The Consequences (13 page)

CHAPTER 24

I
n the silence that followed Julia's departure and the slam of the hall door, they both clearly heard the high-pitched, squealing scrape of metal on stone.

“She's hit the edge of the pillar,” Robert said, unable to keep the grin off his face. He glanced over his shoulder to where Kathy was also smiling. “She was parked at such an awkward angle,” he explained. “I'm not sure I would have been able to get that big SUV out of the driveway without hitting something either.” He brought the bottle of scotch to the table and sat down in the chair facing Kathy. Silently, he poured her a glass.

“I'm thinking I might have given her a different response a couple of days ago,” Kathy said quietly. “There was a time—in the very recent past—when I might have agreed with Julia. But when you become part of an affair, you discover a different perspective. There are two sides to every story, but in an affair . . . there are three. And you never really know anyone's story but your own.”

“Did you know?” Robert asked, just to make conversation. “About Sheila,” he added hastily. In truth, he couldn't care less about how the youngest of the sisters was living her life.

Kathy held the heavy glass in both hands and looked into the amber liquid. “She told me on Monday. We were sitting in her car outside the Boston Sports Club. I sat there and watched my husband kiss another woman.” She looked up, and her expression made him sit back, suddenly frightened that she was going to throw the alcohol in his face. She obviously had the same thought, because she carefully set the glass down. “I called you,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “I sat in a car less than ten yards away from you and called you.”

Robert nodded, remembering the call; he had been standing in the street, having just spoken to Stephanie about children, then he had leaned over and kissed her, deeply, passionately. He felt himself color, and beads of icy sweat gathered in his armpits.

“I asked you what time you were coming home,” Kathy continued.

Robert nodded. The idea that she had been trailing him around, following him, spying on him, was unsettling, even frightening. This was a Kathy he didn't know.

“You told me you were just leaving the office and would be home in forty minutes.” Kathy suddenly stood up, startling him. She threw the rest of her scotch into the sink and then began to clear off the kitchen table.

“How long . . . how long have you known?” he asked eventually. “About us? About me?”

“Not long. Why? Did you think I was the sort of person who would turn a blind eye to my husband's affair?” Kathy's voice was calm, reasonable, conversational. She pulled a cookbook off the shelf and flipped through it until she found the recipe she was looking for.

“No. I never thought that,” Robert admitted.

Pressing the book flat on the table, Kathy scanned the contents, then started to gather the ingredients for the turkey stuffing.

“Will you please sit down and talk to me?” Robert asked. Kathy's constant movement around the kitchen, the banality of her actions contrasted so sharply with the extraordinary conversation that the whole experience was taking on a surreal, dreamlike aspect.

Kathy ignored his request. “I suspected the truth last Thursday, when I was writing the Christmas cards. Once my suspicions were roused, it was relatively easy to put it all together. There was a speeding ticket upstairs in your office. You got a ticket in Jamaica Plain on Halloween . . . even though you were supposed to be in Connecticut that night having dinner with a client.”

Kathy pulled the blender out from the cupboard under the sink and plugged it in. In the pantry, she found the plastic bag of dried bread she'd been saving for the past couple of days. She started feeding the bread into the blender, grinding it to crumbs. When the blades were whirring, conversation was impossible, and she only spoke when she stopped and cleared out the breadcrumbs. “Then I remembered all the other nights you'd stayed away, meeting with clients, wining and dining them. . . . I don't remember the company getting contracts from any of these alleged clients. You were supposed to be having dinner with Jimmy Moran at Top of the Hub last week. But when I called to check, they had no record of your reservation.”

“Jimmy and I really were supposed . . . ,” Robert began, and then shut up. No matter what he said, Kathy was not going to believe him—and why should she? She had lost trust in him; everything he said was suspect.

Kathy stuffed more bread into the blender, and the blades whirred and stopped. “And then I found the phone records in the file cabinet. That was priceless.” She turned to look at Robert. “Hundreds of calls, Robert. Hundreds. First call of the day. Last call at night. All to the same cell or the same house number. And I couldn't help but remember the mornings you left here without speaking to me, or the days when you were too busy to call to see how I was, or those days when you got back late and I'd be in bed. Whole days would go by, and we wouldn't speak more than a few words. And yet you always seemed to find the time to call your mistress several times a day. Every single day.”

“Maureen told me you'd seen the phone bills,” he muttered.

“She just confirmed what I already knew. She just gave me the time frame. She thinks it's been going on for a year. Stephanie said eighteen months. What is the truth?”

He nodded. “June of last year was the . . . the first time.”

“The first time for what?” Kathy snapped.

Robert glanced over his shoulder toward the family room where the kids' voices were just audible over the sound of the TV. “Could we discuss this somewhere more private?” he asked.

“Right now, this is the most private room in the house. If we go upstairs, the kids will think that we're wrapping their presents and be in and out every five minutes. Right now, they know I'm prepping the stuffing for the turkey, and they've no interest in that.”

Robert stood and came around the table to stand beside Kathy. “Can I help?”

“No,” she said simply. She turned back to the blender. “I don't know what's going to happen between us, Robert. But it's going to take me a long time before I can trust you again . . . a long time before I can even look at you without feeling sick to my stomach.”

He reached out to touch her, but she jerked away. “Don't!” she snapped.

Robert allowed his hand to fall loosely by his side. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I know it sounds like a cliché, but I never wanted to hurt you. You have to believe me—that was never my intention.” Folding his arms, he leaned against the counter and took a deep breath. “I allowed myself to enter into the relationship—”

“Affair!” Kathy snapped. “Jesus, Robert, call it what it is—an affair!”

Robert bit the inside of his cheek, the instant pain forcing him to focus on each word. “I began my affair with Stephanie last June. I was lonely, Kath, desperately lonely. I wanted someone to talk to, someone to share with, someone to show an interest in me. I tried to talk to you—God, I tried. But you never seemed to be interested. You never asked how things were going, never seemed to be in the slightest bit concerned with the ordinary day-to-day minutiae of keeping the company afloat. I'm not even sure you realized how much trouble we were in. We came very close to going under.”

Kathy stepped around Robert to remove fat tubes of sausage meat from the fridge.

“I was lonely,” Robert repeated, aware of her movements, but not looking at her. “We'd stopped . . . having sex. When I tried, you'd turn your back on me or you'd come to me so reluctantly that I felt like you were making love to me almost as a duty. You didn't seem to enjoy it. After a while I stopped making the effort; I'll admit it. But—and please don't take this as a criticism; it's just a statement of fact—you never made an effort either.”

“So you're saying it's my fault you found yourself a mistress?” Kathy asked savagely.

“No,” he sighed. “I'm not trying to score points here—I'm just trying to let you see how I ended up in this situation.” When Robert had been driving home, he'd imagined several versions of the conversation he was having now. He'd visualized it taking place in the family room, late at night, with the TV turned off, or the pair of them sitting on either side of the big table in the dining room, or upstairs in the bedroom, with both of them standing on either side of the bed. He'd never imagined it taking place in the kitchen, while Kathy stuffed the Christmas turkey as if everything was normal. “I allowed myself to have the affair, Kathy, because I believed—genuinely believed—that you no longer loved me.” He held up his hand as Kathy rounded on him. “I know. I'm just telling you how I felt, telling you how I saw things. When you stood in Stephanie's living room earlier and said that you loved me, no one was more surprised than I was.”

“I never stopped loving you,” Kathy said immediately.

“Even right now?” he asked, trying to lighten the somber mood.

“I'm not sure how I feel about you at this moment. But the very fact that we're both standing in this room, even after all that's happened today, should suggest something.”

“What?” he wondered.

“That maybe I do accept some responsibility for what happened,” she said, surprising him. “I wasn't paying attention. And if a marriage is going to work, then both parties have to keep paying attention. You stopped paying attention to me, and I stopped paying attention to you.”

“Would it help if I said I was sorry, truly sorry?”

Kathy glanced sidelong at him. “Sorry for what? Do you regret the affair?”

“I regret the pain it caused you,” Robert said carefully. In truth, he didn't regret the affair. His only regret was that he'd been caught and the affair was now at an end.

“Well, I'm glad you chose to tell me the truth,” she said lightly.

“I would never knowingly hurt you,” he continued.

“And yet you have hurt me, Robert. Hurt me and humiliated me. And it's going to take me a long time to forgive that.”

“What's going to happen to us?” he asked.

“As I see it, we have two choices: We can stay together, make some new rules, start again, and really work at it this time. Or I can file for divorce.”

If Kathy filed for divorce, what happened then? If she got herself a good lawyer, he could end up losing his home, access to his children, and possibly even his business. “Well, look, let's talk about this later, or tomorrow maybe. We're both tired and probably not thinking too clearly. I know I'm not.” Robert licked his dry lips and glanced sidelong at Kathy. “I do have a favor to ask,” he added.

Kathy looked at him, a mixture of amusement and disdain on her face.

“Kath, if you decide that you want me to go—and I understand if you do—then can we keep this from the kids for a while? I don't want to ruin their Christmas.”

“I won't ruin their Christmas,” she promised. “Let's try to get through the next couple of days like civilized people.”

“Thank you,” he said sincerely.

“When were you going to tell me, Robert?”

“Tell you what?” he asked.

“Tell me that you were going to leave me.”

“I don't know for certain,” he mumbled. “Probably over the weekend.”

“You don't sound so sure.”

“I'm not,” he admitted.

“And yet Stephanie seemed convinced that you were going to tell me after Christmas so that you could spend New Year's Eve with her.”

“Yes, we talked about that.”

“Or were you going to give her an excuse and stay here?” Kathy guessed.

“Kathy,” Robert said truthfully, “I have no idea what I would have done. But yes, the plan was to tell you, probably on Saturday or Sunday, that I was leaving.”

“Bastard!” Kathy hissed. She pushed him away from her. “You callous, uncaring bastard!”

Robert stepped away from her and moved around the table. “I'm sorry, Kathy; I really am. But I made that decision believing that you didn't love me. Before I knew the truth.”

Kathy turned back to the turkey. “If we're going to rebuild our lives and our relationship, we're going to have to be honest with one another.” She looked up, seeing his reflection in the window. “Will you be honest with me, Robert? Can you promise me that?”

“Yes. Yes, I can,” he said.

“Then you have to promise me something else.”

“Anything.”

“You have to swear to me that you'll stay away from that woman.”