by Lea Geller
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Lea Geller
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503904200
ISBN-10: 1503904202
Cover design by Kimberly Glyder
To Mich, who makes it all possible.
CONTENTS
PART ONE: SUMMER
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART TWO: FALL
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
PART THREE: WINTER
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
PART FOUR: SPRING
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART FIVE: EPILOGUE
THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE: SUMMER
-1-
When you’re making your husband’s green smoothie and forget to put the lid on the blender, and you’re crouched on the counter staring up at the oozing ceiling when the housekeeper shows up and is standing under you, it’s a good idea to be wearing underwear. I was not.
“Why don’t you let me make Mr. Jack’s breakfast?” Sondra asked, her eyes, thankfully, fixed on the ceiling.
“I’m fine,” I said, desperately swabbing away at the green juice that had started to drip down while trying to keep my knees pressed firmly together. “I’ve got this.” I looked over at the clock: 7:55. I had five minutes to clean it up before Jack walked in. Seven years ago, when I first saw this kitchen, Jack’s kitchen, I thought it looked like heaven. Everything was white on top of white, adorned with more white. At first, I didn’t understand why a compulsively neat person would want to decorate in white. But I soon realized that white kitchens and white bathrooms allowed people like Jack to eradicate dirt before it got too comfortable, before it settled in.
The green glob was doing more than settling in—it was threatening to take over.
The mop was useless, or perhaps I was, because all I was succeeding in doing was moving the smoothie around the ceiling, increasing the downpour of blended kale (handful), cucumber (one-quarter), almond milk (half a cup), shelled hemp seed (two teaspoons), and blueberries (one dozen). I wiped some juice out of my eyes, wincing as I remembered adding the pinch of cayenne that Jack said was good for memory.
Sondra forced herself to look at me. She often had to force herself to look at me. “You OK, Agnes?” she asked as I stood on the counter, my eyes now squeezed shut, mop overhead.
Drip.
“I’m fine,” I moaned. Damn, that cayenne burned.
“I’m here early anyway,” she said. “It’s no problem for me to make it.”
“Yeah, I get that.” Drip. It might not have been a problem for Sondra to whip up Jack’s daily green smoothie in addition to all the other cooking she was doing for us, but I wanted to make this smoothie. I needed to make this smoothie. I needed to do one thing in this heavenly kitchen other than sit at the island and eat what was given to me.
“You don’t have much time,” she said, unspooling a heap of paper towels. She began mopping the counter and floor, then motioned to the clock on the wall with her head. “He’ll be down soon, and I don’t think you want him to see this.”
She wasn’t wrong. I didn’t want Sondra cleaning up my messes, but I really didn’t want Jack seeing them.
“Fine,” I said, lowering the mop in defeat. I took stock of myself. My oversize tank top was covered in green juice, my eyes still crusted with sleep, my hair unbrushed. The wrinkles I had apparently gifted myself for my thirty-fifth birthday were screaming for a tub of spackling paste. There was a lot about this Jack didn’t need to see. I squatted as demurely as possible and handed the mop to Sondra.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I keep telling you,” she replied, helping me off the counter and looking up at the ceiling, “stay away from the kitchen.”
By the time Jack came looking for his smoothie, the kitchen was once again a scene of white-on-white order and serenity. Sondra handed him a glass. I watched him take a sip, my eyes moving from the silver at his temples to his perfect jaw and then resting on the shoulders of the suit that I knew would be just as pristine at the end of the day as it was now. I briefly wondered how someone so put together could choose a woman who just minutes ago had been standing on the counter waving a mop around. Jack may have been the older man, but I was the one out of my league.
“Delicious, Sondra,” he said, smiling at her. Sondra was no less taken with Jack than I was. She beamed and managed to give me a healthy dose of side-eye without even looking at me. Whatever. I’d earned it.
I sat in front of Grace’s high chair and began feeding our six-month-old a bowl of pureed organic pears. I had neither purchased the pears (Sondra) nor pureed them (Alma, our nanny).
“Is Alma late?” Jack asked, finishing his smoothie and putting the empty glass in the sink.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s just me and Grace for breakfast.”
Always happy to disapprove of Alma, Sondra tutted loudly and placed her hands on her hips. I looked over at her small, round, compact body and wondered how much tutting she did when I wasn’t in the room. She was still disapproving audibly when Alma ran in.
“So sorry I’m late,” Alma said, throwing her purse down on a barstool. “Bad traffic this morning.” She swooped in and took the bowl of fruit from my hands. I had no choice but to yield. This was, after all, why Alma was here.
Now that order had been restored in his kitchen, Jack bent down and kissed the top of Grace’s head and then moved over to me and put his lips on my neck. He’d just showered after spending an hour with his trainer. I breathed in the scent of his cheek. I could spend all day smelling that man.
“I’ll see you at the spa,” he said in my ear, reminding me that this was the last Tuesday of the month and therefore time for our monthly massage. “We can grab dinner after,” he added. I also knew what that meant. It was Tuesday. Tuesdays were sushi.
Later that day, when I first realized something was wrong, I was naked and facedown on a table, my arms pinned down by my sides, my head shoved into a spon
gy doughnut pillow. The beds in the couples’ massage room were placed in a V formation, so if I lifted my head, I was staring directly at the empty pillow of what should have been Jack’s bed. But Jack, who set all the clocks in the house ten minutes ahead, was now thirty minutes late.
“We could try him again,” said Lynne, my masseuse. She and Misha had been giving us our monthly late-afternoon massage for ten years. It had been an engagement present from Jack. “The gift that will keep on giving,” he’d promised.
“No,” I said, staring down at the creamy tile floor. Jack didn’t answer calls from numbers he didn’t recognize. “I should probably call him from my phone.” I was starting to feel queasy and worried that I’d drool through the hole in the pillow, so I flipped over onto my back and stared up at the ceiling, which was painted a very light blue and layered with gauzy white clouds.
Lynne looked down at me, her face leaning over mine. She ran her fingers through her cropped hair. Both women were blonde and tan, their faces smooth. But Lynne was fifty-five, old enough to be my mother.
I needed to get up off the table and call Jack, but I couldn’t move. Lying there, sensing that first small, almost imperceptible shift in my fortune, I was frozen, my clothes and phone stashed in a locker in another room. In hindsight, I would have liked a phone. In hindsight, I would have preferred to be clothed and upright.
I forced myself to sit up, pulling the sheet to my chest for coverage.
“I have to go,” I said, swiveling and swinging my legs off the table, pulling the sheet with me.
“Agnes,” Lynne began. There was something about her voice that told me I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. “Agnes,” she repeated, reaching for me, touching the sheet, which was now acting as a toga.
“Listen.” She took a deep breath, a look crossing her face. I knew this look. This was the look of the bearer of really shitty news.
“Jack hasn’t paid us in a while.”
“Yeah,” added Misha.
I blinked and Lynne continued. “You know, it’s not like him. He’s usually on time with his payments.” I shifted my eyes to Misha, but she looked away. She hadn’t been touching me monthly for the past ten years. She didn’t owe me anything.
I wanted to tell Lynne that there was probably a perfectly good reason that Jack would suddenly stop paying, but I couldn’t think of one, and although I opened my mouth, nothing came out.
I clutched the sheet and eyed my robe hanging on the back of the door. I was freezing.
Lynne took a step closer to me. “There’s more,” she said.
Of course there is.
“Roger called him a few times, but Jack hasn’t returned any of his calls.”
“Yeah,” Misha chimed in. She nodded, her ponytail swaying with her. I wanted to tell her that if she didn’t want people to know that Misha the Santa Monica masseuse was really Michelle from somewhere in New Jersey, she probably should say “yeah” a lot less often. But I just turned and looked back at Lynne.
“I have to go,” I said, standing up and pulling the sheet around myself. I shuffled to the door and looked back at Misha, née Michelle, and Lynne with her mommish hair, and although I wasn’t sure what exactly was going on, I did know that my monthly late-afternoon couple’s massage would be a thing of the past.
I called Jack as soon as I got outside, doing my best impression of a wife who was concerned but not panicked. I leaned on the wall, dropped my purse at my feet, and watched the contents spill out onto the sidewalk. I took a few deep breaths before I spoke, swallowing back the bitter taste in my mouth.
“Hey, it’s me. Just wondering where you are. Call me when you can.” I didn’t need to remind Jack that you don’t stand someone up with a history like mine. I thought about calling again, but instead I sent a text—What’s up? No massage today?—and walked the three blocks home as quickly as I could.
When I got to the block before the beach and turned onto our street, I found Alma sitting on the wraparound deck with Grace. They were perched on a blanket playing with painted wooden rings. You had to look pretty hard in Santa Monica to find a toy made from plastic. I walked up the front steps and onto the deck and sat in a chair at the large table, my arms resting on the thick planks of reclaimed wood. Grace looked up at me, her one clump of thin blonde hair gathered in a clip above her forehead.
“Alma,” I began, “has Jack been home?”
“Not yet,” she said. “No massage?”
“No. No massage.” I slid down off the chair and sat on the deck with them. I picked up Grace and put her between my legs. She was not yet sitting up on her own, so she leaned against me for support.
“You want to give her the bath tonight?” asked Alma. Jack never understood why I bathed Grace while Alma was on duty, but I often did. The bathroom off her nursery was one of the smallest places in a house full of large, open rooms. It was manageable for me. I knew where to sit, where to be.
“No, you do it,” I said. “I need to figure out where Jack is.” Alma shrugged, took Grace from me, and carried her inside. I tried Jack one more time, but when the phone went to voice mail again, I hung up and texted him. I didn’t trust my voice.
Home now. Call when you can.
I looked out at the ocean and saw the sun starting to make its way down to the horizon. Maybe this was nothing. Maybe something came up at work and he really was just running late. But Jack didn’t run late. Jack never ran late. I thought about what Lynne said about missed payments and unreturned phone calls, and an awful, familiar feeling that I could not shake off started moving up through me.
-2-
Sondra always cooked a light dinner and left it in the fridge, even if we were eating out. Often there were notes: bake at 350 degrees uncovered for forty-five minutes, serve at room temperature. Jack wanted his food to taste as fresh as possible, which was hard when someone was cooking it hours before he ate it. Sondra and I had worked out various ways around the problem—none of them requiring me to cook from scratch. (Before Jack, in my cooking days, I understood “from scratch” to mean “pour a can of condensed mushroom soup over rice and bake,” just as I did not know the word source could be used as a verb, as in “sourcing the freshest coffee beans” or “sourcing kale that is both local and organic.” That might explain why cooking was still Sondra’s job.) I pulled out tonight’s dinner and put it on the counter.
I sat in a kitchen that was mine, but not mine. Each appliance was professional grade, and while there was no microwave in this kitchen, there were items I hadn’t known existed, including something called a warming drawer. (What is an oven if not a warming drawer?) There was also an enormous faucet over the industrial stove so that when making soup, one did not have to lift a pan heaving with water from the sink to the range. I had never made soup. Sondra made soup and complained regularly that for all its bells and industrial whistles, this oven did not self-clean and had no timer. I nodded in mock agreement. Despite my recent forays into smoothie making, when Sondra was not cooking, the kitchen spent much of its existence looking abandoned. It was a pretty kitchen, and sometimes I felt bad for it.
I heard Sondra walking in to get her jacket before she left. I didn’t want her to catch me appearing to nap or rest. I quickly sat up and peeled the aluminum foil off the dinner dish. She had made some sort of grilled chicken. There was a finely chopped salad in a glass bowl with plastic wrap clinging to the top. I made a mental note to remind Sondra that Jack had put a kibosh on plastic wrap. Something about plastics and foods. It was hard for me to keep track. We were now to use something called beeswax wrap.
“Sondra, do you know where Jack is?”
“No. He didn’t go to the massage?” she asked, pulling on her jacket.
“No, he missed it.” I heard the worry in my voice. “I haven’t heard from him all afternoon. He’s not answering his phone.” At that moment, Alma walked in, carrying Grace on her hip.
“He still not home?” asked Alma. I could fe
el Sondra’s eyes narrowing. Crap, I thought. I needed Sondra’s help now. What I did not need was her to feel turfed out by a baby nanny who knew before she did that Jack was mysteriously late, or even worse.
“She knew first?” Sondra asked me, sticking her thumb out at Alma. Sondra believed this house was hers as well as Jack’s and that I was no more than a childbearing arriviste. She had even less patience for Alma, partially because she did not understand why I would need someone around all the time to take care of one child, but mostly because she wrongly suspected Alma made more than she did. When Grace was born and Alma came on the scene, the two women wasted no time establishing and defending their territories. It grew so unbearable that I went to Jack for help. I was tired of listening to them gripe about each other, and I was even more tired of watching them circle each other like feral dogs, teeth bared, often in front of guests and other help. (Carlos, the gardener, seemed to delight in their rivalry. I believe he had a bet with the window washers on who would quit first.)
Jack had told me to leave it be. “Oh, this is good,” he’d said, sitting shirtless in bed one night, checking email. “The less they like each other, the better it is for you.”
“Seriously?”
“You want them competing for your attention and approval. The minute they team up, you’re through. They’ll start asking for more days off and another two weeks of paid vacation.”
“That seems counterintuitive,” I told him.
“Are you kidding?” He sat up straighter and leaned forward, his broad shoulders pressing into his knees. “Why do you think I hired two women from different countries? You do not want these women to be cohorts, darling. You want them to be rivals.” When he said this, it occurred to me not only how little I knew about the workings of household staff, but also that I had no idea which countries Sondra and Alma came from. (I asked Sondra the next day. She was from Mexico, Alma from El Salvador. Sondra could not even bring herself to say the El, only spitting out the word Salvador. Apparently it was a thing and Jack knew all about it, intentionally hiring a nanny from a country Sondra could not stomach, let alone say aloud.)
