Single with Children. Arlene James

catch her against him at the same time.

      “I, um, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bark. It…it’s been a long day.”

      She bowed her head, standing very still in the curve of his arm. “Yes, I know.” The gaze she lifted to him this time glittered with accusation. “They waited until after nine o’clock.”

      They? His children, of course, though why they would bother to wait up for him, of all people, was pure mystery. Most of the time, they ignored everything about him, including his commands. He dropped his arm, put his head back and swallowed his brandy in one hard gulp that burned all the way down and hit his belly with the force of a fist. He inhaled cooling air through his mouth, bit down on the fiery aftertaste and sighed with satisfaction. He immediately felt better. “Suppose you tell me what they wanted,” he said smoothly, loosening his tie with one hand. Suddenly her anger was back. It leaped like bolts of clear blue lightning in bright green eyes.

      “They wanted their father!” she told him sharply. “We built a snow castle in the front yard today, and they wanted to be told what an amazing structure they’d made, what brilliant children they are.”

      “A snow castle,” he repeated dully. He hadn’t noticed. He stepped over to his chair and sank down upon it, all at once weary beyond bearing. “I’ll tell them in the morning,” he said, pressing the brandy snifter to the ache beginning between his eyes.

      Laura shook her head slowly from side to side, but he was too tried to ask what it was all about. This time, when she muttered, “Good night,” and stalked away, he let her go.

      After a while, the pounding in his head seemed to lessen, and he sat forward, trying to work up the energy to get up and go to bed. His gaze fell on the photo albums on the table. Leaning far forward, he could just reach them. He pulled them into his lap, stacking one on top of the other. He ran a hand over the ragged cover of the first and wondered again why his grandmother had left him this shabby piece of memorabilia in her will. You could never tell about Kate. Her mind had seemed to work in several arenas at once, weighing seemingly unrelated matters and reaching often amazing conclusions. He missed her. He was surprised at how much he could miss her after all those years away in the military.

      What were you doing, Kate, flying off to the Amazon alone, leaving your family to fend for themselves? He had the lowering feeling that he wasn’t doing too well on that score himself. After eighteen months, his children seemed hardly to know him, and he was still drifting, still looking for an anchor.

      Slowly he opened the cover of the photo album and looked once more upon his parents’ wedding picture. They had been the perfect couple, the heir apparent and the unspoiled beauty. It was difficult to think of them apart now, despite the reality of their separation, and yet, when he thought of home and his youth, he thought of his mother and her apologetic explanations for his father’s continual absence.

      “He has the whole weight of the family business on his shoulders,” she would tell him. “So many are dependent on him. He’s doing the best he can.”

      He thumbed through the photos, watching himself grow from infant to toddler to mischief-maker to rebel to man. Here were the hallmarks of his life—first steps, birthday parties, eighth-grade graduation, the football championship, hockey play-offs, proms. In these pictures the family grew, too, from first and only son, to Caroline, then Natalie, and finally the twins, in precise two-year intervals.

      Laura was wrong. He was in nearly every one of these pictures. The only person missing here was, as always, his father. Who did that woman think she was, scolding him for not coming home in time to compliment his kids on a silly snow castle? He came home, didn’t he? When they needed him, he was here, wasn’t he? He was doing his level best, and that ought to count for something. Shouldn’t it? He pushed the photo albums back onto the table and set the brandy snifter on top of them. Then he got to his feet and dragged himself to his bed. He never even opened the second album, the pictorial journal—navy blue, leather-bound, embossed in gold—so painstakingly put together by his late wife, the one that chronicled the years of his own young family’s lives—the one from which he was missing.

      Four

      She expected him to shout at her, or at least to tell her to mind her own business. Instead, he came in to breakfast all smiles. His only reference to the evening before was a pointed glance in her direction before he heaped lavish praise on the snow castle on his front lawn. To Laura’s dismay, his children merely traded looks among themselves before the twins followed Wendy’s lead and hunched over their cereal bowls in damning silence. An obviously crestfallen Adam sat at the table and erected the dreaded newspaper barrier before him. Laura got up and poured him a cup of coffee, then pulled a toasted English muffin and a bowl of creamed wheat from the oven to set before him. He smiled distractedly, murmured his thanks, and went back to his paper. The children finished their breakfast and were herded from the room by Laura. She cast a last wistful look at Adam, shook her head in frustration and followed her charges through the door. He left before she could get the children’s clothing laid out and return to him.

      That became the pattern for mornings in the Fortune household. Adam was always last to the table. He and the children paid only nominal attention to one another, and despite Laura’s best efforts, he always left without saying goodbye. His saving grace was that he regularly came home early to share dinner with his children, and with Laura’s calm direction, the family had begun to evolve their own good-night ritual.

      It wasn’t much to brag about initially. She merely marched the children past him, one by one, for a solemn good-night. Before long, however, he was leaning forward to give clumsy pats on the shoulder, and the children, Wendy first, were tentatively reaching out to him for more, and now they were actually hugging. Laura eagerly awaited the evening when one or the other of them would pucker up and the kissing would begin. It would only be a small step on a long road to wellness and normalcy for this family, but Laura felt that it would be a very important step.

      Sometimes she told herself that if she could only stay until she saw that first good-night kiss between father and child, she would be content, but the truth was that she was more content at the moment than she had been in a very, very long time—except for those instances of sheer terror when she thought about what would happen if Doyal found her here. She never intended to actually contemplate such hideous thoughts, but on occasion they took her unawares.

      Late at night, while she lay in her bed and pondered the day to come, plotting games and treats and subtle teachings, Doyal would flash into her head, his ruggedly handsome face smiling, then sneering, and finally bearing down on her with rage distorting every feature. She would feel his hands around her throat and know that she was going to die, and then, in her mind’s eye, she would see Wendy or one of the boys charge at him, tiny fists flailing. She would sit up straight and shake herself out of it before she could form that last grotesque picture, but it was always there in the back of her mind, the specter of a small body collapsed in trauma. She couldn’t let that happen. She wouldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t just walk out and leave Adam and the children in the lurch, but she had to leave before Doyal found her. She would leave before Doyal found her. She comforted herself with that thought. It became her litany, her mantra. She would go before it was too late—just not yet.

      The terror was never far below the surface, however. She would wake in the black hours of morning, drenched in sweat and trembling with fear and disgust, having witnessed again the daming scene that had confirmed Doyal’s guilt. She could almost laugh, had she not feared that hysteria would overwhelm bitterness as she thought of how she’d followed Doyal that day over seven months ago in a jealous pique, believing that he was seeing another woman, only to find that his destination was a run-down house on the rough side of town. She had watched in horror, concealed by a Dumpster and a tree, as a wide spectrum of humanity breezed in and stumbled out of that old house. Some of them hadn’t come out for hours. Some of them had come out right away, the house barely behind them before they were gobbling their pills, snorting their powders or jabbing needles into their veins. Most of them had been so desperate that they ignored the gun brandished by Doyal’s “friend” Calvin, whom Laura now realized was