Marriage in Jeopardy. Anna Adams

      “If you want to call him that badly, maybe you should.” Bart gripped her upper arms for a minute and then let go. “I just hate that you have to prepare yourself to be hurt.”

      “He might understand. He’s lost a child, too.” She thought of Clara. Rather, a memory of Clara stole into her mind. Her baby, in pink shorts that bagged almost to her knees, brown hair blowing across her eyes and a spade almost as tall as she was for digging in the sand.

      Evelyn clenched her eyes shut and willed that wisp of memory to leave. She didn’t deserve to remember the good times, and the worst day was just a nightmare feeling she could call to mind. She’d been so drunk she only knew what had happened after her daughter had died.

      “Josh didn’t lose his child the way we did.” Bart started toward the hallway. “I’ll wash up. You do what you have to, Evelyn.”

      “Bart—”

      He stopped. She wrapped her wet arms around him, finding his sea scents comfortingly familiar. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m tired of him pushing us away. But how can we complain? He raised himself. He was more father and mother to Clara than we were.”

      “Not just because of you.” He looked backward in time. “The catches were so sparse. I was afraid I couldn’t feed you all. I’ve asked myself the same question since the day Clara… Why didn’t I work harder, instead of drinking harder?”

      “And why couldn’t I want to be a mom?” Evelyn made herself say the words, each one like hammering a nail in her own coffin. Josh had been a total surprise to her and Bart. She’d wanted to be a teacher, but pregnant at nineteen, she’d dropped out of college. As a mom, she was a total misfit, never feeling the instincts that came naturally to other women.

      She’d thought something was wrong with her colicky son, but no matter how many times she’d dragged Josh to the doctor, they just kept telling her he was fine—healthy—and she’d get used to motherhood. She’d tried some of Bart’s vodka one night, just after she’d put her baby to bed. The vodka had eased her pain.

      Finally, it had numbed her.

      She pulled Bart even closer. “I might have been better with their baby.”

      “It wouldn’t matter. You think Josh would have let us see him?”

      “He’s not cruel. He’s sad. We have to stick it out—if only because Josh feels as guilty about Clara as we do.” It was only after the state had put her and Bart in jail for eighteen months for negligence that she’d learned not to give up trying to be a good mother.

      “He has no reason to feel guilty.”

      “If he could believe that, maybe he’d learn to forgive us and be our son again. And I wonder if something’s wrong between him and Lydia. Even when they’re together, they— I feel distance between them.”

      “What are you talking about, Evelyn?” He let her go and turned off the water just before it reached the top of the sink.

      “If you disagreed with me, you’d say so. You’ve been worried, too.” She dunked the dishes into the sink, taking comfort from the clash of glass and stoneware. “It’s time we stopped just waiting for things to get better,” she said. “I’m going to ask them to come up here.”

      Bart took the first plate she handed him. Even filthy from working on the boat, he started drying. It was habit. She washed. He dried. People with addictive, alcoholic personalities found strength in habits.

      “Lydia might come. Josh won’t.” He set the plate down and then stared at his dirty jeans. “I’m stinking up the place. Let me shower and I’ll help you.”

      “I’m fine. Go ahead.” She set a plate in the other half of the sink, her mind on her spiel to Josh. How could she convince him to come home and get over his sadness?

      So aware of her thoughts after thirty-three years together, Bart stopped and said, “Listen to me, Evelyn.” His anxiety came through.

      “He may turn me down, but how do you think Lydia feels in that house, with the nursery down the hall? Josh will come if he thinks it’ll help her.”

      “Lydia loves us, but her loyalty belongs to him. She won’t come up here, knowing Josh can’t stand to be in this house.”

      Evelyn turned. She put her hands on her hips, not caring when a marshmallow cloud of dishwashing suds dropped to the floor. “You forget—you can slide along, think you’re doing all right—but when you lose a child, nothing is ever the same. Lydia loves Josh, but she’ll be hating that room.”

      They had a room of their own, hardly opened in the past eighteen years, still filled with Clara’s things. If she could have cut that room out of her house, she would have dropped it over the cliffs on the headland. And yet—it was all she had left of her daughter.

      “You’d use Lydia?” Bart didn’t like that.

      She struggled with a surge of guilt. “Use her, yes.” She couldn’t pretend to be better than she was. “But I love her as if she were ours. She needs a mother and father as much as Josh does, and I want my son back. This family has lost enough, and I’m through waiting for him to come home.”

      “You worry me, Evelyn.”

      “We’ve tried to give him time to make up his mind.” She went back to the sink. “We’ve done enough penance. He’ll either cut us off or we’ll convince him at last that he can depend on us.”

      “I don’t want him to cut us off,” Bart said.

      “This half life of having him come around once or twice a year is good enough for you?”

      “It’s what we have.” Bart opened the fridge. He studied the bottles of water and juice and then slammed the door shut. “It’s what we made.”

      She started washing again. Bart, loving her, even after what they’d done, had saved her life. Was she about to risk losing him, too? “We can make something better.”

      WRAPPED IN A pale yellow chenille blanket, Lydia stared at the evening paper, oblivious to the words. Josh came into the family room and set a cup of coffee beside her.

      “Thanks.” She’d craved it. He’d brewed it.

      He tucked the blanket around her feet. She tried not to move away from his hands.

      Somehow, he knew. He looked at her with the knowledge of her instinctive rejection in his eyes. “Should you go to bed?” he asked.

      “I don’t know. They just told me to call if I felt bad.” She hunched her shoulders and cupped her mug in both hands. The coffee should have been too hot, but it warmed her against a cold that came from deep inside.

      “If you’re staying down here, I’ll start a fire.”

      She glanced toward the fireplace. Gray ash and small black chunks crowded the hearth. The familiar scent of apple and wood smoke usually comforted her. “Okay, but then sit for a while. You don’t have to do anything else for me.”

      Surprise made him look at her. “You want to talk?”

      “I’d just like knowing you’re near.” She had to believe he wasn’t thinking up ways to get back to the office.

      Nodding, he began to scoop the ashes into an old-fashioned coal scuttle they’d found in a shop in his hometown in Maine. No polished copper affair, this was a dusty, dented black metal working scuttle. Like their marriage, it had taken a beating. “Something’s on your mind,” he said.

      She glanced at the phone, resting beside a stack of her library books on a table beneath the bay window. “I promised your mother I’d call when we got home.”

      He opened his mouth, then shut it.

      She’d seen his parents through his eyes at first. Alcoholics, who’d