Tell Me Lies

Maddie Faraday knows she’s having a bad day when she finds a pair of black lace panties under the front seat of her husband’s car. To make things more complicated, C.L. Sturgis, her old high school flame, is back in town and still has a yen for her. Maddie wants to get even with her husband, but she wants to keep her reputation, too, and the juggling act that follows ends with great sex in C.L.‘s backseat, which leads to gossip and a showdown with her husband.

Things get rapidly out of hand as Maddie discovers that nobody’s been telling her the truth: not her husband, not C.L., not her gossiping mother, not her secretive best friend, not even her eight-year-old daughter, Emily. And when her husband disappears, Maddie soon becomes the most-talked-about person in town. She is on quest for answers, but will she survive long enough to discover the truth....and rediscover the man she loves?

Up until then it had been a fairly decent day. The microwave had snapped and died when she’d tried to heat a muffin for Em’s breakfast, but the sun had been shining on their blue frame house, and the temperature hadn’t hit ninety before noon, and Em had been absorbed in planning her school shopping, and contentment had reigned. Even Brent, muttering about what a mess his car was, had cheered up when Maddie volunteered to clean it, something she’d done more from a sense of guilt than a sense of obligation. It seemed fair that she should clean the car since she had summers off from work and he didn’t, and she’d been bending over backward to be fair lately because it was so tempting not to be fair. “I don’t even like you,” she wanted to say. “Why would I clean your car?” But Brent was a good husband by default: he didn’t yell, drink his paycheck, hit her, or do most of the other things the country music she loved complained about. He was doing his part, the least she could do was play hers. “Em and I will clean your car this afternoon,” she’d said when he’d hugged Em good-bye and was on his way to the door. “Call Howie and have him pick you up on his way out to the company.” And Brent had been so surprised, he’d kissed her on the cheek.

Em had done her usual eight-year-old eye roll behind her glasses when she’d heard the good news. But then she’d gotten a calculating look in her eye and become the Angel Daughter, trooping out to Brent’s gleaming Caddy after lunch with no protest. Something was up, and Maddie waited for the other shoe to drop while she cleaned the trash out of her husband’s front seat and sang along with Roseanne Cash on the tape deck.

Em hauled enough junk from the backseat to fill a cardboard box. “I’m taking this stuff inside and putting it away right now,” she announced, her thin arms wrapped around the box, and then she escaped into the bright yellow air-conditioned kitchen while Maddie waved her on from the floor of the front seat.

Maddie reached under the seat and grabbed an Egg McMuffin wrapper as Roseanne sang “Blue Moon with Heartache.” Good song, nice day. A screen door wheezed to her right, and she craned her neck to see their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Crosby, shuffle out onto her immaculate little white porch and lean into her immaculate little marigold-edged yard to squint in the direction of Brent’s Caddy, which should not have been in the driveway because it was a workday.

Mrs. Crosby was festive today, topping the red leggings that hung on her skinny little thighs with a hot orange T-shirt that said “World’s Greatest Grandma,” cotton proof that hypocrisy began young in Frog Point, Ohio. Maddie waved and called, “Hello, Mrs. Crosby, we’re just cleaning out the car.” Mrs. Crosby didn’t have the hearing or the eyesight she’d had twenty years ago, but she still had the mouth, and there’d never be an end to the hell she could start if she was ignored. “There was that car,” Mrs. Crosby would say, “big as life, just like he didn’t have a job to go to.” It was easier to wave and yell now than explain later.

Mrs. Crosby flapped her hand at Maddie and shuffled back inside, now sure that nothing interesting was happening in the driveway next door. Maddie stuffed the Egg McMuffin wrapper in her garbage bag, and then she went under the seat after the last of the trash and found the underpants.

Mrs. Crosby had been wrong.

Maddie sat with her bare legs stretched out the car door, and stared stupidly at the lace and elastic dangling from her hand. It took her a minute to figure out what it was because the middle was missing, there were just four black lace triangles held together by loops of black elastic, and then she realized they were panties, crotchless panties. She thought,
Not again,
and
Beth,
and
Thank God Em went inside,
and
Now I can leave him,
and then a car door slammed next door to the left, and she jerked and crumpled the lace into a hard ball that scratched her palm.

Gloria was home. It would be bad if Gloria peered over the big picket fence as she always did and caught Maddie on the floor of Brent’s car with another woman’s underwear. Roseanne started singing “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train,” and Maddie snapped the tape player off and groped for sanity.

It was probably paranoid to think that Gloria Meyer could identify another woman’s underwear at forty paces, but this was Frog Point, so there was no room to take chances. If Gloria saw, her nose would twitch, and she’d wave and scuttle inside, and an hour later Maddie’s mother would be calling to find out if it was true because she’d heard it from Esther by the toaster ovens at Kmart and now everybody in Frog Point was talking about what a fool Maddie was and what a shame it was for Emily and how it was all Maddie’s mother’s fault because she hadn’t raised Maddie right.

The sunbaked suburban landscape dipped and swerved, and her stomach rose up to meet the curves. She realized she wasn’t breathing and filled her lungs with the hot dusty air as the blood pounded in her ears.

Next door, Gloria’s screen door slapped shut as she went inside.

Think,
Maddie told herself.
Forget the dizzy part.
The talk before had been awful. And Em was old enough to understand now. Em would know.

And then there was her mother. Oh, God, her mother.

Think. Stop panicking.
Well, one thing she could do. She could make sure she wasn’t a fool again. She could get a divorce. She nodded to herself and then felt like a fool anyway for nodding alone on the floor of a car.

She put her hand on the hot beige leather and pushed herself out of the car to stare at her backyard. Funny how normal everything looked. The pine picket fence was still where it was supposed to be, and the splintered picnic table, and Em’s beat-up blue bike, and yet she’d found somebody else’s underwear, here on this spot, on Linden Street, between Gloria Meyer and Leona Crosby, right in the middle of her life.

Maddie took a deep breath and walked up the back porch steps and into the cool of her kitchen, making sure to slam the back door, which had started to stick in the heat. It was the details that mattered, like not air-conditioning the outdoors because she was distracted and had let the door pop open. She stood next to the sink and held the pants in her hand, trying for a moment to make them fit into her everyday reality the way Em used to sing along with “Sesame Street”: one of these things did not belong here, one of these things was not the same. Yellow Formica counter. Dead microwave. Blue-checked hand towel. Flintstone glass with milk in bottom. Mac-and-cheese pan soaking in sink. Brown calico pot holder with “i love you mom” embroidery.

Black lace crotchless underwear.

“Mom?”

Maddie dropped the underwear into the mac-and-cheese mess with nerveless fingers and shoved it to the bottom of the pan, splashing scummy dishwater on her T-shirt. She turned and saw Em in the doorway, lost in her black oversize Marvin the Martian T-shirt, her baby-fine brown hair curling around her face, vulnerable as only an eight-year-old can be vulnerable.

Maddie leaned on the sink for support. “What, honey?”

“What was that?” Em stared at her, her brown eyes huge behind her glasses.

Maddie stared back stupidly for a moment. “What?”

“That thing.” Em came closer, sliding her hip along the yellow counter as she moved, bouncing over the cabinet handles. “That black thing.”

“Oh.” Maddie blinked at the pants floating in the pan and shoved them under the water again. “It’s a scrub thing.” She began to scour the mac-and-cheese pan with the wadded-up pants, taking great satisfaction in the way the pale cheese clogged the lace.

“A scrub thing?” Em peered over her arm.

“It’s not a very good scrub thing.” Maddie let the sodden lace sink to the bottom of the pan. “I’m getting rid of it. What’s up with you? Got everything put away?”

“Yes,” Em said, full of virtue. “And I put the box in the basement so nobody would trip over it.”

Fear caught at the back of Maddie’s throat. Em’s virtue was all part of some plan for whatever it was she was up to this time, some plan she could make because her world was secure and ordinary, and it was all about to blow up in her face. Maddie’s knees went and she pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down before she fell on the floor and made a fool of herself in front of her daughter.

“Mom?” Em said, and Maddie held out her arms and pulled Em close to her.

“I love you, baby,” Maddie said into her hair as she rocked Em back and forth. “I love you so much.”

“I love you, too, Mommy.” Em pulled away a little. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Maddie forced herself to let her daughter go. “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” Em backed up a little and began to sidle out of the kitchen. “Well, if you need me for anything, yell. I’m going to go work on my school list some more. It’s pretty long this year. Third grade is harder.”

“Right,” Maddie said. Whatever it was that Em was going to ask, she’d postponed it until her mother was normal again. But normal was going to be never unless Maddie could handle this mess somehow. The key was in not overreacting. That was the key. Think everyday life. If she hadn’t found the underwear, what would she be doing? Finishing the mac-and-cheese pan. Taking out the trash. Today was trash day. She’d definitely be taking out the trash.

She got up and pulled on the blue plastic trash basket under the sink. It stuck, and she pulled on it again and again, gritting her teeth, finally yanking at it savagely until it gave up and popped out.
Damn right,
she thought, and caught her breath. She dumped the water out of the mac-and-cheese pan and threw it and the gross, cheese-encrusted panties in the trash. Overcome with revulsion, she grabbed the can of Lysol out from under the sink and sprayed the trash and her hands until they dripped and her nose stung from the chemical-rich air. Then she dragged the trash outside and upended the basket into the Dumpster at the side of the yard, carefully not looking at Brent’s car. She was supposed to bag everything she put into the Dumpster, but today was not a bagging kind of day. She slammed the Dumpster closed and straightened as the screen door of the next house wheezed and bounced. Gloria again.

“Uh, Maddie?” Gloria peered over the fence and pushed a wisp of pale hair behind her ear. Maddie squinted at her in the sunlight. Gloria was pretty in a faint, pale, overbred way. Maybe Brent was cheating with Gloria. She was right next door, so he wouldn’t have to make much effort. That was like Brent.

“Maddie, I wanted to ask you, what do you think about the grass?”

Maddie gritted her teeth. “I don’t think about the grass much, Gloria.” She turned back to the house, knowing she was being rude and not caring.

Well, caring a little bit; there was no point in making Gloria feel rejected. Or in giving her a reason to talk, for that matter. She turned to smile at Gloria as she walked past her, but it was feeble.
You can do better than that, damn it,
she told herself, but Gloria wasn’t noticing anyway.

“I don’t know.” Gloria’s forehead creased as she frowned. “Don’t you think yours is getting a little long? Could you ask Brent to come over tonight to talk about it?”

Maddie restrained herself from ripping her neighbor’s face off. Gloria Meyer was a pain in the rear, but there was no way she could be sleeping with Brent. For one thing, Gloria would never wear crotchless panties. For another, sex would mean she’d have to stop talking about her damn lawn. “The grass will be okay, Gloria.”

“Do you think so? I really think I should talk to Brent.” Gloria pursued Maddie obliquely, sliding down her side of the fence much the way Em had slid down the side of the counter.

Maddie reached the steps and didn’t stop. “I have to go,” she said, and escaped into her kitchen.

She was probably overreacting. Absolutely, she was overreacting. She was ready to murder Brent, and over what? A pair of underpants that there might very well be a good explanation for. She was behaving as if she were in a bad TV show, the kind that began with a misunderstanding that any idiot could see through, and then continued while the two stars plotted and fought all through the half hour without ever discussing the problem like reasonable people until the last five minutes of the show when they talked and everything was all right in time for the Infiniti commercial. How ridiculous. She’d just wait and mention the pants to Brent when he got home. Like a rational adult.

“Hi, honey. What the
hell
were black lace underpants doing under the front seat of your car?”

Calm down. Be rational.

Eat chocolate.

There was a good idea. Chocolate spurred the production of endorphins, which would calm her down, and was full of caffeine, which would give her the energy to kill her husband. The best of both worlds.

The cupboards were full of canned vegetables and cereal, but in the freezer, in back of the frozen peas and last week’s chicken soup, she found one permafrosted brownie. Thank God. She peeled the plastic wrap from it in strips and then dropped it on the counter where it skated and spun like an ice cube.

Great. And the microwave was broken. A deeper woman might see this as symbolic of the breakdown of her life. Fortunately, she wasn’t deep. She’d just eat the damn brownie frozen.

She tried to bite off a piece, but it was like chocolate rock. She yanked open a drawer and pulled out her big carving knife. The brownie sat on the counter, sullen, cold, unresponsive. She poised the knife over it and then slammed it into the heart of the cake, but the knife skidded off the top and gouged the yellow Formica. Brent would be mad about that. Well, too bad. Lately he’d been mad about everything; for the past week, she hadn’t done anything right. That was one of the reasons she’d been out there in the heat, cleaning his damn car. She thought of the car and felt her blood pound in her temples. He was doing it again. With Beth? Visions of the perky little redhead loomed before her. Maddie hated perky. The hell with both of them.