by J.M. Thomas
that night, and she never again let him touch her.
Taps ended.
The sound of Edward’s car replaced it. Torture.
She climbed into bed.
Anne turned off the light, the last still burning in the house. She always made Edward come home to darkness and hoped the Ambien would take her from consciousness before her husband and his smell of cigarette smoke, scotch, and woman’s perfume assaulted her senses.
Her thoughts turned to how wonderful it would have been had she spent the night of June 5, 2014, putting out Frank’s dress blues for the next day. Anne kept the thought with her until the sleeping pill did its job.
D-Day
The women from the eight o’clock class at Forever Om Yoga walked en masse to the Starbucks across the square each morning. Chaz Perkins was there every morning, although there were times when she would substitute the session with a run along the lake. Yoga, runs, and walks with her two Golden Retrievers were never missed, regardless of the intensity of the hangover from the night before.
Margot Wallace waited in her Mercedes outside the coffee shop until she saw Chaz walking with her fellow yoga practitioners. Why she refused to go inside on her own remained a mystery to Chaz.
“Good morning,” Chaz said. She leaned in and gave Margot the customary kiss on the cheek. Due to the date on the calendar, she gave Margot a hug.
“How was your workout?”
They followed the rest of the women into the shop. These were the women who found unique ways of occupying their time while their husbands fought through traffic or read the Wall Street Journal on the train into the city to lord over their respective empires. It led to incredible amounts of money being spent on various athletic pursuits and thousands of hours contributed to volunteer efforts. It also kept the baristas happy with a full tip jar.
Chaz and Margot ordered their customary drinks, had their routine banter about the weather with Scarlett behind the cash register, claimed their drinks, and took their place at the table next to the window.
“Marty will be there tonight,” Chaz said. Margot hid her feeling of impatience. “Connie talked with him last night.”
“I don’t know. I might stay in.”
“Don’t be silly, Margot. All of us want you there—Marty included.”
Because Chaz was tone deaf when it came to interacting with even her closest friends, she missed Margot’s inability to keep her irritation concealed.
“I don’t know.”
“It might be Wilbur’s last party. Missing that would be perfectly dreadful.”
Does she even know what today’s date is, Margot thought. The rest of their conversation held little interest to Margot, due to the prevalence of Martin Brooks in her every thought. She wanted nothing to do with the party.
It took many years for Chaz Perkins to feel comfortable around millionaires with a husband who worked in industrial salvage since the age of eight. She did not believe her need to fit in unique to her or to her social circles, and because Chaz felt herself to be her own person, it took dedication to her therapy sessions to put her mind at ease when it came to her friends discussing their husbands’ conquering of whatever world they assaulted. Their men came home dressed in suits, while Conrad Perkins sometimes came home reeking of dirt, sweat, and the wisp of beer on his breath after sharing with his workmen the universal act of acknowledging a job well done. Conrad could float between the worlds of senior vice presidents and Latinos laboring to support enormous families at home and abroad. It took all Chaz’s therapist’s powers to help her understand the worth of what she had, without comparing herself to anything or anyone else.
Connie, other than being saddled with a woman’s name, was everything Chaz thought a woman would want in a man—loyal, chiseled face worn by time and weather just to the point of being extraordinary, witty, intelligent, and the finest evaluator of antiques and home décor in the metro area. Perkins and Son, Connie being the son and Perkins long since passed, was the destination for anyone looking to give character to a McMansion or an attempt at a period-correct restoration. His business was once featured on PBS, several professional athletes knew him by name, and by all measure he achieved the success in business and in life he set out to attain.
“You look fantastic,” the woman behind the counter said.
Kayla Van Der Meer had worked at the shop for eight years, and Kayla lived a life foreign to the other lives on the North Shore. She had a nose ring, she worked streaks of colors from the standard Crayola eight in her hair, she rode a Vespa even with snow on the ground, and she never apologized for who or what she was.
Chaz knew Kayla Van Der Meer was sweet on Connie. In a perverted way, Kayla’s adoration for Connie served as the litmus Chaz herself needed when doubt about her life or her husband sneaked into the corners of her mind.
Chaz knew no fear of infidelity from her husband toward Kayla, but Chaz could not stop herself from wanting the eclectic bookkeeper herself. Devotion to her husband, beyond reproach mentally and emotionally, could not prevent Chaz from tasting the sweetness of the only female employee of Perkins and Son every time opportunity presented itself. She was not sweet on Kayla, and none of their interactions outside the physical realm made Chaz interested in her toy as a person. Yet, she had no ability to satisfy the hunger to consume the younger woman’s form.
“Is Connie around?” Chaz said.
Kayla nodded toward the back room, through the racks of historic cornices, the boxes of vintage doorknobs, and the complete set of four bathroom stalls saved during the renovation of Union Station Downtown. The back room was Connie’s workshop. The stalls were forbidden to sell.
It disappointed Chaz, because with Connie in the shop, she would not be able to free Kayla’s breasts from her shirt. They were not enormous, but Kayla wore shirts tight enough to make it appear so. Chaz felt the pang of desire in her own nipples coupled with the disappointment that she would have to wait for another time.
“Thank you,” Chaz said.
She patted Kayla’s hand and closed her eyes to close off her vision and allow the touch to work its magic.
Her husband pored architectural spread across the drafting table he reclaimed from the downtown ad agency Chaz worked at after college when the agency determined it time to modernize its offices. Seeing him hunched over, wisps of chest hair now gray peeking from under his white shirt and a small bead of sweat tracing the strong line of his jaw, made her pine for the man in front of her. Marley can have her weasel chief marketing officer husband, she thought, because this man is my man.
Whenever she saw him as that, she felt the ache only his cock could ease. She liked men, she liked women, and through the years she had enough of both. Yet, only Connie could leave her feeling sated.
“How late will you be?” she said. He shook his head.
“With traffic?”
“The check and the address.” Kayla handed both to Connie, and Chaz watched and saw there was nothing between her husband and his employee other than their working relationship. Loyal to a fault, Chaz thought. “Jon said he would be a little late.”
“No. Conrad, send someone else. Come home now,” Chaz said. All three knew what “come home now” meant, and only Connie had the will power to refuse.
“Seven. I will be home by seven.”
For the next quarter hour, she feigned disappointment. She stuck out her lower lip, as she was known to do with him when she did not get her way, and gave him a long, wet kiss goodbye. Five minutes after his truck pulled away, Kayla locked the front door to the shop, and Chaz led her to the stalls unavailable to any customer no matter the price.
A dozen suits once occupied the other half of the closet. They were fine suits, some tailored; all were purchased at significant expense, and while few made notice of their quality, Michael Wallace felt confidence wash over himself when he put one on to go to work or a party. Margot thought them his armor, and as she was given to flights of notions, romantic and otherwise,
she would sometimes spot him through a crowd and squint just so and see the knight she fell in love with when they were undergraduates at Kent State.
Now there was one half of a closet that stood empty. The suits were gone, donated without so much as a receipt to claim the contribution on taxes to account for the thousands of dollars spent. Because Margot had those kinds of thoughts, she decided a closet bar without clothes is the loneliest thing in the world. Foolish. On the anniversary of D-Day, literally and figuratively, the romantic notions of her husband and their life together kept her distant from reality.
In that room in the walk-in closet, among the lingering smell of talcum powder years since removed, was nothing more than a small room, her own clothes, and a reminder Michael was gone with the absence of his suits. The rest of his clothes were gone too, along with the powder—all disappeared to prevent any of it reminding her of him and his death. She had moments of clarity when she realized seeing the empty spaces Michael and his things occupied was as damaging as seeing them.
Margot started buying sundresses Michael would never see her wear. She purchased them for the parties during the first summer after his death, and while she went from home to home and friend to friend, they all commented on how nice she looked. They all went to great lengths to help shoulder her, and with sincerity, a quality sometimes missing from her
