A Curve in the Road

by Julianne MacLean

  She gestures inelegantly. “That way.”

  “You’ll have to leave it, wherever it is. I’ll take you home. We can talk while we drive.”

  She shakes her head. “No. I’m not going home.”

  “Why not?”

  Her speech is so badly slurred I can barely make out a word she says. “Because my husband can’t see me like this.” She reaches for the empty wineglass, picks it up by the stem, peers inside, and tries to suck out a few remaining drops. “Thanks to you.”

  “And why is this my fault?”

  “Because you went to my house, and now he’s suspicious. Not that he wasn’t suspicious before. He probably was.”

  My stomach muscles clench tight with dread. “Suspicious of what?”

  Paula looks up at me drunkenly, as if I’m a fool. “What do you think? It’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it? The reason you’ve been texting me. The reason you went to my house.” She sits back and waves a hand through the air. “Because you’ve figured it all out. You know what was going on between Alan and me.”

  I feel a bit sick, because she appears to be admitting flat out that she and Alan were having an affair.

  I’m not sure what to say or do. I’m in shock, and I can’t speak.

  “I need another glass of wine,” Paula says, squinting toward the bar.

  At this point, I could probably use a stiff drink too, but I resist the urge because I need to keep my wits about me and get the whole story out of her.

  “I think you’ve had enough,” I say.

  “You’re probably right.” She tries to get up but staggers sideways and almost knocks over the chair.

  I leap out of my seat to grab hold of her. Just then, the bartender exits the washroom. “If you’re done, Paula, and I really think you ought to be, you’ll need to settle up at the bar.”

  Swaying on her feet, Paula reaches for her purse and fumbles with the zipper. She pulls out her wallet and hands it to me. “Pay my bill, will you? Use cash.”

  I take the wallet from her limp grip, move to the bar to ask the amount she owes, and hand over a wad of twenties. Paula can barely stand, so I return to help her. The bartender sees me struggling, comes over, and helps me get her to the door.

  “Do you have a car here?” he asks me.

  “Yes.”

  As soon as I push the door open, bright winter sunlight blinds me. I’m forced to squint as we drag our drunken cargo to my mother’s vehicle.

  We manage to get Paula settled in the front seat. Then the bartender says, “I don’t know who you are, but go easy on her, all right? She’s going through a rough time. She just lost someone.”

  I want to scoff, because I’m the one who lost someone. Paula’s someone was never really hers to lose. Or maybe I have that backward. I don’t know anymore.

  I buckle Paula’s seat belt, shut the car door, and face the bartender.

  “Where are you planning to take her?” he asks as I begin to dig through my purse for my keys.

  “Home.”

  The bartender regards me hesitantly, then follows me around to the driver’s-side door. “You can’t take her there. Not like this.”

  I stop and stare. “Why not?”

  I have no intention of hauling her to my mother’s house to sleep this off. Not with my family there—my mother, my son, and my nieces.

  The bartender rubs at the back of his neck. “Her husband can be a jerk sometimes. Alan had a place here in town, just a few blocks away. That’s where she’d want to go.”

  “A place . . .” Alan had a place? “Can you give me the address?”

  Again he hesitates. He studies me painstakingly. “Jesus. Are you Alan’s wife?” He points at his own face and draws a circle in the air with his finger. “I’m guessing because of the bruises. You were in the accident . . .”

  This is unbearable. I feel like I’m the only person in the world who knows nothing. “You knew Alan?”

  He nods and looks down at the ground. “Yeah. He was a good guy. Came here a lot. He helped me last year. He noticed a lump on my neck and told me I should have it looked at. I doubt I’d be here today if he hadn’t pointed that out to me. So . . . I’m sorry about what happened. It’s a real pisser.”

  By this point, I feel like I might throw up, because it’s just been confirmed that my husband was cheating on me and this man seems to know more about his extracurricular activities than I ever did.

  The bartender’s cheeks flush with color, as if he’s realizing only now the enormity of what he’s just revealed to me. I imagine what he must be thinking: Don’t kill the messenger.

  I might not want to kill him, but I sure as hell would like to yell at him and shake him until his teeth rattle, just to vent some of my anger, because I feel like a pressure cooker with the lid about to fly off.

  He glances over his shoulder. “I gotta get back inside.”

  He gives me the address of an apartment in town. Apparently it’s within walking distance, a few blocks away. Not that Paula’s in any condition to walk. She’s passed out cold.

  I look in at her and feel an extreme antagonism building up inside of me. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so outraged by anyone. Not even Lester.

  I get into the driver’s seat and can’t think about inserting the key into the ignition because I’m angrier than a bull. All I can do is stare at Paula—she’s so gallingly pretty—and wonder about the lies my husband must have been telling me over the past few years. Or maybe during our entire marriage.

  Was Paula the only one? If he had a place of his own in this town, there might have been others.

  I have no idea what to do or how to go on living the life I thought I knew. That life is over, not only because my husband is dead but also because my marriage to him wasn’t what I thought it was. He was a stranger, a cheater, a liar, and he betrayed me.

  How could I not have known? And how can I possibly grieve for him now? Part of me wishes he were alive so I could kill him myself.

  Suddenly I feel like I’m hanging upside down by my ankles and I don’t know which way is up. It takes all my concentration to turn the key and start the car, because I want answers from the woman passed out in the seat beside me and I’m determined to get them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Come on—get up. You have to walk,” I say to Paula as I open the passenger-side door, unbuckle her seat belt, and try to wake her by tugging at her arm.

  Her head swivels like it’s on one of those bobblehead toys, and she looks up at me in a daze.

  “That’s right—time to walk.” I pull her to her feet. “Do you have a key to the front door?”

  “Pocket,” she drawls, seeming unable to retrieve it on her own. I’m forced to slide my hand into her coat pockets to find it.

  A moment later, she’s staggering up the walk in her camel-colored wool coat and jeans, making her way to the entrance of a run-down three-story brick apartment building with dilapidated wooden balconies. It’s a far cry from the expensive South End home Alan and I shared in Halifax. Nor does it hold a candle to Paula’s tidy little house in the Lunenburg subdivision full of families.

  She opens the door to a security entrance with an intercom to each unit. I glance at the names and see “Sedgewick” handprinted in ballpoint pen on a little piece of white paper. My stomach burns. If this is Alan’s secret love pad, how long did he have it, and how was he paying for it? Was he using our retirement fund? Or did he have a private bank account I didn’t know about? Where did the secrets end?

  It takes a moment for me to focus my attention on finding the right key to let us in, while Paula leans against the wall with her eyes closed.

  At last, I unlock the door, pull it open, and gesture for her to follow me. She pushes by and makes a beeline for the elevator, and we ride up to the third floor in silence. As soon as the doors open, she takes the keys from me, walks out, and lets herself into an apartment at the end of the hall, leaving the door open for me to foll
ow her inside.

  She goes immediately to the bathroom, and I remain just inside the door, looking around the small space. The walls are beige and full of stains. The brown wall-to-wall carpet smells musty—it probably hasn’t been changed in twenty years—and the sofa looks like something someone picked up on the side of the road on garbage day.

  Alan certainly wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He probably chose this place because he could stay hidden here. Like Paula said, they didn’t expect to run into anyone they knew in this neighborhood. And the costs were probably low enough not to affect our financial situation. I wouldn’t have noticed. Hell, I hadn’t noticed.

  Or maybe he had a hankering for the world he knew as a child, because according to the stories he told me, his family had sometimes lived below the poverty line.

  I hear the toilet flushing and water running in the bathroom, so I steal the opportunity to poke around in the living room in this secret place Alan kept hidden from me. I figure I’ve earned the right.

  I let the shock settle in while I look at things. On the end table next to the sofa, there’s a framed photograph of Alan and Paula together on a whitewater rafting adventure. He must have taken her with him when he went away for a medical conference somewhere, which makes me feel jealous and angry. How could I not have suspected anything?

  Swallowing uneasily, I force myself to do the unthinkable. I wander to the bedroom, but I can’t bring myself to step over the threshold. All I can do is stare at the bed covered with masculine gray and black bed linens and contemplate the fact that my husband made love to another woman in those sheets.

  I’m afraid I might throw up.

  Paula emerges from the bathroom and collapses on the ratty sofa. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have texted you. Thanks for the ride, but you should go now.”

  I return to the living room and shake my head at her, because I came here for answers and I’m not leaving without them.

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll stay awhile.”

  She offers no reply, so I set my purse on the hall table, remove my jacket, and text my sister to let her know where I am.

  Eventually, Paula staggers to the kitchen to fill a glass with water. She takes a few sips, then shuffles back to the sofa and sits down.

  “I guess the cat’s finally out of the bag,” she says, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s glad about that.

  I sit on a tattered upholstered chair, facing her. “If you’re talking about your affair with my husband, then yes, the cat’s running all over the damn place.”

  I consider all the questions I want to ask her. She’d better be sober enough to answer them. At least there’s a coffee maker on the counter. I’ll do whatever it takes.

  “You’re not doing yourself any favors,” I say, “by going on a bender like this. It won’t bring Alan back, and it won’t take away your pain. It’ll just add a whopping headache on top of it.”

  “I know.”

  We sit in silence for a moment until she finally meets my gaze. “You must really hate me right now.”

  “I can’t say that I like you. I just want to know what was going on between you and Alan, and for how long.” I glance around the room. “Obviously, if you had this place together, it must have been serious.”

  When she speaks, there’s a sudden hint of rancor in her voice. “It wasn’t serious enough to get him to leave you, even though I tried my best to convince him to.”

  The jealous, aggrieved wife in me wants to scratch her eyes out for trying to take my husband away from me.

  And she’s blaming me for her unhappiness? Seriously?

  I have to fight to stay cool, only because I want more information. “Just tell me how you met him.”

  She won’t look at me when she talks. “He came into the hardware store to buy a furnace filter. We didn’t have the kind he needed, so I had to special order it. I asked for his number so that I could call him when it came in.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Three years ago. It was summertime.”

  I shift uneasily in my seat. “How soon after that did you start the affair?”

  “Pretty soon after.” She meets my eyes with a look of pure misery. “When he came in to pick up the filter, it was my birthday, and he was so nice.”

  There’s a hot pounding in my ears, and my body begins to tremble with rage. “Just tell me how it happened.”

  She keeps her eyes fixed on mine, and I can’t decide if she’s full of grief and remorse or if she wants to rub this in my face like sandpaper. “We flirted and started texting each other, and then we met for a drink.”

  As I imagine all of this happening, my stomach turns because I can’t imagine Alan—my darling Alan—falling under the spell of another woman. A woman who was married herself and obviously had no qualms about flirting with a married man with a teenage son. I want to scream and hit something, but there’s no way in hell I’ll let this morph into an episode of Jerry Springer in which we start screaming and throwing chairs at each other. I want to keep my cool.

  “Were you married back then?” I ask.

  “Yes. Just for a year or so.”

  “That seems a bit soon to start cheating.”

  She shakes her head with something that might be regret, but I can’t be sure. “Michael isn’t the easiest man to live with. He can be controlling sometimes. I probably shouldn’t have married him. But then Alan came along, and he was the opposite. He was so kind and caring.”

  I wonder which of them was the instigator in all of this. The part of me that still loves my husband wants to believe it wasn’t his fault—that he was seduced and manipulated by a beautiful woman who was desperate to escape her own imperfect marriage. But I don’t know anything anymore. For all I know, Alan could have recognized that she was vulnerable and in need of a hero, and maybe that was what he couldn’t resist.

  “Who started it?” I ask plainly. “You or Alan?”

  “I don’t know,” she replies. “We both did, I guess. The attraction was intense.”

  I look away, because hearing about their attraction makes me want to scream.

  It also makes me feel inadequate—like a failure as a wife for not recognizing that our marriage was in trouble or for not working harder to keep the romance alive in the first place. But I was so busy with work, doing a lot of night shifts. I didn’t always have time for him. I certainly didn’t need him to be my hero. I prided myself on being a strong, independent woman, and I always made it clear that he wasn’t responsible for my happiness. I didn’t want to put that on him.

  Was that the problem? Did he not feel needed? Was that why he’d had an affair?

  Or was that when he stopped wanting me sexually? When he already had Paula on the side?

  And how often did they come here? Was she better than me?

  No. Abbie, don’t go there . . .

  I turn and look at Paula again. She starts to cry, but I have no desire to comfort her. After a moment, she collects herself and slides her drunken gaze to meet mine. “I should have known he was never going to leave you. You should feel happy about that.”

  Happy? Was she serious?

  I’m breathing heavily now. It feels almost like a panic attack.

  “Do you and Michael have any children of your own?” I ask, taking a few deep breaths.

  “No,” she replies. “I wanted kids, and he knew it. But as soon as we were married, he told me that he’d had a vasectomy years ago.”

  “God.” As much as I don’t want to feel sympathy for her, I can’t help thinking that that kind of trickery was wrong of him.

  Paula turns to me. “I’m not going home tonight. Michael and I had a really bad fight on the phone after he talked to you, which is why I’m here and not there.” She watches me for a moment. “I suppose I should thank you for getting me out of that bar in one piece.”

  “I didn’t do it for you. I came here because I wanted answers, and I still want to know what happened on
the night Alan died. I don’t understand how he could have gotten behind the wheel when he was drinking. Now that I know he was having an affair with you, I’m wondering what else was going on that night.”

  She lowers her gaze. “He was very upset that weekend.”

  Her reply hits me like a brick in the head. I sit forward in the chair. “Tell me what you know.”

  She hesitates, and it feels like she’s keeping quiet so that she can feel superior and wallow in the fact that she knew my husband better than I did.

  At last, her eyes lift. “There’s no point keeping it to myself, because you’re probably going to find out about it anyway, when you get the autopsy report.”

  I rest my elbows on my knees and frown. “Autopsy report? Jesus, Paula. What do you know?”

  She covers her face with her hands and starts sobbing inconsolably.

  Oh God, stop it! Maybe it’s cruel of me, but I feel only impatience and hostility. I want to shake her until she breaks apart and squeeze the truth out of her once and for all.

  Paula can’t stop crying, so I go to the bathroom and get a roll of toilet paper. I hand her a few squares to wipe her tears and blow her nose.

  She finally collects herself, takes a deep breath, and begins to explain. She dumps it on me so fast I nearly lose my balance.

  “On the Friday before the accident, Alan found out he had cancer.”

  I blink a few times. “What? That can’t be true. He would have told me.”

  But I should know better than to presume anything. At this point, nothing is out of the realm of possibility.

  But how could he have told Paula first, while keeping it from me? Did that mean it was true love between them? Not just sex?

  She rises from the sofa and goes to the kitchen. I follow, but I give her a moment before I ask another question. “When did he tell you this?”

  “Friday afternoon. As soon as he got out of the doctor’s office.”

  I’m trying to digest this news—that my husband had cancer—but I can’t seem to get past the fact that when he learned of it, he called Paula and not me.

  Where was I that night? I was in the OR.