Read Online Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online Page A

jalapeño in somebody’s guacamole, the sound of some kid practicing the trumpet, drifting out a window when she was out on her bike. There he was again. There he wasn’t, actually.
    Once her kids came back from Sam’s house and school started, she was occupied, and that was good. She attended Pete’s soccer games and Sally’s dance recitals. The director of the children’s museum, whose brochures Claire had always designed for free, moved to New Mexico, and when her job was offered to Claire, she took it even though the salary was a little less than what she’d been earning at the ad agency. She had always dreamed of making a place like this—rooms full of treasures where children can touch anything they want, and instead of adapting to the rules of the adult world, it’s what they care about that matters.
    The custody hearing in her divorce from Sam was scheduled to go to court right before Christmas that year. She sold the Thomas Hart Benton drawing her father had left her to pay the rest of her lawyer’s retainer. “You keep your nose clean and we’ll win this thing,” he told her, “but it’s going to cost you twenty, thirty thousand dollars.”
    A guardian ad litem was appointed to evaluate Claire and Sam as parents and make a recommendation to the court concerning custody. The day before the guardian was scheduled to pay his home visit Claire spent the entire afternoon cleaning their house. An hour before he was due to arrive she put bread in the oven and set her baseball glove out on the counter. Past the point where pride remains a consideration, she put the Mother’s Day card Pete had made, “For the #1 Mom in the Universe,” up on the refrigerator. Maybe she should set out a pair of Sally’s jeans to mend?
    How do you begin showing a total stranger, in a matter of an hour or two, what kind of a parent you are? What is there a person can say that gets the point across about how she loves her children? Where does she begin?
    Craig, the man the court had appointed to evaluate Claire’s fitness as a mother and make a recommendation that would determine the next half dozen years of all their lives, turned out to be very young: twenty-eight, thirty tops, father of an infant daughter. “So,” he said, “what sort of father is Sam, in your opinion?”
    “He loves the children, naturally,” Claire said. “He’s just never been all that involved in a lot of their lives. I don’t think he ever took one of the kids to a doctor’s appointment or stayed home when one of them was sick.” When she told him how Sam would speak of “babysitting” their children, on the occasions when he’d take them for a morning, Claire observed a flicker of discomfort on the guardian ad litem’s face and realized that this man probably used this same term concerning his own participation in child care, which was probably equally spotty. Her palms were sweating now.
    “I don’t know how you gals do it,” he said. “Jobs, kids, aerobics classes, doctor’s appointments, the whole shooting match. Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to fasten the tabs on a Pamper.”
    This guardian work was a sideline for Craig. He was actually a paralegal, but he’d taken many courses in child psychology. He was only a few credits away from getting his master’s, in fact. “You know, Claire,” he said earnestly as she told him about Pete’s migraine headaches, and how they often coincided with his return from his father’s house after the weekend, “there’s more to kids than meets the eye.”
    In December she went to court, where Sam testified that Claire was prone to hysterical fits and uncontrolled rage, like her father. He told about the time she had thrown the dessert for their Christmas dinner down the garbage disposal, and how she threatened to jump out of the car that time, and dumped a bag of trash on the floor when all he’d said was that he hoped she’d get around to taking it to the dump soon.
    “I was