Something New (39 page)

It is now twelve fifteen, a full fifteen minutes past target. I am about to turn the key in the ignition so that I can go home and use the
landline
to call Jill when I see Linda Campbell frantically storm out of her house dragging a completely sodden rug in one hand and holding a lamp with the other. Her face is set in a grimace as she drops her things on the front lawn and runs back into the house. Ten seconds later, she hurries out with a small side table. Liam and Evan trail her, soaking wet from their hair to their sneakers, and giggling in direct opposition to their mother’s distress. She scowls at them as she sets the table down, then clambers back into the house.

Now, a normal person would immediately jump out of the car and rush over to offer assistance. But a normal person
probably isn’t having an
almost
-affair with the husband of the person presently in need. Plus, for one crazy moment, my usual empathetic and do-gooder tendencies take a backseat to the voyeuristic thrill of watching someone who has no idea she is being watched undergo a situation of obviously calamitous proportions. Still, when I see Linda at the front door, trying to lug a dripping, formerly-plush easy chair through the doorway, I spring into action.

“Can I help you?” I ask, trotting up the front steps of Ben’s house.

She looks up at me sharply, and there is no sign of recognition on her face, only doubt. Under these circumstances, which I have yet to discern, her pretty features are obscured. She looks angry, weathered, and beaten.

“I’m Matthew’s mom, Ellen. From soccer?”

“Oh,” she grunts, trying to support the weight of the chair on her thighs. “Hi. Yeah, thanks.”

I cross to the door and bend at the waist, grabbing the underside of the chair. Together, Linda and I manage to haul the piece of furniture out to the driveway and set it down on the concrete. Briefly, I think of the first time I met Ben, the day his family moved in, when the direction of the furniture was reversed.

“I can’t believe this!” she hisses between gritted teeth. “I just can’t
believe
this! It’s just…
unbelievable
!” For a smarty-pants environmental lawyer, her vocabulary sure is lacking. She stomps back up to the house and disappears through the front door. I look at Liam and Evan, who evidently have realized the severity of the situation in their own seven- and ten-year-old ways, as they are no longer smiling.

“What happened?” I ask them.

Liam shrugs and remains stoic, but Evan cannot suppress a sudden grin. “Waterfall.”

Confused, I leave them on the lawn and make my way up to the house and step inside. As soon as I reach the foyer, I hear what sounds suspiciously like the water show at the Bellagio sans the musical accompaniment. Turning to my right, I gaze through the den toward the sliding glass door on the far side of the room and my jaw drops. Water gushes from the second floor, cascading over the open doorway like Little Niagara. Linda stands a few feet back from the spray, surveying it, hands on hips, temporarily paralyzed.

“That bastard! God damn him. God
damn
him! He said he’d fix it. He told me he’d get to it!”

I take a step toward her as she continues to vent angrily. I don’t think she even realizes that I’ve entered the house.

“And now where is he, huh? Surveillance, my ass! He’s probably with his goddamned
girlfriend
!”

I freeze in place, and I mean literally. An arctic chill sweeps through every fiber of my being. Linda suddenly senses my presence and turns to see me standing there, like an ice sculpture, unable to move or speak. For a split second, her venom is directed at me. Not because she knows I was dry-humping her husband in a bar last night, but because I am the only one here. But I imagine that she knows and it fills me with dread.

Snap out of it, Ellen!
I tell myself as the water continues to rush into the room, soaking everything in its path. Linda is shaking her head and flapping her arms like a mental patient, clearly overwhelmed and without a clue as to how to deal with the situation. I manage to break free of my own paralysis and reach out to grasp Linda’s arm.

“We need to shut the water off.”

She stops shaking her head long enough to give me a perplexed look, as though I’m speaking in a foreign language.

“Do you have a wrench?” I ask the question slowly, emphasizing each word.

After a beat, she nods and races from the den, disappearing down the hallway past the foyer. I glance at the waterfall one last time because I may never see something like it again, then head outside and trot to the Lexus. I pop the trunk and grab the crowbar, which is exactly where it should be, on the far right tucked behind Jonah’s emergency road kit and Jonah’s emergency overnight bag.

Crowbar in hand, I move back toward Ben’s house, scanning the sidewalk for the main water line for his house. When I find it, I wedge the crowbar beneath the concrete cover and, putting all my weight into it, lift it and push it away with a grunt. In my peripheral vision, I see Liam and Evan scamper up to the house. A moment later, Linda races past them, waving a crescent wrench in the air like a victory flag. She hands it off to me as she crouches beside me, and silently watches me reach into the hole to turn off the line. I try not to think about the herd of black widow spiders that are lurking below, probably waiting for a nice fleshy hand to appear on which they can feast. I locate the valve and give it half a dozen forceful turns with the wrench until I can turn it no more.

“Bye-bye, waterfall,” says Evan from the foyer, looking forlorn as he gazes into the den.

Linda sits back on her haunches and blows out a heavy sigh, releasing most of her tension. She looks up at me and gives me a wry smile.

“Thank you so much,” she says. She laughs with little humor. “I’m usually good in stressful situations, but when it comes to…I don’t know…what do you call it? Being handy? I suck.”

I only know about the main water valve because a few
years back, one of Matthew’s Bakugans rolled down the driveway and fell through the small slot in the cover, and my son wouldn’t stop yammering about it until I rescued the damn thing. Before then, I just assumed that the water magically appeared when I turned on the faucets, brought into the house by little water elves who lived in the pipes. I don’t tell Linda this lest I shatter her belief that I am cool.

“Anyway, I’m really grateful for your help. Can I make you a cup of coffee?” she asks.

“Actually, no.” She is surprised by my refusal and I allow myself to grin. “You can’t make me a cup of coffee,” I tell her. “You have no water.”

A sly smile plays on her lips. “That’s okay. I have a Keurig.”

The Keurig is the best invention since Spanx. I want one. For Mother’s Day, I am going to demand that my kids pool all of their piggy bank savings and get me one, and if they don’t, I’m putting them up for adoption. It’s a coffee machine that makes one cup at a time using these little things called pods, enclosed plastic cups with the exact amount of gourmet grounds for a single serving. Every cup of coffee comes out just the right temperature and perfectly delicious. No mere mortal can make a cup of coffee this good, which is why, if you’re getting married, make sure a Keurig is on your bridal registry. Because your husband-to-be might end up being a total schmuck who leaves you for a younger, higher-breasted chick, but your Keurig will never let you down.

I am sitting at the kitchen counter sipping my heavenly brew while Linda piles dishes in a water-free sink. Liam and Evan frolic in the empty wading pool that used to be the patio outside the den.

“Can I get you anything to eat? Are you hungry?”

All of a sudden, I remember:
lunch with Jill.
I ask to use the phone. Jill’s cell rings only once before she picks up.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Where the h-e-l-l are you? I’ve been calling your cell for forty-five minutes!”

“I’m at your next-door neighbors’. Where are
you
?”

“Oh my gosh,” she breathes. “Emergency at the salon this morning. You would not believe.”

She’s right. I would
not
believe. It’s hard to imagine any cataclysmic event happening at the salon. But then, I don’t spend much time there, so who am I to say?

“Kiki got the color wrong on my roots; they were Day-Glo orange! I think she’s hungover.” She whispers this last in the same way you might say
She has can-cer
, which is probably on the same level as
hung-over
since Kiki is an
al-co-hol-ic
. “So she had to start all over again—”

There is dead silence on the line for five full seconds. Then: “What the h-e-l-l are you doing next door?”

“We had a bit of an emergency here, too,” I say as Linda sets a tray of crackers and cheese on the counter in front of me. “I’ll tell you about it later. So, no lunch?”

“We’re at the home stretch,” she says. “Shouldn’t be more than a half hour. I have to pick the kids up from Patty at three, but that’ll give us time. We need to talk.”

Her implied meaning is transparent, but she clarifies anyway. “I read your blog today.”

“Uh-huh.”

“
Uh-huh
,” she mocks. “I get it. I’ll see you soon.”

She rings off and I set the phone down in its cradle. Linda is looking at me speculatively, like she might be privy to my inner thoughts and is about to charge into her bedroom and
get Ben’s off-duty weapon (because every cop on TV has one) and come back in and shoot the crap out of me. But perhaps I am projecting.

“I’m sorry,” she says, surprising me. “About earlier.” She lowers her gaze to the counter. “What I said.” She chuckles softly. “Well, screamed, actually. About my husband.”

“Don’t worry about—”

“That thing about his girlfriend…” She tucks a loose strand of blond hair behind her ear. “Ben’s a great guy.”

Don’t I know it
, I think, then immediately feel ashamed.

“But, you know. Marriage.”

“Yeah, marriage.” I laugh, but it sounds forced and unnatural, more like someone trying to hack up phlegm.

Linda fingers a cracker, absently moving it around on the plate. “He, um, Ben…He had an affair a couple of years ago.”

My mouth goes dry and when I swallow, my throat feels as though it is full of sand.

I’ve never done anything like this before.…

“It didn’t last long, you know? And we were going through a tough time.”

I can tell that this is hard for her, a kitchen confession to a virtual stranger, but one she feels compelled to give. And if I weren’t so consumed with my own torrent of conflicting thoughts and emotions, I would be able to offer her some comfort. I try to paint my face with an open and empathetic expression, but the effort is exhausting.

“I thought about leaving him, but, you know. The kids…Not just the kids, me too. I’m a lawyer. I see what divorce does. So I stuck it out, and I’m glad. But it never really goes away, you know?”

I’ve counted four
you knows
in Linda’s last several sentences and I recognize that the structured writer in me is
seizing on something tangible to think about in order to avoid thinking about what I absolutely do not
want
to think about.

I’ve never done anything like this before.

“Anyway,” she says. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I just didn’t want you to think…”

“It’s okay,” I assure her, resisting the urge to lower my head into my hands and weep. Because it’s about as far from okay as it could be.

The rest of the day passes in a haze, including my lunch with Jill, during which she alternated between grilling me on the lurid details of my bathroom encounter and chastising me for the lurid details of my bathroom encounter. She seemed almost disappointed by Nina Montrose’s interruption of what surely would have been a night to remember, then proceeded to wax philosophic about how it was for the best and ultimately Nina Montrose had unwittingly saved my marriage. I related to her the tale of the Campbells’ water disaster but kept Linda’s revelation about Ben to myself. I also chose not to mention tomorrow’s planned rendezvous because right now, I am confused to the point where I wonder if there will even
be
a tomorrow. (Melodramatic, I know. But now I understand why soap operas are so popular.) And although, under ordinary circumstances, Jill would be the first person (the
only
person, actually) I would tell about Jonah’s love letter, I inexplicably omitted that lovely little anecdote from our conversation.

I spend the afternoon going through every single drawer of my monolithic-sized dresser. This task is not on my spring cleaning list, and there is little to purge, but it is mindless and meditative. When I finish, only having thought about Ben
and Linda a total of four thousand, seven hundred and sixty-two times, I move on to my computer desk and sort through every scrap of paper, take-out menu, magazine, and kid’s homework assignment that managed to get tucked inside. Thoughts of Ben: two thousand, three hundred and six. Since the desk takes less time than my dresser, I guess the lower number doesn’t count. I move on to the bathrooms, scrubbing the toilets and counters and mirrors to clean-room proportions, but it is impossible not to think of Ben while performing this job, and I have to stop several times, midscour, when I am overcome by images of Ben and me at the T Bar.

I have never done anything like this before.

Bastard. Liar. Gorgeous sexy hunk of man that I still want to ride like a stallion despite the fact that you lied to my face, because when it comes down to it, who the fuck really cares what you’ve done before now?

I do.

Fuck me.

At four o’clock, I lace up my sneakers and take Sally to the park adjacent to the house and spend thirty minutes trying to get her to chase a tennis ball. I beg. I plead. I entreat her with snacks waved in front of her nose, at which point she promptly lies down on the grass and rolls over for a belly scratch.

“I know, girl,” I surrender, kneeling beside her and raking my fingernails through the fur of her stomach until she gives me bicycle leg. “We could all use a little belly scratch, couldn’t we?”