The Other Widow (14 page)

“Gonna have a story tonight?” Samuel might ask, and Lily would clap her little hands in delight, scooting over so he could squeeze himself onto the tiny, sloping mattress, flop his legs over the footboard, cross his arms under his head as Dorrie conjured princesses and genies and lamps, flinging them into the room to escort Lily off to sleep. She sighs, wishing she could take a magic carpet ride back there for just a day. A night. An hour, even, that she could shrink her daughter back into that crayon bed, the blue nightgown with the cat embroidered on the pocket.

She fiddles with a box of matches on the scarred wood of the workbench, pulls her coat tightly around her as she props open a small window. Music drifts from a neighbor's house, a clarinet and something else. A trombone, maybe. She strikes a match and sticks one of the joints between her lips, inhales deeply as the sound of the horns merge and blend and dance across the night.

At some point Dorrie hears a car pull up in the driveway, but it takes off too quickly for her to see if it
was
actually Mia in her little butter-colored car. She slips into the house as Lily storms through the front door.
So embarrassing,
she hurls back over her shoulder. Her heavy boots thump loudly on the stairs.

“Wait,” Dorrie calls. “We need to talk,” but Lily keeps going. “I can't! I have hours more work to do. On my
own
now, since you don't trust me to be at the
library
with a
study
group! Since you forced me to come
home!
What more do you
want?
”

“Tomorrow then.” Dorrie decides not to press the point. She feels a little spacey anyway, standing there in the living room in her coat. She tries to remember the last time she smoked pot. Fifteen years ago? Twenty?

Samuel's car pauses in the driveway and then, a moment later, pulls into the garage. Dorrie sighs. Samuel is the last person in the world she wants to see, especially now, after she's just learned he spewed out their life problems, stretched across Viv's hotel bed in a room the size of a postage stamp. Still. Lily is his daughter, too.

She meets him in the doorway. The garage is freezing, but she steps across the threshold and eases the door closed behind her. “Lily's smoking pot,” she announces in a stage whisper even before he's all the way out of his car. “I found it. It's probably that guy she likes. The science nerd. Or at least that's what she and Mia call—”

“Found what?” he says, but Dorrie is already squeezing between Samuel's car and several piles of junk. She grabs the baggie from behind the box of nails.

“This,” she says. “Lily's stash. Do they still call it that? Stash or—”

“Oh.” He stands in the icy garage and stares down at the baggie Dorrie's plunked into his palm.

“Oh?
Our daughter's smoking weed
here
at the
house
and all you can come up with is
oh?”
Her teeth chatter and she clomps them together.

“It isn't Lily's.”

“Huh? Well then who . . . ? Oh.” She giggles.

Samuel flips the baggie back and forth in his hands and it makes a thin, slithery sound, like a fish. “Wait.” He looks at her, his eyebrows knotting in a frown. “I guess she
is
smoking pot.”

“
Why?
I thought you just said it was—well,
implied
it was your—”

“Yeah,” Samuel says. “It is, but there were—there's a joint missing. I don't know—should we—maybe we should wake her up, give her the whole Say-No-To-Drugs talk right now. But with me being the one who— Of course, I am an adult, so really . . .”

“Which makes it
legal
for
you
, right?”

“Yeah. That's right.” Samuel looks around. He looks trapped. Since his daughter thinks he's basically infallible, Dorrie almost feels sorry for him until she remembers the whole Viv thing.

“Why's the window open? It's cold as a— Wait!” Samuel moves a little closer, sniffing like a bloodhound. “Hey! Jesus, Dorrie!”

She giggles again, relieved. With Lily, there will be a ton of other issues, now that she's tumbled into that dark terrain of adolescence. Still, it won't be this particular one. Not tonight.

“Why?” she says when Samuel's forced the sticky window closed and locked the kitchen door behind them.

He shrugs. “It helps. It takes the edge off.”

She doesn't ask him what kind of edge. She doesn't want to know. “Beautiful,” she says instead.

“What?”

“The horns.”

Samuel shakes his head. “I'll drive Lily to school tomorrow.” He doesn't look at her. “A little father-daughter time,” he mumbles. “Comin' up?” He tosses his coat over a chair in the living room and starts upstairs.

“No,” Dorrie says. “I have a headache. I think I'll just stretch out here on the couch for a minute—”

XV

KAREN

A
nd there it is. Karen pours herself a glass of stale Oyster Bay before she even takes the letter out of the envelope that's stuck halfway back together with old damp glue from the flap. It's postmarked two years before. She takes a sip of wine and gently tugs on the thin sheet of paper.

My dearest Karen,

I am here in my mother's town, but I am wishing to be back in the States with you. I so much want to be there in Boston, to be working again at the hospital, and to see you. I close my eyes and see the tulips starting to bloom by the river, and I can almost taste the pastrami at that deli where you took me downtown.

I miss you, beautiful Karen. I hope to soon be back in Boston, but until then please do not forget me and please write to me here at my mother's home.

Love always,

Tomas

The writing is overly slanted to the right, and his name is signed with such a flourish, Karen isn't sure if Joe could even make it out. Only Tomas's last name is on the back flap, along with his mother's address in Honduras.

She takes another sip of wine and sits back on her heels. What must Joe have thought? The letter didn't sound platonic. It was actually extremely personal, romantic, even. Joe would have assumed she and Tomas were having an affair. Of course he would have because Joe was a philanderer himself, at least potentially, when he intercepted Tomas's letter. Funny, Karen thinks, how that works. Funny how she didn't realize Joe was cheating until his little twit literally spelled things out for her in black and white, because she, Karen, wouldn't have thrown away her marriage the way Joe did. People, Karen has decided, can only project what they would do. It's the thief who worries most that he'll be robbed, the peeping tom who pulls his shades down tight. In this case, likely the adulterer who imagines his wife deceiving him. Projection.

She looks back at the date on the postmark. Is that why Joe distanced himself from her so completely? Was his involvement with the woman at work the result, rather than the
cause
, of his detachment? God. Karen sits all the way down on the floor, pulls her legs up under her, and wraps her arms around her knees. Maybe his affair with Dorrie was payback for what he thought she'd done with Tomas. Initially, at least, which makes what he did a lot more plausible. Not necessarily forgivable, but plausible. If he thought he'd lost his wife, if he thought she had betrayed him, that she loved another man . . .

But how dare he steal a letter meant for her? How dare he grab this small and slightly sad communication from a friend on the other side of the world? It was petty and provincial and really not at all like Joe. She guzzles down the rest of the wine, but she doesn't feel the least bit tipsy. She feels suddenly more grounded than she has in months. He was jealous. Needlessly. Suddenly, she's overcome by sadness, a suffocating grief that sinks inside her bones. She stares at the letter in her hand as if she's seeing it for the first time. And then she sighs and tears it into tiny pieces, marches into the kitchen and burns it to ashes in the sink.

How could she have been so blind? So stupid? So totally oblivious? The failing business, the stolen letter, the photograph of Dorrie, this girlfriend with the smoking husband? How could she have missed all this? She gazes out the window at the snow, so bright, it's visible in the dark, blanketing the street, the yard, her car. Or did she not see any of these things because she didn't
want
to? She gets up, stumbling over Antoine. It doesn't matter. Even if she didn't want to know the details of her husband's life, of their crumbling marriage—even if, like the proverbial ostrich, she'd had her blond head stuck in sand for the past two fucking years, she's got her eyes wide open now, her head straight up, fielding all the truths bombarding her at breakneck speed. Even if she let things get away from her before, she's determined, now, to get them back, to figure out exactly how she came to be where she is, with her husband dead, a thriving business in its death throes, and a stalker marring both her front yard and her sanity.

It's late. Karen checks the locks and the alarm, stands at the broad window, and gazes out across the front yard, glancing across the street, and then as far as she can see in both directions before she heads off to bed. Tonight she'll sleep in the middle of the mattress, not huddled up against the wall, the way she has for the past two years, possibly because her husband misconstrued this stolen letter from a lonely man, uprooted from his life to nurse a dying mother. Apparently Tomas had given up and never written her again. He must have thought she didn't want to hear from him when, or, possibly,
because
, he'd left the country. Drained, but at the same time oddly energized, she falls across the bed in yoga pants and a T-shirt, sends two texts—one to Edward, telling him she's ready to talk about the business, and the other to Tomas.
Would love to have a cup of coffee sometime
, she says.
So glad you're back in Boston
. And then she turns off her cell. Quickly. Before there's any chance of a response.

The next morning Karen wakens to the ringing of the home phone in the kitchen. She rolls over, glancing at the clock, surprised to find it's nearly ten. She yawns. Stretches. Whoever it is can leave a message. Finally, she's slept through the night. Across the house, in the kitchen, Antoine's tags clang against his bowl as Karen reaches into her purse to turn on her cell.

She drags herself out of bed, ties her old blue robe around her on the way to the kitchen. She puts on coffee, lets the dog out and then back in before she picks up her new message. Not Tomas or Edward. She shakes her head. Of course, it wouldn't be Tomas—he'll call her on her cell. Or he won't call at all. She waits. A strange voice identifies herself as Maggie Brennan, from Mass Casualty and Life. “A surprising turn of events,” the woman tells her. Could Karen call her back at her earliest convenience? And she's left her number.

Karen sips her coffee and finds her phone, enters Maggie Brennan's number. “Karen Lindsay,” she says when Brennan answers. “You left me a message?”

“Yes.” Karen hears squeaking, pictures Maggie Brennan swiveling around in a cheap office chair. “Your husband's death.” There's a slight pause. “I don't want to alarm you, Mrs. Lindsay, but there are a few irregularities. I wanted to give you a heads-up, let you know I'm still looking into the claim. I'll be in touch,” she says, and then she's gone.

Before Karen has a chance to think about the woman's cryptic words, a small ding announces Edward's response to her text the night before.
I'll come there, he says. See you early afternoon
, and she sighs, texts him back.

Fine.

She finishes her coffee standing up and makes her way through the house, attacking the visible portions with a short-lived zeal. After an exhausting two hours, the house is presentable, at least presentable enough for Edward. He arrives at one on the dot. “Lunch hour,” he informs her. “I won't be staying long. There's so much to get in order down at the office.”

“Lunch?” She's put together a little plate of food—veggies and fruit—and Edward scoops up a few stalks of celery, dips them in hummus. He chews. “Drink?” Karen asks, following his gaze to a collection of scotch and bourbon. His eyes narrow in on a particularly good bottle of scotch, but he shakes his head.

“Rain check,” Edward says. “I'm—like I said—I'm on a quick lunch break and then it's back to the old—the old grind. ‘Balls to the wall,' as they say.”

“Let's at least sit, shall we?” Karen carries the plate of nibbles to the living room and sets it on the coffee table as Antoine leaps out from under a nearby chair and sinks his teeth into Edward's ankle.

“Ow!” Edward kicks at the dog, but lightly, as if it's a game the two of them are playing and not an all-out attack on Antoine's part. “Nice doggie.” He reaches down to pat Antoine on the head, and Antoine nips at his hand with a nasty little growl.

“
Antoine!
” Karen makes a grab for the dog but he skitters sideways and hides under the chair. “I'm so sorry, Edward,” she says, and she surveys his hand. “At least he didn't break the skin. I think he misses Joe so much—he barely touches his food these days. Ever since the night of the accident, the poor thing has . . .” Antoine marches out from under the chair and trots into the kitchen, gobbles down a few remaining Kibbles pellets from his bowl.

“Seems to be coming around.” Edward forces a wry smile and slides forward on the sofa. “I think you should sell me your half of the company,” he says, and, even though this comes as no surprise at all, Karen feels shocked. Blindsided. “I can offer you three hundred thousand. Considering the shape we're in at this point, that's more than generous.”