Hope Street Part 33

ELEVEN.

THE WEST SIDE MOTOR LODGE on Rockwell Turnpike had not aged well. It was clean and the staff was friendly, but Joelle seriously doubted the motel had undergone any significant renovations since she'd left town thirty-seven years earlier. The pattern in the lobby's carpet had faded so badly that the black circles resembled oil stains marring the green background. The trite still-life paintings on the walls were faded. The leaves on the fake potted plants had been bleached by time to nearly white.

The room rate was cheap, though, and the night clerk hadn't balked when Joelle had checked in at nearly midnight last night. She probably should have stopped for the night somewhere in Pennsylvania, rather than driving all the way to Holmdell in one day. But she didn't want to be in Pennsylvania.

She wasn't sure she wanted to be in Ohio, either. All she had was a vague idea that returning to the place she and Bobby had agreed to get married might help her understand how their marriage had reached this crisis.

She'd considered driving straight to her mother's house last night, but she hadn't even warned her mother that she was coming to Holmdell. If Joelle had rung her mother's bell in the middle of the night, Wanda would probably have had a heart attack. Joelle didn't need that calamity on top of everything else she was dealing with.

So the West Side Motor Lodge had been her home for the night. She'd staggered into the room, taken a quick shower and found herself too agitated to sleep, even though she was exhausted and aching. She'd unpacked her cell-phone recharger, plugged it in, then lifted her phone and listened, for at least the dozenth time, to Bobby's message: Come home. Please.

The "come home" she could handle. The "please" filled her eyes with tears.

She couldn't bring herself to call him. She'd tried to talk to him all week and he'd shut down on her. Well, now it was her turn to shut down. She'd phone him when she was ready-and she wasn't ready yet.

She'd crawled into the hard motel bed and willed herself to rest. The sheets had smelled of starch and bleach. The air conditioner had rattled like a tin can rolling down the sidewalk. The curtains at her window didn't meet, and through the narrow slit she'd seen the occasional flash of headlights as a car barreled down Rockwell Turnpike, heading toward Indiana.

Eventually she'd drifted off. But the first gray light of dawn to slice through that crevice in the curtains roused her, and by seven-thirty she was seated in the motel's sleepy restaurant, sipping coffee that tasted burned and waiting for a platter of scrambled eggs.

Was Bobby awake yet? Was he eating a decent breakfast? Had he ever grilled the shrimp?

Her phone rang, and she checked the caller ID. Bobby again. Why did he want to talk to her now? Why couldn't he have talked to her before she'd left, when she'd been begging him to open up?

The phone stopped ringing, and she checked to see if he'd left another message. He hadn't. If she'd answered, he probably would have only asked her to come home. Maybe he would have said "please" again.

She didn't want to go home, not until she knew what she was going home to.

She was on her third cup of coffee when Claudia called. As soon as she answered, she realized Claudia was phoning from Joelle and Bobby's house. She heard Doors music in the background-not a listening choice Claudia would make in her own home. Claudia a.s.sured her that Bobby was all right and Joelle told her to tell Bobby about the Prius's outstanding highway mileage.

She signed her breakfast bill to her room, then left the motel. More than ten years had pa.s.sed since she'd last been back in her hometown. It was so much easier to fly her mother to Hartford than to try to haul everyone to Holmdell for a visit, especially now, with Jeremy and Kristin in the family. Since her mother had more or less retired from her job at the Bank Street Diner, she had no real constraints on her schedule and could visit Connecticut without having to negotiate for vacation time.

She still went to the diner a few days a week to run the cash register, because sitting around her apartment was boring. She had no family in town; she'd told Joelle that her coworkers at the diner were her subst.i.tute family and she'd go there when she felt like seeing them. She'd station herself behind the cashier's desk and schmooze with the customers, and most people seemed to think Wanda Webber's presence at the Bank Street Diner meant all was as it should be.

Joelle drove up the turnpike into town and turned onto Bank Street, stopping at the corner where the diner sat, only because a red light forced her. The eatery's windows were cloudy, the interior dimly lit, but the awning shading the windows appeared new, its green-and-white stripes vivid in the pale morning light.

The traffic signal changed and she continued down the street. The sidewalks had been inlaid with bricks in a herringbone pattern, she noted, and a few concrete planters had been installed along the curb, holding clutches of impatiens. Evidently Holmdell had hired the local version of DiFranco Landscaping to spruce up the downtown area. Although limp in the late-June heat, the flowers were pretty.

She noticed that Fontaine's Beauty Salon was gone, replaced by something called Kwik-Kuts, and Clement's Hardware had been taken over by one of the national retail-hardware franchises. Beldon's Department Store had looked like something out of the thirties when Joelle had been a child; it still looked like something out of the thirties, its limestone facade boasting an art deco flavor and its outer walls stained from decades of auto exhaust. A Starbucks stood next to Harley's convenience store, where Joelle used to work. Even Holmdell had its own Starbucks now, Joelle thought with a smile. The Bank Street Diner had better improve the quality of the coffee it was serving if it hoped to compete.

She pa.s.sed the bank building, a ma.s.sive structure with a clock embedded in its front wall. When Joelle was a child, the clock had been round, with ornate hands and gothic numerals. That clock had been replaced by a digital panel that flashed not just the time but the temperature in Fahrenheit and centigrade. The clock was off by eight minutes, and the thermometer claimed it was only sixty-five degrees. It felt warmer than that to Joelle.

She turned off Bank Street and headed toward Tubtown. The gentrification that had improved Holmdell's business district hadn't reached this part of town. The neighborhood was still dreary, houses and duplexes crowded together, sidewalks crumbling or nonexistent, buildings crying out for paint or a new roof. At least every fourth house had a bathtub shrine adorning its front yard.

She steered down one familiar street and then another until she reached the DiFranco house. The last time she'd been here, her goal had been to empty the house and shut it down after Bobby's father died.

Mike and Danny had driven out to Ohio with Bobby and Joelle when they'd received word that a neighbor had found Louie lying dead on his kitchen floor. The coroner wasn't sure how long he'd been there-a couple of days, at least. Fortunately a funeral home had already carted his body away by the time Joelle and the family arrived. All medical evidence had indicated that Louie DiFranco had died of a ma.s.sive stroke, although according to the autopsy, he'd had a great deal of alcohol in his blood.

Claudia and her new husband had flown in for the funeral. Eddie had traveled east from San Francisco, leaving his partner behind. Louie hadn't left a will-that would have made things too easy-but his estate hadn't been large or complicated, and Bobby and Eddie had agreed to split whatever was left after expenses. The funeral service at St. Mary's had been spa.r.s.ely attended. Wanda had offered to pay her respects, but Joelle told her not to bother.

Joelle had felt sadder viewing Bobby's mother's grave than watching Louie's casket as it was lowered into the ground beside her. Bobby had remained expressionless throughout the entire ritual, one hand holding Joelle's and his other arm looped around Eddie's shoulders, as if he still felt he had to protect his baby brother from Louie's fists. There would be no more fists, no more violence.

Joelle and Bobby had sent the boys home on a plane with Claudia and Gary, and then they and Eddie tackled the daunting task of emptying Louie's house. Running fans in the windows, they managed to chase most of the foul, musty smell from the rooms. They threw out empty pizza boxes, bags of stale bread, a plastic container of rice pudding edged in blue mold and all the liquor Louie had left behind, scattered in bottles throughout the house. While Joelle scrubbed the kitchen, Bobby and his brother sorted through Louie's belongings in the rest of the house, stuffing his old clothing into boxes, gathering up the unpaid bills piled on his dresser, filling trash bag after trash bag with the contents of his drawers and cabinets.

Bobby tuned his father's radio to an oldies rock station so they'd have music to distract them while they worked. Above the din of Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles and Pink Floyd, she'd hear Eddie shout, "Hey, look at this!" or Bobby holler, "d.a.m.n-remember this?" When their words were followed by laughter, she'd smile and scrub the stained counters and sing along with whatever was playing on the radio.

After three days of sweaty labor, the house was as empty and clean as it would ever be. Bobby gathered the few items he intended to bring back to Connecticut with him-an old, weathered baseball glove, a ratchet set and a crucifix that had belonged to his mother-and hired a Realtor to sell the place for him and Eddie. Then they'd driven away.

"Are you sad?" she'd asked him.

He'd thought awhile before answering. "I'm sad that I don't feel sadder."

Someone had painted the house yellow since that August day so many years ago, but the place still seemed shabby and mournful. The roof was missing a few shingles, the shrubs were overgrown and the Madonna statue in Bobby's mother's bathtub shrine listed as if she'd been guzzling some of Louie's leftover booze. Joelle knew someone else had bought the house the spring after Louie's death, and maybe more families had moved in and out since then, but the place seemed abandoned. No cars in the driveway, no tricycles or basketb.a.l.l.s on the lawn, no plants visible along the windowsills. Joelle parked, strolled up the front walk and knocked on the door. No one answered.

She wandered around to the back of the house. The back porch still sagged and the back door's screen still sat crookedly on its hinges. She recalled a night when light had spilled through that screen door and she'd heard voices coming from inside. Bobby had stood behind her in the shadows, fearing for his life, while she'd peeked through the door into the kitchen and seen Louie with his busted nose.

Oh, Bobby... Maybe one of the things she'd loved about Drew Foster back then was that he'd been so simple. No deaths in his family, no drunks, no father swinging his fists. No ghosts in his soul, no torment in his eyes. Whatever he'd wanted, he'd gotten. He had never had to fight for anything.

Bobby had always had to fight. He'd fought here, in this house. He'd fought in Vietnam. He'd fought his own body after a land mine had shattered it. He'd fought to create a viable business, to become an educated man.

And now he was fighting Joelle. He was fighting Drew. He was fighting to hold on to the lie on which they'd built their lives-but he'd already lost that fight.

How could she get him to stop fighting?

Sighing, she trudged back around the house, across the scraggly front yard to her car. Her heart was so heavy it seemed to pull her off balance. When she gazed through her windshield at the bathtub shrine, she wondered whether perhaps the Madonna's heart was heavy, too, and that was why she couldn't stand straight.

JOELLE STEERED AWAY FROM the DiFranco house, away from the leaning Madonna and the memories and drove back through downtown, past the rivet factory on Bailey Street where Bobby's father had worked; past the cemetery; past the high school, to where the alt.i.tude and the economic status were elevated. The houses on the Hill were s.p.a.cious and solid. No vinyl siding here, no rusty rain gutters, no driveways with weeds growing through cracks in the concrete. No half-buried bathtubs.

The curving roads in this part of town bore names like Cedar Lane and Glenville Terrace and Harvard Street. The air smelled of newly cut gra.s.s and sun-warmed roses. The houses featured elaborate stonework, leaded windows and heavy oak front doors with polished bra.s.s knockers. The two-car driveways that weren't vacant held Audi coupes and Lexus SUVs.

She cruised down Harvard Street, then veered onto Birchwood Drive. The road arched around the golf course, the rear yards of the houses separated from the fairway by rows of Scotch pine and aspen. When she reached the house where Drew Foster used to live, she coasted to the curb and turned off the engine.

Drew's house, a symmetrical mansion of brick and stone with a peaked slate roof flanked by chimneys on either side, had once seemed like a palace to her. The few times she'd been a guest there she'd felt like a village peasant paying homage to n.o.bility.

It seemed a bit less grand to her today. She'd grown used to the rambling houses of northwest Connecticut-and she'd grown, period. She was no longer a poor girl in awe of her hometown's wealthiest residents. As she gazed at the Foster house, she acknowledged that the Fosters had a grandson who might die too young from a terrible disease. How could anyone envy them?

The front door opened and a slim woman with short red hair emerged. She had on a tank top and cargo shorts, white anklets and sneakers. She might have been dressed to go for a jog, or to clean house. If Joelle were home right now, she'd be dressed much the same way, and she'd be dusting and polishing furniture, pushing the vacuum around, making the bathroom sinks sparkle.

Instead she was in Holmdell, spying on a stranger as she strolled down the slate front walk to the mailbox at the curb. The woman opened it and emptied it of its contents, then marched back up the walk to the house.

Watching as the woman vanished behind the ornately carved wooden door, Joelle acknowledged that the Fosters no longer lived there. They'd probably decamped to Florida or Arizona or wherever rich retirees who no longer wanted to deal with snow lived.

She stared at the house for a minute longer, trying to envision herself living in it, ambling down that front walk past rows of flowering spirea, past a lawn as smooth and green as the surface of a billiards table, to pick up her mail. She couldn't picture it. Even if Bobby hadn't married her, she could not imagine herself living the life of a Foster.

She started her car's engine, U-turned and drove back to Harvard Street, to Glenville Terrace, down the hill, toward town. On Jackson Street, she slowed as the black wrought-iron fence bordering the cemetery loomed into view. Alongside the cemetery's border, she eased to the curb and yanked on her parking brake. Through the fence she saw the rows of head-stones, all different sizes, different sentiments. Somewhere up the rise, near an umbrella-shaped oak tree, was a marble bench beneath a tree where she'd found Bobby one September afternoon and asked him for a favor.

Why had he proposed marriage that day? Friendship and fear, she realized. Friendship for her and fear for himself, for what lay ahead of him in Vietnam. "I'd have something to come back to," he'd said.

He'd been coming back to her ever since-from Vietnam, from his injuries, from his nightmares. From work at the end of each day. She'd been there waiting for him, never expecting him to stagger home drunk, to arrive late after spending time in a tavern with another woman.

The day he'd asked her to marry him, she had trusted him more than anyone else in her life, anyone else in the entire world. She wanted to trust him like that today, but she longed for something more: she longed for him to love her.

He'd never spoken the words. He had never handed her his heart, never offered her his soul. He'd lived with her, made babies with her, created a family with her-but never once, in all the years she'd known him, had he said, "I love you."

FIVE YEARS AGO, WHEN Mrs. Proski had died and her son had put the duplex on Third Street up for sale, Wanda had bought it, with help from Joelle and Bobby. They'd provided the down payment, and she'd paid the mortgage using the rent she collected from the Tranhs, a family of Vietnamese immigrants who'd moved into the upstairs apartment. Unlike the old DiFranco house, the duplex was spiffed up: recently painted, new roof, air-conditioning units in several windows and the old washtub flowerpot gone, replaced by azalea bushes blossoming pink and magenta. Since Joelle and Bobby considered the house an investment, they made sure Wanda was diligent about maintaining the property.

Joelle walked up the neatly edged path to her mother's front door and rang the bell. She half expected her mother not to be home, but Wanda opened the door. She was wearing an old housedress, a loose-fitting thing of thin cotton with snaps down the front, and her hair was unbrushed, the gray roots in need of a touch-up. Seeing Joelle on the front step, she appeared at first thrilled and then stricken. "What happened?" she asked.

"I just...needed a road trip," Joelle said. "n.o.body's dying, I swear. Everyone's fine. Can I come in?"

"Of course." Wanda swung open the door and beckoned Joelle inside. From the living room drifted the babble of a television show, people conversing energetically in saccharine-sweet voices. "I slept in this morning-up late last night. Me and Stan Sherko, you remember him? We went down to the Dog House Tavern to watch the Reds game on the wide-screen TV and have a few beers. And that's all we did," she added emphatically. "We're just friends."

"I didn't say a thing." Joelle stifled a smile.

"I fixed a pot of coffee. Would you like some? It's fresh. You hungry? When did you get to town? Where are you staying? Here, of course," she answered herself. "You're staying here. Where's your suitcase?"

"I got in late last night," Joelle said, following her mother into the kitchen and settling onto a chair at the table. Her mother's high-voltage chatter tired her as much as driving eight hundred miles had tired her yesterday. "I took a room at the West Side Motor Lodge for the night."

"No sense paying them when you've got a comfortable bed here."

Joelle wasn't so sure her narrow childhood bed was all that comfortable. But her mother's coffee couldn't possibly be worse than what she'd been served in the motel's restaurant. "I'll check out and stay here," she agreed.

The kitchen hadn't changed since the day Joelle had propped a note to her mother against the salt and pepper shakers and left town with Bobby. Same Formica-topped table, same vinyl-padded gray chairs, same clock in the shape of a rooster fastened to the wall above the window. Same graduated canisters filled with flour, sugar and tea bags, same two-slot toaster plugged into the wall, same stained porcelain sink.

She thought of her own kitchen, and of the note she'd left propped up for Bobby yesterday morning. And the note he'd left propped up for her a week ago. He'd said he had gone fishing. Maybe she'd done the same thing. Maybe she was fishing for something here in Holmdell.

Her mother hustled into the living room and switched the television. She moved fast for a woman on the far side of seventy-five. All those years waitressing had kept her reasonably fit. Age had left is marks all over her-skin hung loose from her bony arms and her upper lip was pleated like a fan. But she remained light on her feet as she glided to the counter, filled two cups with coffee and carried the cups and saucers to the table without splashing a drop.

"So," she said, sitting across the table from Joelle and glowering suspiciously at her. "Suddenly here you are in Holmdell."

If Joelle hadn't intended to tell her mother why she'd traveled to Holmdell, she wouldn't have rung her mother's doorbell. Yet she wasn't sure what exactly to say. Wanda had never been the sort of warm and cuddly mother a woman would want to confide in.

"Bobby and I needed a break," Joelle said. "And I-" she shrugged "-I had this urge to visit my old haunts."

"What kind of break?" Wanda leaned forward. "You tell me that boy is cheating on you, Joelle, and I swear I'll fly to Connecticut and tear his eyes out."

"He's not cheating on me," Joelle hastened to a.s.sure her mother. Her mother's loyalty would have been more welcome if Joelle had actually believed Bobby had done something wrong. He hadn't, though. He'd just been himself-closed in, shut down, sucked into a black hole.

"Then what kind of break? You hungry? I've got some Danish, left over from the diner. It's a little stale, but still good. Cheese and apple," she said, rising and moving to the refrigerator. She removed a platter covered in aluminum foil and deposited it on the table. Then she sat back down and peeled the foil back. "Here, take one. This one's apple," she said, pointing. "You always liked apple Danish."

"No, thanks." Joelle's stomach felt leaden from the eggs she'd eaten at the West Side Motor Lodge.

"You look thin. You're not on one of those crazy diets, are you? South Beach or whatever. Why do they always name diets after fancy towns? Why isn't there a Holmdell Diet?"

"Or a Tubtown Diet," Joelle joked.

"That would be a liquid diet," Wanda muttered with a grin. "Lots of beer and whiskey." She grew abruptly solemn. "He's not drinking, is he?"

"Bobby? No," Joelle said, praying that it was the truth.

Wanda lifted a cheese Danish from the platter, pulled a napkin from the plastic holder on the table and used it as a plate, tearing the pastry in half and arranging the halves on the napkin. "It took me twenty-five years to decide that marrying Bobby DiFranco wasn't the dumbest thing you ever did in your life. I'll admit it, Joelle-he turned out a h.e.l.l of a lot better than I would have predicted. A businessman, a college education-who would have guessed that long-haired boy in torn jeans and boots would wind up like that? I always thought he was wild, with that good-for-nothing father of his and no mother to take him in hand, and that G.o.d-awful truck he rattled around in. He had no prospects, no money, nothing but an induction notice when you ran off with him."

"He was a good man. I always knew that."

Wanda nodded. "He's a good man. He's proved it a whole bunch of times. So why are you here and he's in Connecticut?"

Joelle sighed. Crumbs fell from her mother's hands as she broke her Danish into bite-size pieces and popped them, one at a time, into her mouth. Even as she ate, her eyes remained on Joelle, sharp and a.s.sessing. "He won't talk to me," Joelle finally said, the power of her mother's stare forcing the words out. "It's always been a struggle to get him to open up, but now he won't talk to me at all. How can you have a marriage when your husband won't open up?" As if her mother were in any position to offer marital advice.

Wanda devoured another chunk of pastry, then dusted the crumbs from her hands onto her napkin. "It's Claudia, right?"

Joelle flinched. "What?"

"How many year snow, Joelle? Thirty-seven? Tell me the truth."

"What truth?"

"Bobby isn't Claudia's father."

Joelle fell back in her chair. How had her mother guessed? What should Joelle do, now that she had guessed? She and Bobby had vowed to keep the truth hidden, and they'd maintained the lie successfully for all these years. No one in Holmdell knew. Maybe her mother had suspected, but why should Joelle confirm her suspicions?

"I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm not blind," Wanda said, her voice low and firm. "My daughter spends her whole senior year of high school dating a rich boy from the Hill. He's her ticket out of here, her gateway to a better life. They're going steady. They go to the prom together. And then all of a sudden she runs off with another guy-a guy who's her ticket to nowhere and her gateway to nothing. Why does she do that?"

"You know why I married Bobby," Joelle said, her voice scarcely above a whisper.

"Because you loved him." Her mother sneered. "Seven months later you have a baby. You think I can't count?"

"I've never denied that I was pregnant when Bobby and I got married."

Her mother glared at her. "You're dating Drew Foster, Mr. Wonderful-Mr. Rich-and-Wonderful-and on the side you let Bobby DiFranco knock you up? You weren't stupid, Joelle, and you weren't careless. You wouldn't have risked your chances with Drew Foster by getting involved that way with Bobby. Besides, you weren't the type of girl who slept around. If you were going steady with a boy, that was who you would have given yourself to."

Joelle drank some coffee while she tried to figure out what to say. No, she hadn't slept around. If she had, she'd bet Bobby would have known how to use a condom better than Drew had. Bobby would have protected her. He was that kind of boy, that kind of man.

"How I got pregnant is irrelevant," she said.

"I'm aware of how you got pregnant, honey. There's really only one way for that to happen." Her mother shook her head. "Claudia is Drew Foster's daughter, right?"

Once the truth was out, it was out, Joelle supposed. Sustaining the lie about Claudia's parentage was pointless. Claudia might as easily have told her grandmother who her father was, now that she'd been informed of the fact. It was no longer Joelle's secret to keep. "Claudia is Bobby's daughter," she said quietly. "Drew Foster provided the sperm."

Her mother made a face. "G.o.d, I wish I still smoked," she muttered. "I could use a cigarette." She reached for another Danish, instead. "I guess you were stupid. You're pregnant with Drew's baby-why didn't you make him do the right thing?"

"I didn't want to make him do anything," Joelle retorted. "I sure as h.e.l.l didn't want to marry him, not after he told me to get an abortion. He even sent me money and the name of a doctor."

Wanda, not the most religious woman, clicked her tongue and crossed herself. "That would have been a sin. And it wasn't even legal then."

"Legal or not, it wasn't what I chose to do. I wanted my baby."