Kiss Her Goodbye

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  She isn’t so certain God will forgive Henry, though. She hopes not. Her husband can rot in hell, for all she cares.

  She leans closer to the mirror. The swelling around her nose has gone down considerably in the past week or so, and she’s fairly certain it wasn’t actually broken. But the angry black and purple bruises that rim both eyes are still too dark to be concealed by makeup.

  How did he find out where she was that day?

  He claimed he found an anonymous note on his windshield, telling him that she had met her former lover at the coffee shop.

  Lucy isn’t sure she believes him. She confided in only one person where she was going—the one person she trusts more than anybody else in the world. And he would never have told Henry. Never.

  For all Lucy knows, Henry followed her to the coffee shop when she left the house that afternoon.

  But if he did, why wouldn’t he have confronted her there? Confronted both of them, for that matter.

  How many times, fourteen years ago, did her husband swear he was going to kill the man she loved?

  She believed him, believed he was capable of murdering somebody with his bare hands. She still does.

  So why, if Henry followed her and saw them together that October day, didn’t he come forward right then and there?

  Why did he go back home to wait for her, sitting in the darkened kitchen smoking, planning, preparing to pounce on her with his vile accusations—and with his savage fists?

  Somebody must have tipped him off. Otherwise, he’d have had no reason to follow her that day. No reason to suspect, after fourteen years, that she was anything but a faithful, obedient spouse.

  If Henry wasn’t lying about the note, then somebody is watching her, following her every move . . . or somebody else found out about the meeting.

  In either case, she’d better watch her step. And so, she realizes with a sinking heart, should Jen Carmody.

  Maybe it’s time to get this out in the open. All of it, and to hell with the consequences.

  The trouble is, the decision isn’t hers to make alone.

  She spotted him. He’s certain of it. In the moment before he ducked out the door into the vestibule, he looked back over his shoulder and saw Kathleen turn her head and look directly at him.

  Did she recognize him in that instant?

  Probably not. If she had, she probably would have come running after him.

  He looks over his shoulder, half-expecting to see her there, chasing him down the boulevard. But the sidewalk is empty aside from a litter of dropped candy wrappers, Silly string, pumpkin guts, and bits of shattered orange shells.

  The wide steps of the church are still deserted. Mass won’t be over for at least another five minutes. He’s heard that Father Edward likes to lengthen the service with endless announcements before the final hymn.

  He assumes Kathleen won’t leave until mass is over, that she learned her lesson well in all those years of Catholic school.

  You shouldn’t have left before communion, either, he tells himself, consumed by remorse so potent it’s all he can do to keep moving.

  But God understands. And God will forgive.

  Overhead, branches creak in the gusting wind, the toilet paper draped there by Halloween pranksters fluttering noisily against the remaining leaves.

  He quickens his pace as he hurries around the block, away from the church, away from the woman he once believed he would never see again.

  Ah, Kathleen. It would have been better for you if you had never come back here. Better for all of us.

  “My God, what happened to you?” Maeve asks, setting aside the menu she’s been pretending to read as Kathleen slides into the seat opposite hers.

  Kathleen’s hand goes to her damp, tousled head. “You mean my hair? It’s like a hurricane out there.”

  “I mean all of you.” Maeve glances from her friend’s drab gray sweater to her sunken eyes to her overall pallor. Only her cheeks have a faint splash of color, undoubtedly from the raw weather rather than rouge. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks,” Kathleen says dryly, reaching for her own menu.

  “No offense,” Maeve adds belatedly. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “No, it isn’t. If I hadn’t dragged you here today you wouldn’t even be out of the house.”

  “Yes, I would. I went to church this morning.”

  “Church?”

  “It’s a holy day of obligation, remember?”

  Maeve searches her distant memory, then nods. “All Souls Day?”

  “All Saints.”

  “Right. Day after Halloween. Remember when we were kids, how we used to sneak trick-or-treat candy into morning mass on All Saints Day because we were starving and we weren’t allowed to have breakfast before communion?”

  That brings a smile to Kathleen’s pale, chapped lips, albeit a fleeting one.

  “So you went to church?” Maeve asks, watching Kathleen peruse the list of specials. “At least you got out for a change. I swear you’ve been hibernating. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “I went to the soccer game on Saturday. You weren’t there.”

  Maeve shrugs. “Erin didn’t feel like playing. I didn’t feel like going, so why force her, you know?”

  Kathleen’s mouth tightens. “Actually, we had to force Jen.”

  “Jen? Superstar Jen? Why didn’t she want to play?”

  “I guess she was just tired. I thought maybe she was coming down with something, but she seems okay now.”

  “I heard there’s a nasty stomach flu going around. Which reminds me, they’re having a flu shot clinic at my gym next week if you want to come. They said this season’s going to be worse than last year. You can bring the kids if you want.”

  “Maybe I’ll bring the boys. Jen can’t get a flu shot. She’s allergic to eggs.”

  “What about Matt?”

  Kathleen makes a face. “He never gets one. He says he’s afraid of needles.”

  “Big, strong, strapping Matt is afraid of needles?” Maeve shakes her head, then wonders if she shouldn’t have described Kathleen’s husband that way right to her face. Any red-blooded woman would notice that Matt is big, strong, and strapping, but Maeve certainly wouldn’t want Kathleen to suspect that she has a thing for Matt.

  To change the subject, she asks quickly, “What are you ordering?”

  “Is the spinach wrap any good here?”

  “I have no idea. I always get the same thing.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “Chicken Caesar salad. It doesn’t have any carbs.” Maeve braces for the usual attack on her stringent dieting, but Kathleen merely nods and goes back to scanning the choices.

  Maeve busies herself glancing around to see whether she knows anybody else in the cozy trattoria, with its blue-and-white checked café curtains, round wrought-iron tables, and white wainscot walls. She vaguely recognizes a few faces from the gym, and momentarily locks gazes with the male half of an attractive couple. Relishing his appreciative glance, she allows a tiny smile to play across her lips.

  Too bad flirting gets old after awhile, Maeve concludes, looking away as the man’s partner reclaims his attention. There are days—more and more of them, lately—when she wouldn’t mind being married again. Days when she actually craves the casual, comfortable camaraderie that bored her when she was living it.

  Back then, she envied the exciting lives of single women. Now she finds herself coveting what her happily married friends have. Kathleen, for example. That she has the freedom to go around looking like this, knowing that at the end of the day, big, strong, strapping Matt will come home to her no matter what . . . well, there’s something to be said for that kind of confidence.

  Yet, studying her friend as her friend studies the menu, Maeve suspects that something’s wrong. Something serious. She can feel it. It isn’t just that Kathleen has obviously neglected to put on makeup and fix her hair; she looks
haggard and, Maeve notes jealously, she’s lost weight recently.

  What’s going on? Is the perfect Carmody marriage really on the rocks? For the past few weeks that Kathleen’s been avoiding Maeve, she’s kept such a low profile that the neighborhood rumor mill has already kicked into gear.

  A waitress appears, pad in hand, to take their order. The moment she leaves, Maeve leans forward, elbows on the table, chin in her hands. “So what’s up?”

  Kathleen looks startled. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a wreck. I can see it.” Maeve hesitates, then asks, with what she hopes is concern and not hopefulness, “Are you and Matt having trouble?”

  A scowl crosses Kathleen’s features.

  “No,” she says, so firmly that Maeve believes her.

  Okay, so the neighbors were wrong about that. Chances are, they’re also wrong about Kathleen having a problem with liquor or drugs. Maeve knew her when that was the case, and it was obvious. You could smell it on her; see the stupor in her eyes.

  Now, she doesn’t look stoned. She looks troubled.

  “It’s your father, isn’t it?” Maeve realizes, wondering why she didn’t think of that sooner. She kicks herself for not being a better friend. She should have called to ask Kathleen about his test results before now. “Did they diagnose him with Parkinson’s?”

  “Actually, the doctor said he’s leaning away from that. Dad has been much better lately. The tremors aren’t as bad.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah.”

  So why doesn’t Kathleen seem relieved? God knows she has every reason for contentment, Maeve thinks, wishing she could keep from begrudging her friend all that she suddenly longs for in her own life.

  Maybe she’s imagining trouble where there is none. Maybe she wants so badly not to be the only screw-up in suburbia that she’s projecting her own discontentment.

  The waitress sets down Maeve’s black coffee and Kathleen’s hot tea, along with a basket of freshly baked rolls that immediately assault Maeve’s willpower with the tantalizing aroma of hot yeast.

  She tries to focus instead on her coffee, but it just isn’t satisfying without a cigarette to go along with it.

  After stirring a packet of sugar into her cup, Kathleen looks up. “Maeve . . . since you asked. . . .” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “There is something that’s been bothering me.”

  Forgetting all about the rolls and her salivating taste buds, Maeve nods triumphantly. “I knew it. When you’ve been friends as long as we have. . . . So what is it?”

  “I thought maybe Erin mentioned it to you.”

  “Mentioned what?”

  “I figured Jen told her . . .”

  “Told her what?”

  “I don’t know how to say this.”

  Oh, for God’s sake, just say it!

  Kathleen stretches a sip of her tea into a maddening pause before blurting, “Jen found out that Matt isn’t her birth father.”

  Maeve sputters into her coffee cup. “What!”

  “Please, Maeve, don’t say anything to anybody.”

  “Who am I going to tell?” she asks, offended . . . although the neighborhood gossips would have a field day with this news. “I can’t believe it, Kathleen . . . I had no idea.”

  “Really? Because I was sure Jen must have told Erin.”

  Maeve debates whether to reveal that Erin and Jen don’t seem to be as friendly lately as they were at the beginning of the school year. In fact, Erin hasn’t mentioned Jen at all. She’s been spending most of her time with Amber, and with Michael, a lanky tenth-grade basketball player who seems to have replaced Robby, from what Maeve has been able to figure out.

  “If Jen said anything to Erin, Erin kept it to herself,” Maeve tells Kathleen, who nods, her expression desolate.

  “What happened, Kathleen? Who is Jen’s father? And does Matt know that he isn’t?”

  “Of course he knows!” Kathleen snaps. “I didn’t even meet him until she was almost a year old. He adopted her when we got married, and we figured we’d tell her the truth as soon as she was old enough to understand. But then . . . we just didn’t. It was just easier not to.”

  “It would be.” Maeve reaches out and touches Kathleen’s hand, finding her flesh icy despite her fingers cupped around the steaming mug of tea. Her mind is awash with questions she’s dying to ask, but she settles on, “So you decided it was time to tell Jen now?”

  “No. She overheard us talking. It was a horrible scene.” Kathleen closes her eyes, as if to block out the memory. “Now she’s barely speaking to any of us, not even the boys. All she does is lock herself in her room.”

  “Who’s her father, Kathleen?”

  “Do you remember Quint Matteson?”

  “Should I?”

  Kathleen’s smile is bitter. “Probably not. He was older than we were, and he was a loser. He played the drums in a bar band that used to play over on the Elmwood Strip. We went out a few times, if you can call it that. I don’t know if you remember, because you and I had drifted by then, but at the time, I wasn’t exactly . . . together.”

  “I remember,” Maeve admits.

  “It’s such a cliché, you know? Nice Catholic girl gets involved in sex and drugs and rock and roll, gets herself pregnant, and the guy wants nothing to do with her.”

  Maeve nods, thinking that she, too, was a cliché, minus the drugs and rock and roll and with a happier ending.

  Then again, not really. Gregory might have married her when she found herself knocked up, but eventually, like Kathleen said, he wanted nothing to do with her.

  “My father freaked out when he realized I was pregnant. I wasn’t even going to tell him—I don’t know how I thought I could avoid it, you know?” Kathleen laughs bitterly. “But I was sick as a dog, and getting fatter by the second, and he figured it out, of course. He threw me out.”

  “You went to live with your aunt in Chicago, right?”

  Kathleen hesitates, her green eyes clouding over. “Eventually. But not until after I had the baby.”

  “You had her right here? I can’t believe I never knew.”

  “No, not here. Do you remember Father Joseph?”

  Maeve smiles. “How could I forget?”

  “When I had nowhere else to turn, I went to him.”

  “You went to Father Joseph?” Maeve asks in disbelief. “He’s the last person I’d have gone to in your shoes. He scared the shit out of me.”

  “Me, too,” Kathleen admits. “But when my mother died, he was around a lot, and he told me that if I ever needed help, I should come to him. So . . .”

  “So you did. That’s unbelievable.”

  “I had nowhere else to go, Maeve. It was cold and stormy and I was alone and afraid and—and I had nowhere else to go,” she repeats, a faraway look in her eyes.

  “What did he say when you told him you were pregnant?”

  “He didn’t say much. He just . . . he let me stay at the rectory for the night, and he made some phone calls. The next day, he sent me to a home for unwed mothers near Albany.”

  “That sounds horrible.”

  “It was . . . but in a strange way, it wasn’t. It saved me. Father Joseph saved me.”

  “And Jen.”

  “Yes.” Kathleen looks down at her teacup, stirring, stirring, the spoon rattling against the porcelain. “When I left that day, I promised Father Joseph I would name the baby after him if it was a boy.”

  “Too bad it was a girl.” Maeve is striving for levity, but her tone merely feels inappropriately flippant. “Then again, you could have gone with Josephine.”

  “Actually, she’s named after Father Joseph’s mother. I told him I’d do that if the baby was a girl.”

  Maeve conjures the image of a little old Italian lady huddled in a black shawl, then shakes her head in disbelief. “Father Joseph’s mother’s name was Jennifer?”

  “It was Genevieve. That’s Jen’s name, too. I started out calling her that, but th
en Matt and I decided it was too big for such a tiny girl so we shortened it, but she’s Genevieve. She doesn’t know why. She just thinks we liked the name. And I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except . . .” Kathleen exhales heavily, looking up at Maeve. “I need to tell someone.”

  “That’s what friends are for.”

  “Plus, I’m worried about Jen, Maeve. I don’t know how to reach her now. I’m afraid she’s slipping away from us. I’m afraid she’ll want to find her birth father.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Silence.

  She knows, Maeve concludes, watching her friend over the rim of her coffee cup.

  “He’s listed in the local white pages,” Kathleen admits at last. “I checked when we moved back. But I don’t want to set her up for disappointment. The truth is, he was a drugged-out loser and fourteen years later he’s not going to welcome with open arms this kid he didn’t want.”

  “Maybe he’s changed.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You have.”

  “I know, but . . .” Kathleen shakes her head. “You know, I wouldn’t even recognize him if I ran into him on the street. For all I know, I have. The few times I was with him, I was so wasted . . . I mean, it’s not like it was this great love affair.”

  “Not like you and Matt.” Maeve means it sincerely, but somehow, the words emerge with a sardonic edge.

  “Matt saved me, Maeve. I was on my own with a baby, living above my aunt’s garage, working as a waitress. . . . If he hadn’t come along and wanted me—wanted both of us—God only knows where I’d be now.”

  She’d be exactly where I am, Maeve thinks, as the waitress arrives with their order. A bitter single mother raising a rebellious teenaged daughter.

  Maeve gazes moodily down at her plate, suddenly sick to death of chicken Caesar salad, sick to death of everything in her life. When did it become all about denial?

  Almost without thinking, Maeve reaches into the basket for a hot roll. She breaks it open, and after only a moment’s hesitation, takes a small bite.

  Oh, God. It’s delicious.

  Maybe it’s time to make a change. Time to start indulging in some of the things that have filled her with ardent longing.