The Beresfords (40 page)

“That day we had a fight—” I murmured.

“Your
birthday
, you mean,” corrected Jonathan, “—yeah, that was a bad one. I came straight from one with Caroline, where we went round and round in circles, just to get into another fight where I least expected it.”

“I’m so sorry! So, so sorry! I didn’t have any idea—I would never have—”

“
Shhh
…Frannie, stop. I know you didn’t, and even if you had, you didn’t say a single thing that wasn’t true. Not a single thing I hadn’t said to myself at one point. We’ve already worked through this, and I wasn’t bringing it up again to make you feel bad. You actually helped me clarify that day: Caroline was my wife, and my role as her husband was to love and support her, not to make her give up her thing for something I was so half-assed about. That was Decision #1. Decision #2 was that I would, in fact, stop being half-assed. I would get serious again and figure out if, when law school was finished, I would quit Core-Pro and pursue my original goal. You helped, Frannie.”

“Then why, Jonathan? If she got what she wanted, and you were okay with it, why didn’t everything get better?”
What did she still want with Rob Newman?
was what I meant.

He understood. “We’d been through such a rough patch I knew it would take time to heal. It’s hard to have your spouse’s least-promising attributes thrust in your face and forget all about it. I had to come to terms with the fact that I might not have faith in common with my wife for years, if ever. I could only love her and do right by her and follow God myself. The rest wasn’t up to me. And she—well, she had to deal with finding out her husband’s religious zeal had only been dormant, not dead. And that, worse yet, it was coming back to life.” Rubbing the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, he sighed. “It seemed like we stopped really talking when we stopped fighting. We were friendly, civil, but it was like she was pulling away. And the more I tried to draw near, the further away she went. I knew she wasn’t thrilled about me going to church and ‘cutting our weekend in half,’ but I kept going. And when I joined Eric’s Bible study…I guess she found a way to fill her time.”

He fell silent.

Gingerly, I peeled my legs from the plastic chair again, pulling it into the spotty shade of the lone backyard tree. Jonathan followed me automatically, his mind far away. A part of my brain registered the voices of Rocky and Bullwinkle floating out to us—the same part that registered relief because that meant Robbie and Jamie were parked in front of the television and not injuring themselves or each other.

To give him more space to think, I wandered over to the hose, picking up Jamie’s Holly Hobby watering can along the way. The hose water was warm, and the rusting container lent it a metallic flavor that reminded me of blood, but water was water. I didn’t want either of us adding heatstroke to heartbreak.

I looked over to find him watching me, an anxious furrow to his brow. When I held out the can, he took a long drink, thanking me, before placing it on the ground and gesturing for me to sit down again.

“There’s something else I need to tell you, Frannie. I probably should have led off with it, since it had more to do with you, but the temptation to spill my guts was too great. Thank you for listening, by the way.”

I felt my heart speed. Had Uncle Paul relented toward me?

“It’s about Eric.”

“Eric Grant? What about him?”

My cousin’s blue eyes sought mine, and I felt a blush rising. Why, I couldn’t have said—out of mixed feelings toward Eric or out of suspicion that everyone
expected
me to have feelings of some kind—

I cleared my throat. “I saw him just a couple weeks ago. I didn’t invite him to visit, but he came anyhow.”

“Frannie—I don’t know how this will hit you. If my head wasn’t so full of my marriage problems, this would’ve been enough by itself. As it is, I think I’m already so numbed I can’t even get my mind around it.”

“For God’s sake—what? Tell me, Jonathan!”

“Eric and Caroline were in New York, you know—along with dear Rob Newman. While they were there, they went to see Rachel.”

“I know,” I interrupted hurriedly. “Caroline said so in her letter.”

He nodded. “Did she—did she tell you how the visit went?”

“No. She wrote before it happened, and I didn’t hear from her again. Did Rachel and Eric get in a fight or something?” I knew they hadn’t, even as I framed the question. Greg Perkins’ odd behavior came back to me—
did I know where Rachel was
? All of a sudden, my face felt hotter than the Loveland sun could make it.

“Rachel—she’s in California now,” said Jonathan. “We actually didn’t know about it for a while, and Caroline said nothing. But Rachel is—staying with Eric. In his apartment.”

Something funny was happening to me. Jonathan’s voice receded as if I were walking away from him down a tunnel and there was a rush and thump that I didn’t recognize at first as my own blood and heartbeat.

“Frannie!” He grabbed my upper arm before I could slide out of the chair. “Good Lord—are you all right? Here—drink some more water.”

The Holly Hobby watering can swam into view but I pushed it away.
No
.

“Damn him!” my cousin swore. “I was afraid of this. Leading you on like that! You were right all along. He hadn’t changed, deep down. It was bad enough, to think he betrayed our trust
and that Rachel would so lose her head—but I was clinging to the hope that you wouldn’t care—that all this time your indifference to him was God’s way of protecting your heart.” While he said this, he squeezed my shoulder with one hand and fanned me ineffectually with the other. “I’m sorry, Frannie. I’m sorry he hurt you and sorry that we all encouraged you to care for him.”

“I don’t care for him!” I protested, infuriated by how feeble I sounded and by the weight that settled on my chest. Shaking Jonathan off, I fought a childish urge to scream.
I don’t care about him—I hate him! I hate every Grant I’ve ever met!

Only, I didn’t anymore.

I hated Caroline for hurting Jonathan (and I assumed it was temporary because I could hardly envision a world where someone would prefer a Rob Newman to a Jonathan Beresford long-term), but I was equally aware that she had hurt me. As unlike as we were, she was the closest thing I had to a sister. She had said so, too! I had spent far more alone time with her than I ever had with Rachel or Julie. She had written me the most since I went away, and when I had initiated our friendship of sorts, she had never refused me. I thought we shared our love of Jonathan, if nothing else. Of course she saw me first as Jonathan’s cousin, then as a quasi-friend-sister—I knew that—but I was aware of a stab of pain and loss to realize she never shared with me what was really occupying her. And that maybe she never would. When would I see her again, and how would we overcome the awkwardness?

As convoluted as my feelings for Caroline were, they were clear-cut compared to the thicket of emotion Eric Grant plunged me into. I was eighteen—he was the first young man who ever showed interest in me, beyond a few snickering, pimpled boys at my high school who made me feel like something chopped to order at the butcher counter. It was true I disliked him at first—for years—but I had begun slowly to believe in his kindness to me. Without acknowledging it even to myself, I had begun to find his attentions flattering and—the very last time I saw him—not entirely unwelcome. It grieved me that all the goodness he was discovering in himself should be so quickly abandoned when temptation came. Whatever I had said in the past, if you had asked me an hour before Jonathan’s appearance, I would have grudgingly confessed that Eric Grant did indeed seem to be putting off his old self and putting on the new. And now?

Now, I was mortified. Familiar insecurities flooded back.
Of course he would prefer Rachel. Even Caroline said how good she was looking.
Don’t be ridiculous, Frannie! I chastised myself. You didn’t want him anyhow, and thank God.
So much for his deep love for you—he chose a married woman with a baby over a tongue-tied, gauche girl, and who could blame him?

I am those things, I thought. Tongue-tied and gauche. But I was also who I was becoming—who I was created to be by a loving Father in heaven. I whispered my new names to myself. Confident. Precious. Chosen.

Tell the truth, Frannie. Is anything terribly wounded here, except your pride? No, not
terribly
, I had to admit, but there was a pang. I would miss Eric, in my way. Miss feeling special. If Caroline was the only one to write me this summer, he was the only one who missed me enough to come out. And I had thought fondly of the afternoon we spent at the Cherry Pie
Festival. I actually enjoyed being with him and maybe—just maybe—looked forward to seeing him again.

I sat up straighter. Wow. If seeing Caroline again was going to be thorny, what would it be like to see Rachel and Eric?
If
I saw Rachel and Eric. What if Uncle Paul was so furious at their behavior that he barred them the house?

When I spoke again, my voice surprised me with its steadiness. “Jonathan—if all this has happened—has Uncle Paul forgiven me for not dating Eric like he wanted me to?”

“Better,” he answered. I saw his relief that I was not going to faint after all or beat my breast or tear my hair out in grief. I couldn’t say the same for my cousin. The faint smile he mustered didn’t reach his eyes.

“You’ve been forgiven and more than exonerated,” he said.

“Frannie, I’ve come to take you home.”

I remember little of the return trip.

Jonathan stayed at a nearby Best Western while I broke the news to Mom and Bill and prepared to go. Bill said about as much as he usually did, but Mom surprised me by minding.

“It’s always about what’s convenient for them, I suppose. And Paul and Marie couldn’t do me the courtesy of calling and asking how I felt about it?” She slammed the 57 on the Heinz bottle to get the ketchup unstuck. Robbie and Jamie had already wolfed down their hot dogs and were tearing around the living room.

“Jonathan explained to you—their family is in kind of a crisis right now. And we always knew I would probably only be here for the summer. This is just a week or two early.”

“
You
always said it would be for the summer,” Mom shot back. “Your uncle kept it pretty vague. I planned on you being here. What am I supposed to do about—about child care, for the couple things I have lined up?” She cleared her throat with surprising violence, and it struck me all at once that maybe she did care if I lived or died, if I was around or not.

“I’ve…been glad to be here, Mom,” I said. The words came slowly but I felt the truth of them. “Glad to see you again and to get to know Bill and Robbie and Jamie.” I felt a lump in my own throat here—how quiet my life would be, without harum-scarum Robbie and Jamie bounding around, nipping at my ankles. And who would take them to church? Would they ever go again?

“
Ermh
.” Mom waved this off, drumming her fingernails on the tabletop. “Don’t see what your hurry is. Sounds like they didn’t miss you a bit until they thought you could help out nursing that cousin of yours. But if you wanna go, go. You’re eighteen. No one’s stopping you. I did think, though, that you were trying to finish some research project.”

“I finished it.”

“I don’t recall you talking to me about it.”

“To you?”

“Yeah. Wasn’t it supposed to be about the brain on addiction, and wasn’t I supposed to be the addict you interviewed? Isn’t that what I’ve always been to you Beresfords? The addict?”

“Oh.” I guess she had known more than I thought she did, all along. It didn’t seem the moment to point out that I wasn’t, officially, a Beresford. Neither was I a Dawes. I occupied a no-man’s-land,
namewise
.
Confident. Precious. Chosen.
“I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about it. I just interviewed some addiction counselors instead.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m sure they had plenty to say.”

“Did you—have anything you want me to mention?”

“About addiction?”

“About addiction.”

Mom looked at Bill, but he was picking the stuck-on French fries off the baking sheet.

Clearing her throat again, more gently this time, she said, “I guess I would say—I only want to say that it…messes with you. And that every day’s a struggle, even after you quit. More,
maybe. And then mostly that you—you lose some things, and they don’t ever come back. That’s all. What would you say, Bill? Anything I forgot?”

Her husband popped one more charred fry in his mouth. “That’s about it,” said Bill. “In a nutshell.”

The first strange thing to happen was that Aunt Marie came with Uncle Paul to the airport. At the gate she hurried toward me, wrapping me in her arms and breathing, “Oh, Frannie! Now everything will be all right.” Her hair was loose and grayer than I’d seen it—for an instant she reminded me jarringly of my mother.

Uncle Paul turned from the brief side-arm hug he and Jonathan gave each other to place an awkward, heavy hand on my shoulder. “And Frannie. Welcome home.” The word
home
said it all, even if I hadn’t caught the tremble in his voice and the rapid blink of his eyelids. Any lingering resentment of mine melted away. If he had been unjust to me, the disintegration of his children was punishment enough. And now that I was allowed back into the diminished Beresford fold, no matter the circumstances or reasons, I could feel only gratitude. Even the months with the Dawes’ were a gift from this man whom I owed everything. If Uncle Paul had not exiled me, I would not have known my half-brother and -sister; I would not have experienced that last-minute, partial rapprochement with my mother; I would not have understood in my heart that God called me by name, not for anything I had or had not done, or for Jonathan’s sake or Aunt Terri’s, but for my own.