to laugh. She remembered when she and her sister had made a list of pros and cons when discussing whether she should leave Max. It had quickly dissolved into an anti-love poem called “Let Me Count the Ways I Don’t Love You.” Although, come to think of it, that was a little mean. She had loved Max, had been smitten with him from the moment he asked her to the movies and dinner and his big blue eyes had swum with a mix of infatuation and admiration. Those eyes had won her over instantly.