Chapter 4: The Piano Room
Tammy cracked first, and it wasn’t even my doing. It was Mason’s.
Three days before the party, I came home early and found him on the basement stairs with his knees pulled up, crying the silent way kids cry when they’ve learned crying gets them in trouble.
“Aunt Claire,” he said. “Is it true you have to move out?”
I sat down next to him. “Who told you that?”
“Grandma. She said after New Year’s the baby’s coming to live here, and you won’t be married to Uncle Derek anymore, so you’ll go live somewhere else.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Which baby?”
I found Tammy in the laundry room, folding Mason’s jeans on top of my dryer. She took one look at my face and stopped folding.
“Mason heard his grandmother say a baby is moving into my house,” I said. “Which baby, Tammy?”
She tried. I’ll give her that. She tried “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and “Mom gets confused since her surgery,” and “You’re being paranoid.” Then I took out my phone and played her own voice, on my own porch: She doesn’t suspect a thing.
Tammy sat down on the laundry basket and started to cry.
“It wasn’t my idea,” she said. “I swear to God, Claire. By the time I found out, the baby was already coming. Derek pays my rent on the storage unit, my car insurance, everything. He said he’d stop if I told you. And Mom…” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Mom’s the one who said it. That you couldn’t give him a son, so somebody had to. She went to the baby shower. She brought your mother’s casserole dish.”
The dish. Of course it was the dish.
“How long?” I asked.
“Two years. Ashley did the books at the lumberyard in Georgetown. The baby’s name is Derek. Derek Thomas Vance Junior.” She laughed, ugly and wet. “Mom cried at the hospital. She said it was the happiest day of her life.”
I thought about the bathroom floor. We’re enough, you and me.
“And the loan?”
Tammy stared at the floor. “The company’s broke, Claire. It’s been broke since summer. Derek pays Ashley’s mortgage out of the business account. The bank won’t lend him another dime unless your house backs it. Once you sign, if the company goes under, the bank takes the house, and…”
“And what?”
“And he figured you’d divorce him anyway, after. But by then the money’s spent and the house is the bank’s problem. Not his.” She finally looked up. “He said you’d be fine. You’re a pharmacist. He said, She always lands on her feet.“
I stood in my laundry room with one hand flat on my mother’s old dryer, and I felt something I wasn’t ready for. Not anger. Guilt.
Because Mason was ten, and Tammy was crying on a laundry basket, and in two days a cardiologist named Ruth Okafor would own the room we were standing in. In six weeks of planning, I had not once thought about Mason.
“Are you going to tell Derek I told you?” Tammy whispered.
“No,” I said. “I’m going to tell everybody what all of you did. There’s a difference.”
“Claire, please. I don’t have anywhere else to go. Mason doesn’t.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer yet.
I turned to leave, and she caught my sleeve.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “You have to hear it from me, because if you hear it Saturday, you’ll do something crazy.”
“Tammy.”
“After New Year’s, Derek’s moving Ashley and the baby in here. Mom already measured for the crib.” She swallowed. “They’re turning your mother’s piano room into the nursery.”
