Chapter 4 - The Drive Home and the Silent Kitchen
The front door did not slam; I made certain of it.
I closed it with a soft, precise *click* that felt far more final than any violence could have managed.
The afternoon sun was blinding after the dim, curtained coolness of Gloria’s parlor. It beat down on the hood of our gray crossover, turning the interior into an oven that smelled of hot vinyl and the mints Sophie kept in the door pocket.
Sophie climbed into the passenger seat without a word. She had the yellow-and-green quilt tucked between her knees, her small hands clutching the edges so tightly that her knuckles were white. She didn't cry. That was what broke my heart most—she didn't cry. She simply stared straight through the windshield at Gloria’s immaculate lawn, where two concrete geese stood dressed in matching baby bonnets by the mailbox.
Caleb came out of the house forty seconds later.
He didn't run; he walked with that hurried, stooped shuffle of a man who knew he was being watched from behind the lace curtains of three neighboring houses. He threw open the driver’s side door, threw himself onto the seat, and slammed the door so hard the side mirror vibrated.
"Are you happy?" he demanded.
He didn't look at me. He shoved the key into the ignition, twisted it until the starter shrieked against the flywheel, and wrenched the gearshift into reverse. The tires crunched viciously over the gravel at the edge of his mother’s asphalt drive.
"Are you completely satisfied with yourself?" he yelled, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand as we backed into the street. "You couldn't just keep your mouth shut for forty-five minutes? You couldn't just let Natalie have her day?"
"Watch the road, Caleb," I said, my voice dead and steady.
"Don't tell me to watch the road!" he roared, swinging the wheel around. "You humiliated my mother in front of the entire church auxiliary! You made Natalie cry so hard she was hyperventilating on the sofa! She’s pregnant with twins, Emma! High risk! Do you have any idea what that kind of stress does to a pregnancy?"
"Caleb," I said, nodding toward the back seat—no, toward the front seat, toward Sophie, who had pulled her knees up to her chest, her chin resting on the hem of her yellow dress.
He glanced at her, then his mouth snapped shut into a thin, white line. His throat worked as he swallowed down the rest of his rage, his knuckles whitening on the black leather of the steering wheel.
For four miles, the only sound was the thrum of the tires over the expansion joints of Route 14 and the heavy, ragged sound of Caleb’s breathing. The air conditioning blew tepid air into our faces, carrying the faint scent of the lemon bars Aunt Ruth had pressed into my hand as we had passed her on the porch—she had slipped two of them into a paper napkin and shoved them into my purse while Gloria had been fetching Natalie a glass of ice water.
"Mom?" Sophie’s voice was very small, barely louder than the hum of the fan.
"Yes, baby?"
"Is Aunt Natalie going to hate the babies?"
I turned in my seat, reaching across the console to lay my hand over her ankle. Her skin was cool beneath the cotton eyelet. "No, sweetie. Of course not. Why would you think that?"
"Because," she whispered, her eyes fixed on the glove compartment, "Grandma said if they didn't have the same things, they would resent each other. She said it was bad to share."
"Grandma is wrong," I said, each word distinct, carved out of stone. "Grandma is completely, dangerously wrong. Sharing isn't a lack of love, Sophie. What you made was the only thing in that house today that had any real love in it at all."
Beside me, Caleb let out a sharp, derisive snort through his nose, but he didn't speak. He kept his eyes fixed on the asphalt ahead, his jaw working back and forth like a machine grinding sand.
When we pulled into our driveway—our modest, cedar-shingled ranch with the hydrangeas that needed pruning and the cracked front step Caleb had promised to fix since October—Sophie didn't wait for us. She unbuckled her belt, scrambled out of the car, and bolted up the walk, the yellow quilt trailing behind her like a fallen flag. We heard the front screen door slap against the frame, then the heavier thud of her bedroom door closing down the hall.
Caleb turned the engine off. The silence that filled the car was heavy, rancid, and twelve years old.
"You're going to call her," he said. He didn't look at me; he stared at the garage door. "You’re going to call my mother, and you’re going to apologize. And then you’re going to send Natalie the money for the second monitor."
I looked at him. Really looked at him.
I looked at the slight graying at his temples, the soft curve of his jaw that had lost its definition over a decade of desk work and comfortable dinners, the slight slump of his shoulders that I had once thought was gentleness, that I had once mistaken for patience.
"I am not calling your mother," I said.
"Emma, be reasonable—"
"I spent eight hundred and fifty dollars this week, Caleb. On food your sister’s friends ate. On flowers your mother will leave to rot on her dining table. I bought a two-hundred-and-twenty-dollar monitor off that registry with money I was supposed to use for Sophie’s summer camp."
"We have the money," he snapped, turning to face me now, his eyes rimmed with red, his face mottled. "Don't act like we’re on the street, Emma. We could afford the extra hundred bucks! It’s not about the money and you know it! It’s about you always having to be right! You always have to look down on them because they aren't like your family! Because my mother isn't some soft-spoken saint who lets you run everything!"
"Your mother," I said, my voice dropping so low he had to lean toward me to hear it, "is a bully. She is a small, bitter, greedy woman who has spent thirty years training you to jump through hoops so she doesn't withhold her affection. And you are so terrified of her displeasure that you sat there and watched her make your ten-year-old daughter feel like dirt over a piece of calico."
His hand came up, pointing a trembling index finger two inches from my nose.
"You leave Sophie out of this," he hissed.
"She *was* in it!" I shouted, the volume finally ripping through my throat, violent and sharp enough to make him recoil against the driver’s side door. "She was standing right there! She watched her grandmother turn her gift into a shakedown! And you sat on your hands against the kitchen door like a coward!"
The word hung in the humid air between us, ugly and greasy and true.
Caleb’s face went entirely slack. For a second, the anger vanished, replaced by that hollow, wounded look he always got when the truth cut too close to the bone. Then the mask hardened again, turning into that cold, sullen stubbornness that was his only defense against the world his mother had built for him.
"I’m going for a drive," he said.
"Don't bother coming back tonight," I replied.
May you like
He didn't answer. He waited until I opened the passenger door and stepped onto the driveway, then he slammed the transmission into reverse again, spun the tires across the blacktop, and was gone before I reached the porch steps.
***
