She Makes It Look Easy

by Marybeth Whalen

  “I’m getting a job.”

  I tried to make what she was saying fit with what I had been thinking. Where was the tearful confession, the rational explanation? Maybe this was it. This was the explanation for her odd behavior. “Oh?” was all I said.

  “Remember I told you Tom was going to help me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “There’s a job at his company he’s going to help me get. And with Mark out of work now, well … we just can’t make it if he doesn’t get a job. And with this job market we have no idea how long that will take.” She looked over at me again briefly and returned her eyes to the road. “This opportunity just sort of came up, and we decided it would be best for me to pursue it.”

  “Oh,” I said again. We were nearing home, and I couldn’t get there fast enough. I wanted to escape from the thoughts that were circling in my head about what Justine was really up to the night before. It was impossible to take in that my perfect friend could step even one toe outside the line of decorum. Yet not only had she, but she’d done it right in front of me. And now she expected me to smile and go along with it like nothing had happened. I wanted to throw myself back into normal life, get far away from the realities that were pressing in on me in that enclosed car.

  “So this was my last hurrah before I go back to work, so to speak. Thanks for letting me get a little crazy.” She smiled at me as if that explained it all.

  “I guess everyone’s entitled to get a little crazy every now and then,” I said, hoping I sounded earnest.

  “Exactly. I knew you’d understand.” She turned on a CD of old love songs, the car filling with some cheesy Barry Manilow song. I turned to look out the window at the scenery rushing by, faster than I could take it in.

  Later that night, after I had successfully answered David’s questions about how the weekend went without saying too much and hugged on the boys until they gave in to sleep, I lay beside David in bed. He was snoring softly beside me while all the things I hadn’t said ate at me from the inside out.

  I thought about breaking my promise to Justine and waking David up so I could spill it all: Brian’s kind words to me, the way he looked at me just before the cab left, the way it felt good to have another man’s eyes on me and how guilty I felt about it. I wondered if I could tell all that without breaking Justine’s confidence. I knew his questions would follow. “Where was Justine? Why were you in a cab alone? When did she get home?” So instead of waking him up, I lay quietly beside him, my stomach churning. It felt like there was a poison within me, a poison I had to get rid of one way or another. I had never kept anything from David before, and I wondered what kind of friend would ask me to start now.

  Chapter 29

  Justine

  The night we got home from the beach I made dinner—hoagies with all the fixings and a side order of guilt for my plate. After dinner, Mark watched TV, and the girls slept peacefully in their beds, content that I was home and all was well. I slipped out to the deck to look at the stars and wonder what I’d just done, wondering why my family couldn’t see traces of him on me. Mark didn’t look up from ESPN as I closed the door behind me.

  The night was not quiet. Crickets, frogs, and cicadas blended together to perform their summer symphony. From across the yard I could hear Ariel’s neighbor, a recluse I’d waved at but never met, playing music as he often did. Tonight was ’80s music. Toto sang, “All I wanna do when I wake up in the morning is see your eyes.” Even after dark the air was still hot, though not as humid. I wore a tank top and fantasized that I’d stayed long enough to wake up with Tom this morning, that the slight breeze I felt on my arm was his touch as we woke up tangled together in his hotel room. It was hard to imagine that just the night before we’d been on the beach together. I tilted my head back, breathed deeply, closed my eyes, and heard a noise—a movement in the yard.

  I yanked my head back down, scanning the yard for the source of the noise. There was movement in the playset tower. I saw the faint outline of a profile, a white shirt. “Who’s there?” I asked, foolishly heading toward the culprit instead of going inside like a smart woman would.

  A girl stuck her head out from the cover of the tower. “Miss Justine, it’s me, Heather.”

  I stopped in the yard and watched as she climbed down. “Heather?” I asked. “What in the world are you doing out here?”

  She stopped at the bottom of the tower and leaned back against it. “I come here sometimes,” she said. “To think. I’m sorry. I’ll go.” She started to walk away. I could see her clearly in the light coming from our house windows.

  “No, Heather, you don’t need to feel like you have to leave. I was just going inside,” I lied.

  She reached up and pulled on her ponytail, shifting her weight and looking around like she was trying to find the fastest escape route. I hadn’t really looked at her in a long time, I realized. She’d grown up while I looked the other way.

  “You’ve gotten so pretty,” I blurted out.

  She blanched and looked away. “Umm, thanks,” she said. She wrapped the end of her ponytail around and around her index finger, then let it go.

  “I mean, you’re not a little girl anymore.” I smiled. “I still think of you as a little girl.”

  “You and my dad,” she said.

  “How is your dad?” I asked. I could feel the blades of grass against my bare feet, sharp on my skin. I shouldn’t have asked about him.

  “He’s good. Working a lot. He lives not far from here. I see him some.” She looked at me with eyes that told me she knew more than she was supposed to. “I remember he built this playset with Mr. Mark.”

  “Yes, he did.” I thought back to that day years ago. Caroline had been so little I was afraid for her to climb the stairs of the tower. The men had looked so handsome, so capable, climbing around hoisting lumber. Erica had come over, and we’d cooked dinner, laughing as we worked. Heather had helped watch out for the girls. “That was a good day,” I added.

  She smiled with one side of her mouth. “Sometimes I like to come here and remember when things were better with my parents. When we were all happier.”

  I wondered what to say in response to that. “That sounds like a good idea,” I said. “It’s good to remember the good times.”

  She paused and looked at the house. “I know,” she said. “About what’s going on with you and Mr. Dean.”

  My heart started pounding. “What?” I asked, laughing. “Nothing’s going on with me and Mr. Dean.”

  “I saw the two of you together. You were in his car on that dead-end street where they stopped building houses. I saw your car and I saw his, so I went over to see what was going on. And I … saw you. Together.”

  If she only knew that I was trying to figure out which time she saw us. We’d gotten pretty crafty at inventing excuses to meet there. It was “our place.” “Listen, Heather, I don’t know what you think you saw, but … there’s nothing going on with me and Mr. Dean.”

  She looked me in the eyes for the first time that night. “My dad denied it too, when my mom caught him.”

  I didn’t try to argue further. We stood for a moment and looked at each other, neither of us saying a word. “I might be a kid,” she continued, “but I’m not stupid. And the truth is, I came over here tonight to try to figure out what to do about it. The Deans live across the street from us. They’re nice people. They love their kids. You and Mr. Mark are nice people. You love your kids.” She sighed. “So I came here just to watch your house and try to remember what that felt like—to be like Cameron and Caroline. To still have a mom and a dad who loved each other.” Her eyes flashed in the darkness. “Do you really want to take that away from them?”

  I looked away, ashamed. “No,” I said quietly, thinking of the guilt I’d been carrying since I slipped away in the first light of dawn.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone.” I couldn’t explain to Heather that Cameron and Caroline didn’t have a mom and dad who still loved each other. That argument was pointless, and she was, after all, just a child. A wise child, but a child nonetheless.

  “Then stop, Miss Justine. Just stop. It’s not too late.” She kicked at the grass with her flip-flop. “I won’t tell anyone. It’ll be just between us.” I saw desperation in her eyes. The poor kid needed to believe that I could do what her parents could not. In that moment, I wanted to be the person she believed me to be.

  “Okay,” I said, because it was all I could think of to say, and because I just wanted this confrontation to be over. I raised my eyes to look into hers. “Thank you.”

  She left without another word, and I wondered if she thought I was thanking her for not telling or thanking her for helping me see that I had to do the right thing. She was right, and I knew it. I was a grown-up. I had to stop, for my girls if nothing else. I stood in the yard for a long time after she left, figuring out how to do just that, watching as the lights in the houses around me went out, one by one.

  The next morning after Mark had gone to a coffee shop to hide behind his laptop screen and the girls were busy playing upstairs, I called Tom and was relieved when his voice mail picked up. Between Heather’s visit and the overwhelming guilt I felt, I knew what I had to do even if my heart wasn’t in it. I was worried that if I actually spoke to him, I wouldn’t say what I had to say. His voice made me weak, drove me to promise things I had no business promising. This promise wasn’t for me or for him. This promise was for my family.

  “I think that we both know the other night was a mistake,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry, but this just isn’t me. I’m not this person. And I know once there was something between us, but now … there just can’t be now.” I glanced around the kitchen and thought of him trying to pull me to him the night we had him and Betsy over, how happy I was just from his nearness. “I’m sorry,” I said into the phone and ended the call.

  Later I would tell Mark we needed to sell the house. He would agree because of our finances and his job loss. He would never suspect the real reason I wanted to get away. He might even congratulate me for being willing to sacrifice my house to save my family. He would never know what I was sacrificing. I wiped away tears and turned to face the rest of my life without Tom.

  Chapter 30

  Ariel

  I was in the kitchen, mixing up a batch of Justine’s play dough for the boys and trying to break my habit of watching Justine’s house for movement, when I looked up to see her standing on my deck, about to knock on the door.

  I let her in but did not look her in the eye. “Hey, Miss Justine,” Duncan said. He threw his arms around her legs and squeezed, but she barely noticed, absentmindedly patting him on the head as she made her way to the kitchen. Undeterred, he pressed on. “Where’s Cameron and Caroline? We want them to come over and do play dough with us.” He jumped around, the energy in his body escaping in short, contained bursts.

  “They’re home with their daddy,” Justine replied as she took a seat at our kitchen table. Her voice was flat, emotionless.

  Duncan tried unsuccessfully to snap his fingers. “Rats,” he said. “Will you tell them that we’ve got play dough here? ’Cept this time it’s blue. Not pink. But they can still play with it.”

  She looked at me as she answered. “Sure.” She sighed. “Hey, Duncan, can you let your mommy and me talk for a second?”

  He continued jumping around, adding the flourish of waving a gun in the air like a choreographed routine. “Dunc,” I said, my voice raising to be heard over the sound of his feet hitting the floor again and again.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Can you give Miss Justine and me a minute to talk? Go upstairs and see what your brothers are doing. Tell them play dough will be ready in a minute.”

  “Can we use your cookie cutters?” he countered before leaving. He needed something exciting to tell his brothers.

  I knew when I was beat. “Sure,” I said as he pumped his fist in the air and ran up the stairs, all thundering feet and movement, the Tasmanian Devil in motion, whirling up the stairs. I smiled at the sight of him.

  As I turned to face Justine, my smile faded. “What did you need to talk to me about?” I asked, as if my mind wasn’t on the same thing hers was.

  “I barely slept last night,” she said. “I needed to come over and clear the air between us.”

  Relief escaped from my lips in the form of a sigh. “I feel the same way.”

  “Listen. I should not have gone on to that other club. It was stupid. I put you at risk. I put myself at risk. I just got caught up in the moment. I felt young and daring and … not myself.” She gave me a wry smile. “I guess I just didn’t want to be myself, just for one night. Can you understand that?”

  I nodded. I did understand. The need for escape was exactly why I had gone on the trip in the first place.

  Justine continued, “The realities of the changes in my life caught up to me, and I dealt with it by acting crazy. I just hope you can forgive me. I’m not that woman you just spent the weekend with. I hope you know that.” She had voiced my previous rationalizations. Yet I wasn’t convinced.

  “But are you the woman I’ve spent the last several months getting to know either?” I asked, pushing my fear of going too deep with her aside. I stared at the grain of my hardwood floors, thinking how just six months ago I had actually believed the right floor, the right granite, the right house would bring me the right life.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” was all she said. She rolled her eyes. “Suddenly I’m learning that I don’t know who I am.”

  “Are you really going to get a job?”

  She looked away, out the window at her house. I wondered what she thought when she saw it from this vantage point. Did she see it as beautiful, as perfect, as I did? “I don’t know,” she said without looking back at me. “Maybe. Probably. We’ll probably sell the house.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. I like being your neighbor.”

  Her shoulders slumped forward. “Mark told me I had to get a job. He said he’s tired of doing all of this, that I am capable of helping. And we—” She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “We have too many bills to make it for very long.” She looked around the room, and I wondered what she saw—my attempts at order and decorating, or the many ways I still fell short? “I don’t expect you to understand. Things seem much … simpler … for you. You make it look easy.”

  “Me?” I gasped. “I make it look easy?”

  “Of course. David just took a great job,” she said. “You’ve been smart with your money. You told me that—how frugal David is, how he made you wait to buy this house till you could afford it, how you don’t have credit cards.”

  “But I was complaining,” I said, stunned at the turn of events.

  She didn’t miss a beat. “Maybe you shouldn’t complain,” she said.

  Our eyes locked. She blinked slowly and turned to leave. “I came to say I was sorry.”

  “Okay,” I said. Her hand was on the doorknob, her nails still polished a vixen red from the night at the beach, but the red nails no longer seemed to suit her. “I appreciate you coming by.”

  She shrugged. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Thanks for hearing me out.”

  I smiled. “That’s what friends do.” She tried to smile back, but her smile lacked its usual fervor. I watched her walk back to her house slowly and wondered what could’ve made her look so sad.

  Chapter 31

  Ariel

  When the phone rang, I was in the midst of making table centerpieces for the neighborhood Fourth of July party out of red, white, and blue colored sand. There were granules all over my counters and floors, a
nd so far the centerpieces didn’t look a thing like the pictures. “Why did I say I could do this?” I wondered aloud to no one.

  I reached for the phone, expecting it to be Kristy. We had been playing phone tag the last three days. The voice on the other end was female, but it wasn’t Kristy. “Is this Ariel Baxter?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said, walking over to clean up the sand from the counters and find a safe place to store the glass centerpieces.

  “Hi, Ariel, this is Betsy Dean. Tom’s wife?” She sounded as if she’d been crying. “I met you briefly at the pool, and I was …” She paused. “I was—well, it sounds silly to say since we don’t know each other—but I was at your birthday party. At the Millers’?”

  “Yes, of course, Betsy,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to get together with you!”

  “Me, too,” she said, but her voice did not carry the polite enthusiasm of mine.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” I asked.

  “Well, actually I had a question. You’re friends with Justine, right?”

  “Well, friends is a strong word, Betsy,” I said, thinking of the last conversation I had with Justine, the way she’d looked at me before she left.

  “Did you go to the beach with her for the weekend recently?”

  “Yes,” I said. My heart was hammering in my chest so loudly I wondered if she could hear it. I did not like where this was headed. She was asking me about something I wasn’t supposed to talk about.

  “Well, I just wondered if anything strange happened while you were there.”

  “Strange?” I asked. Where would I begin?

  “Yes. With Justine.”

  “Umm, no?” I lied.

  “Can you hang on a minute?” she asked.

  “Sure.” I listened as she covered up the phone and spoke, her voice muffled by her hand. Was Tom in the background? Her children? My heart beat wildly, and I wondered where this was leading. Stupid weekend. What had she heard? I wished for the hundredth time I hadn’t gone. I felt like I had wandered into a trap.