Never Tell a Lie

by Hallie Ephron

  “You can have that, my treat,” Ivy said. The words were pleasant, but the tone was snappish.

  Melinda barely blinked. She tucked the swan dish into her canvas bag.

  Ivy cleared a spot on the steps to the side door and sank down. She had heartburn, her morning OJ was repeating on her, she had to pee, and her ankles felt like overripe sausages about to burst their casings.

  Thank God, David was on his way over.

  “Did you see Theo?” he asked, an anxious look on his face. “I promised him one of those greatcoats.”

  “You should have told me to save him one. Was he here?”

  “Just long enough to leave a campaign sign he wants us to put on the front lawn.”

  “Sorry, I sold every last—” Ivy closed her eyes as her abdominal muscles cramped.

  David crouched alongside her. “You okay?” he said under his breath.

  Ivy suppressed a burp. “Just tired.”

  David pulled over a cardboard box filled with 1960s National Geographics and propped her feet on them.

  “There’s a guy looking for books,” he said in his normal voice. “Wasn’t there a box that we didn’t put out?”

  “If there is, it’s still in the attic.”

  David started for the house. He paused midstep and turned back. “Hey, Mindy—want to see the inside?”

  Mindy?

  “Could I?” Melinda swung around. Her belly bumped into a card table, and a large mirror that had been leaning against the table leg began to topple forward. “Oh, my gosh!” she cried.

  Ivy reached over and caught the mirror just before it hit the ground.

  “I’m so sorry.” Melinda had gone white. She bit her lip, and her face turned pinched. “I mean, what if—”

  “It’s okay,” Ivy said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You sure?”

  “See?” Ivy set the mirror upright. “No damage done.”

  “Thank God,” Melinda whispered.

  “Really, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.”

  “No big…?” Melinda stooped alongside where Ivy was sitting. She gave Ivy a penetrating look as she placed one hand on Ivy’s belly and the other on her own. Through her sweatshirt Ivy felt the pressure of Melinda’s palm and the tips of those long pink fingernails against her taut skin. “Are you kidding? We don’t need more bad luck, do we?”

  Ivy felt her jaw drop.

  Melinda stood and turned to David. “So did you keep the embossed leather wallpaper in the front hall? And that wonderful statue at the foot of the stairs?”

  “You can see for yourself,” David said. “Go ahead in. I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  Melinda brushed past Ivy as she climbed the steps to the house. David rolled his eyes and followed.

  Ivy rubbed her palms across her belly, trying to erase the feel of Melinda’s handprint.

  “Hey,” Melinda said from the doorway.

  Ivy turned.

  Melinda mouthed the words, “See you,” then turned and went inside, the screen door smacking shut behind her.

  Ivy sincerely hoped not.

  2

  By late that afternoon, all that was left of the yard sale was the lingering scent of exhaust from the truck David had hired to cart away mounds of leftovers. As far as Ivy was concerned, that had been the best part.

  She squeezed the telephone receiver between her shoulder and her ear as she straightened the stacks of checks and bills and change on the Formica top of the kitchen table that had been her grandmother’s.

  “Twelve hundred twenty-three dollars and seventy-five cents,” she told Jody, who’d called to apologize for not showing up at the yard sale to help. Riker, Jody’s little boy, had come down with a virus and kept Jody and her husband, Zach, awake the night before.

  “Sounds like you did just fine without me. Don’t tell me you sold those Scarlett O’Hara drapes?”

  “Can you believe it? A woman actually paid twenty-five bucks for them.”

  “Did she see where they’d faded?”

  “I warned her. Didn’t want her showing up and demanding her money back.”

  “Ferengi Rule Number One of Acquisition: ‘Once you have their money, you never give it back.’” As usual, Jody had one foot on this earth, the other firmly planted on the starship Enterprise.

  “You invented that.”

  “Google it.”

  “Anyway, it feels great to have it all gone. Tomorrow I’ll clean the attic. Can’t wait to get the vacuum up there.”

  “Yippee,” Jody said.

  “You think I’m nuts.”

  “Certifiable.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk. I remember when you were nine months pregnant with Riker. You were up on a ladder washing windows. Not merely insane. Downright dangerous.”

  Jody laughed. “Never had the urge before or since. Listen, when you’re pregnant, it’s like being taken over by the Borg—resistance is futile.”

  Ivy poured herself a glass of milk. “You’ll never guess who showed up. Melinda White.”

  “No kidding. Melinda White from high school? How’d she look?”

  “Totally put together. She got her teeth straightened, hair styled and frosted, lost weight. You wouldn’t recognize her, not in a million years. Calls herself Mindy. And guess what? She’s pregnant.”

  “Pregnant? Really?” A pause. “Married?”

  “I didn’t ask. She wasn’t wearing a ring.” Ivy twisted her wedding ring with its filigree setting and three small rose-cut diamonds. She and David had found it in an antique store in New Orleans. “She kind of freaked me out. It felt as if she knew all about my miscarriages. But how could she?”

  “That would certainly creep me out, too,” Jody said. “Maybe she heard from someone who knows you. She’s still living in Brush Hills?”

  “I’m not sure. She said her mother moved away.”

  “Remember how she used to try to guilt-trip you into being nice, and then if you were, she’d be on you like the Phage?” The Phage? Ivy knew better than to ask about what was probably a foot fungus from some Star Trek episode. “Once I was nice to her, and I practically had to scrape her off on a tree.”

  “You were nice?”

  “I’ll ignore that remark. We used to call her ‘the leech.’”

  “We didn’t.”

  “We so did.”

  “We were awful.”

  “Cruel, self-centered monsters. Most kids are. I was, anyway. Not you. You were Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”

  “You make it sound like a character flaw.”

  “Ivy, there’s only one person I know who’s nicer than you, and you married him. Despite that, I love you both. And I’m sure Melinda didn’t deserve the abuse we heaped on her. But you gotta admit, the girl offered herself up like a human sacrifice. She was weird.”

  “Still is,” Ivy said. She told Jody how upset Melinda had gotten when she knocked over the mirror. “She turned white as a sheet.”

  “Superstitious. You should talk,” Jody said. “You’re forever rubbing that amulet of yours. And you won’t even set up the baby’s crib. Did I ever tell you about my Great-Aunt Dotty—Beatrice, actually, but we called her Dotty. Now, she was truly superstitious to the point of being dysfunctional. Wore rubber gloves all the time and boiled the doorknobs to keep germs from spreading. She thought President Nixon was listening in on their phone line.”

  “And that was crazy?”

  “No. But no one knew it at the time.”

  “I don’t think Melinda’s crazy. Just very odd and intense. Needy.”

  “And desperate. More than a little of that. Also my Uncle Ferd,” Jody went on, her thoughts leaping zigzag, as usual. “He—Speaking of strange, remember Melinda’s mother? She and Melinda were practically attached at the hip. Remember how she used to march Melinda to school and back every day? The woman was a fireplug with feet.”

  Ivy laughed.

  Jody sang, “Dum, da-dum, da-daaaah dum.” The
tune was the witch’s theme from The Wizard of Oz.

  “Stop! You’re awful.”

  “If Melinda comes back, invite me over,” Jody said. “I’ll get rid of her for you. No problem. Just don’t ask me to be nice. Or to do any vacuuming.”

  That night rosemary-scented bath salts filled the third-floor bathroom, the only one with a tub large enough to accommodate Ivy and David together. They reclined, facing each other, her belly rising between them like a great fogbound island. Occasional earthquakes sent water rippling against the sides of the tub.

  The bathroom was in the half of the attic that, according to their real estate agent, had been renovated decades earlier to make an oversize bedroom and bath for a mentally deficient son. Ivy had visions of a young man laid out in that tub wrapped in cold, wet sheets, back in the days of ice-pick lobotomies.

  Wind whistled through the eaves overhead, and rain pelted the roof like ball bearings. Ivy sank lower, and the hot water rose to her chin.

  “Has peace descended in the valley?” David asked. “Feeling better, now that everything has disappeared?”

  “Why do I ache?” Ivy asked. “I didn’t do anything. I just waddled around and accepted money.”

  The house creaked. Sometimes the place felt alive, like an old person sighing and shifting to find a comfortable position.

  “You poor thing, you. What hurts?”

  Where to start? Ivy rolled her shoulders, then her head. Her vertebrae cracked. “Ouch. My neck. My ankles. My feet.”

  “Ah, zee feet. And I have zee magic fingers,” David said, wiggling the fingers on both hands and flashing her his half-up, half-down smile. “Scoot back.”

  Ivy pushed back. David picked up one of her feet, rubbed it with soap, and massaged gently. She rotated her ankle. The tightness eased.

  David’s hands were strong, rough and callused from working with his crew digging, clearing brush, and hauling stones. Despite his fancy CAD tools, David insisted that he did his best work in the world of three dimensions. Landscaping was about choices, he said—where to place a specimen plant, how much to alter the natural contour of a plot of land. Spend time in a space and it would come to you, how best to enhance it.

  There was a slightly obscene sound as David squished her foot between slippery hands and ran his fingers between her toes, then up her leg. Electricity traveled up and tingled in her groin. Ivy closed her eyes, savoring his touch, as sensual as it was therapeutic.

  “Do you think feet qualify as an erogenous zone?” she asked.

  “Definitely.” He started on the other foot.

  She relaxed and surrendered to pure pleasure.

  “Backs qualify, too,” David said, handing her the soap. He hoisted himself, pivoted 180 degrees, and sank into the water again so he was sitting between her legs, facing away from her.

  Ivy sat forward and soaped David’s back. He had the shoulders of a football player, but the skin, with its dusting of freckles, was smooth and baby soft.

  “Mmm. That feels great.” David hunched forward. “In my next life, I’m coming back as a cat.”

  “I thought you told me you wanted to be a sea otter. And float on your back, dining on oysters.”

  “That sounds good, too. Maybe that’ll be my next next life.”

  Ivy pressed her lips to David’s spine. Then she soaped up a washcloth and spiraled it around and across his shoulders and down into the small of his back.

  “It was weird seeing Melinda White again,” she said. Odd that she’d shown up pregnant with a due date identical to Ivy’s. “Here we’ve been living in the same town and never run into her before.” Ivy soaked the washcloth and began to rinse his shoulders. “Did you—”

  David straightened and started to get up.

  “Hang on. You’re still soapy.”

  “That’s okay.” He stepped out of the tub and reached for a bath towel.

  Ivy stretched her legs and leaned back. Just her head and belly button, now an outie, stuck out of the water. “I didn’t realize that she had a sister. Her mother I can still picture. Remember how she—”

  “Don’t ask me,” David said as he rubbed himself down. Then he anchored the towel around his waist. “I barely remembered her at all.”

  Ivy sat up. Water sloshed against the sides of the tub. “I thought you recognized her.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “But you looked so surprised—”

  “Yeah, sure I was surprised. I mean, what did you make of that story? She used to play in this house? Who with? Vlad?”

  “So why’d you offer to show her around?”

  “Because you looked as if you were about to drop-kick her into the street.”

  “It was that obvious?”

  “Besides, I had to go in anyway.”

  “I admit, she made me very uncomfortable. She was going on and on about Doc Martens. And stirrup pants.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  David offered Ivy his hand and helped her to her feet. As she stepped onto the damp bath mat, she caught a glimpse of herself in the misty bathroom mirror. Only months earlier she’d had a slim runner’s build—long arms and legs, sinewy torso, solid thighs.

  Now she was a gigantic jelly bean. But it wasn’t just that amazing pink abdomen with the dark line running down from her belly button to her groin that gave her pause. It was those breasts—out of nowhere, bazooms!—that overflowed her usual A cup.

  She ogled them in the mirror. Marvels of nature. Too bad they were so tender and achy—took the fun out of having them. She pressed her arms against her sides, bunching up magnificent cleavage. Who’d have thunk she’d ever have some of that?

  Ivy dried off, wishing she’d invested in supercolossal-size towels rather than merely extra large. The towel snagged on the chain of her necklace.

  “Damn.” She tugged at it and tugged again.

  “Stop. Here, let me,” David said. His fingers tickled her neck as he worked it loose. “Uh-oh. Looks like the clasp got bent.” He set the chain and the hand-shaped amulet on the bathroom vanity. “I’ll leave it here. I can fix it for you later.”

  The room had turned drafty. Ivy shivered and slipped into her thick terry-cloth robe. She padded out of the bathroom and across the darkened bedroom. The cavernous space, with its cathedral ceiling, dwarfed the daybed that had been the couch in their first apartment and the maple bureau and floor lamp that had been Ivy’s ever since she was little.

  The green-flecked linoleum felt cold and smooth under her bare feet. Melinda was right; it was the perfect surface for playing jacks.

  Ivy was halfway to the lighted stairwell when she felt a stabbing pain in the ball of her foot.

  “Ow!” She set the foot down gingerly and felt the pain again. She hopped, then limped to the wall and leaned against it. When she ran her finger lightly across the bottom of her foot, she could feel a sharp point sticking out from it.

  “What’s wrong?” David asked.

  She tried to pinch the splinter and pull it out. “Ouch! Damn. Something’s stuck in my foot.”

  Ivy tried to see what was there, but getting a good look at the bottom of her own foot was no longer a trivial matter. Besides, it was too dark to see anything.

  “Stop picking at it. You want to drive it in farther? Stay there, and I’ll get something to pull it out.”

  Bare-chested, with the towel wrapped around his waist, David left behind a trail of damp footprints as he crossed the room and started down the stairs.

  “There’s a pair of tweezers on my bureau,” Ivy called after him. “Or maybe it’s in my cosmetic bag on the back of the toilet.” She couldn’t make out his grunted reply. “And bring up the rubbing alcohol. I think it’s under the sink in the kitchen. Or—” When was the last time she’d used the alcohol? Ivy couldn’t remember.

  She eased herself down to the floor and slid back until she was pressed up against the wall. Her foot throbbed. She felt more than heard a scutt
ling from the other side of the wall where the attic was unfinished. Mice, probably, wondering where all the old furniture and delicious wax fruit had disappeared to. She’d get David to set more traps. Fortunately, she had the baby’s things stored in the spare room.

  The rain had let up. Bathwater gurgled in the drain as David clumped down the stairs. Ivy pulled in her feet and just managed to hug her knees.

  “Can you hear me now?” David’s voice came from the dumbwaiter just a couple of yards away. His spooky chuckle seemed amplified. It was amazing how well sound traveled up and down the shaft.

  Ivy bumped over and pushed up the sliding panel that covered the dumbwaiter opening. In the dark she could just make out the twisted-metal cable that ran up and down the shaft, still intact, though the dumbwaiter itself lay dormant at the bottom of the shaft in the basement.

  “Loud and clear,” she said.

  “Ain’t technology grand?”

  “Would you stop playing games? This hurts.”

  “Any other ideas on where you hid the alcohol?”

  “Try the downstairs john. In the medicine cabinet, maybe. Or under the sink. If you can’t find it, there’s probably a bottle of hydrogen peroxide somewhere.”

  The dumbwaiter panels operated like old-fashioned double-hung windows, and Ivy had done most of the work refinishing them. Soon after that, she’d scored some funky chrome ceiling fixtures at a yard sale. “Retro-chic,” Jody had proclaimed them. Tired of waiting for David to get around to installing them, Ivy had gotten a book on home repair out of the library and tackled them herself. It had been a proud moment when she flipped the kitchen switch and the lights came on. No blown fuses, no scorched-wire smell.

  “Bingo!” David’s voice was barely audible. There was a pause. “Hang on.” Louder. “Here comes the cavalry.”

  Ivy heard his footsteps in the stairwell, saw his shadow growing long in the frame of hallway light cast on the linoleum floor. Then he appeared, holding a flashlight under his chin, his face transformed into a Kabuki mask.

  “Eet’s Vlad. I’ve come to suck your blood.”

  In spite of herself, Ivy felt an adrenaline surge, and her heart raced. “Would you stop being a jerk and get whatever this is out of my foot?”