The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [8]
en minutes late. When she turns the corner, the car skids. She slows down. This storm isn't supposed to intensify until later, but the dark roads are already slick. Hard to see with the snow falling so fast, sheets of big wet flakes across her headlights. She was supposed to meet Ken in his office at five. Something's wrong, she can feel it. Of the two of them, Ken's always been the more upbeat, but lately he seems depressed, almost remote at times, like a man besieged, hounded, but by what? Work? His family?
A couple of nights ago, Chloe and Drew had been teasing each other all through dinner. She could sense Ken's edginess, but she was enjoying their good-natured banter. The pleasure they found in each other's company, even their occasional annoyance with one another, seemed a joyful contrast to her own teenage years, the sameness of such silent, weary meals that the scrape of a fork against her mother's teeth could set her heart beating faster. “Geeky” Chloe had called her brother's plaid shirt. Drew glared at her a moment, then caught himself as he so often must lately. He laughed and said her tight, low-rise jeans were “slutty.”
“That's it, you're done! Leave the table, goddamnit!” Ken roared.
“He was just kidding,” Nora said, shocked as Drew stomped upstairs, then slammed his door.
“He didn't mean anything,” Chloe snapped at her father, and with that, Ken threw down his napkin and stormed into his study, holing up there for the rest of the evening.
So unlike Ken. He is a chronic optimist, according to gloomy Oliver, which is precisely why the brothers work so well together. Oliver loves the newspaper, but has little patience and less affection for most people. Ken finds tedious the details of running the paper, but he loves people, making him the perfect spokesman for the Chronicle. It is Ken who sits on the boards of banks and charities, Ken who cuts ribbons and, from years of groundbreaking ceremonies, has his own display of silver shovels hanging on their garage wall. “Our poster boy,” Oliver sniped recently after Ken's picture ran in the paper three days in a row. Uncharacteristically, Ken called him on it, and Oliver's response was a shrug and a snide look. Ken was deeply offended. That alone is cause for alarm. For years the brothers have played off one another's foibles, with Ken rarely letting Oliver cloud his sunny aura. But in these last few days they're barely speaking to one another. At yesterday's editorial staff meeting each sat stonily at opposite ends of the table. It fell to their cousin Stephen to initiate discussion of various topics, which became uncomfortable at times, with Ken the easy target of Stephen's sarcasm.
Once again last night Ken didn't come to bed. He said he'd fallen asleep watching television. This morning when she asked what was wrong, was he still upset with his brother, he turned quickly in the doorway and said it was a lot more complicated than just Oliver. He was backing out of the garage when he called and asked her to meet him tonight at five so they could talk.
“Come on back in. We can talk here,” she said, watching his car inch down the driveway, cold sweat rising on her back. They hadn't made love in weeks. Months, really, since there was any real passion between them. Maybe longer. Just middle-age doldrums, her friend Robin said once, assuring her that every couple goes through it, which Nora was relieved to hear. Ken was always the better lover, but for a while now, she's felt his impatience, his eagerness to get it over with, so he could read, watch television, brush his teeth, anything. He blames his back yet somehow manages to play racquetball twice a week. Saturday night after a wonderful dinner out and two bottles of wine with Bibbi and Hank Bond, she locked their bedroom door, telling him how she'd spent the entire evening aching for him, for every inch, every part of him. He wouldn't have to move a muscle, just lie down, she'd take care of every single thing, she promised as she unbuckled his belt. He muttered something. What? He was tired. Well,