Part 1 (2/2)

Across the room, there was a bank of matching silver picture frames on a table that had been Mike's great-grandmother's - a happy blond couple on vacation in the Bahamas, at a Fourth of July barbecue, sitting in front of a Christmas tree. In each of them, I'm smiling blithely into the camera, secure in my position in a life where nothing could possibly go awry.

How could he cheat on me? Was Beebee his first ... was ”girlfriend” the right word? Had there been others? Did he even think about how this might make me feel, or was I even a consideration before he unzipped his pants? Was she better in bed than me? Did she know special tricks?

How dense could one person be? I didn't even bother asking about his Lions Club or Rotary meetings anymore. After hearing ”Oh, nothing new” so many times, I just a.s.sumed he wouldn't want to talk about them. I never questioned how many nights he was spending away from home. He came to our marriage bed with her stink on him. And I didn't see (or smell) any of it.

I was the stupidest woman on the planet.

I slipped off my wedding ring set and stared at the tasteful solitaire. My hand felt so light without that empty circle, that hideously appropriate symbol. I laid it on the nightstand and wondered if Mike would notice that I wasn't wearing it. Our wedding portrait had been sitting on the nightstand for so long, I'd almost forgotten it was there. For the first time in a long time, I looked, really looked, at the pretty blue-eyed girl in the white dress and the handsome man smiling down at her. She seemed so bright and full of promise. Capable, confident, just a smidge sa.s.sy. What the h.e.l.l happened to her?

I was someone in my own right before I married the Tax King of Hanmet County. I had plans. I was going to be a newspaper reporter. As my Gammy Muldoon always said, everybody has a story, the trick was finding a way to tell it that didn't bore the h.e.l.l out of people. (Gammy was a colorful woman.) I loved finding the story. And I was good at it. I even won a couple of minor awards writing for my college newspaper. Right after graduation I was supposed to take over a general a.s.signment position for the local newspaper, the Singletree Gazette. But I got so wrapped up in planning the wedding that I agreed when Mike and Mama suggested I should just wait until after we were married to start working at the paper. Daddy was an old golf buddy of Earl Montgomery, whose family had run the paper since 1890. Earl agreed to keep the reporting job open for me until after the honeymoon. And then we bought the house and Mike said we should finish moving before I started working. Moving became renovating, renovating became redecorating, and Earl finally told me that he'd had to fill the position while I was waiting for wallpaper samples to be s.h.i.+pped in from Tulsa. I was disappointed and embarra.s.sed, but I understood. And soon it didn't matter, because Mike's business took off and he finally admitted that he didn't want me to work because none of his friends' wives worked and it would be ”uncomfortable” for him.

So I stayed home. I never considered myself a homemaker because that always made me think of those scary ladies who organized the baking compet.i.tions for the county fair. I was Mike's at-home support. I joined clubs, women's organizations, charitable boards. I approached planning benefits and auctions like it was a career. My job was to live and breathe the image of a happy wife of a successful, capable accountant so that people would bring their finances and tax problems to said accountant. I worked full-time to make sure Mike's accounting firm seemed as prosperous and thriving as possible, even before it was prosperous and thriving.

At work, Mike was the ultimate go-getter, motivated and energetic, meticulous to a fault. But when he came home, he shut off. He honestly believed that because he paid the bills, I should have to handle all of the messy details of our life together. He just wanted to show up and be there - like when he used to live with his mama. I took care of booking Mike's dental appointments, vacation plans, shopping for gifts for his parents. Mike didn't want to get a pool or a dog because it was too much maintenance. He had halfheartedly broached the subject of having a baby, but seemed relieved when I put him off for reasons even I couldn't explain. This turned out to be a good thing as I would hate for our children to currently be witnessing Mommy's snot-coated, terry-cloth-wrapped breakdown.

What was especially ironic was that part of what had attracted me to Mike was his plans, this unrealized potential that I found adorable and anchoring. When we were in college, he would talk about traveling and seeing the world together, about the family we would raise. When we were married, he made promises about putting shelves in the garage or putting a rose bed in the backyard. Neither of those ever materialized. He was always going on about his boat, this little sixteen-foot wooden sailboat that he had been building for the last five years. When we were at parties or holidays or any gathering where there were more than two people, he waxed poetic about his connection to the water, how a man could only master a vessel he'd built himself, until I wanted to gouge my ears with a shrimp fork. He spent thousands of dollars on tools and materials, despite the fact that he'd never completed so much as a birdhouse. So far, he had the basic structure of the hull, which he'd a.s.sembled in the first year. He hadn't added anything to it since. So pardon me if I no longer believed his boat was going to be anything more than some sort of nautical dinosaur skeleton in his workshop.

Unless it related to the business, these things never seemed to get done if Mike was left to his own devices. In fact, even though it was for the business, Mike couldn't be bothered to write his monthly office newsletter. Every month I dutifully wrote it, laid it out on seasonal stationery, and trudged down to the bulk mail office to s.h.i.+p it to hundreds of Mike's family, friends, and clients. Part public relations, part brag sheet, part actual business correspondence, it was chock-full of vital information, such as ”Lacey is learning to crochet, badly. She's either making a tablecloth or a very large potholder.” For some reason, our friends and family seemed to love the fact that I made fun of myself while promoting Mike's firm.

I'd suggested that we switch to an electronic format to save paper and postage. I'd even gathered the vast majority of the recipients' e-mail addresses in a spreadsheet and loaded them into E-mail Expo, an online marketing service that allowed users to design ma.s.s messages using ready-made templates. It would have meant the difference between my spending two hours or two days every month on the newsletter. But Mike was afraid of alienating his older, less techno-savvy clients, so I just kept buying that stupid themed stationery. It became another thing I was expected to do to make Mike's life easier.

He loved the idea of the report. He loved the friendly personal touch with the clients and what it did for the business. He just didn't want to have to do it himself.

It was now 4:24 p.m. Mike was due home in an hour. I had a roast in the oven and it would dry out it if I didn't check on it in the next ten minutes. But the idea of getting out of bed was a mountain I was not prepared to climb.

”Get up,” I muttered to myself. ”Get up.”

But my limbs stayed where they were, leaden, tired, stubborn. Maybe I would lie here long enough to die and Mike would have to explain the soggy, woebegone corpse in his master suite.

After convincing myself that I didn't want to be found dead in my bathrobe, I crawled back into the shower, running it on cool to try to take the swelling down in my face. I looked into the little shatterproof shaving mirror and swiped at my eyes, which seemed to be a little less puffy. I didn't like having the mirror in our shower because the suction cups left weird little soap-sc.u.m circles on the gla.s.s door. But Mike insisted that his mornings would be much easier if he could just shave in the shower, so I'd spent the better part of an afternoon hunting down the best mirror I could find. Just like I'd spent countless afternoons doing countless stupid little errands because they were important to Mike. I'd wasted most of my twenties doing his stupid little errands.

Somewhere in my stomach, the tight, miserable little ball of tension bubbled to my lips in the form of: ”a.s.shole!” I screamed, yanking the mirror off the door and throwing it against the wall. ”How could you f.u.c.king do this to me, you miserable, d.i.c.kless piece of s.h.i.+t!”

I picked up the mirror again and brought it cras.h.i.+ng down on the floor, stomping on it, doing my best to break it. But the d.a.m.n thing was shatterproof. I was just making noise, empty, stupid pointless noise that no one would hear. I slid down the tile wall, collapsing in a heap on the floor.

I wasn't going to cry anymore. I was tired of making empty noise.

I blew a shallow breath through my teeth and pushed to my feet, putting my face under the cool spray. I wondered how close Mike was to the house. Was he actually coming home tonight or did he have another ”meeting”? Either way, I didn't want him to find me like this. I needed time, to think, to decide, to plan. I needed focus to keep myself from knocking him out the minute he walked through the door and supergluing his d.i.c.k to the wall.

”Get up, you giant cliche,” I said, my voice stern, cold. ”Get up. Get your a.s.s out of this shower and stop re-enacting scenes from every Lifetime movie ever made. Get up. Get up. Get up!”

I sat up, brus.h.i.+ng the wet, snaggled hair out of my face. ”Now brush your d.a.m.n teeth.”

I am an emotional person. It's one of the reasons Mike said I would never make a decent accountant. (That and needing a calculator to perform long division.) Mike was always in control of his emotions. Though, not apparently, in control of his p.e.n.i.s. He would not expect me to remain calm, cool, and unaffected in the face of his pantsless office hijinks.

So I got up, got dressed, and waited. I smiled when Mike managed to make it home for dinner and served him pot roast. I told him about my Junior League meeting that morning and acted like the problems we were having printing this year's charity cookbook were the biggest worries on my mind. And I slept beside him, having to concentrate hard to prevent myself from smothering him with the pillow.

It was the last thing he would see coming. The calm thing, I mean, not the smothering. Though he probably wouldn't see the pillow coming either.

In my weaker moments, I considered forgetting this whole thing and staying with him. For one thing, you can't discount eight years of history. My parents were very fond of him. My parents and his parents seemed to enjoy spending time together, a rare and precious coincidence that meant I never had to split my holidays. And Mike was safe. He was stable. Apart from the receptionist-s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g, he had been a decent husband to me. I didn't have to worry about bills being paid or him drinking too much or watching an alarming amount of SportsCenter.

We'd made a life together. It wasn't perfect, but I was proud of what we'd built. Even if he'd smashed it all to h.e.l.l by betraying the unspoken rule I thought we'd both agreed to - don't have s.e.x with other people.

And at other, angrier moments, I found my hands gripping the edge of the kitchen table as I stared at my husband. Mike had retained the blond, boyish good looks that had drawn me to him when we were seniors in high school. The sun-streaked sandy blond hair that curled just at the ends. The guileless brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. The little cleft in his chin that his mama called ”G.o.d's thumbprint.”

Mike was equally tense. He wouldn't look me in the eye. His knee was bouncing steadily under the table, a sure sign he was nervous about something. He didn't even complain about our dinner menu of blackened catfish and Mama's ”Light Your Fire” cheese grits. Mike hated spicy food with a pa.s.sion. He treated Taco Bell like exotic third-world cuisine.

I said I was trying to behave as normally as possible. I didn't say I was a saint.

Finally, he cleared his throat and asked, ”Honey, did Cherry Click stop by here with some flowers a few days ago?”

So that's why he was wound so tight, I mused. He'd been stewing for days, wondering where Beebee's anniversary flowers had ended up. ”No.” I said, concentrating on every muscle and nerve in my face to keep it a pleasant, blank mask. ”You sweet thing, did you order me flowers?”

He paled ever so slightly as he stammered, ”N - no, one of my clients lost his mama. I sent an arrangement, but I don't think it arrived at the funeral service in time.”

Well, that was a far more interesting lie than I would have previously given him credit for. I gave a breathy little gasp. ”Oh, no, whose mother died?”

I watched him squirm as he searched for the right answer. ”Oh, n.o.body you know,” he said, picking at his plate. ”It's a client over in Quincy.”

”Oh, well, it was so thoughtful of you to send something. I can call Cherry and double-check whether it arrived.”

”No! No, I'll take care of it,” he said, far too quickly.

”I don't mind,” I told him, willing my lips not to curve upward.

”It's okay, really. Don't worry about it,” he a.s.sured me.

”All right,” I said, shrugging blithely.

His shoulders relaxed and the tense little lines around his mouth disappeared. He was comfortable again, sure that I was still in the dark. My fingers gripped my fork, my teeth grinding ever so slightly as I imagined jabbing the tines right into his forehead.

”So, um, how's the old monthly report coming?” he asked around a mouthful of catfish. ”Remember, we have to get it out by next week. You only have a few days left to mail it out.”

I hadn't looked at it in a week. And somehow I just didn't think descriptions of Mike's golf game and repainting the office were going to cut it this month.

”It's fine,” I lied.

”Be sure to mention the condo. And call down to the office and talk to Beebee,” he added before downing half of his gla.s.s of water.

I dropped my fork. But considering my usual level of clumsiness, he didn't notice. ”What?”

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