The doctor assured her that’s what colic is, a frustrating condition where healthy babies cry for no reason, and she told Grace many times that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. But knowing this doesn’t help. Grace just wants her baby to be happy, and each time he cries, it rips her heart anew.
Her neighbor pounds on the wall. “Shut that damn kid up.”
The three-hundred-pound tub of wasted carbon moved in a week after Jimmy returned to Afghanistan, and Grace knows, when Jimmy gets home, there’s going to be hell to pay. Jimmy might be a hundred pounds lighter than their neighbor, but he’s also at least two hundred pounds tougher, and he doesn’t take to people not treating his family right.
But at the moment, Jimmy is seven thousand miles away. So each night, in addition to dealing with Miles’s inconsolable crying, she needs to put up with her jerk of a neighbor screaming at her through the walls.
Ignoring him, she continues to soothe Miles as best she can, stroking his back, rocking him, and telling him it will be okay.
She can’t believe it was her idea to have a baby. What was she thinking? She remembers the thought process, dreaming how wonderful it would be to bring something wholly hers and Jimmy’s into the world. They’d been married five years, and Jimmy was doing well. He had made it through sniper school and hadn’t gambled since enlisting. So, she figured it was time and that they were ready.
“Damn it!” the neighbor screams. “I’m calling the landlord. Every goddamn night. Shut that damn kid up.”
What a horrible miscalculation. She wasn’t ready. She might never have been ready. And now, here he is, this little human, totally dependent on her, and she is completely screwing it up.
She kisses his flaming scalp. “You’re okay. You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.”
She carries him to the kitchen and rummages through the cabinets, so hungry she feels like she might pass out. She opens door after door—salt, pepper, vanilla extract, two cans of expired tomato paste. She considers the tomato paste, looks down at Miles screaming, and decides against it.
With a sigh, she returns to the living room and pulls out her phone. It’s nearly seven, and Jimmy hasn’t called. He always calls on Fridays.
She imagines him in his barracks trying to work up the courage and trying to figure out what he is going to say. He is hungover; she is sure. His slipups always involve alcohol. It was probably a friend’s birthday, and he lost sight of his promise not to drink. Then he got drunk and was suckered into a bet. His downfall is always the same: he drinks, he gambles, he loses—a pattern that destroys him and destroys them, but that he seems powerless to stop.
She looks around their apartment, at the stained ceiling and chipped counters, at the threadbare futon that serves as their couch, at the crate that holds the old television Jimmy’s brother gave them. She’s been poorer, but never has she been so broke, crushed by her disappointment in Jimmy and in herself.
She looks at the photo on the counter of her and her grandmother taken six months before her grandmother passed away. In that moment, they were smiling, nearly twins for how much they looked alike, though her grandmother was near seventy and Grace only fourteen—same copper curls and hazel-green eyes. How disappointed she would be. People don’t change, Spud, and only a fool believes they do.
The tears she’s been holding back leak from her eyes, and she blots them away. Her grandmother was right. Grace is a fool. Look what believing in people got her—a snake-in-the-grass boss like Frank, and a sweet-talking loser husband like Jimmy.
Another thought strikes, and she looks down at Miles, then at the cabinets that hold no food, and a shiver runs down her spine. Come Tuesday, she is going to be out of a job. Sure as the sun will rise, Frank is going to fire her. All her life she’s dealt with men like Frank Torelli, and men like him don’t keep people like her around. He’ll blame it on something other than Jerry’s contract, but it won’t change the fact that that’s the reason, the reflection he sees when he looks at her discomfiting and creating an undertow of distrust.
Her hollow stomach growls.
No money. And come Tuesday, no job.
She feels her grandmother watching. Only person you can count on, Spud, is you.
She looks again at her son, still wailing, then juts her jaw out, hoists the diaper bag from the floor to her shoulder, slides the photo of her and her grandmother into it, and pivots for the door.
7
HADLEY
Hadley stands in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom frowning. Gone are her comfortable skirt, soft cotton tank, and ballet flats. In their place: linen slacks, a silk blouse, and beige Jimmy Choos. Beneath it all, her pair of thigh-to-waist Spanx digs into her flesh.
Even with the added four inches from the shoes and the supergirdle, she looks fat. She smooths the pooch of her belly and sucks it in, then, with a resigned sigh, releases it and turns from the mirror to brush out her hair. She pins it into a loose chignon at the base of her neck with a gold clip, a style Frank likes because he thinks it makes her look like Sophia Loren, a comparison Hadley finds flattering, though she herself has never seen the resemblance.
First off, Sophia is Italian, while Hadley is French and German. Sophia has soft chocolate eyes set over a long nose and plump lips, whereas Hadley’s most defining feature is her green eyes, and her nose is small and her lips wide, like Julia Roberts.
But, Hadley supposes, if you only compare her and Sophia from the chin down, the heights and curves are similar. Of course, Sophia was young in a time when curves were appreciated, while Hadley lives in the era of Jillian Michaels and Heidi Klum.
She glances at the clock, and her irritation grows along with her hunger. Having dinner as a family is one of Frank’s rules, a sentiment she used to believe was sweet, naively thinking it showed Frank’s commitment to the family spending time together. But over the years, she’s learned to see it for what it is: another way for him to control them, making them wait to eat and rarely showing the consideration of telling them when he’ll be home.
She looks forlornly at her bedside table, where she keeps a stash of peanut M&M’S and, stomach growling, chooses the less caloric option of sneaking a cigarette on the balcony instead.
Lighting up, she takes a deep drag and closes her eyes as the heady buzz of nicotine seeps into her blood. She ignores the niggle of guilt that accompanies it. Frank hates when she smokes, and she gave it up for the sixth time four weeks ago. But she supposes today is a day for breaking promises.
The breeze is light and warm, a hint of summer in its breath, and she watches as it carries the smoke away and thinks about tomorrow. Frank has planned their trip to her sister’s down to the smallest detail. It will take them three days to get to Wichita, three days to get Skipper settled, and three days to drive back. The hotels are reserved, and he’s listed all the places along the way where they can stop for meals and gas.
Everything is all set.
Or it was.
Until three days ago, when Vanessa called wanting to know if Hadley could bring Skipper to Tom’s hometown of Omaha instead of Wichita so she and Tom could extend their honeymoon in Belize. Tom wanted to get scuba certified, and that required them staying a few extra days.
Hadley never told Frank about the call, and her heart has been beating out of rhythm ever since, the smallest window of opportunity opening at the exact moment she most desperately needed it.