by Delia Ephron
“I’ve forgotten my Social Security number,” she said.
He pecked a few computer keys and reeled off the number. “Anything you need, I’ve got.”
“What are the current balances in my joint checking and savings?” she asked.
“Do you want to transfer money from there?”
“Yes.”
He consulted the computer, wrote down the amounts, and passed the paper across the desk. I smiled encouragingly at Jane, and kept up a breezy conversation with him about identifying fowl by the Peterson method. “Every bird has a unique marking that is visible from a distance,” he told me.
“Like a walk or a hat?” Or a spout, although I didn’t say that.
“How recent are these balances?” inquired Jane.
“Close of last business day.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I really don’t think I need to do this.”
“What?” I squawked. I sounded like something Frank Pritchard might spot and mark off his life list.
“I’ll just deposit this check into our joint savings.”
“Whatever you want,” said Frank.
I smacked my hand on the form before he could discard it. “Wait a minute. Don’t you need an account of your own? Because of your will?” This rationale was all I could come up with.
“No, I don’t,” Jane said. “I’m going to deposit this into our joint savings.” She endorsed her commission check.
“Do you want me to take care of that?” asked Frank. “I can make out the deposit slip.”
“Would you? That is so kind. Thank you.” She stood up, smiling widely. “I hope I didn’t waste your time.”
“Of course not. Always a pleasure, Jane. Nice to meet you, Lily.” He shook my hand.
“Same here.”
She sailed toward the door and I hurried after. “What happened?”
She didn’t respond until we hit the street. “It’s back.”
“What?”
“The money. It’s all back in. Oh my God, I feel—”
“It’s all back in?”
“Yes. All our money is in the account.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“It’s not impossible, it’s there. Let’s go celebrate, I’m starving. Lily, it’s not happening.” She threw her arms around me.
“Impossible.”
“No, I imagined everything. Oh God, I am crazy, I really am a crazy person. I want a hamburger with onion and Russian dressing.”
She gesticulated as she walked, waving and calling to people on the other side of the street, even hailing folks as they drove by. She’d metamorphosed from a depressed, barely ambulatory wreck into the town mayor on parade.
“You didn’t make it up, the money was gone.”
“It could have been an investment thing—you know, Jonathan’s quite brilliant, how do you think he could retire so young? He was probably moving money around. Didn’t you suggest that?”
I had suggested it, but I hadn’t believed it. “What about the ponytail, his coldness?”
“Preoccupied, I guess. Look, Lily, you weren’t married very long, so you have no idea. A husband and wife can go through long periods when they don’t connect.” Now she linked her arm in mine. “You always see the worst.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, please, don’t act coy. You’re the all-time doom-and-gloomer.”
I supposed she was right, but to hear it announced so bluntly was wounding.
I trailed her into Burgers and Such, where she loudly declared to the hostess that she was famished.
“I’m buying,” she said as we sat down. “What do you want?”
“Just a diet Coke with lemon.”
“And I’ll have an iced tea, a steakburger medium-rare, onion, Russian dressing, fries crisp, that’s it. Thanks, Toni,” she told the waitress. “Lily, my life has been given back to me.” She opened her compact, bared her teeth and ran her tongue across them. “My teeth are too big. Just a little. Thank goodness I didn’t start smoking again, I was on the verge. If I’d started smoking and didn’t get divorced, I’d have to kick a nicotine habit.” She dropped the compact in her purse. “Look at me, I’m making jokes.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“Yes.”
We observed a moment of almost religious silence in gratitude for this development.
“Gambas,” I said.
“What about them?”
“Was it Jonathan or you that started all that crazy gambas this and gambas that?”
“Jonathan.” She smiled. “He can be so silly.”
I suppose I should have taken the gambas into account before jumping to conclusions about Jonathan. Gambas were sweet.
“I’m sorry I dragged you through this.” Jane reached across the table to turn my collar down properly. How swiftly her motherly nature reasserted itself once she had her equilibrium back. Hearing her soothing voice, I couldn’t believe she’d ever been distraught. Her deranged self might be something I’d fantasized rather than experienced. “You cannot imagine how horrible it is to think that someone you love is betraying you. If you’ve been married forever, as I have, Lily, it’s beyond bearing.”
Our drinks arrived, fortunately, and I had an activity: squeezing lemon into mine. Looking at Jane was not an option. Seeing her calm face, the anxiety washed away, was a hideous rebuke to my own behavior. The bridge she was standing on wasn’t burning, after all. I wished she would stop confiding in me, sneaky fire-setter that I was, cease recalling her emotional ordeal, yet she seemed compelled to expunge it, even relished recounting it. Her restless nights. Her inability to eat. Her dreams, utterly real, in which she and Jonathan made love, followed by dreadful mornings when she awoke to her shattered reality.
“Believing I was deceived, Lily, that was the worst.”
I wanted to bolt, scrambled to invent a reason, a sudden migraine, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak up.
“Believing that every day he looked me right in the eye and fibbed. Even worse, suppose he said in some momentous way, ‘I have to talk to you.’ I kept expecting him to do that, to sit me down and reveal the truth: ‘I love someone else.’ I dreaded that the most.
“I couldn’t envision life without him. I couldn’t conceive of putting one foot in front of the other.”
“Even though you thought he stole all your money?”
“Yes, isn’t that awful? Even then.”
Jane took pleasure in unfolding the cloth napkin, fastidiously arranging it in her lap when her food arrived—a burger obscene enough to satisfy Bluto, with gobs of pink Russian dressing and a thick slab of onion on a lettuce leaf, both of which she stacked inside the bun. “And now I don’t have to diet. If I were single, I’d have to be thin.”
CHAPTER 13
YOU LOOK like a load of cement landed on your head.” Bernadette delivered her greeting buoyantly, before I had closed the front door. She must have observed me slogging up the walk, the stuffing unwittingly punched from my body by Jane.
It’s amazing how powerful attraction creates a need that can be satisfied only by more. I have to shut down. Be sensible and honorable. But what about my undernourished libido, not to mention my parched soul and wasted heart? What about I’ve been lost in the desert and someone led me to the well? No, thank you, I’m supposed to say primly. I’d rather die.
Yes. Tonight I will have to do that: close the magic back up in the box. Tonight at nine. And we both knew where. The summer house. Very clever of Tom to assume I’d figure it out. Made me wonder about … but never mind. There would be no autopsy results at nine, only our date. Our last.
Sam, Deidre, and Bernadette had strung themselves and their belongings all over the living room: jackets, gloves, books, soda cans, notebook pages covered with pen drawings of grisly headless and limbless ghouls (probably Deidre’s artistic output). Bernadette, who had adopted our living space as her bedroom, had piled several changes of cl
othing on a chair. She had converted the coffee table into a dressing table, arranging hairbrush, comb, and toothbrush in my precious Art Deco glass vase, and scattering a few ponytail scrunchees here and there. Snacks were out—Wheat Thins and a plate of fruit that Bernadette was passing around. The TV blared one of Sam’s usual shows, featuring characters with skin as lumpy and cratered as the surface of the moon, one man with a fan-shaped hairdo, another with the ubiquitous Mandarin collar favored by people in spaceships. Just once I would like to see a normal human being on my television screen.
In between jabbing slices of apple, Bernadette poked Sam with her fork. “Say hi to your mom.”
“Hi.”
The doorbell rang.
The fork clanked onto the plate as Bernadette dropped it and leapt up. “Suppose that’s Dunkie?”
Sam hastened to the window for a peek outside. He actually moved fast.
“Is it him?” demanded Bernadette.
“Does he know Dunkie?” I asked.
“No,” said Deidre.
“The guy’s old,” said Sam. “And fat.”
“Not Dunkie,” said Bernadette. “Thank God.” She fell back on the couch and hooked a leg over the armrest.
“I assume Dunkie’s your boyfriend.”
The bell rang again.
“Yes. Short for ‘Duncan.’”
“I’ll get it,” I said. “But keep the TV down, it’s too loud.”
Deidre plucked the remote from between two pillows and reduced the volume a notch. The sound wasn’t really too loud, but I was feeling so beaten down that I needed to issue a request for the satisfaction of having it obeyed.
By the time I answered the door, he was edging backward down the front path. “Billy, oh my gosh, I forgot.”
“I guess she’s here like you said,” he called to Mr. Woffert, hard at work covering his Tyvek with clapboards.
“You getting a security system?” Mr. Woffert asked.
“Who’s that talking?” His wife called from a second-story window. “Tom McKee’s brother,” said Mr. Woffert, as if she couldn’t see for herself.
“I’m not getting a security system,” I announced loud enough for everyone on the block to hear. “Billy, I am so sorry, my head’s a fog, I forgot our interview. I feel terrible. Come on in.”
He wiped his feet on the mat many more times than was necessary, and snatched his baseball cap off his head as if he were entering church. “I waited around,” he said hesitantly, “and when you didn’t show, I thought I’d troll on by.”
“How’d you find out where I live?”
He pulled a short strand of his curly hair.
“How’d you find out where I live?” I asked again.
“Is this your boyfriend?” Bernadette called from the living room.
“No. Would you stop with that?” I turned a friendly smile on Bill. “She’s always kidding me.”
He chuckled.
“She’s got a secret life,” said Bernadette.
“That’s enough, it’s not funny.”
He laughed boisterously. I thought this reaction was a comment on my relationship with his brother. The heat rose up my neck, my face was about to be bathed in red, when he said, “Babylon 5,” and I realized that he was amused by something on TV, who knew what? One of the most infuriating things about these science fiction shows is that the humor is incomprehensible to all but the faithful.
I introduced Billy to everyone. He had an affable conversation with Bernadette and Deidre about a character named, I believe, Vir, and then I butted in and hustled Billy into the kitchen. It was time to put my gumshoes to work. I would interview him here. It would remind me that I had a profession and a brain—always a therapeutic thing to recall.
Keeping up a steady stream of charm and chatter, I got him to shed his jacket. He was sporting a silky horizontally striped shirt, the worst thing a chubby could wear. It rippled over settling and resettling flesh. When he sat at the breakfast table, as invited, his wide bottom lapped over the seat, and he kept himself anchored with his two thick-soled, high-topped black leather shoes planted as far apart as chair legs. His eyes would light on mine, then dance off. He couldn’t stay focused on any one thing.
I confided, or appeared to. “What in the world should I do about mice? I’m divorced,” I added, as if the mouse problem and my marital state were connected. “Are you married?”
“Tom’s married,” he replied.
“I know,” I said airily, bustling about, putting up water for tea, hunting for something to snack on. “I haven’t met his wife yet. But are you married?”
“Kinda. I’m separated. Tom runs the business.”
“I see.” Possibly the only person who thought more about Tom than I did was Billy, the younger brother, the tag-along kid.
“Mice go for peanut butter,” he said. “You’ve got to buy traps and lay on a spoonful. That’s some snap when you catch them.” He paused, enjoying the thought. “If you like, I could set the traps for you.”
“Thank you. That’s really nice.” I was pouring corn chips into a bowl as Bernadette took a giant step into the room.
“I just realized who you are,” she declared.
“Who am I?” asked Billy with genuine curiosity.
“Lily, could I speak to you privately?”
“Can’t it wait until later?”
“No.”
“Excuse me,” I said to Billy, and followed Bernadette into the hall. “What’s this about?”
Bernadette sulked. Her lower lip curled out, her eyebrows crunched into a wavy scowl.
“What is it?” I asked.
“He’s my story, not yours.”
“What story?”
“I called him today. It was the first article ever that was my idea, and you completely put it down at the meeting.”
“What?” I was dimly aware of Deidre in the living room, twisting around on the couch, and even more faintly conscious of the significance: Deidre had antennae for drama.
“You said that there was no murder, so that meant that my story all about locks was really stupid.”
“I’m not tracking what you’re talking about, Bernadette.” Sam was now riveted, too.
“Art liked it.”
“Is something wrong?” Billy lumbered out of the kitchen. “I could come back another time.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“I phoned you today,” said Bernadette.
“Huh?” Billy slowly wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, sprinkling off corn chip crumbs.
“I’m supposed to interview you. Me, not Lily. Art said I should call Sakonnet Bay Security. Why didn’t you return my call?”
“Tom usually—didn’t he—?”
She cut him off. “I hate to make calls, so that is really mean. Did Lily ask whether you have more business?”
“No, I didn’t ask him.”
“Why is he here?”
Billy looked over, obviously wondering himself.
“I was going to ask about that,” I acknowledged, “but I arranged the interview last Saturday night, before Art assigned you that story.”
“Last Saturday, well, that doesn’t make any sense. You’re kind of a fake, Lily, no offense.” Bernadette even had the nerve not to lose her temper, behaving as if she were the more mature being. “Imagine, coming in this afternoon all weepy and moping like someone broke up with you, when I’m the one in the breakup and you’re the one about to do something underhanded. Come on.” She grasped some of Billy’s voluminous sleeve and yanked.
He cast a last, helpless gape in my direction while Bernadette threw his jacket at him and dragged him out the front door.
I grabbed my coat and chased after them. “Bernadette, please, we can talk about this.” Honestly, she was such a child, this was such nonsense. “You’re overreacting, this is no big deal.” As she was about to climb into his four-by-four, I placed a hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy, sweetie, slow down.”
<
br /> She whirled around. “You are sick and lonely.”
I slapped her across the face.
It was Deidre who suggested that I go back inside, after Bernadette had begun crying hysterically and she and Billy had taken off. “Do you want to come indoors, Mrs. Davis?” I heard her whisper. Instead, I swerved away down the block, avoiding the Wofferts who, among others, must have been thinking of selling tickets to “The Lily Show.”
I had slapped Bernadette across the face. Me. I had never before hit anyone.
“Mom, wait up.”
I traveled faster, past three deer nuzzling through bushes. Autumn leaves crackled under my shoes. Tom had a leaf of his daughter’s resting on his dashboard. Alicia collected leaves.
Sam scooted up behind me, and soon I was flanked on my mad walk by two quiet creatures. Deidre’s legs, so much longer than mine, took enormous strides, one for my two.
“Where are you going?” Sam asked.
I shook my head.
“This way.” Deidre led us into a vacant lot overgrown with dry brush, which reminded me of brittle hair and Deborah’s Hair and Nails, and how happy I’d been right near this corner holding hands under a kind moon not two days earlier. Real life had been mercifully suspended.
In the back corner of this untended acre there was a hideaway. Large branches had cracked off a tree during a storm. They had fallen in an arc, creating a shady natural cave. Sam and I bent to follow Deidre and then sat on the damp ground. Secluded and still. Nearly dark now, too, and I was so close to these two oddball kids that I could feel their body heat. And I needed it. I yearned to be warmed by their breath and their affection. Sam and I sat identically, compressed like accordions, arms wrapping legs. So we were related.
I started to cry.
“Mom, don’t”
“I slapped her.”
“Big deal.”
Deidre, who betrayed no emotion, kept a careful eye on me.
“I can’t get a grip, I don’t know why. I want a grip.”
A woeful plea that no one answered, and the piteousness of it made me want to wail. Sam’s thick arm landed on my back. It lay there like a log, then slowly his hand tightened on my shoulder.
