In An Instant, Ch. 23

Beth exhaled heavily as she rolled up the exit ramp on Saturday afternoon. Was it relief she felt at returning to a safe place, with familiar routines and familiar expectations? Or resignation? The glory of the triumphant performance in St. Louis seemed surreal beside the gray reality of Des Plaines, Iowa, which lay under a blanket of rotten snow, its sidewalks gritty with salt residue.

She had intended to pick up Toby first thing, but she had to drive right by the auto shop to get there. “Hi,” she said to the woman behind the counter. “Is Dean busy?”

“Dunno, hang on.” She stuck her head through the door behind the counter. “Dean! You got a minute?”

“Just a sec,” he called. A few moments later, he came through the door, wiping his hands on a rag. “Beth!” His hands and face were smudged and grimy. Beth hesitated. He held up his hands to keep her at a distance. “Sorry, I’m kinda a mess,” he said.

Embarrassed that her aversion was that obvious, she stepped forward and kissed him. “Hey,” she said.

“I didn’t expect you back yet. You must have had a good drive.”

“It was long. I’m headed over to pick up Toby. I thought I’d see if you wanted to bring your mom over tonight.”

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s Caleb’s birthday, remember? I promised him I’d take him bowling.”

“Oh. I forgot.” He had mentioned it two weeks ago, but after Evander’s call she’d never thought of it again.

“Why don’t you come with us? We could put up the bumpers for Toby. He’d have fun.”

They’d had so little time together lately. They’d been out of sync ever since that conversation about sex.

Is this how relationships end?

The thought made her queasy. She should go bowling, just to spend time with him, to reassure herself that she was meant to be with him. But keeping Toby corralled in a noisy bowling alley was not her idea of a relaxing evening. “No,” she said. “I’m tired anyway. We’ll just make it an early night. I just… I thought you might’ve done that kind of stuff while I wasn’t here, so we could spend some time together tonight.”

He winced at her poorly-concealed resentment. “You were only gone for two days. This time.”

“What do you mean, ‘this time’?”

“Nothing. Just, you’ve been gone a lot lately.”

“I’ve been doing sub gigs, Dean!”

He glanced behind him hastily and said softly, “I know. Just forget I said anything.”

She was being unreasonable, and she knew it. She pinched her lips together and took a deep breath. “You’re right, I have been gone a lot lately. It’s fine,” she lied. “But I really need to spend some time with Toby. Don’t worry about it.” She turned to leave.

“Hey.” He grabbed her arm, and she winced at the black smear he left on the white sleeve. “I’m sorry, Beth. I’ll come over tomorrow night, okay?”

She plastered a smile on her face. “Okay.”

Which, of course, didn’t stop her from fuming all the way to her parents’ house.

“Mommeeeeee!” The shriek began the instant she opened the front door of her childhood home. Toby launched himself into her arms, gripping her neck so hard that she could barely breathe.

Dad pried himself from the pages of Newsweek long enough to look up from the recliner and offer, “That boy’s been asking for you every five minutes since he woke up this morning. Did you have a nice time?”

Leave it to Dad to bypass the performance altogether. He always could tell when something was on her mind, even—perhaps especially—when he didn’t seem to be paying attention. “It was… it was good,” she said, glancing up as her mother emerged from the kitchen with a towel slung over her shoulder and perched on the arm of the recliner. “The concert was amazing. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. And afterwards, Prescott and I hung out.”

“Prescott?” said Mom. There was a world of meaning in that one word.

“I just couldn’t seem to wind down, so I went out.” Beth heard the defensive note in her voice and tried not to cringe. How did Mom always manage to make her feel like she was on trial? She straightened her shoulders. “It was nice,” she said, glaring. “Not to be a mom for a few hours.”

“But you are a mom.”

“Coreen,” said Dad softly, his eyes never leaving the magazine page.

“He needs his mother, Beth,” Mom said. “He needs you here. It’s not good for him, you being gone this much.”

“I know that!” She tightened her arms around Toby’s body. “Look, it’s been hard on me, too. I’m exhausted all the time, I’m barely keeping my head above the water—”

“Well, you’re an adult. You have a choice. He doesn’t.”

Beth bit back an angry retort. After all, it was exactly what she’d been pondering all weekend. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said carefully.

Her father looked fleetingly at her over top of his reading glasses, then dropped his eyes back to the magazine. Beth sat down on the couch, arranging Toby on her lap. “Evander’s been on my case to move to someplace more accessible. He says I’ve missed a couple of gigs because I couldn’t get a flight in time.”

“I thought you just told us you were having trouble with the schedule you already have,” Mom said.

Beth sighed impatiently. “It’s not the gigs, it’s the travel time. We’re two hours from Des Moines and four hours from Chicago. It’s brutal! If I were closer to an airport, a good sized one, I mean, it would cut the travel time.”

Dad grunted from the depths of his magazine. Both women looked at him, but he did not appear to notice.

Mom folded her arms. “So what are you suggesting? You want to move to Boston with your in-laws? You never liked living in the city, Beth. And who’s going to watch Toby? Surely you don’t think Martha and Wesley Alcott are offering child care?”

“Actually, I was thinking of St. Louis.” Nervously, Beth ran her fingertips over her scalp. “The Alcotts keep offering me an apartment in Boston, but you’re right, I don’t have any real contacts there except for them. But in St. Louis, I know Prescott. He’s already offered me a gig at his church. He’s got a whole network in that community. He can help me find people to watch Toby. I think Mr. and Mrs. Alcott would help me get started there, if I asked.” Her mother was silent; Beth shifted uncomfortably. “The thing is…” She hesitated. “I really enjoyed being in St. Louis this weekend. And in a metro area, there are more opportunities to play—to get paid to play, I mean. Maybe enough that I could quit working somewhere else. And there’s so much for kids there. Free stuff. I was looking through the hotel packet, and there’s a zoo, and a science center—all kinds of stuff. Plus, I could take him to concerts—expose him to things we just don’t have up here.”

“What about Dean?” Dad flipped a page.

“Well… I haven’t talked to him about it yet.”

Abandoning all pretense, her father closed Newsweek and took his glasses off. “Don’t you think you owe him that?”

“Well, of course.” She shifted uncomfortably. “It’s just… things have been kind of weird lately. Since, um… since that night we saw Jen.”

Dad raised his eyebrows. “It’s not easy to act normal when you have to confront your ex. Especially after the way she broke up with him. But you’re saying things have been off ever since then? What’s been happening?”

Beth grimaced. Where should she start? With the conversation about sex? With Dean leaping to the word “love” right after it? With the building resentment between the two of them ever since she started traveling?

Beth gave a noncommittal shrug. “It’s just been weird,” she said lamely.

“Hm.”

Under his scrutiny, Beth squirmed. Toby picked up his head from her chest and smiled. “Mommy, pway.” He placed his hands on her face and squashed her cheeks forward. Grateful for the distraction, she dove for his neck and blew a raspberry. Then she stood and slung him headfirst over her shoulder. “Come on, little man, time to go home.”

“Mommy, ’top! No, Mommy!”

Grinning, she brought him upright. “You want me to stop?”

“Yeth.”

Her mother helped her maneuver his wiggly arms down the poofy sleeves of his coat. “Just don’t do anything rash, Beth,” she said. “Think it through first.”

“Oh, Mom,” she said with exasperation. As if she would just up and move without thinking it through! “Of course I will.” She set Toby on his feet and zipped his coat. “Maybe we do it on a trial basis, or something. Till the end of the season.”

Dad came to the door and hugged Toby, who plastered him with a wet kiss. “Ah, that’s my boy!” Then he rose and kissed Beth’s forehead. “We’d sure be sorry to see you leave,” he said. His eyes looked suspiciously misty. “But you have to do what you think is best. For you and for Toby.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said in a low voice.

She walked down the porch steps and out to the car. She’d been expecting them to talk her out of her scheme. But they hadn’t. In fact, they hadn’t offered much resistance at all. What did that mean?

All that evening, while she played with Toby and caught up on email… all that night, as she tossed and turned… all the next morning before church, her body moved automatically through its motions while her mind wrestled with the question.

Three minutes before church, Dean walked in and sat down beside Toby and her parents. He flashed a crinkle-eyed smile in her direction, and a rush of warmth flooded through her. As the service progressed, she watched how he interacted with Toby, calming his restlessness with gentleness. She’d really acted like a jerk yesterday. What had she expected—that Dean would sit at home with his mother and pine for her whenever she wasn’t around? She owed him an apology.

After church, Dean took them out for brunch. He carried Toby from the car, swinging him in circles by one arm and one leg. “Whoa-oa-oa!” Toby said, giggling as he staggered around the parking lot.

Normally, these displays made Beth giggle, too, but today she couldn’t shake the rotten sensation in her chest. Dean needed to know about the decision that weighed so heavily on her mind. But she dreaded the telling. Maybe it was better to go through life alone. It seemed that all she was capable of was hurting those she ought to love.

“You’re kinda quiet,” Dean said as they sat watching Toby play with his scrambled eggs. “What’s up?”

She shoved a bite of pancake in her mouth to give herself a few extra seconds. But when she glanced up and saw the glower hovering around his eyes, she realized that procrastinating was only making things worse.

“Are you still ticked off about last night?” he said. “’Cause I’m sorry. It’s just, you’re gone all the time now, and I get bored, and lonely. Besides, I didn’t even know what time you were coming back. You could’ve been gone till midnight—or longer, if Evander”—he always infused the name with dripping sarcasm—“had called while you were still in St. Louis. You could’ve hopped a plane to Timbuktu, for all I know.”

She was supposed to be apologizing, but the gratuitous crack just made her plain mad. “I would not, and you know it!” she snapped.

“Okay, fine, I’m exaggerating. But you are gone too much.”

Beth clenched her fists around her napkin. “Dean Townsend, you’re the one who got him to come listen to me in the first place! Don’t go acting like I caused all this.”

“Well, this wasn’t how I thought it was gonna be!”

“Well, how did you think it was gonna be? You don’t make a performance career out of one performance.”

He threw his napkin down. “I dunno, it’s just all happening so fast. It’s just not what I expected!”

She pinched her lips. “Me, either,” she admitted.

Silence fell. Dean slumped down into the seat and folded his arms. She heard a loud slurp and glanced to her right. Toby was trying to drink his milk with a spoon. “Stop it, honey,” she said. “Use your straw.”

“No! Mine!”

“It’s not good for him, either,” Dean muttered from the depths of the booth.

Beth was sick to death of people telling her what was best for her child. “I’m aware of that.” Beth’s words were clipped. “I’ve given Toby every instant of my life. I’m so tired of people trying to make me feel guilty for doing something for myself!”

“I’m not trying to make you feel guilty,” Dean said. “I want you to be happy. But you used to be happy, Beth, and now you’re not. And neither is he.” He paused, and then added so low that she could barely hear, “And neither am I.”

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until it hurt. What could she say? That she didn’t know what would make her happy? That, as much as Dean had added to her life, she wasn’t sure he could follow where she was going? That, if she had to decide between him and the ivory tower she was climbing, she wasn’t sure which she would choose? And if she didn’t already know the answer, wasn’t that an answer in itself?

The only thing she was sure of was that if she was going to take time for her career, it had to be now, because Evander wouldn’t wait.

She was so tired of being afraid. Afraid of hurting Dean, afraid of staying like she’d stayed with Geordie, afraid of settling, of regretting lost opportunities, of ending up resenting him because she’d given up too much to be with him.

She should never have let things go so far. Dean belonged here, and she… where did she belong?

She wasn’t doing Dean any favors by staying with him just to keep from hurting him. She looked up. “I need some time,” she said quietly.

Clearly, whatever he had been expecting, that wasn’t it. “What?”

She swallowed. “I’m going to go stay in St. Louis for a while,. I just… I have some thinking to do. I need some time, and some space.”

He stared dumbly for a full five seconds before he answered. “You’re leaving?”

She cringed at the hurt in his voice. “Just for a few months. Till the season’s over. I think I can spend more time with Toby if I’m not so far from the airport.”

His mouth worked around two or three false starts before he said, “Sheez, Beth. How long have you been thinking about this?”

She shrugged, staring at her plate. “A while.”

“A while,” he echoed. In her peripheral vision, she could see the muscle in his jaw twitching. His fingernails stood out in pinched white against his water glass. “You’re running away,” he said, his voice tinged with disbelief.

Her back stiffened. “I’m not running away.”

“You’re scared.”

“I’m not…” Beth fixed her eyes on the beads of sweat trickling down the glass below his fingers to pool on the tablecloth. She didn’t think she could bear to look up and see him self-destruct again like he had that first night. To know that this time, there was no one to blame but herself.

“What are you so scared of, Beth?” His voice sounded tiny, broken, defeated.

She felt hot and heavy and physically ill. She wished she had never stopped at his house that night last June. Then, none of this ever would have happened. “I just want you to be happy.”

“Then stay, Beth. I love you!”

She stared at her plate.

His hand shot across the table and gripped her wrist so tightly that she winced. She looked up. His face was drawn and white, his eyes intense. “Say it to my face,” he said.

“What?”

“If you want to ditch me, at least have the decency to look me in the eye.”

Hot, festering waves pulsed over her one after another, barely leaving room to breathe between them, like labor pains, but without the reward. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, because she didn’t know what to say.

“What do you want, Beth?” he said fiercely.

“I…” What did she want? Life had been sweeping her along for so long now, she hardly remembered what it felt like to have a choice. But one thing she knew for sure: if she stayed just to keep from hurting Dean, in the end it would only make things worse. She’d let it happen with Geordie, and she would never do it again. She wrenched her hand free. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

Even through the haze of tears, she could see his heart shattering, right in front of her. She couldn’t bear to watch. She snatched up Toby and his coat; the high chair tipped over and clunked on the floor. “Mommeee, noooo!” Toby protested, slathering her coat with syrup as he reached back toward his plate. But she didn’t even hear him. The only howl she heard was the silent one—the one that began with Dean and followed her out the door.

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