hats this time,” Jack said, stepping over our son gingerly to grab the luggage before it came sliding down the stairs. “But I may have something for you, if you were good for Mommy.”
“Are you kidding?” I grinned. “They were little monsters the whole time you were gone.”
“Mo-om!” the girls moaned, well accustomed to our little joke that played out every time Jack returned from a business trip, which seemed to be a frequent occurrence these days. Part of his job at one of the network television stations in Manhattan was to keep the affiliates happy, which meant traveling to their various cities to wine and dine them. Add on the fact that Jack’s station was headquartered in Dallas, which required a trip to the second biggest state in the union about six times a year, and it meant my husband was a very busy, very scarce man. He loved his job and was well suited to the requisite schmoozing. “The beauty of my job is that I don’t really have to work,” he always said. “I just have to get in lots of face time.” I wholeheartedly supported my sweetie in doing something he loved, but I hated losing him to Dallas and Phoenix, Portland and Detroit.
“Why do you always go away?” Scout asked Jack as she trailed him up the stairs.
“I have to travel for my job,” he said smoothly, though from the dark look he cast over her head I could tell her question cut him deeply.
That night after Jack supervised baths and played a giggling round of “Spank Your Fanny,” a game the girls had fashioned with him out of idle threats, he tucked the girls into bed and joined me on the living room couch where I was snuggled under a fleece blanket, the TV muted as I waited for one of the millions of Law & Order spin-offs to come on. We watched the show together and tried to guess “who done it” before the TV detectives put it all together.
“We saw this one,” Jack said as he picked up my feet and sat down. “Remember? It wasn’t a robbery at the jewelry store, but the clerk’s ex-girlfriend was angry because she found out the ring he gave her was fake.”
“I never saw this one, and thanks for ruining it.”
“Ah, you did, too, Rubes,” he insisted.
“Nah-uh. You must have seen it one night in Dallas.”
“No way. I was here. You saw it.”
“Nope. You were lounging in bed in your boxers, surrounded by silver-domed room service plates and a passel of belly dancers.”
He pulled my heels onto his lap and began one of his expert foot massages. “Make that a squad of cheerleaders and we’re in business.”
I wanted to sling a witty rebuttal back at him, but I’m a sucker for a well-placed thumb in the instep. It was during a picnic dinner in Central Park with friends who’d assembled to see opera at Met in the Park that I’d first learned of Jack Salerno’s skill with foot massage. My friend Gracie moaned and squealed as he caressed her feet. “Get a room,” one of the other guys joked, and I admit, it did seem quite intimate. But since I knew Gracie had a huge crush on someone else on the picnic blanket, I didn’t hesitate and was next in line when Jack finished with her feet.
Although I held back my moans and sighs, I admit that that first massage was nearly orgasmic. I’ve had an exclusive on Jack’s hands ever since…
“Scout’s out,” Jack said. “I told Becca she could read in bed for a few minutes, since she’s not tired.” Becca needed time to unwind, while Scout had an enviable ability to conk out soon after her head hit the pillow.
“Becca should sleep well tonight, now that you’re back.” I had told Jack about our oldest daughter’s tears at night.
“I just feel so scared. Can we leave the light on?” she would ask me, though I’d noticed that the nighttime tears came only when Jack was out of town.
“No tears tonight?” I asked him.
“No tears.” He stared at the TV screen as his thumbs worked the arches of my feet. “I feel bad about that. No kid should be scared at night because her old man is on the road. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t jump off the old hamster wheel.”
“I know why,” I said. “It’s because the wheel is a fun ride.”
“Maybe, but lately I’ve been thinking about all the things I miss. The girls really do look taller than they were two weeks ago. And Dylan, he’s lost that baby look completely. Those fat red cheeks? Gone. He’s moving from toddler to boy, and I’m missing it.”
I was glad to hear that Jack had noticed Dylan’s growth. Though Jack claimed I was hypersensitive, I didn’t think he paid enough attention to our son. By the time our third child was born, Jack was so caught up in vying for a promotion at work and managing the girls that he dealt with Dylan methodically, without joy or verve. “It’s like your body is here but your mind and spirit are somewhere else,” I’d told Jack one day when Dylan started crawling, the first time he’d made it from the living room to the kitchen. Jack had growled something back, but it was clear he was in denial.
“Our kids are growing up without me, Rubes,” he said.
“You’re just noticing these things because you’ve been away two weeks. That’s a long time, honey.”
“Exactly. And I don’t want to go down as the absentee father.”
I smiled. Maybe he had been listening all those times months ago when I’d complained about his parenting ennui. I pushed the decadent warmth of his hands out of my mind for a second to focus on the conversation. “What are you saying, Jack?”
“There’s a position opening up at Corstar Headquarters. It’d mean a move to Dallas, but there’s almost zero travel involved.”
My smile faded. “Dallas, huh?” I humored him, knowing he hated it there—the warm weather, the oily twang. Texans didn’t appreciate Jack, a wise-cracking New Yorker. “We could do that. Dylan would finally get his cowboy hat. What’s the latest from Dallas, anyway? How are Desiree and Hank and CJ?”
Not that I’d met these people, but I’d heard enough about them from Jack to get a mental picture. CJ was a spunky goofball, Desiree a blonde bimbo with a vacant mind, and Hank was a boyish wisp of a thing who outsold everyone else at the station, maybe every one south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“Oh, and Tiger. How’s she working out?” Tiger was the new supervisor at Corstar, the parent company that owned the station where Jack worked. Her real name was Terry Anne Muldavia, but her nickname had made her a legend even before her first day of work.
“She should be nicknamed Shark,” Jack said. “She’s got the wide mouth of a predator, the sleepy eyes of a cold-blooded killer. She’s always moving, cruising the halls, swinging her head back and forth in meetings.”
“A charming young lady. It’s a wonder she never married.”
“You should meet her, really get to know the whole Dallas gang,” Jack said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Especially if we’re thinking of moving there.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
“You think I’m kidding? I could leave New York. The greatest city on Earth, the huge, stinking armpit that crushes us in its concrete embrace.”
“Uh-huh.” Dallas to me was no more real than the tourist sites I’d gone to while at a business conference there, back when I’d worked for an insurance consulting firm. My office buddies and I had done the JFK parade route, the Grassy Knoll and sampled just about every froufrou drink the Fairmont had to offer. Dallas was a lame fantasy. No one was going anywhere.
Although I grew up in the burbs of Jersey, Jack was raised here in Bayside, Queens, in a house about ten blocks away. After retirement his parents moved to Florida, but Jack had never roamed much farther than across the East River to Manhattan during a whirlwind period after college when he shared a two-bedroom apartment with three other guys.
I