Jaime Sommers – former tennis champ, government operative, schoolteacher, and now psychologist - blew a wayward strand of hair away from her face and chided herself for being so incredibly grumpy. There wasn't any single item in the pile she resented – it was the pile itself. Why did everything have to happen at once? Her day at the office had been very full – in fact she had packed in two extra sessions in an effort to keep up, which had been a mistake. Beset by sleepiness in the late afternoon, she could only hope the two clients hadn't noticed. Still, the pile of work was a clear sign that she was a success – her practice was brimming with patients, and underneath the grumpiness she was extremely pleased.
In one of life's ridiculous contrasts, after listening to heart rending human problems all day, here she was flipping through a Martha Stewart hors d'oeuvres cookbook, filled with fussy little mouthfuls that would take forever to prepare. These 'horse ovaries' (as she used to call them - her younger self thought she was funnier than she actually was) were for a very special occasion – in honor of a very special person. The OSI had recently downgraded the security levels on Rudy Wells's bionics work up to 1980. This meant that the country's leading physicians and bio-engineers would be given access to his remarkable legacy, and as a result he would finally receive some of the recognition he deserved.
While with him, Jaime rarely forgot that when she was in the presence of a true genius (albeit in a very unassuming package). It pained her that due to the nature of his work, he was not allowed take his place in the history books, where he belonged. Rudy was thrilled with this latest development – not for the recognition, but because he had long dreamed that his work might eventually benefit more than one or two lucky government operatives, and now that dream could come true. His discoveries would be disseminated and improved and carried forward – not shoved into a Top Secret envelope and pushed into a filing cabinet never to be seen again. For Jaime and Steve this meant that they would have to submit to being trotted out for show and tell, but neither of them minded one bit - they owed Rudy everything.
Jaime was less pleased about heading back into the lab for what Rudy flatly referred to as "upgrades" to her bionic skin. Tinkering with bionics took time, and as hers worked just fine she took the If it ain't broke, don't fix it position. But Steve and Oscar had convinced her. It would be an improvement in quality of life they said, an opportunity to feel just a little bit more human. Long ago she had given up worrying about whether she was a whole human, (she was) but she had to admit she was intrigued, and so she agreed. It was going to take more time, but once again, she could refuse Rudy nothing.
Finally, the cherry on top of this rather unmanageable sundae, was that the very weekend they were expecting Michael and Heather and the girls, there was a conference in Boston on Attachment theory. How she had not caught wind of it till now she couldn't imagine – usually she scoured the journals for just these sorts of events. In fact, she had been hoping for such a gathering - being deeply interested in the subject and woefully ignorant about it. Somehow she had a suspicion that this scheduling conflict was going to be a problem for her husband.
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"No way, Jaime!" Steve blurted. "Michael's coming."
"I know, honey." she replied evenly. "I wouldn't dream of bringing it up unless it was really important."
"You can't go." he insisted. "This is family. This is more important."
"Is that an order Colonel?" she said, managing to keep her voice steady as her internal thermometer jumped upward.
"No, it's not an order! But I'd like to have my wife by my side when we have grandchildren coming to visit!"
The words Your grandchildren! sprung into Jaime's head - but remained unvoiced.
It still had the power to shock her. After knowing Steve almost all her life, after having been engaged all those years earlier, after she had lost her memory of their love and recovered it in middle age, while she was starry eyed and newly in love with her old love, he finally told her the story of his marriage to Karen twenty five years after the fact. As if that weren't shocking enough, there was a second, more astonishing revelation. Steve had a son, a boy he hardly knew, and had never mentioned. Worst of all, Karen had died, and Steve, believing his life was too unstable to include a child, had handed Michael over to his sister in law.
It was a good thing Steve had brought it up while the bloom was on their romance, because it allowed Jaime to accept what might have otherwise been a difficult pill to swallow. Her first impulse was to help him mend and nurture his relationship with his son, and to welcome the young man into their lives. She knew that Steve was deeply ashamed of that part of his life. As someone who had always tried (and mostly succeeded) to "do the right thing", the neglect of his son was the most spectacular failure of his life – and Jaime knew it ate at him, undermining his belief in himself, and his confidence in all his decisions.
A year into their marriage, Steve began to refer to Michael as "our son". Perhaps it was partly a way of cementing Jaime's position into his life, and a way to extricate Karen from his memory. (He often told Jaime that life began anew when she came back to him.) Somewhere in her, mostly dormant, was a tiny, ungenerous, drop of anger– that he had never told her about Michael, and worse, the ways in which he had rationalized his lack of involvement in the boy's life.
Now, belatedly, Steve doted on Michael, rushed around after him on visits, bought extravagant gifts for the girls, paid lavish compliments to Heather - trying hard to be a good Dad and Grandfather. Jaime felt for him, and she was touched by the earnestness of his efforts. So she blotted up that drop of anger with kindness. Moments like this however, it seeped into her heart and colored all her reactions.
It was not surprising she felt this way – in fact it was quite a legitimate response, but she would have preferred to let it go, once and for all.
It didn't help that, try as she might, she couldn't get herself to really like Michael. He had been a chilly and bland young man when she met him, and was no more enchanting in his late thirties. Heather was too materialistic for Jaime's tastes, but she was pleasant enough, and she meant well. Their girls, Amber, nine, and Paris, five, were a delight, and Jaime enjoyed her role as Grandma with them – especially when she could get them involved in activities that didn't involve malls and shopping.
Steve stood rooted to the kitchen floor, one side of his face ticking upward to into an uneasy squint. He was not the world's most emotionally expressive man, but Jaime knew every expression as well as if he had sung them all out to guitar accompaniment. He couldn't quite face Michael and family all by himself. He was frustrated with her, and he was worried about making her angry.