"That's... it's..."
"Not something you want to get into with some schmuck off the street," he said, but did so with a smile to ease the insult he hurled at himself. "So, you have a cook, I hear."
"She will happily cook for you. Just flash that smile at her."
"You don't want to join me?"
"I'm supposed to..."
"Ah, yes," he agreed, nodding. "Right. You want me to sneak you something, or are you holding out for your junk food haul later?"
"After years of carefully prepared, healthy, small-portioned meals, I am looking forward to eating a whole bag of potato chips."
"Totally understand. Go rest. Be a grieving widow. I'll go charm your kitchen staff."
He actually sent me a wink before swaggering off to do, I was sure, exactly as promised.
I let myself back into my bedroom, looking at the bed with distaste. The sheets still smelled like Teddy. Once the staff was gone for the day, I was going to strip the bed myself, wash everything, and put it all back on so no one suspected anything. I imagined a normal grieving woman would want her sheets to smell like her late husband.
As I sat there, flipping through endless options on TV - so many that I was having trouble zeroing in on anything, I wondered what would happen, what could happen the day I was finally free.
When Teddy's memorial was done. When the suspicion was off me. When the scrutiny was maybe gone.
Could I fire the staff?
Could I change the furniture?
The paint colors?
Could I give up the house as a whole? Claim that I couldn't stop seeing the 'worst night of my life' over and over.
People would understand that. No one would find it suspect.
Maybe I could get a little place of my own, fill it with things that I loved, make some money of my own. I was pretty sure that, eventually, our fortune could be mine. It likely wasn't the sum it looked like from the outside. I didn't have access to the books, just a Platinum card that I could use for basic things like gas, lunch or drinks at the club, just life things. I wasn't given a limit, but my life didn't allow for much spending. My world was small. My clothes were chosen for me.
If I had to place a guess, I would say our account - if my name was even on it, that is - had about maybe two. Three at most. Million, of course. And the girl who grew up in a house with wheels that was third-hand by the time my parents moved into it shocked back at that, but the woman who brushed shoulders with other wives who talked in hushed voices - though really wanted to be heard - about the five million they spent on a new yacht, the eight on a vacation home, knew that two was a fair sum, but not exorbitantly rich. If I lived a modest lifestyle of fifty-thousand - or less - a year, I could go forty years without even needing to work at all on that.
But that was assuming I got the money.
That wasn't factoring in things like paying for a new home - since I was pretty sure Bertram would never let me sell this place.
I would have to do something.
Hell, I would want to do something.
What, I had no idea.
I hadn't been given much time to think about my future before Teddy came in and steered it how he wanted.
I didn't get to think of college majors or even trade school types.
I just went from high school girl to socialite wife in a matter of months.
There was a knock at my door, snapping me out of my swirling thoughts, making my gaze move to the clock on the cable box.
How did it get to be evening already?
"Missus?" Maritza called, peeking her head in, taking in me in the bed. "Just wanted to let you know we were leaving. Lydia left some dinner on the stove in case you are hungry. I think Smith is relieving that pretty boy right now as well."
"Thank you, Maritza."
"Of course, missus. Get your rest. We hope you'll be feeling better in the morning."
Feeling better.
What an odd thing to say.
But she was gone.
And I wasn't really the type to question her anyway. Too many years. Too much training. My tongue didn't know how to find accusatory words.
I took a moment to check my face and hair in the bathroom, choosing not to think about why I was doing so, then made my way down the stairs to find Smith already standing in the kitchen, lifting the lid off whatever was on the stove.
"What is it?" I asked, watching as he half-turned his head toward me.
"Inedible," he decided, making an unexpected laugh/snort escape me.
"That sounds about right."
"How do people get paid to steam three sprigs of asparagus and boil a pathetic piece of chicken, drizzle it with some yellow crap on it, and call it a meal?"
"It was Teddy's instructions. To, ah, keep me thin," I admitted, not knowing why I was unloading on him when I had kept it all to myself for so many years.
"You're shitting me." He almost seemed, I don't know, outraged. For me.
"there were... many rules about our marriage."
"For you," he specified.
"Yes, for me."
"Did he force you onto a scale every week or some shit?"
"Not every week. Only when he suspected I was getting bigger."
"Jesus Christ. And if you did. Get bigger," he clarified. "What then? Did he force you to go on a hunger strike?"
"He gave me a week to get back to where I was."
"Or?"
"I never failed," I admitted, feeling almost ashamed of myself. For never having a spine enough to say no. Enough guts to form a rebellion.
"Jenny..." he started, then trailed off, shaking his head. "You deserve every bit of this," he said instead of whatever he was going to originally, waving a hand to the counter behind him where half a dozen reusable bags were situated.
Reusable bags.
Smith was the kind of man who kept reusable bags in his car for impromptu shopping trips. That was... an interesting little fact to learn.
I found it charming.
"I got everything you requested. And more."
"I want to toss this, but it would probably be good for the staff to think you're simply not eating. You can stash some of the junk in the guest room with me."
"Sounds like a plan," I agreed, moving over toward the bags, slowly taking the contents out, spreading them over the counter.
Chips - plain, sour cream & onion, Fritos, Doritos. More candy bars. Sweets - Devil Dogs, Yodels, Twinkies.
"I haven't had a Twinkie since... I was maybe fifteen."
"You're overdue then," he said with a genuine smile as he took the box, ripping the end open, and handing me a spongy yellow cake in a crinkly wrapper.
"Do you eat like this?"
"On a day-to-day basis?" he asked, reaching for a Twinkie himself. Not, I didn't think, because he actually had a sudden craving, but because he wanted me to feel more comfortable eating one. "No. Many nights, we order in at the office. Otherwise, I will throw something together."
"Like... cook? Or make a sandwich?"
"Either."
"I never learned."
"To cook?" he clarified.
"Yeah. My parents' idea of cooking was to take something from a can and throw it into a microwave. And I went right from them to," I stopped, waving a hand out.
"It's a good skill to have. It's nice to be able to depend on yourself. You can learn eventually."
"Did you hear anything today?"
"I watched the senator's press conference. Did you catch it?"
"No. Should I have?"
"I think it's best you avoid the news as a whole right now. But the Cliffs-notes is - he is using this to push a more strict sentencing for violent criminals, more use of capital punishment, stronger rights to use Castle Law."
"He's using his son's death as a political angle." It was half a question, half a declaration.
"Yeah. He's a prince among men. The other news cycles are just saying it's a tragedy, the man is still on the run, nothi
ng to worry about. I think they are going to take away the rent-a-cop tomorrow. You might want to prepare yourself for visitors now. Your social circle will want to get inside here."
"The curiosity is morbid."
"Yes. And predictable," he agreed. "Your best bet is to just... get teary-eyed if they press. The less you repeat things, the better. You want to make sure nothing ever changes. You remember that game in elementary school where one person repeats a phrase to another, then the other to the next, so on and so forth until the end where the sentence didn't even resemble the original one. You don't need it getting around that Sandy Silverspoon said she has it on good, personal information that you said that the man had blue eyes or some shit, and some innocent guy gets locked up."
"Right," I agreed, nodding as the Twinkie in my mouth started to melt without any actual chewing on my part. "Keep things vague."
"Except with the cops, yes. Vague is best. And if anyone is particularly pushy, go ahead and be dramatic. Go to stand and get faint. Start getting upset. Any excuse for the staff to step in and shoo the guests out. Which they will be happy to do because they want to seem important right now."
"I wish we could keep them out a while longer. I mean, not to sound whiny. Poor little rich girl, right?"
"I think we both know that you don't fit that trope. That this lifestyle has cost you dearly. I don't envy you having to deal with these people. But one visit where they get nothing will be enough to discourage them from coming back again. They will just walk away with a 'Poor Jenny' story and move on to the next scandal. I can't imagine they are hard to find from the amount of business we get from this town. What?"
"You don't think any of these women will be contacts you've worked with before, do you? People who might know what Quinton Baird & Associates really does?"
His uncertain face didn't exactly inspire confidence.
"To be safe, when the bell rings, I will make myself scarce, but keep an eye. If no faces are familiar, if you want, I can show myself. Or if you want to handle this all yourself, that is fine too. I will just stay within earshot in case anyone won't take a hint. I can always invent some kind of emergency. Just don't drop our name. Say you hired a Mr. Smith and be done with it. I doubt they'd press beyond that."
That was true.
As a whole, the women in my circle would never be called the brightest bulbs. They were sly, gossipy, and vapid, pretending their charitable works were anything other than social gatherings to promote themselves as such good people.
There were maybe two women in the whole of Navesink Bank's upper crust that I thought were genuine. One was somewhat shunned by everyone else because while she was very successful, she married a tattoo artist. The other was single. And, for some reason, that was a problem for the rest of the women.
Maybe they thought she'd steal their husbands. Of all the ridiculous notions. If she had a fortune of her own, why on Earth would she try to steal someone else's husband? That was what destitute, desperate women did. Hell, there were rumors going around that at least two of the ladies got their husbands that very way.
Young and pretty was a commodity.
Young, pretty, and independent, that didn't compute.
I wondered if I would be viewed differently because of my singleness. Or were widows different? Was I not young enough to be a threat anymore?
Ugh, why did it even matter?
I had no plans on ever marrying again, ever giving even a small chunk of my life over to anyone else ever again.
I just wanted a nice, quiet life of my own.
"So, are you going to show me?"
"To your room? I'm a terrible host," I said, knee-jerk, ingrained.
"Jenny, no," he said, shaking his head almost sadly. "I know where the guest room is. And you don't need to act like a host around me. I can find my way around, make my own coffee. I'm staff, for all intents and purposes. I meant are you going to show me the clay jewelry?"
"You don't have to pretend to be interested. I really appreciate you doing it, but..."
"I wouldn't bring it up if I wasn't interested, sweetheart. I'm curious."
"Okay. Then, yeah," I said, smiling because it meant more than maybe it should have that he was interested at all. In this tiny little thing that was mine and mine alone. "Let's go then."
"Bring it," he said when I went to put down the bag of chips and Coke I had just reached for.
I didn't, tea aside, eat in the other rooms of the house. I had this former-poor-girl-guilt about making anyone do any extra clean up because of me.
But just this once, I guess I could make an exception. I grabbed the sour cream & onion and coke and led him upstairs, down the hall opposite the one that would lead to the master suite, and into the little, girly guest room with a full-size bed covered in all white, a delicate, gently curved white nightstand, and a coral pink armchair where I would often sit in the room with walls that were barely, just barely pink. If you pulled back the comforter, you'd find that the white sheets had a sweet little pink peony pattern on it.
"How do you do crafts in here?" he asked, looking at the plush off-white carpet, the lack of empty surfaces.
I walked over to the closet, sliding the doors open, revealing a mostly empty space save for the two plastic containers in one corner, a small row of decorative pink boxes on a top shelf, and an oversized fold-up table meant for doing puzzles.
"So, every time you want to work on something, you have to drag everything out? In a house this big, you couldn't just have one room all to yourself to have a few worktables and organization?"
"It sounds reasonable to ask that, but I wasn't even allowed to keep an African Violet I picked up at a store. How would he explain to his friends that his wife enjoyed making silly little clay earrings?" I asked, taking out one of the decorative boxes. All of them were almost full of finished products. The plastic containers were for supplies.
I reached for the table, but Smith was there before I was, pulling it out, opening it up for me to place the box down.
I did, then opened the lid, then took a step back, trying desperately to gauge his reaction to the contents.
Everything was carefully organized - each set of earrings stuck through holes in little pieces of cardboard squares that closely resembled the kind that I used to see in department stores back when it was acceptable for me to shop in them.
"Are these pig noses?" he asked, reaching for a set of studs with pink sideways ovals with nostrils.
"Ah, yeah," I said, feeling my cheeks heat, my pulse quicken, suddenly feeling very foolish to have ever found a sense of pride in my silly tinkering.
"Can I buy these off of you?" he asked, and I was pretty sure I blacked out from utter shock for a second. "Jenny?" he asked when I didn't answer.
"You want to buy the pig studs?"
"Miller... she works at the office. She likes pigs. Has a little collection of statues of them. She'd dig these. I can sock them away for her birthday."
My heart, beaten down for years into a shape unrecognizable, deflated from being pricked so many times, swelled, found its true form again.
Did he really think they were good enough to actually pay for? Could other people maybe feel the same?
"Take them," I told him, giving him a grateful smile. "I have so many boxes of them."
"These are great," he said, reaching for a different pair of studs - a set of succulents that took hours to get just right the first time I tried to make a set. "They almost look real. Have you ever thought of selling them? Stupid question," he said, shaking his head at himself. "If you couldn't have a plant or gain a pound, I doubt you'd have been allowed to open a shop on that website. With all the craft shit..."
"Etsy," I clarified.
"Yeah, that one. You could do something with these instead of hoarding them in boxes. Get a good camera, take some pictures, upload them. What the fuck, y'know? You never know."
He made it sound so possible.
And, well, may
be it was.
I mean, not right now. Not this soon. That wouldn't look right - the widow who suddenly opened a business a day or two after her husband was killed.
But in a few weeks... a few months. Claim to others that it was a way to keep my mind occupied, that it felt good to be productive. It could work. Even if my so-called socialite friends would totally look down on jewelry that didn't sparkle and come in a little green-blue box.
But who cared what they thought?
"Maybe I will give that a try," I said, feeling like it was only real if it was heard by someone else. "You know, after things calm down around here."
"I think that would be really good for you. Get something of your own going. And you can totally turn this room - or any other room - into a genuine workspace if you want to," he reminded me, like he knew I needed the reminder, that I had been so trained over the years that it didn't even occur to me that I could make changes, that I could take the reins.
"If I stay here," I said, tucking the rest of the earrings away, putting them back in the closet on their shelf, promising myself it wasn't for forever, that I would find Teddy's good camera, take pictures, open an Etsy shop, at least try. Even if I failed. Failing at something I did totally for me was better, I believed, than winning at things that meant nothing.
"You'd like to leave?"
"I know. It's a beautiful house. It's just... I can't think of a single happy memory here," I admitted, looking down at my feet.
"Would you stay in the area?"
"I like Navesink Bank," I admitted. "But I think I would move, um, closer..."
"You mean out of the uber-rich neighborhood," he guessed with a twinkle in his eyes - more green in this room. Each room was different. I really shouldn't have been noticing things like that.
"Yeah. Somewhere smaller. Where I wouldn't need a staff to upkeep it. Can put up colored Christmas lights. With tinsel."
"Do they even sell tinsel anymore?" Smith asked, but his eyes were dancing, amused by my vision, the girl in her mansion wanting to move to a little house and fill it with gaudy silver strips of... I didn't even know what.
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