Charlaine Harris - A Fool and His Honey

“She came by?” Martin prompted. “To the house on Archibald Street?”

“No, I moved. We moved. Dennis and I live on Grant.”

I rolled my eyes. Gettysburg Street. Grant Street. “You people,” I muttered into the fuzz on Hayden’s head.

“Did you say something, Aurora?” Dennis asked, bending down to me.

“No,” I said, smiling with all the sugar in my system. “We’re just having us a time, taking care of this little baby.”

“Oh my gosh, Aurora, this must be awful for you!” I felt every muscle in my body tighten as her pitying tone alerted me to what she was about to say. “Is it true that you can’t have your own? Martin, I think Barby told me you’d said that?” Cindy asked, and right then and there I decided I would kill my husband slowly, painfully, maybe publicly.

“Of course, with us never seeing Barrett, Martin was thinking of having more children,” I said, as slowly and deliberately as I could manage. “But I said, ‘No, Martin, that wouldn’t hardly be fair to poor of Barrett. I know it doesn’t look good, him never visiting you even though you’ve been sending him money for years, him never showing me the courtesy of shaking my hand-much less hugging my neck. But us having another child would just make Barrett feel so bad. So displaced.” I stopped then, afraid I was over the line into parody.

Cindy turned an uneven kind of red.

Martin was looking at me with a kind of horrified fascination. I hoped he had enough sense to keep his mouth shut.

“So, where are you staying while you’re in Corinth?” Dennis asked hastily.

“Ah-out at the old farm,” Martin said, not taking his eyes off me. Evidently, he had enough sense. “We’ve been at the Holiday Inn, but with the baby… I think we would be better off out at the farm.”

“It was nice of you to let Craig and Regina live there,” Dennis said, since I was elaborately fussing with the baby and I had the strong feeling that Cindy was still staring at me.

“Yes,” Martin said senselessly. “Well, we better be on our way. You wouldn’t happen to know where Craig’s brother Dylan lives, would you?”

Dennis said, “Let’s step outside, Martin; I can give you better directions that way.” They were out the door with suspicious alacrity. As Dennis pointed down the street, apparently counting stoplights, Cindy and I gave each other quick glances.

“Barrett really hasn’t come to see you at all?” she asked in a subdued way.

“No. He doesn’t acknowledge that I’m alive.” To my pride, my voice was calm and dispassionate. “Now, I can see that is loyalty to you, which of course you’d expect from a son. But it does make Martin feel bad that Barrett never visits him and seldom calls.”

His mother sighed heavily. “Barrett has never been able to see the divorce as anything but Martin walking out on us, though Barrett was in high school when we separated. He never saw that if Martin needed to be away from me, I needed just as much to be away from him.”

I tried to look interested and understanding. I was, to some extent, but I was also thinking my arms would fall off at the shoulders from the burden of holding this baby. I sort of half laid Hayden on the glass-topped counter.

“Just before and after her marriage, Regina used to come talk to me,” Cindy went on in a low voice, while through the front window I observed Dennis and Martin continue their pantomime of checking the weather and kicking the tires, or whatever guys do when women have embarrassed them. “Aurora, there’s something wrong with that girl. She’s got some moral blind spots. Craig’s brushes with law seemed to make no difference to her whatsoever, and the fact that Rory went everywhere with Craig-and I mean everywhere -didn’t seem to give her any pause.”

Hayden’s Binky rolled from his mouth. Even as he made some fussy protest, Cindy caught it in her hand before it hit the floor and popped it back into the little mouth. Hayden lapsed back into semiconsciousness.

“What do you mean?” I asked cautiously. “Good catch, by the way.”

“Thanks. I guess I mean Regina never seemed to make a moral judgment about the trouble Craig got into, he and Rory. She never said, ‘Oh, no, my husband has done a bad thing, writing those worthless checks.’ Or ‘My God, my husband uses illegal drugs!’ And she never tried to defend him either… pretend he was set up, or he was simply innocent. It was like it was just a lark, you know? Just fun. And ah-oh, Craig got caught!”

I’d always just thought Regina was intellectually stupid. According to Cindy, she was morally stupid as well.

“Thanks for warning me, Cindy,” I said. I took a deep breath and tried a social smile. “Dennis seems very nice.”

“Oh…” she paused, eyed me sideways in a significant way. “He is .”

We both started laughing, and Cindy opened the door for me. At the sound of the bell, the men both turned with relief apparent on their faces. Martin unlocked the Mercedes.

“You might want to call Margaret and Luke Granberry when you get out to the farm,” Dennis suggested. “They’ve owned the one next door for a few months. Luke pretends to farm, and Margaret pretends to farm right along with him. They’re really living on income from a trust, but they’re trying to put a back-to-nature spin on it.”

“They’re very nice,” Cindy agreed. “She’s the kind of woman who loves to help out.”

Martin and I nodded our thanks for the information, went through the interminable process of buckling Hayden in his seat, and finally were back on the street.

I took a deep breath. “Martin,” I began.

“Roe,” he forestalled me. “Listen, I know, I’m sorry. I had no right to tell Barby your problems. I was just-unhappy that you were unhappy, and she asked me over the phone one night how you were. I just… overstepped my bounds.”

“Yes.”

“You and Cindy were having your difficulties, weren’t you?”

“We’re okay now, Martin. I don’t want to go relate our whole conversation.”

“You and Cindy are at peace?”

“Yes.”

“What about you and me?”

“Unless you ask me first, never tell anyone about my female problems. Never.”

“I promise.”

“Okay. We’re all right.”

“You don’t sound altogether all right.”

“Don’t push it.”

We stopped at Dylan Graham’s house next. After the squalor of the Harbors’ place, Craig’s brother’s home was almost painfully respectable. It was small, and on a street of small houses. But every yard was neat, and Dylan’s house in particular was freshly painted and shiny. The only disorder, if you could call it that, was the scattering of toys visible in the little backyard. I remembered Rory telling us that Dylan and his wife had a little girl.

Rory, come to think of it, had been full of information, of the less-than-valuable-and-pertinent kind.

Martin went to the front door and knocked. After a long pause, the door opened, and a young woman began talking to Martin. At first her face looked suspicious and tight, but gradually she seemed to relax. She was plump and plain and friendly, with a small mouth, pale freckled skin, and crinkled light brown hair that was cut in bangs in the front and bushed out behind her shoulders.

Martin turned and gestured to me to come on, and I slipped out of the car and started to walk toward the little house.

And then I remembered the baby. I heaved a sigh, the theatrical kind, and turned around to go through the process of retrieving Hayden.

“Oh, isn’t he beautiful!” the young woman said. “Won’t you come in?”

While we exchanged condolences on the death of her brother-in-law, she waved us into the tiny house, which reminded me of an apartment I’d had while I was in college. The complex had just been finished when I signed the lease, and everything in the small space had gleamed: kitchen cabinets, walls, countertops. Craig’s older brother Dylan and his wife Shondra were obviously house-proud, and after a few days of taking care of an infant, I was impressed that Shondra, herself a new mother, was still keeping her standards high.