Monday's Lie (14 page)

Undeterred, I resorted to forced tears to persuade the convenience-store owner to check the camera, only to find to his surprise, but eerily not mine, that it had suffered a fatal malfunction on the afternoon of the incident and that it hadn't worked ever since.

•  •  •

If my mother was ever followed while we were with her, I never knew about it. She wouldn't have made a game of it, anyway. There's no entertaining spin to put on a chase. I don't know that even she, with all her confidence and infinite stock of truisms, could have given me a mental talisman against the burn of being prey. Tag was always my least favorite school-yard game. Nothing stripped me of all cleverness, grace, and every coherent thought in my head like being hunted. Not even for fun. I heard the delighted squeals of the other children on the playground, but between my own ears was always loud white panic and little else. When the game was done, I kept my face turned from the group until I could tame my wild eyes and coax back my happy mask, showing that I knew, just like everyone else did, that it was only a game.

I checked the rearview mirror again. I was being dramatic. Angela's fire raid on our cell phones coming right on the heels of having seen Brian Menary at the mall and the dustup at the yoga studio had put me on buzzing alert for days. This was surely still part of that hangover. It had to be. The blue sedan I saw now looked very much like the one that had been outside my house that morning the week before. (Then I'd seen it again three rows over in the supermarket parking lot the very next day.) But it was a common enough model, and like getting a new one myself, as soon as any particular car imprinted on my attention, I saw it everywhere.

The other drivers in their not-blue-sedans rolled past me as I plied the brakes. The rest of the cars behaved just as they should have, their images sliding predictably into my mirrors when I ran down the gas pedal. But not this guy. I towed this single blue car as if it were on a peculiar hitch, fifty feet long and one lane crooked. I had just made up my mind to draw him out with a more decisive maneuver, zooming into the clear road ahead, when my nemesis (or probably just fellow commuter) ticked on his turn signal and banked innocently out of sight on the exit ramp.

The steering wheel showed the damp ghost of my grip, and the air wicked it away once I peeled my hands off their ten-and-two position to scan the radio channels for something better than the noise in my head.

•  •  •

The thing about the truth is that if it is any way complicated, it's slow. It gets weighed down with reasons and other people's agendas. I could smell Paul's brimstone wafting through my life. He wanted something from me, or maybe from Patrick. Poor Patrick. Paul would eat his lunch. It made sense. He had turned so nasty, so quickly. No wonder he was all wound up. If Paul knew what I knew about Patrick's finances and misbehavior, he'd have put Patrick on strings, pulled my husband any way Paul wanted him pulled.

The decision to use a lie as a shovel was easy enough. If Paul's people were nosing around my home in blue cars, buzzing my commute, and staging burglaries for a chance to paw through my purse when they weren't chatting up my husband right under my nose, Paul would never tell me anyway. No matter how hard I strained at the cleverness to drag a little information from him, I'd never get anywhere by asking him directly. Paul Rowland was more than a bit beyond me when I was armed with nothing but suspicion and a sliver of truth. I'd just have to go at it sideways.

Confronting Patrick would be unnecessarily stressful for the both of us, and if I was wrong about the whole thing, it would be pointlessly embarrassing, too. We certainly didn't need any setbacks in our timid dance over the floor of eggshells.

I followed the bouncing ball: Paul gave us some access to a reasonably large amount of money, and within two weeks I didn't recognize my own stream of consciousness. My hands tingled in the afterglow of paranoid blooms of adrenaline. And I knew everything had got away from me when I poured the sugar on the saucer and tossed its paper packet into my afternoon coffee out of pure distraction. The sight of the white paper twisting through the spoon-swirled wake in my cup pushed my resolve into the passing lane in my mind. Enough. No more cruising along behind this nonsense.

The money was probably the button to press that would summon either the blue sedan or the man who took my mother away from me on that night so long ago. What I'd do with either of those things once I'd got one of them on my hook was a guess best made on the spot.

So, to rattle loose a clue, I transferred $10,000 of the available balance of my mother's fund into Patrick's and my regular checking account at the bank, and after the form was signed and the keyboard was tapped, I made a detailed conversation with the manager, for the benefit of anyone possibly listening, out of what it would take, penalty-and-timeline-wise, to liquidate the entire account.

Then I had some lunch.

As the cherry on top of my performance, I treated myself to what every woman who is readying herself to bolt into the anonymous wild needs. I'd been wanting new luggage anyway, so there was no need for a lie, but the drive to the nearest department store later in the day didn't draw a blue sedan or any other obvious tail. I didn't note anyone overly interested in my show of struggling to load the new bags into the car either.

Back in my office, feeling somehow both foolish and disappointed, I thought I'd welcome the distraction of a phone call. That was until, of course, the phone rang.

“Dee, why did you move ten thousand dollars?”

“Oh, hey! Patrick, you're going to spoil my surprise.” The revving lie leapt out of my mouth with a speed that startled me. I hadn't intended to leave the money out of the savings for longer than it took the withdrawal to play the dangling carrot to anyone who might be watching the account or my activity. And I certainly wasn't planning on leaving it out for long enough to have Patrick worry about it. I had thought I had plenty of time to decide how to explain it away as an accident or an oversight. The day-to-day finances were nearly a hobby of his, but I figured I should have had at least until the statement arrived.

“I just thought we could pay off a few bills,” I said—no stammer, all dexterity. Two points for me. “And then treat ourselves—clear our heads, you know, to kind of blow out the blues and start fresh. We need it. We could relax and celebrate that we've finally got a little breathing room. Like a getaway. I was thinking a spa weekend? I mean, that's what I had in mind. But, if you'd like to do something else . . .”

“You know what I'd like?” I braced for the answer I could hear he had cocked and ready. “I'd like for you to let me know when you get the urge to play around with five-figure sums before I hear about it on the automated teller. That's what I'd like.”

“Come on. Don't be like that. There's really no reason for you to get all pissed off about this.”

“Why? Because it's your money and you can do with it whatever you damned well please?”

“Good God, Pat! That's not what I meant. Where did that come from?”

“You make decisions about our lives without me, Dee. You do it like I don't even get a vote. It's like I don't even exist. I hope you don't insult me by pretending you can't think of any reason I might feel this way.”

I left it quiet, poised between a guilty angel at one ear and a devil tap dancing for attention on the other shoulder, squeezing a handful of hateful truths to justify a nasty argument.

Patrick's anger rolled through the gap in the conversation. “Don't you dare act like I'm coming out of nowhere with this.”

“I didn't say anything, Pat.”

“Well, you
need
to say something. Or would you like me to cite a recent example of why I might be just a little touchy on the topic of you doing stuff behind my back?”

“First of all, I didn't do anything behind your—”

“No? I don't remember talking about us dipping into that money to
pay off a few bills
. I dunno, maybe your head was under the bathroom sink when you mentioned it.”

“Stop it. What are you doing? We've talked about this. And things have been good. I thought we'd made some progress after the whole Angel—”

“I swear to God, Dee, do not go there. No matter how hard you try to make it so, this is not a balance sheet where one mistake on my part—one mistake that I stopped on my own, I'd like to point out—makes up for a years-long scam you pulled on me until you got caught. You can't say you forgive me if you're going to keep trotting this out, because that doesn't feel like forgiveness. It feels like leverage, kinda like it did from the start.”

“Keep trotting it out? First of all, I don't
keep trotting it out
, and second, that works both ways, Pat. And I've apologized a hundred times.” I checked my tone, not that I wasn't furious, but because I wanted to be able to end the call with something other than his hanging up on me. “I thought we were getting past it.”

“I thought we were getting past it, too, until you pulled this stunt.”

“It wasn't a stunt.” Not in the sense Patrick meant it, anyway. “I'll put the money back.”

“No. Don't bother. Go ahead and pay off the bills. But I don't want to go anywhere this weekend.”

“Okay.”

A graceless exit would put us out of speaking terms for at least the rest of the day. I ransacked the script in my head for the best and the kindest parting line and hated myself for the bad habit. I didn't get there fast enough.

“Look, don't worry about it.” Patrick sighed into the phone, a disgusted, exhausted sound that rolled into my ear with a hard thud that promised to leave me with a headache later. I shoved down the urge to hang up the call and skip the fizzling end of this pitiful conversation.

“Sorry I snapped,” he said. “I'm just tired. I'm stressed-out. It'll be fine. It
is
fine. I'll see you at home.”

“Pat, I'm—”

“I might be a little late, so go ahead and eat. See you later, okay?” And he was gone.

O
nce
upon a time . . .

I texted my brother in our shorthand. Our mother had started all of her adventure stories like that, but over the years
once upon a time
had come to mean a summons to the pub over on Carver Street. When the phrase was hers, she would toss it into a lull in the conversation at the dinner table by way of encouragement for us to tell her about what sort of day we'd had. For Simon and me, though, our tales had always been tamer than hers by a mile. He had kept the little intro alive more than I had, made it his own, and
once upon a time
between us was now just an invitation to buy each other an equal number of drinks instead of simply splitting the check down the middle as would make better sense.

I can be there by 6,
he wrote back.

I'll save you a seat,
I typed.

Simon tugged my hair twice, and I looked up from the newsfeed I'd been scrolling through on my phone, checking the headlines and looking at the pictures, but not reading the articles.

“Hey,” he said as he took the barstool next to mine.

“Hey, yourself.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I'm just on my own for dinner and I didn't feel like being all by myself.”

“It doesn't look like you feel like having dinner, either. That's just french fries.”

“And they're really good.” I nudged the plate toward him.

The conversation slid through the slots and chutes of what was new in only the most surface of ways: what books we'd read, and what movies we'd seen, who was an asshole at work.

“Hey, now I'm going to get nosy,” I said. “Are you thinking about quitting? I mean, doing something else, now that there's a little money in the bank?”

“Nah. For all the bitching I do, I actually like my job. I help people. Don't make that face. I do! I like it. Besides, it's really not that much money, is it?” Simon looked to the ceiling toward a heaven that our mother had never believed in. “Not that I don't appreciate it, Ma! It's great! And thanks. Amen.”

“Mmmmm. I'd do it, I think. Quit my job, I mean. I could go for finding something else to do. Not that information logistics isn't riveting . . . I would do it, except that it would give Patrick a stroke.”

“He'd stroke out if you spent your own money?” Simon had a special cranky tone reserved just for the topic of Patrick's shortcomings. I both courted it and resented it at turns.

“Don't say that! What are you, the devil? It's not only
my
money. Good Lord. I just had this conversation. It didn't go well. I'm treading very carefully these days.”

“If you say so. I obviously know so much about being married. There. I said it before you could.”

“Ha ha.” I stuck my tongue out at him. “Seriously though, he's been really hypersensitive lately.”

“My guess? He's still way pissed about the pill thing.”

“Among other things, that would be a good guess.”

“It was a pretty boneheaded thing to do, Dee.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours—always and obviously.” Simon double-dipped into the ketchup. “And still it was a pretty boneheaded thing to do.”

“I don't know how else to say I'm sorry about it. I've apologized to Patrick a hundred times. I've even apologized to you, just because you had to know about it. I've said it and said it. I just wasn't ready to have a baby. I know I went about it the wrong way, but then I can't do anything right. I've given him a hell of a wide margin of error, because I know he's upset. And he even gets mad about that. I tiptoe around all the time and make special dinners . . .”