Monday's Lie (11 page)

•  •  •

Patrick had just recently given up with his fascination with Deirdre, the girl at the coffee counter. He started buying his brew elsewhere, and I cleared his name as best I could with Simon. I'd forgiven Patrick without his asking, or indeed without his knowing, and was satisfied in my nobility, if not in our harmony.

Then Uncle Paul showed up unannounced one night after ten o'clock, soaked to the skin with a chill November rain. We hadn't seen him in a long time, not since my mother's funeral more than three years before, and it was hardly anything I'd peg as a welcomed intrusion.

“Sorry to drop in so late without calling,” he said.

“I'm sure.” I helped him drag the soggy coat off his shoulders. Paul had never got all the way to fat with age, but he had gone a bit walrusy in the shoulders, now heavy and rounded, somehow without losing height. He was always taller in person than he was in my memory. His hair and his mustache he'd let go a bit longer than he used to, lengthening his face to a slightly more glum version of himself. They were shot through with silver now.

“Where's my candy?” I demanded.

“God, you looked just like her when you said that.” His smoker's laugh had grown thicker in the intervening years. Everyone in Paul's orbit smoked, even as it fell out of fashion.

“You couldn't see me. I was behind you.”

“I can see with my ears as good as you can, Dee. And feel with my eyes, and hear with my fingers. Your mother learned her games from somewhere, you know.”

“What can I do for you, Paul?” Any sort of banter with him was just land mines in the field of my relative tranquillity.

Paul sat Patrick and me down in our own living room and told us that we had a little money now. My mother had socked away savings for decades in a hidden, numbered offshore account. She had willed it to me and Simon in the event of her death, via Paul's administration over a lawyer's or accountant's. It had taken him, or more likely Them, a long while to secure the legitimacy of the funds and to follow the paper trail to a point of reassurance for everyone. But of course she'd done it right. Every
i
was dotted with visible ink and each
t
crossed with a verified flourish. The timing, though, stung.

I said, “Yeah, you know, this would have been really helpful last year. We had a pretty tight time and had to dip into the retirement funds to get by.” I didn't offer Paul another beer even though his empty bottle had been sitting on the table since just after the pleasantries.

“Don't imagine I didn't think about that, Dee. Times are tight for everyone. I know how it is when you're counting on bonus money that doesn't come in. It can be a real bitch to the bottom line, not to mention the nerves. But at least you two kept your jobs. I just couldn't bring this up until we'd checked it all out. Money is gasoline and curiosity is matches.”

I didn't ask him how he knew about our circumstances, and Patrick hadn't seemed to notice. Before any of our other troubles, my mother's death had wounded my husband. Our lack of a baby for all his reading up on it had frustrated him, then the added insult of canceled bonuses in the face of economic downturn, and the slowly mounting money shortage, had all stacked up to humiliate him more than he'd say out loud.

All these things he'd borne in blaring silence, his blood pressure playing ruddy in his skin. I had tried to see his playfulness with Deirdre as a bleeder valve for his frustration. The mortgage on his home and his childless wife were reminders of all that wasn't going well at the moment. His little side bank account bothered me more for its fundamental weight. If it was a petty-cash fund, it was uncalled for. I didn't hassle him about spending. But if that money was the bare ribs of a lifeboat in the making, well . . .

I would have waited it out for the chance to talk these things through, but first of all I would have had to craft a work-around to explain how I knew about them in the first place. In the midst of that puzzle came the reveal of my little birth control stunt, which had done nothing positive for his mood. The only upside to it was that I'd been relieved of the need to straighten out the rest of the mess. So instead, I waived off the balance as a wash and set my eyes on the horizon. I tried to make a blank slate of it.

After a short swell of renewal, his temper had been riding an increasingly short fuse and his patience was a heavy burden he'd shrug off at our doormat, leaving me to tiptoe around his delicate sensibilities. He'd stopped bringing up the subject of babies altogether, and I wouldn't stoop to using it as a shortcut to sunnier conversations.

Paul had unwittingly rolled up just in time to miss the smoke end of the evening's fireworks. Dinner had ended with me scrambling for a way back from a long drop into an unfathomable argument.

“Want me to get his number for you?” Patrick had wiped the corners of his mouth on his napkin. The globed candles that used to light the tables of our favorite local restaurant had been replaced by battery votives that pretended to live like their flamed counterparts. The effect was almost the same until you caught the repetition in the flicker pattern.

Patrick was lit from below in the too-dark restaurant. He looked unfriendly, sinister even, all sharp jaw and glinty sparks where his eyes watched from deep caves of brow shadow. Historically, he'd never been the jealous type.

“Huh?” I said.

“The waiter. I can ask him for his number if you're too shy.”

“Pat, what are you talking about?”

“You're tracking that guy all over the room. He's a little young for you, don't you think?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Yeah, I'm imagining it.” Patrick was simmering down from insult to pout. His complaint had lost momentum as soon as it was out loud in the air between us. It was ridiculous.

“Actually, I
was
just looking at him. I think he looks like Simon did when he was that age. I mean, if he had curly hair. Don't you think so?”

“Okay, that's not a little bit creepy.”

“What? Ew. Don't do that. You're the one saying I have motives, so I'm explaining myself. I'm just trying to catch a look at him in the light. It's so damned dark in here. C'mon, Pat.”

The money my mother had left us—almost $500,000, after the taxes were paid—was a balm to some of his hurts, but his moods still blinked off and on, not unlike the votives at our restaurant. I just hadn't picked up on the pattern yet. For certain, I saw him brighter in the brights and more grim in his lows, so I tread carefully, picking my way past his rise and fall, aiming for our old level ground. I reserved the right to hope the money would help us in more than just the finances.

Breathing room isn't the same thing as happiness, but money can surely buy it.

•  •  •

What goes up, though, swings back the other way eventually. And sometimes “eventually” doesn't take all that long to pounce. You've barely said your thank-yous for a little slice of good fortune and the rug's back out from under you before you've got even a quick feel of the nap of it between your toes.

We'd not taken in three of the plumper bank statements when the text came in from a number I didn't recognize.
Mrs. Aldrich—I need to speak to you.

•  •  •

Of everything I ever resented about the way I was raised, the most persistent was the ghost of constant alert, the fixed cowering under a subtle pall of anticipation. From my mother's return from the Long Trip onward, it felt as if I never fully exhaled. Something was coming. Something could happen at any moment. Wait for it. Be ready.

Of everything that ever bewildered me about my mother, her warm acceptance of inevitability was the oddest. She embraced it. She wanted it. Let it be bad, but if it was a sure thing, she liked it better than a “maybe.”

As sure as lies in church, baby girl.
None of her adages purred out quite like that one. She reveled in announcing a certainty. Whether it was good news or bad, it was the starting gun to getting things done. And my mother was all about the getting done of things.

So it wasn't exactly surprise that burned through me as I read the text. It's hard to claim astonishment when you are forever poised for the jolt.

Who is this?
I responded.

Rather talk in person. Meet me?

Last chance before I block this number,
I typed with trembling fingers.

The trouble with pervasive, nonspecific alarm is that I never knew what or whom I was waiting for. Could be a winning sweepstakes notification, or it could be Dr. No.

As it happened, it was a woman named Angela.

•  •  •

My mother was not a dramatist even though dramatic things occasionally happened. Anything accomplished in preparation—for ant bites or apocalypse—was considered worthy. But in me, the call to readiness cultivated a certain yearning for the worst, if only to justify the constant fighting stance that quivered just under my skin.

This wasn't the worst.

I'd have guessed it would have hurt more. But instead, I was mortified, not devastated, to hear what she had to say. Hot tides of loathing pulled me back and forth while she yammered into my ear. But it was the wrong brand of reaction. I wanted
not
to know that my husband had been making ridiculous promises with his head buried in a stripper's cleavage more than I wanted for it not to have happened.

Angela kept me on the phone for forty-five minutes until I made myself burst into the tears she wasn't going to hang up without. She was furious with Patrick. I endured her biting, rambling rant and found, against a good percentage of my will, the tawdry little story tucked away in there between the lines.

He'd flirted when she served him lunch, outright hit on her when she brought the check, then called her up when she'd left her number on the receipt. He'd gone to see her at her other job—the less dressed and more lucrative one. He'd monopolized her time and teased extra attention out of her with big talk of bigger tips to be had in some vague, flush future. She'd stoked his bluff with nearly naked grind.

It must have been a spontaneous dare he'd made to himself. Patrick wasn't that brand of bold, and then he'd gone and underestimated a woman who was. She wasn't the sort of person you wind up, then brush aside. I couldn't imagine how he'd misevaluated Angela, because I could tell just by listening to her on the telephone that she was a semiprofessional pain in the ass.

If wallowing in drama is someone's favorite pastime, it's nearly impossible to disguise it. I didn't understand how he could not have seen that. But in a certain mood, these rocket-propelled people can be invigorating. When that frame of mind meets an unguarded opportunity, just the mere whiff of you-only-live-once whets a craving that's hard to resist.

Poor Patrick. He had certainly been towing a dark cloud over his head for a long while. He'd run right past the invigorating return of a good mood, straight past giddy, and headlong into insanity. Then, predictably, he'd come to his senses.

I wanted to stop her. More than that, I wanted to call her names. Not for being a stripper. A decent body and a bossy wiggle can be for sale and I'd have nothing to say about it. But she was low and stupid to bring me into this, to weigh me down with the details—as if she had the right to make a triangle out of the painful part of her job. I could feel my cheeks glowing, scalding with humiliation for having to hear Angela complaining to me of all people. Still, in the embarrassment I felt for Patrick, I burned with an extra dose of heat. Some strange shame brought me low for pitying Patrick in this moment.

He had called her after he stopped showing up as promised, wedging in some distance from the boasts he'd made, as she put it, “blowing smoke up my ass,” but then he had switched off completely, soon afterward, pouring regret into her ear during a final good-bye on the telephone, saying he wouldn't be visiting the club again.

She'd spent money on his beery forecasting, too much money, and now found herself in the red. By her math, she'd sold him the inspiration for fantasies on credit. And the bill was due. Angela warned him against ignoring her over a barrage of unanswered calls and texts. Ferreting out my number and drawing me into the soap opera was her punishment for his disregard. But my sympathies didn't exactly nestle down where she'd expected them to.

“I just thought you should know, Mrs. Aldrich,” she said, making
Mrs.
sound underlined and bold-typed.

That put the hard brakes on my conjured tears. I sniffed once and cleared my throat. “Really? Except that if he
had
come back like you told him to, then you wouldn't have called me because then I
shouldn't
know?”

“What?”

“I'm just trying to follow the conversation here. You're mad that he didn't do as you ordered him to do, so you called me and tried to blow up his life. What would you have done if he had obeyed you?”

“Excuse me?” Angela's scorn resparked brightly.

“It just seems like this whole call is a lot less about you thinking I should know what my husband is up to, than it is about you burning Patrick because you feel that he's crossed you.”

“Don't you put this on me. Your sack-of-shit husband is the one you need to be talking to.”

“Right.”

“So what are you gonna do?” she demanded.

I sighed. “I don't know. Get tested for crabs?”

Inarticulate fury wrung a few strangled clucks down the line.

“Look, Angela, I don't know what you want me to say. Presumably you're not waiting for a ‘Thank you.' If you want to know that I'm upset, I can at least offer you that. I'm upset, okay?”

“But what are you gonna
do
?” she shouted.