Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  When Harvey was done, he clambered over the seat and plopped his butt between us. He looked from one to the other, tail wagging, clearly overjoyed at the additional traveling companion.

  “What if it doesn’t?” Matt asked again.

  “Then I—” Do what? There was no Plan B. I couldn’t go back to the status quo, because that didn’t exist, and besides, I’d kind of dramatically changed the status quo back there among the Ruffles.

  I also couldn’t go back to pretending none of this had happened, because it had. I couldn’t go back to having that naive belief in my marriage, because all that had been shattered the minute Susan showed up at the wake.

  I looked down at Harvey, now sitting on my lap as I drove, watching the world go by with an excited, panting fascination. And most of all, I couldn’t give Harvey away to some stranger, because the silly dog had grown on me.

  I drew in a breath, held it tight in my chest, listening to the thud of my heart. “I don’t know where to go from here. And that scares me. I’ve never been the kind of person who was good with spontaneity. I like to know the ending before I start at the beginning, if that makes sense. I like to have all the variables laid out, so I can plan ways to avoid them.”

  “Well, that idea was shot to hell this week,” Matt said. “Nothing like a dog show and a crazy poodle to upset an apple cart.”

  I laughed a little, then went on, sobering to the reality facing me with each passing mile. “I know I have to go back and find the will, which I bet he kept at his office, because my sister couldn’t find it in the house. But I’m not ready to do any of that yet. There’s undoubtedly going to be consequences from the estate, and I’ll need to deal with those. But before I can get to those, I need to meet Annie, to rule out that last variable. Then, I think I can finally make a plan.” Just the thought of the word gave me comfort and undid a tiny bit of the tension in my stomach.

  Matt chuckled. “I don’t know about all that planning and variables thing. If you ask me, you aren’t the same Penny I met three days ago. I don’t think you’re going to be able to go back home and lay out this little map for the future. I mean, you had a gunfight with a terrier and a psycho poodle in front of several hundred people. Does that sound like a woman who runs her days by a checklist?”

  We approached the next turn on the laid-out route from MapQuest. “Annie’s house isn’t much farther,” I said, ignoring his comment for now.

  As much as I’d been excited by the turn of events at the dog show, and the way it brought out a spontaneity gene I hadn’t even known I had, I was also scared by it. If I wasn’t the Penny I used to be, then who was I? And how on earth would I find my way back to normal if I changed too much?

  The rest of the turns came quickly one upon the other, shifting the conversation into direction giving, with Matt reading the MapQuest route and me following it. We passed down neat, well-tended streets in a middle-class neighborhood of Cleveland. Middle America, clear in its perfect lawns and bikes haphazardly left in smooth, grass-edged driveways. Two more rights, and then we left the manicured lawns and headed into a part of town that was more run-down, less middle-class perfection. I could practically see the income levels dropping as each block passed.

  “Take a right here,” Matt said.

  “Into the trailer park?” I asked. “I thought Annie had five kids. How can she fit them all into one of these things?” I gestured toward a single trailer at the head of the park. The mobile homes were jammed in together like piano keys.

  As I drove and took in one run-down aluminum, portable home after another, I refused to feel sympathy for another of Dave’s wives. Heck, I’d already made one a friend. I didn’t need another. Next thing I’d know, this whole fiasco would be a Goldie Hawn movie with her and her extra wife buddies singing show tunes as they walked off into the sunset.

  The trailer at 2121 Winterberry Lane was a double-wide fronted by a bed of purple crocuses surrounding a small white wrought-iron bench. It had a fresh coat of paint or siding or whatever they did to spruce up the outside of one of these. A new wooden porch led us up to the front door, the wood still holding that fresh-cut smell. Dave had to have paid someone to do this, because he had all the woodworking skills of a monkey.

  I held Harvey tight to my chest, my free hand raised to knock. Matt stood beside me, a six-foot dose of moral support.

  Inside I could hear the sound of children, their happy voices ringing with laughter, echoed by the barking of a dog. Harvey perked up in my arms, yipping, as if he, too, were joining in.

  Traitor.

  Susan’s words came back to me. What if Dave’s baby was in Annie’s arms, right on the other side of the flimsy door? What would I do? Say?

  Before I could change my mind, I knocked. It was a good two minutes and a second knock before anyone came to the door.

  “Hi, Harvey!” A three-year-old girl stood at the door, her curly brown hair a jumbled riot framing her face and curious brown eyes staring out of a jelly-smeared face. It took her a second to register that there were people holding the dog. “Hi. I’m Holly.”

  “Hi, Holly,” I said, offering up what I hoped looked like a nonthreatening smile as she reached forward and petted Harvey, clearly familiar with him, and he with her. He turned his head and licked her palm, eliciting a giggle. “Is your mother home?”

  “Oh, jeez, Holly, how many times do I have to tell you not to open the door to—” A petite dark-haired woman stepped in front of the little girl. Her mouth stopped midsentence and dropped open. “It’s you.”

  The last thing I had expected was for Annie to recognize me. “You know who I am?”

  She nodded slowly. “Uh, Holly, why don’t you and your sister go make a card for Grandma?”

  “I wanna see Harvey. And we made Gramma a card yesterday.” The word came out more like yed-er-day.

  “Well, she’d love another. You know how bored she gets in the hospital. You can see Harvey later.” Annie shooed the little girl away, then grabbed a coat that must have been hanging by the door and slipped outside, leaving her front door ajar. “Let’s sit at the picnic table and talk. Away from the zoo.”

  “Your kids will be okay?”

  “Trust me. They’ll find me if someone gets hurt or takes a toy from someone else. Kids are better than bloodhounds at tracking down a mother.” As she walked down her stairs and a few feet across the yard, she gave Harvey a greeting pat.

  We slipped onto opposite sides of the picnic table. I studied Annie for a second. She was short, maybe only five foot two, and had spiky dark-brown hair. She wore no makeup, a well-worn button-down denim shirt and black leggings. She looked about as much Dave’s type as Susan had.

  I introduced Matt, then handed him Harvey’s leash. “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” he finished, leaving me with a smile before taking the dog on a walk.

  “I’m Penny,” I said. “But I guess you already know that?”

  Annie nodded. “I wondered when you’d find out about me.”

  “I didn’t. It was…sprung on me. After Dave died.”

  Annie gasped. “He died?”

  “A week ago on Thursday.” It was now Saturday afternoon. I’d been a widow for nine days. It felt like nine years.

  “Was it his heart? I was always telling him he needed to watch that.”

  I bit back a renewed sense of jealousy and swallowed one more bit of evidence that I had been completely oblivious to what had been happening with my husband. I’d never worried one bit about his heart. He worked in insurance, for Pete’s sake. Probably one of the least stressful jobs on the planet.

  Only, it appeared, if you actually worked in insurance instead of working with a performing dog and a trio of wives. “Yeah, it was a heart attack.”

  Tears filled her eyes. She bit her lip and looked away, her knuckles whitening with her tightened grip on the wooden table. I felt like hell. Why was I the one to deliver this news? Why couldn’t that friend from the dog
show have called her? Or someone else in this supposedly tight-knit community of canine fans have done it?

  “I guess that’s why Betty called me twice,” Annie said with a sigh. She shook herself, as if pushing the emotions to the side, to deal with after the kids went to bed. “I’ve been busy with the kids. One of them had strep and then the dog ate a wheel off a Tonka truck, so I’ve been cleaning up puke all week instead of answering the phone.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say to that.

  She laced her hands together, then laid them flat on the table, studying her short, cropped, plain nails for a second. The triplet to my ring glistened in the sun, but on Annie’s right hand instead of her left. I didn’t bother asking her what jokes Dave had told during the wedding or whether there was a black Benz parked in her carport.

  Those were answers I already had.

  “I suppose you’re wondering how I knew about you,” she said. “And why we were involved.”

  “It has crossed my mind.”

  “My mother is sick. Has been for a long time. She’s got heart disease, which is why I rode Dave about all those damned burgers.”

  I swallowed hard. I’d never said a word about his fondness for fast food. Chalk one more up for the worst-wife award. “I don’t understand what that has to do with Dave and me and—” I spit the word out “—you.”

  “And Susan,” she added.

  “You knew about Susan?”

  Annie nodded. “I knew it all. I’m smarter than the trailer makes me look.”

  “I never thought—”

  “You don’t have to. Anyone who sees me, a single mom with five kids, living in a trailer park, thinks one of two things—white trash or welfare tramp. Heck, I’m a walking government statistic.” Annie shook her head. “I’m not here to burden you with my story. Let’s just say I made a few bad choices in men and they always left me to pick up the tab.”

  Annie was a gruffer woman than either Susan or I. Dave couldn’t have picked three more different women if he drew our names out of a bride lottery.

  “I had a feeling from the beginning with Dave, that he had a wife. But I ignored it.” Annie flicked a piece of wood off the picnic table and onto the ground. “Because I was being selfish and I needed him.”

  Those words sat hard in my stomach, adding to the enormous pile of digested words and secrets already there. Any more of this and I was going to need liposuction. “Because he took care of you?”

  Annie let out a little laugh. “Dave? No. He wasn’t here long enough to do anything worthwhile. I think he changed a lightbulb once. He played with the kids. Oh, boy, did he love those kids, but he didn’t help me.”

  “Then what did you need him for?” I didn’t add any polite apology about butting into her personal life. I figured with Annie, that kind of social dance wasn’t necessary. Besides, Dave was my husband and I had a right to know.

  Annie drew in a breath, then met my gaze head-on. “Money.”

  “You didn’t marry him for love?”

  She scoffed. “No. And he knew I wasn’t involved with him for love. I mean, I liked him, but I wasn’t in love with him. Besides, Dave wasn’t looking for love, either. He told me he already had that.”

  I didn’t ask her to fill in the blank of the sentence with a name. Some things, I didn’t want to know. Matt had called it blissful ignorance, but when it came to whether my husband had loved me, I preferred to keep on thinking that he had.

  “My mother is sick, like I said,” Annie went on. “She owns this dress shop, which is where I work. Third generation, a pretty good operation and the pride and joy of my mother’s life. But between helping her in the hospital and running the shop, things started getting a little hairy. Business was down, and I’m not exactly management material, as you can tell by the wild animals back in the house.” She laughed a little and gestured toward the continued sound of play coming from the trailer. A little boy peeked his face out from behind a curtain, then disappeared for a second before doing it again. “I wasn’t making enough money to hire someone in, and I was losing the business. If I’d done that, it would have killed my mother. She started there when she was a little girl, working with my grandmother.

  “Anyway,” Annie went on, “it was all kinda crashing down on me at once. The mortgage payments for that palace—” again she gestured toward the trailer, where the little boy was still playing peekaboo “—the lease for the shop, the stress of trying to come up with something to make it all work, and then covering the part of my mother’s bills that insurance didn’t pay.”

  I put all this together in the mental file I’d been keeping, adding it to what I already knew. “Then why did you do the UKC dog show?”

  Annie chuckled. “I’m one of those people who gets a hair up her butt about something and then takes off on a tangent. Last year, it was making a star out of Max. Lord knows the damned dog costs enough, between the dog food and the vet. He might as well earn his keep.”

  “Did the kids go with you?” I had yet to ask whether one of the five was Dave’s. I was working my way up to that question.

  “Are you kidding me? Bring them with me? Try taking ’em to a Kroger and see how much fun they have with the canned goods.” She laughed, the kind of laughter of someone who knew a world no one else in the room did. “No, I left them home. My best friend Carol offered to take the kids, to give me a weekend away. She’s got four of her own, so she’s already a little insane. I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity for some time alone. It’s been a hell of a year.” Annie ran a hand through her hair and as she pushed back the brown locks, I could see the tension around her eyes, etched into the dark circles. The sympathy I’d refused to feel bobbed to the surface of my heart all the same. “The kids had taught Max some tricks. They got their hands on some book one time and had him doing all kinds of things. I thought maybe he was good enough to earn some prize money.” She shrugged. “It seemed a safer bet than Vegas.”

  “But Max wasn’t all that cooperative and Dave stepped in to help you,” I said, filling in with what Vinny had told me.

  She nodded. “I should have sent my oldest. She can get that dog to stand on his head, for God’s sake. The dog wouldn’t obey me at all at the show.” She rolled her eyes and glanced again at the trailer, where for now, all had become quiet. I heard the strains of a children’s television show. “I don’t know why I thought the dog would listen to me. Hell, the kids don’t.”

  Once again, I was struck by how different Annie was from what I’d expected. Coarse around the edges, frank and direct, she wouldn’t have been in the top one hundred of women I would have pictured Dave going for.

  “Anyway, Dave saw me struggling with that moose and he helped me, even offered a few private lessons. Not because he wanted me,” Annie hastened to add, “but because he liked Max. I guess he saw him as a challenge or something. And Harvey and Max got along really well, too.”

  Somehow, that was easier to take than Dave falling madly in love and using the dog as a ploy to get closer to Annie. It fit the husband I had known, a man who was always off helping people, even when that helpfulness gene cut into our vacations or made him late for work or a dinner party we were supposed to attend. For once, some of the pieces were aligning with what I had believed to be true. “When did you marry Dave?”

  Annie drew in a breath, then reached into the pocket of her sweatshirt and pulled out a package of light cigarettes. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  I shook my head.

  “I know,” she said, as she lit the cigarette, then took a drag. “I have no business lecturing anyone about heart disease when I’ve got one of these in my mouth. To tell you the truth, they’re my excuse for a few minutes of peace. I can go outside on the porch, have one of these and then feel ready to face two more hours in there.”

  I glanced again at the trailer, which had started up again, the pacifying effects of the TV done with the show. An older boy, maybe about eleven, p
opped his head out the door. “Mom, will you please tell Carly to get out of my room?”

  “Carly, get out of his room,” Annie shouted back at the trailer. “Did it work?”

  “No. She’s still in there. She’s trying on my shirts, Mom. She’s calling my clothes her costume gallery or something dumb like that. Can we just put her up for adoption?”

  Annie heaved a sigh, then rose. “Can you wait a sec? I have to go do some crowd control.”

  I nodded, then waited as she ground out the cigarette, went inside, apparently resolved the situation, then came back out.

  “I have a mutiny on my hands here,” Annie said. “Do you want to come in for some coffee? My yard time’s over.”

  We headed into the trailer, Annie ushering me into a seat in the small kitchen at the front. The messy, congested trailer was a mirror of the pandemonium I’d seen at the Dog-Gone-Good Show, only taken up a notch and involving small children. Max the dog was running between the kids as they alternately wrestled, leaped off the sofa and had a play knife fight with weapons made of cardboard.

  None of them looked like my husband. None of them looked young enough to be his, given the timeline with Annie. Relief edged around my senses.

  Annie disappeared down a hall and must have dispensed some justice, because a preteen girl in too-tight jeans came stomping into the living room. “Why do mothers exist?” she asked of no one in particular, throwing up her hands and letting out a huff.

  Annie came out behind her. “To drive their kids crazy.” She laughed, then placed a kiss on the girl’s head, a kiss that was brushed off, but not before I saw a quick smile take over Annie’s daughter’s face.

  “Okay,” Annie said on an exhausted breath as she entered the kitchen. “Coffee. And lots of it.” She headed over to the counter and began filling a coffeepot with ground beans.

  “Who are you?” The little girl who’d answered the door stood in front of me, her hands clasped over her belly, which jutted out beneath a striped shirt that she’d probably outgrown a year ago.