Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [57]
“You’re home early,” she said with surprise when he opened the back door.
Having booked an e-ticket to Atlanta for Monday afternoon, Charlie had taken Bill Trieste up on his offer and shunted his biggest account, with its irksome client, off on a colleague. Then he took an earlier train home than he’d said he would. Now that he had a plan, he felt a surge of warm feelings toward Alison and her parents that was directly proportional to the guilt he felt for leaving, the anxiety he felt about lying to them, and the fear that his plan might somehow be foiled. “I wanted to get home as soon as I could. How is she?” He gestured vaguely upward.
June, chopping bok choy, lifted her shoulders slightly. “She’s not in bed, at least. She’s in the playroom with Ed and Annie.”
“How are her spirits?”
“Hard to tell.” She stopped chopping and held the knife aloft in apparent contemplation. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing you can get over easily. Not if you’re Alison, at least. She’s going to need a lot of support—a lot—in the next few months. Years, maybe.”
Charlie nodded, shrugging off his coat. He felt as if she’d gently slipped the knife under his skin. His conversations with June had always seemed this way to him, with the subtext italicized and partially exposed. You don’t fool me. We both know that you are absent here, disengaged. You need to change your attitude.
“We’re looking for a good therapist,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true. Dr. Waldron had given Alison some names, but the blue prescription slip with the contact information was somewhere in a pile of receipts and business cards on Charlie’s dresser.
“That’s a start, but I’m really talking about what Alison needs from you,” June said, spelling it out in case he hadn’t gotten it.
Charlie turned and hung his jacket on a hook in the hall, then came back into the kitchen. “I know. It’s going to be a long road,” he said, striving for a bland metaphor to close the conversation and realizing too late that it was exactly wrong.
“Well,” June said briskly, “that’s not how I would have put it, but yes.” Gesturing toward the pile of vegetables under her knife, she said, “I thought it might be time to introduce the children to something a little more interesting than baby carrots and frozen corn.”
“Good luck,” Charlie said. “What’s the backup plan?”
He found Alison sprawled on the floor of the playroom with Ed and Annie, watching them build a castle out of blocks. “Hi,” she said, looking up with a wan smile. “I heard you come in.”
“I was talking to your mother,” Charlie said, kissing Annie on the top of the head and squeezing Alison’s shoulder, then sinking down beside her. “Why haven’t the kids eaten yet?”
“We had a late lunch. Mom wants us all to eat together tonight.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “It looks like nuggets are off the menu. You sure this is going to fly?”
“They can have toast, if it comes to that,” Alison said. “Bless her for trying, right?”
Charlie knew Alison was peacemaking; she was probably as skeptical as he was. The seething indignation he’d felt at June’s bullying insistence on what their kids should eat melted away. Alison was right—her mother meant well. Peace, love. Warm feelings, remember?
“How go the crusades? Doth the enemy lie vanquished?” Ed asked Charlie. He sat up, crowning a pile of blocks with a conical turret. Having worked in education all his life, Ed made no secret of his disdain for and utter ignorance of corporate America. It wasn’t personal, and Charlie didn’t take offense. Ed tended to equate working for a corporation—any corporation—with going to war, and Charlie had to admit that he wasn’t half wrong.
“The enemy lies, yet is not vanquished,” Charlie said, playing along. “But it appears that I have been summoned to the king’s court.”
Alison pulled herself up to a sitting position. “What do you mean?”
Charlie winced exaggeratedly, trying to convey his own displeasure at this news and his awareness of hers to come. “I need to meet with the client next week,” he said. “They’re feeling