Free Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard Page A

loves him so much she wants him to be happy and cared for, she explains to Nancy. He loves her so much he wants the same for her. The only lover who could ever threaten her would be one he didn’t tell her about. Same thing for her. She pays more for long distance every month than she pays for food.
    “So tell me what she looks like,” Claire will say, having heard from Mickey that he’s taken some new girlfriend to a Texas Rangers game, and knowing that means it’s serious. Serious for him, anyway .
    And he will describe her extraordinary skin or the elegance of her calf muscle. She has no children, of course .
    “Have you told her about the vasectomy yet?” Claire will ask, once the relationship has progressed to a certain point. Knowing what it’s like to love him and lose him, she maintains a sisterly protectiveness for these women. But she also knows that Mickey doesn’t reveal to these women the most precious and irreplaceable parts of him, which makes it easier for them when they discover they aren’t going to get to keep him forever .
    “Has he met the children?” he’ll ask her on the infrequent occasions when the tables are turned, and she’s the one with a prospective partner. He can barely conceal his surprise if she says, with some defensiveness, “Yes, and he thinks they’re great.”
    “We went to Martha’s Vineyard with them for the weekend,” she tells him. She no longer expects this sort of thing to get any kind of a rise out of him. The fact that a relationship allows for this kind of family-ish togetherness only confirms for them both that it must lack the passionate intensity of their love affair. They all do .
    On rare moments she gets a little shaky during these phone calls. “Come on now, Slim,” he’ll say. She imagines his hand stroking her neck. “Stop that now. We’ve been through this. You know the rules.”
    And she’ll snap out of it.
    S ometimes Pete hears his mother crying on the phone. He will be lying in the dark, at an hour so late she supposes he’s asleep, and he will hear that record of organ-violin music she sometimes puts on that’s like what they’d play on a soap opera night after they found out someone had a brain tumor. The saddest piece of music in the world. Other than that, she mostly listens to country now. All these songs about relationships that didn’t work out.
    “Sometimes I just don’t know how I’m going to keep taking care of everything,” she’s saying into the phone. “I feel so alone.”
    Sometimes he hears her talking about her job, and what will happen to them if the board doesn’t renew her contract at the children’s museum. They didn’t reach their fund-raising goal this year and his mother has had to cut her own salary back by three thousand dollars. Sally needs car insurance once she gets her license this fall. His mom still owes her lawyer so much money he’s going to attach their property, whatever that means.
    “All day long I’m taking care, taking care,” she sighs. “There’s never anybody taking care of me.”
    She thinks Pete hasn’t noticed, but he has. He has seen her, mornings after a blizzard, out in the driveway shoveling out their car. He has watched her struggling to get their basketball hoop up. “Three-quarter-inch socket wrench!” she says. “Who would think you’d need four different-sized wrenches to put up one lousy hoop?” Finally she got it up, but it has never been quite right. It wobbles. Every time he plays basketball, it’s a reminder that other people have their dads to put up their basketball hoops. He has his mom.
    She can’t get the lawn mower started. Nobody told her you had to mix in a special kind of oil with every two gallons of gasoline, and now the motor’s clogged. They have maggots breeding in their trash bin, and although it is his sister’s job to carry out the trash, Sally refuses to go anyplace near it. His mother tries pouring bleach in the bin, tries boiling