Free The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer Page B

face-saving I didn’t argue. I debated whether or not to tell Jen and finally knocked the amount down to five hundred so I could maintain the idea that I didn’t keep secrets from her—just details.
    He came back in a wrinkled T-shirt and jeans and over Rebecca’s eggs proceeded to entertain the kids with stories from the Blair family almanac. My boys liked hearing about the time I went looking for a lost tennis ball and instead came face-to-face with a skunk. But what, they asked James, did our dad do while Penny went to get the tomato juice? Where did he wai t ? How bad did he smel l ? They wanted to know how many cans of tomato juice I’d bathed in and what had happened to the juice afterward.
    Ryan’s daughter was only four, too young to believe in a childhood for her father. The story James told failed to engage her, and he fell silent and began poking through his eggs as if there might be something valuable hidden in them. “So what should we talk about?” he said at last, looking around the table. “Robert’s misery?”
    Ryan’s eyes widened. Marielle licked the corners of her mouth. My boys stared at their plates, and Jen put a steady bead on me. I could feel Rebecca’s medical interest stir from deep within its weekend resting place.
    “You people,” James said, “are so dishonest. Wishing doesn’t make it so, remember? I don’t think I’ve heard one real thing from any of you since I got here. It’s all ‘how nice,’ ‘how nice.’ You guys are so corrupt.”
    Rebecca was motionless, the only sign of distress a twitch below her left eye. She had our father’s strong nose and our mother’s narrow chin. She was sometimes called handsome, which Jen said was worse than nothing as compliments went, but I saw beauty in her: in the straightness of her back and in her heavily lashed gray eyes.
    “It’s okay, James,” Ryan said. “We know things might be complicated.”
    “That’s it?” James said. “Can you go further, Ry? One little step? What ‘things’ might be complicated? And who is ‘we’? You and your lovely French lady, or you and your esteemed older siblings, Dr. and Dr. Blair?”
    I was experiencing a kind of basement-level rage overlaid by a number of competing urges—to say something funny, to say something lacerating, to pretend nothing had happened, to leave the table. Perhaps because none of these was within my reach, I said, inflecting it into a question, “ ‘Wishing doesn’t make it so’?” though I knew the answer. Our mother had been famous among us for her pointed and yet strikingly unhelpful proverbs. I think she believed such comments fulfilled her maternal duties, for she rarely had anything to add in the way of empathy or even consolation.
    “Penny,” Rebecca said.
    “I know.”
    “Well,” Ryan said. “So anyway—”
    James set his fork down with a clank. “You want to know why I’m here, don’t you? You think there has to be a reason, like I’m in trouble, I’m broke again. God forbid I just wanted to come home. And no, Rebecca, I’m not projecting.”
    I’d felt Jen watching me since James’s comment about my misery, and now I looked at her, wondering if I’d receive censure or forgiveness. Instead, she gave me one of her loveliest and most encouraging smiles, and my lachrymal glands lurched into action.
    Ryan was speaking, but I hadn’t heard a word. “. . . take some time,” he was saying, “and create some space . . .” and I was off again, because Jen’s sympathetic look had gotten me thinking that James might have helped me, saying what he’d said—that I might, if I were very careful, find a way to use it to my advantage.
    Immediately, I felt the kind of shame I associated with my father, with whom—or with whose image—I had created a tightly constructed system of self-esteem manipulation, a habit pointed out to me and elaborated by Rebecca, bless her analytical heart. It was as if I had a flow chart in my head that