Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard Page A

herself; she just didn’t know if she could.
    As much as Mickey disliked the person Claire became around her children, Claire’s children disliked even more who she became around Mickey. “My mom gets this weird, whispery way of talking when she’s around him,” Sally said once during therapy. “The two of them are always touching each other and whispering stuff. Sometimes they even sing these old Beatles songs together in the car. It’s really dumb.”
    They were accustomed to Sam’s way of treating Claire. To them, Mickey’s brand of tenderness and concern was evidence of what Pete called his wimpishness. “He’s always doing stuff like putting pillows under her feet and giving her neck massages,” he told the therapist. My dad would never do something like that, is what he was probably thinking, Claire knew.
    Claire remembers a visit their family had taken to Disney World, back when she and Sam were still together. There was this couple at Epcot Center kissing under the fake Eiffel Tower—a kiss that lasted for the entire five minutes they were standing in line for whatever movie it was they were showing there. Watching them kissing like that, in a way she and Sam never did, Claire had felt her legs go weak .
    “Can you believe it? They’ve got their tongues in each other’s mouths,” Sally had said. Then she and Pete laughed. That night in their hotel room, alone with Sam after the children were asleep, Claire wept to him about that kiss. “We’re raising children who think expressions of affection are comical,” she said. “You only kiss me when you want to have sex.”
    “Give it a rest, Claire,” said Sam .
    With Mickey there was never a shortage of kissing. He touched her constantly.
    “How’d you get this?” Mickey asked Claire one time, a few minutes after she arrived on Friday. There was a deep cut on her thumb. He noticed every little thing about her. Claire just shrugged. When her children were around, she didn’t pay attention to what happened to her.
    With his son, Mickey played catch and attended jazz concerts Sunday afternoons. Gabe had long since learned to entertain himself at events like this. Pete and Sally would have been asking when they were leaving or requesting money for the arcade next door, not that she would have taken them to a jazz club in the first place. But Gabe, who was almost the same age as Pete, always sat there patiently looking through his baseball cards, and when Mickey would ask him a question like “Who wrote that song?” he could tell you it was Thelonius Monk. At bedtime, Mickey read him the box scores for the American League or a book on baseball tips for Little Leaguers, with chapters like “How to Bunt” and “Theories of Base Stealing.”
    For Claire he would stop at three different stores until he found the kind of coffee beans she liked, which he’d grind fresh for every pot he made her. He’d warm her bathrobe in front of the fire when she was having a bath, and then he’d put the towel on her hair and dry it. Before it got to be time for her to leave, Sundays, he warmed up her car for her, checked her oil and her tires. He made her call him when she got in the door of her house after she got back home, so he knew she was okay. “No offense, Slim,” he said. “But you drive worse than you sing.”
    Claire and Mickey used to talk about how they might work things out so they could live together. Secretly Claire believed that once he got to know Pete and Sally better, Mickey would realize what wonderful children they were and his view of blending families would change. Sometimes when they were making love she even allowed herself to imagine that they could have a baby. The one time she brought it up, he actually shivered. “Horrifying idea,” he said. Shortly afterward Mickey had his vasectomy.
    As anxious and uncertain as it made Claire feel, knowing the intensity of Mickey’s resistance to spending time with her children, it was also