“Go suck an egg, Stu,” Lena said in her delightful accent.
Stu sat down across from Frank and put his elbows on the table. “Ready for some ass kicking?”
Josie wasn’t exactly sure what transpired in the next twenty minutes. All she knew was that when she left the dining room to give Izzy a quick bath and help her change, Frank and Stu were facing off across a checkerboard.
When she returned, they were rolling around on the floor, fighting.
“Frank! What are you doing?” she shouted. “Stop it!”
Doc and Bob were already moving to separate the two. Doc grabbed Frank and Bob pulled Stu away.
“Am I going to have to throw ice water on you boys again?” Susie asked. Josie looked at her, stunned. Susie’s voice was casual, as if it were no big deal to have her two grown sons fighting on the floor.
Susie misinterpreted Josie’s look. “That’s how I used to separate them when they were teenagers.”
Frank and Stu were standing now, both breathing hard. Frank’s shirt had been partially pulled out of his jeans, and Stu’s hair was sticking up.
Lena was shaking her head. “Really, Stu? This is how you illustrate to our children how to settle a dispute?”
“He touched his checker!” Stu protested. “You have to move the checker once you touch it. You can’t move a different checker!”
Are you kidding me? Josie thought. That’s what the fight was about?
“Outside,” Lena told Stu. “We need to go for a walk. Everyone, I apologize for my husband’s boorish behavior.”
Bob moved to clean up the checkers, which were scattered on the floor, while Susie rounded up the kids, telling them she needed them to help her with something in the kitchen.
Josie just looked at Frank. She’d always thought of him as the peacemaker, the guy who defused tension.
“What happened?” she asked.
Frank was watching Stu shrug into his parka and head out the front door, trailing Lena.
A slow smile spread across Frank’s face as the door closed.
He stood there for a moment, and when he finally answered Josie, instead of looking at her, he continued staring ahead, as if Stu were still there.
“I won.”
• • •
“But you’re not a supercompetitive person,” Josie said to Frank on the drive home. The gentle buzzing sound of the tires spinning across the pavement had lulled the girls to sleep. It was around nine o’clock, and the sky was very dark. Few cars were on the road. It felt very intimate to Josie, as if she and Frank were cocooned together.
Frank shrugged. “My brothers bring it out in me.”
This wasn’t about a game of checkers. Josie began to recast everything she’d assumed about Frank’s family dynamics. The teasing, the comparisons about height (Frank was the shortest of the three, but Bob was only half an inch taller) and weight and hairlines. The old jokes, like the one about the time Frank had been competing in a quarter-mile race as a high school junior and had spectacularly fallen, wiping out two other runners in the process. Stu and Bob called him “Usain Dolt” sometimes.
Josie had assumed it was all in good fun. The verbal equivalent of roughhousing. And Frank certainly gave as good as he got.
“Did you fight a lot growing up?” she asked.
Frank shrugged. “They were older and bigger than me, so no. I mean, sometimes we did but it ended quickly.”
They won, Josie almost said.
She’d always considered Frank the prize in the family. He was the funniest, the best father, the most easygoing—at least in her eyes.
But some men didn’t value those traits the same way they would, say, a football trophy or a Mercedes (which Stu drove; Bob had a Lexus).
Josie wondered whether Frank felt as if he didn’t measure up in other ways. At Thanksgiving Bob’s eleven-year-old son had caught at least one touchdown pass—maybe even two; Josie couldn’t remember. But she did recall Bob picking him up and swinging him around and shouting, “That’s my mini-me!”
Josie twisted around to make sure the girls were still asleep before she spoke again. They were, but she still whispered her words: “Did you want a son?”
“No, God, Jos, I can’t imagine not having Zoe and Iz,” Frank said instantly.
“I know, sweetie, I just meant . . . if you could still have them, too, would you want a son?”
Frank looked at her sideways. “We always said we’d only have two. Are you saying you want another one?”
Josie shook her head. “I’m happy with the girls. I just want to make sure you don’t feel like anything is missing.”
Frank reached over and covered her hand. “I have everything I want.”
He was so good at saying the right thing, at making Josie feel as if they were connected. At ending a sensitive conversation on a positive note.
But when everything erupted, she also began to reevaluate what she’d once considered a strength in Frank. When he cut short conversations with a line that he must have known would satisfy her, was he doing it because he was sharing his actual feelings, or was he dodging true intimacy?
It made Josie wonder whether she’d ever truly known Frank’s deepest vulnerabilities, his most secret thoughts. If she had married a man who had always been, in some ways, a stranger to her.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
* * *
Present Day
THERE WERE TWO REASONS that she had to call Dana’s husband.
First, she needed to verify that it was actually Ron who had left that voice mail message. Josie had lost her ability to gauge whether it was far-fetched to suspect that Frank had lied about that, too. She no longer had faith in her own judgment, given how she’d blindly trusted her husband for so long.
Second, it wasn’t logical that Ron was being so protective of Dana. Perhaps this was because Dana had told him she’d merely kissed Frank once, and now Frank’s psycho wife was hounding her. Since Ron was in the middle of this, it seemed only right that he should know the facts.
The truth was what Frank and Dana had stolen, what Josie needed to reclaim. Josie wanted to hand Ron at least a piece of it back.
Plus, Dana had gotten away with too much already.
Hi, Frank Moore, Dana had said in her weird voice. Josie pictured her wearing a teasing little smile as she’d looked up at Frank that first night.
Her salutation would have thrown Frank off, because he was as good at remembering people’s names as he was bad with numbers. He would’ve made a joke, probably, because they always sprang easily to Frank’s lips. He would have been intrigued.
It was a pretty masterful opening line, Josie had to admit. It was designed to spark more than a superficial initial contact. She wondered whether Dana had planned it, whether she’d had her eye on Frank for a while. Or maybe Dana had just craved some excitement and had wanted an affair in general, and Frank happened to wander into her line of vision at the right time.
Her throat tightened as she imagined Frank and Dana on the phone together, discussing a strategy to keep as much of their relationship concealed as possible in the aftermath of Josie’s discovery.
How had they ended that particular conversation?
Not with “I love you,” surely. Not after less than two months. But maybe they’d said something like “Talk to you later.”
Josie began to pace tight circles around the living room. Her thoughts felt choppy and sharp, jerking her between memories and images.
Frank pulling away from her embrace on the night she’d gone to see La La Land . . . Maggie, their neighbor, standing on her front walk, saying, I loved having the girls visit yesterday . . . Frank on their wedding day with red-rimmed eyes, repeating their vows: Until death do us part . . . Frank after her discovery, with red-rimmed eyes: I am so sorry. I will say that to you until the day I die . . .
Then a possibility she hadn’t considered muscled through the chatter in her mind like a battering ram. Maybe Frank and
Dana hadn’t talked on the phone when they’d both returned to work after the discovery. They could have met in person instead, at a corner booth in a quiet coffee shop. Dana might have become distraught, and Frank could have put his arm around her to comfort her.
The thought of Frank tenderly soothing Dana while she, Josie, was feeling flayed by her discovery was so abhorrent that Josie ran to the sink and retched.
She ran water into her cupped palm and rinsed out her mouth, noticing her hand was shaking. She wondered whether she’d ever fully trust anyone again. Whether she’d ever know peace.
Dana deserved to be punished for that, too.
Josie opened a cabinet and reached for a box of peppermint tea, leaning against the counter and staring into space while she waited for the kettle to boil. When it finally emitted a little shriek, she was so lost in thought that she flinched.
She sat at the kitchen table, cupping her hands around her mug. Huck ambled over and flopped down next to her, releasing a sigh. She lifted her bare foot and rubbed it over Huck’s back while she tried to organize her thoughts.
She was taking a break from work. She’d already set up an automatic email response for clients who might be trying to place an order. The automated message explained that she would respond to any sales requests as soon as she returned. Josie’s little side business brought in about eight thousand dollars a year, so losing the commission on a few boxes of toys or missing an application deadline to lease a booth at a festival wouldn’t torpedo their family financially.
She was only going to do the bare minimum to keep their household running right now. She’d order groceries online and arrange for Peapod to deliver them. She’d let the girls watch television and choose their own outfits, no matter how outlandish the combinations. Huck would clean the crumbs off the floor, and the laundry could wait. The things that had once mattered so very much to her—like giving the girls vitamins every morning, and making sure they used cavity-fighting mouthwash every night—were of so little import now.
She didn’t have the luxury of choosing her battles; she needed to eliminate every potential conflict in her life so that she could focus on the seismic one currently gripping her.
In two hours, she was scheduled to pick up the girls at school. She’d call Ron before then, Josie decided. But she needed to do more investigating before she dialed the number on the Post-it note she’d tucked into a slot in her wallet. Dana had known something of Frank before they’d met in Atlantic City. It seemed only fair that Josie had the chance to learn a bit about Dana’s husband.
She sipped her tea, then opened her laptop computer, which had been resting on the kitchen table next to a crooked blue bowl Zoe had made in art class last year.
She began with Ron’s Facebook page. It displayed only a few things publicly, but among those things were a handful of “notes,” or journal-like musings. Josie got up and found a pen and small spiral notebook in a kitchen drawer, then began going through Ron’s notes. Unfortunately, they weren’t very illuminating. Ron wrote about his enjoyment of gardening—The sunflowers are growing at an astonishing rate—and he compared two different Chinese restaurants in his neighborhood, rating them on the quality and value of their entrées. He wrote almost nothing about Dana, other than a brief mention of a marathon his wife was competing in.
Josie continued to search the Internet but could find little else about Ron.
She reached into her wallet and extracted the pink Post-it, smoothing it out on the kitchen table. She would use her cell phone to dial Ron’s number, she decided. If he truly wanted to, he’d be able to ascertain their address and home phone number. But for now, she intended to keep up this firewall between the affair and her children.
She dialed and listened to it ring twice before going to voice mail.
“Hello,” she said. “This is Josie Moore. I think you called my husband Frank’s cell phone yesterday . . . I’m sorry to bother you, but I needed to make sure it was really you calling, or if it was another lie . . .”
Her voice broke and she quickly recited her phone number and ended the call. She wondered whether Ron was at work today, or whether he and Dana were talking at this very moment. Perhaps they were in emergency counseling.
Josie was trying to think of what to do next when her phone rang, less than a minute later. She knew even before she looked at the screen that it was Ron.
She stood up abruptly as a fresh surge of energy flooded her body. Her heart throbbed so powerfully it was almost painful.
“Hello, this is Josie.”
“Hi, it’s Ron calling you back.” His voice sounded far less forceful than it had on the message on Frank’s machine. “Um . . . so . . .”
“So, how are you? No, dumb question.” Josie tried to give a little laugh but the sound stuck in her throat.
She was talking to Frank’s girlfriend’s husband, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, in front of the refrigerator where Zoe’s latest art project was secured with a Smurf magnet. It was ludicrous. It was a scene from a reality show, or a French arthouse movie.
“I got your message and I wanted to ask you . . . you said there were a lot of lies?” Ron said.
“Yeah, I just have been trying to sort everything out . . . and, well, it’s hard. Do you know anything?” Josie asked.
“Only that they saw each other twice, and then they felt so horrible about it, they met a few more times to discuss what to do.”
Josie frowned. Could Ron truly believe this?
“Do you know how long it has been going on?” she asked.
“Just those few times, I think,” Ron said. “They met in Atlantic City.”
“Yeah, that’s what Frank told me, too.” Josie hesitated. She lowered her voice, as if she were making a confession. “I found their messages on his cell phone. That’s how I learned about it.”
“Wow. You know, I’m not even mad yet.” Ron sounded as if he was marveling at this fact. “Isn’t that weird?”
“I wasn’t right away either,” Josie said. “The shock.”
The thought briefly popped into her mind that in the next scene in this reality show, she and Ron would meet in person to commiserate. Then they’d fall into each other’s arms for revenge sex.
“I just want to get past this.” Ron sighed. “We need to move on so we can heal.”
Josie’s head jerked back. He believed Dana’s version of events? He must, if he thought their relationship was salvageable.
“I guess I feel as if I need to know the truth,” Josie said carefully. “I need to know if there are more lies out there.”
She hesitated, then said, “So in the emails, Dana seemed like . . . she was the one who initiated it.” This was technically true, even though Josie hadn’t learned that information from an email. But Dana had originated most of the email conversations with Frank, like the one about the killer margaritas.
“Oh,” Ron said.
He should have been asking for more details about what Dana had written to Frank. He should have sounded more upset.
“Was there anything else she revealed to you that I should know about?” Josie asked.
“Not really,” Ron said. “She just kept saying that she was sorry.”
He wanted to get off the phone. He wanted to tidy up this mess and go back to his sunflowers and his Chinese food. Dana would get away unscathed; she’d shed a few crocodile tears and move along with her life, while Josie remained mired in misery.
The marathon.
“Okay, it’s just that Frank has been acting differently for a while,” Josie blurted. “He took up running a few months ago, out of the blue. Is Dana a runner? I wonder if they jogged together, if they shared that.”
She held her breath. Silence. She pressed the phone tighter to her ear. She wished she could read Ron’s mind.
He said: “I’m sorry, I have to go now. Thank you for calling.”
She heard the click of the call ending, and she slowly lowered her right arm,
wishing she could snatch back her words.
I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ron, she thought. I only told that lie because I wanted to hurt her.
• • •
Physical intimacy was the only thing that set a marriage apart from all of the other relationships in your life. Josie knew she was far from the first person to make this observation, but she’d never thought deeply about it until now. You could love your friends, and fight with them, and share inside jokes with them. You could commingle funds with a business partner, and stake your financial futures on each other. You could enjoy meals with coworkers and trade deep confidences with strangers on a train. You could even share a bed with a close friend, as Josie had on several girls’ trips in her early twenties, when money was too tight to pay for extra hotel rooms.
But the specific line separating a romantic partnership from other relationships existed for a reason. Sexual contact was the only thing you shared with your spouse that you shared with no one else.
Imagining Frank and Dana together—entwined in his car, in her office, in the hotel room—made Josie feel such an intense swell of emotions that she felt as if she were about to explode. She fantasized about throwing open the door to Frank’s car and seeing the sudden light shine down on the two of them before she grabbed Frank by the hair and yanked him away from Dana. She imagined kicking open the door to the hotel room and stalking over to them as they lay in bed kissing, saying something so cutting they would both wither. In some of her daydreams, she threw a vase at Frank while Dana cried and Frank insisted that Dana meant nothing to him, that she was a terrible mistake and that it was Josie he loved.
Josie had an actual dream in which she’d clawed Frank’s face with her fingernails. In her dream, he just stood there and silently endured her assault. When she’d awoken, she’d had trouble breathing for a few moments.
She needed to talk to someone.
Karin was still calling and texting every day, but Josie knew she needed a professional’s help. She phoned her doctor for a referral.
• • •
Josie’s physician was a small, trim, white-haired woman who was brisk yet kind. “So now you’re trying to decide if you should stay for the sake of the kids, or leave the bastard,” she said once Josie had summed up the situation. The doctor’s tone was softer than her words.
The Ever After Page 12
