Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  What if I did, and ended up in the same boat as before? With a man so tired of the ennui that he had to seek something else to fill his days?

  I looked down at my button-down silky shirt and gray trousers, all as neatly pressed as they had been the day they’d come out of the dry cleaners. Lines aligned, buttons were snapped, lint hadn’t dared tread anywhere near me.

  “You’re right, Susan.” If there’d been a list of top ten sentences I never expected to hear come out of my mouth, that was number one.

  She beamed. “Of course I am. So, will you do it?”

  “There’s really not much to it.”

  I wheeled around and saw Matt standing there. How long had he been there, listening? And what was he thinking about me and my wet-wipe issues?

  “You walk Harvey around a ring,” Matt said, coming closer, “and toss him a treat from time to time. He’ll do all the heavy lifting.”

  I looked down at the tiny, wriggling ball of fur at my feet and thought I’d done nothing but heavy lifting since Dave had died. If the piano-playing dog wanted to take a few of the concrete blocks off my shoulders, I’d buy him a year’s supply of Beggin’ Strips.

  eleven

  Georgia was thrilled when I called her later that night from our hotel room, a space that had all the personality of a cardboard box and about the same decor. “I knew this was going to go well for you, Penny. I had a feeling about it.”

  “Going well?” I thought of the flat tire, the hitchhikers, the E.R. run and then Matt’s idea that I trot Harvey around. I’d left him with a dog, and without a commitment, because as much as I worried that my status quo was half the problem in my marriage, it still represented comfort. Organization was my life afghan and right now, I needed that crutch. “That’s like saying the Titanic had a great maiden voyage.”

  Georgia laughed. “Look at it as an adventure.”

  I glanced toward the closed bathroom door of the La Quinta Inn room Susan and I had rented. The Grand Resort Hotel had been full and we’d opted to share a space. I’d proposed it as a money-saving idea, since neither of us knew how the estate would pan out. Truth be told, she was beginning to grow on me.

  And, the thought of being by myself didn’t exactly make me jump for joy. The last thing I needed late at night was to be alone with all these thoughts about why, and how, and when and where. I’d done altogether enough of that already.

  “It has been different,” I told Georgia. “That’s for sure.”

  “Different is good right now, Pen. I know you don’t think so, but it is.”

  I murmured something noncommittal. Different had never been my strong suit. I didn’t plan on adding it to my personal deck of cards anytime soon.

  “Oh, and you need to give Dave’s mom a call. She left a message on my machine, looking for you. Said something about wanting to clear up something unusual in Dave’s estate.”

  I sank back against the bed, balancing the phone against my shoulder, and pressed my hands to my temples. “Do you think she knows?”

  “She’s his mother. Don’t you think she would?”

  “I was his wife. And I had no idea.”

  “Oh, Pen, you’ll figure it out.” A doorbell sounded on Georgia’s end. “I’m sorry, hon, but I gotta go. My shiatsu massager is here.”

  “You have a massage therapist who comes to your house?”

  “Oh, no, not a person. A machine. Without you around to keep me busy, I’ve gotten hooked on QVC.” Georgia laughed. “So either send me money or come home soon.”

  “I’ll be home soon as I can. There are a lot of…loose ends.”

  Georgia paused and I could almost hear her sending me a mental hug. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Penny.”

  I glanced at the bathroom door, where Susan was inside, singing a Beatles song as she showered. “To be honest, I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for. Or what I’ve found.”

  I told Georgia I loved her, then hung up and lay back against the pillows. A plan, that’s what I needed. I pulled out the pad of paper from the hotel, then started making a list of everything I wanted to cover tomorrow. Questions I still had, goals I hadn’t hit.

  Find out who Annie is

  Decide what to do with the dog

  Call Georgia; ask her to take another look in Dave’s study for a will

  Meet with Vinny. Tell him no way on the dog show idea

  Determine legalities of this mess

  Get myself untangled from the same mess

  With each numbered item, calmness descended over my shoulders. Order was being restored, at least on this particular slip of paper. I studied the program guide for the Dog-Gone-Good Show, then tossed it to the side and slid under the covers.

  The calmness ebbed, replaced by a wash of grief so strong it would have knocked me over if I’d been upright. The loss crushed my heart, squeezing it like an overjuiced orange.

  Inside the bathroom, I heard the hair dryer start. The noisy Conair muffled my tears. I clutched the list, as if holding it could give me back the security I’d lost.

  It didn’t. All I got was a paper cut.

  A few minutes later, Susan left the bathroom, clad in a silky blue nightshirt that skimmed her thighs. Quite the contrast to the oversize T-shirt I’d gotten for opening a Christmas Club account. I tried not to think about whether Dave had seen—and appreciated—that nightshirt and the slim, busty woman beneath it.

  “Penny?” Susan asked after I had turned out the light. In the dark, her voice sounded miles instead of just a few feet away in the other double.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why do you think Dave did it?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, rolling over and clutching the second pillow to my chest and trying to get comfortable on the cheap mattress, avoiding the dip in the center. I could make out Susan’s slim shape beneath the blankets, her back to me, her hair in a loose ponytail.

  “I always thought I was the one, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.” What woman suspected her husband had an extra wife on the side? It certainly wasn’t something you saw on Maple Street in Anytown, U.S.A. Maybe there were bigamists on every street corner, but I doubted it.

  “It’s like that guy on Oprah, did you see that show?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “He had nine wives. Nine. And they all lived in, like, the same state, and they all thought he was this big-shot navy pilot or something. I don’t know how he kept that many secret. At least you and I live in different states.” Susan was quiet for a long moment, and the dark seemed to wrap around us, joining us in a way that we hadn’t been before. “Do you think Dave was like that?”

  “With nine wives? God, I hope not.”

  Susan paused a moment. I could hear the alarm clock flip the numbers from 10:56 to 10:57 p.m. “What did he tell you he did for work?” she asked.

  Susan was trying to do what I had set out to do—uncover what was lies and what was truth. But I didn’t want her questioning my husband. To me, he was mine, always had been.

  Susan had come after me, after Dave had said “I do” and “I promise” to me. Annie, if she even was a wife, had come after that. I was the first, I had the ownership claim.

  But what did I really own? A man who’d run around the country, slipping marquise-cuts on women’s fingers, while taking his piano-playing dog on the road?

  Not exactly a big prize at the bottom of my box of Cracker Jack.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked Susan.

  “That he worked in insurance. That’s how we met, you know.”

  Oh, God. I didn’t want to hear this story. I didn’t want to know he had met Susan at one of the office parties I had skipped because it had been tax season. Or that she’d been the receptionist at the office, there to greet my husband every day with a smile and a stack of pink messages.

  But Susan apparently lacked the ESP gene because she went on, undeterred. “I was in a car accident, a hit-and-run on the highway, when I was co
ming back from visiting a friend in Boston. This guy switched lanes and nicked me, sending my car into the guardrail. I was standing there, on the side of the highway, crying. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been in an accident before and I was clueless. But then, Dave saw me and pulled over, got out of his car, and he helped me figure out what to do. Who to call, all of that.”

  “That’s Dave,” I admitted. It was the husband I had known, a man who would stop and help a little old lady who had dropped her groceries, who never passed a man broken down on the side of the road with a hissing radiator without running to the closest gas station to buy him some water and antifreeze.

  “And we got to talking, and because I was still so upset and shaky, he offered to drive me home. And we stopped for coffee and—”

  “One thing led to another,” I cut in, not wanting the sordid details. Not wanting to picture them, swept up in the moment and hurrying off to the nearest Motel 6.

  “No, not at all. It was a long time before anything like that happened. We kept in touch because I was having problems getting my insurance company to cover the accident and all, so he was kind of like my adviser.”

  A friend. He’d started as her friend.

  It was the exact way we had come together.

  “So how did you two meet?” Susan asked, the question sounding like the kind you asked at a class reunion or a cocktail party, not in the darkened hotel room you were sharing with your husband’s other wife.

  Nevertheless, she’d told me her story, and in that guilt women seemed to inherit along with breasts, I felt compelled to do the same. “I met Dave in college. He was a business major, I was going for finance, but we had a couple of classes that overlapped the two majors so we ended up in a study group together. We were friends, really, nothing else. Then he came up to me after a business ethics class one day, and asked me out. I said no.”

  “You did?”

  I nodded. “But he didn’t give up. He asked me out again the next day, but I still wouldn’t agree.”

  “Why?”

  “He wasn’t my type. I like men who are studious and quiet.” I laughed a little at the memory, the image I’d had for my future back then. “I guess I pictured myself marrying a professor in a tweed jacket. You know, the kind with the patches on the elbows? We’d sit in the study, him smoking his pipe while I balanced the checkbook or read the Wall Street Journal. We’d pour a glass of brandy and talk about world politics.”

  Susan let out a yawn. “Oh, sorry. That wasn’t for you. It’s been a long day.”

  I almost yawned myself at the thought of the future I’d once wanted, thinking it would have been so safe, devoid of the hairpin turns my younger years had held. “Dave didn’t fit that image.”

  “He is the complete opposite of the tweed-and-pipe-smoking kind of guy.”

  “Not to mention, every professor’s worst nightmare,” I said, laughing again, the memories seeming sweet in the dark, not painful. “Dave was the class clown. He’d crack up the class at the worst possible time.”

  “He was good with a one-liner, wasn’t he?” Susan’s voice was soft, tinted with grief.

  In that shared thought, a bond began to develop between me and Susan. Not the one forced upon us, but one that was growing out of the natural event of loss, and of sharing Dave.

  “Yeah, he was,” I said. “He even…Oh, I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “No, go ahead. I’m fine. I want to hear about what he was like. It’s almost like being with him.”

  Susan was a stronger woman than I. There was no way I could have lain here, listening to her top ten favorite memories of my husband and found it anything short of torturous. But she seemed genuinely interested and the urge to voice Dave’s name had grown stronger in me, as if saying these words would help make all that had happened seem real, not some distant dream had by another woman.

  “At our wedding,” I said, my mind winging back fifteen years as easily as if it were two hours ago, “when the pastor got to the part about whether there were any objections, Dave said—”

  “Wait, I know this. Let me ask my lawyer for a second opinion,” Susan finished. “And then, he looked around, asked some poor guy who barely knew Dave if he had any objections, which about gave the pastor a coronary until Dave grinned. Five seconds later, the whole chapel was laughing and making lawyer jokes.”

  Something hot and sharp stung at the back of my eyes. “He said that at your wedding, too?”

  “Yeah, but Penny, you know Dave. Once he had a good joke, he used it everywhere he could.”

  “Yeah.” I drew in a breath and rolled over, clutching a pillow to my chest that would never take the form of the husband I had lost.

  In the space of a few minutes, I had lost more than a husband. Every memory I had of him was now tainted. I’d never be able to sit in his favorite chair again, flipping through our photo albums and thinking I was the only one who had heard that line, felt that kiss on my cheek, known that event.

  He’d doubled everything, damn him, and now he’d stolen more than my life. He’d taken my memories, too. “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.”

  “Okay,” Susan said, but her voice said she didn’t believe me. I thought of apologizing to her for being short and crabby, of trying to explain, but I couldn’t. She meant well—if there was one thing I’d learned about Susan and her nonstop chatter, it was that she meant well by every word—and I wasn’t in the mood to hurt anyone else today.

  Silence descended over the room, heavy and thick as a vat of peanut butter. I lay there, pretending I was asleep but really staring into the dark, busy hating my husband.

  I hated him, I hated the dog, I hated the entire situation. I didn’t want to get to Annie’s house and hear Dave’s best lines again.

  To hell with Cleveland. Let Susan rent a car and go meet Annie. Susan seemed remarkably well-adjusted to this whole thing, as if it were just a step out of her ordinary day. She’d been chipper and bright, as happy-go-lucky as a leprechaun. While I had a perpetual my-husband-betrayed-me stew cooking in my intestines.

  Georgia had said I could do this, that it would be good for me to take a walk outside the perfectionist ring.

  Fear tightened its grip on me. No way. I wasn’t strong enough for this.

  Then the fleeting thought that this dog show could actually be fun ran through my mind. How would being a part of this change the Penny Reynolds I knew?

  I shut the thought off, shoved it to the back. I’d already had one major life change this week. I’d hit my quota.

  Tomorrow, I was going home and going back to work. To something more normal than a dog show and the Groundhog Day version of my marriage. A few days of tax preparation and I’d be deep in columns and rows, straight lines and balanced totals.

  And maybe, just maybe, with enough little green grids, I could fool myself into thinking that I’d never heard Susan regurgitate what had been one of my fondest memories.

  Yeah, and maybe the book of tax-code updates from the IRS would be a little light reading. I wasn’t simply looking for a miracle.

  I was looking for a rearrangement of the cosmos.

  twelve

  It was Harvey who convinced me to stay.

  Matt showed up early the next morning, undoubtedly clued in on our location by Susan, who seemed determined to keep me here.

  And who seemed equally determined to sleep till noon. I couldn’t rouse her, no matter how hard I tried or how many times I opened the blinds and lifted her eye mask. She just groaned, rolled over and went back to snoring.

  “Guess it’s just you and me,” Matt said. Harvey, who’d been waiting patiently at Matt’s feet, let out a yip and raised himself onto his back paws. “Oh, and Harvey.”

  I refused Matt’s offer of breakfast and led him down to the quiet lobby, figuring the best thing to do was tell him I was leaving. Before he got any ideas that involved me, a stage and a dog who played the piano.

  I sank into one of the crushe
d red velvet chairs, while Matt chose the one opposite. Harvey came over, plopped himself at my feet and then looked up, expectant. “I don’t have a Milk-Bone, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “He’s not,” Matt said. “He’s concerned.”

  “He’s a dog. All he cares about is eating, sleeping and dropping a surprise on the neighbor’s lawn.”

  Matt chuckled. “Harvey’s got a lot more than that in his emotional repertoire. He’s empathetic, too. He knows you’re upset and he’s worried.”

  I rolled my eyes. A dog that was worried about me. Yeah, right.

  “I think he missed you, too. Last night, he paced my hotel room and whined half the night.”

  “He misses Dave. Harvey and I didn’t meet until two days ago.”

  Matt sat back in surprise. “You’re kidding me. Dave had a dog and you didn’t know?”

  “Dave also had a second wife and I didn’t know.”

  Matt nodded. “True.”

  I reached into my purse, pulled out my list and a pen. Best to start right at the top. “What do you know about Annie?”

  Matt shifted in his seat, moving from the relaxed, ankle-over-the-knee position to two feet on the floor and his back against the seat. “Not much.”

  He was lying. Why? To protect me? To protect her? “Is she another of Dave’s wives?”

  A couple with a bichon frise walked past us, chattering about the upcoming show and how well their pooch would do. “Blue ribbon,” the woman said, confident and sure. “Isn’t that right, Hemingway?” She nuzzled down and kissed the dog, her face disappearing in a mess of fur.

  “I never met Annie,” Matt said after the couple was out of earshot.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Listen,” he said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “I think you’ve been through enough. You don’t need to add to that pile.”

  “What I need is to find out what my husband was keeping from me,” I said. “Besides the dog.”