Monday's Lie (15 page)

“Do you ever think that maybe it's ruined?”

“Can't you just ever be that friend who thinks Patrick is great when I think he's great and calls him a rat bastard when I don't?”

“No.”

Simon stared into my scowl until it unraveled and we both laughed.

“So what are you saying? My marriage is ruined?” I continued my new trend of not telling Simon everything. I couldn't yet face his reaction to the Angela episode.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Simon shrugged.

“Really? You're just going to blurt it out? Just like that?”

“What's the point of not saying it? Things get ruined. It happens. You guys were always kind of a weird match. And I wasn't even all that surprised about the baby stuff. I remember how you played with dolls—giving them Mohawks and seeing if you could make parachutes out of garbage bags. Very maternal.”

“You're horrible.” I pulled the plate of my french fries out of his reach.

“Hey, I'm not the one throwing babies over railings.” He reached across me and slid the plate back between us. “But seriously, if it is screwed up that bad, there's no point in taking forever to admit it. It's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of you, you know?”

“You just have it all worked out, don't you? A marriage is a process, Simon. Not a fixed thing that never changes. And it's not about ‘matching.' People are too complicated to expect anyone else to be like them. It's more about . . . I think it's a decision, and then the handling and care of the life you want to have. Bottom line, it's not like I haven't forgiven him for things over the years.”

“Yeah, I don't know if all that is actually ‘forgiveness.' I think it might be part of the same problem: you not handling things head-on. Look, I'm not being hard on you. You're awesome. You know I think you're awesome. But I know you have this picture in your mind of what things are supposed to look like . . .” Simon let the conclusion drift in on its own. “I mean, what do you think Mom would say about all this?”

“I know what she would say. She knew.”

My mother had known of the pill game from its first days. In the early weeks after she came to live with Patrick and me, there had been a scare, a missed cycle, and I'd run straight for the doctor. Except that my doctor was out of town and it wasn't the sort of worry I was willing to wait more than a week to unknot. I didn't trust the drugstore tests. I wanted blood drawn and an expert telling me to my face that I wasn't pregnant. I landed at the family planning clinic, waiting hours with a brain blanked by dread. When they called me back to speak with the doctor, my wool skirt was picked clean of fuzz and a small mountain of frayed lint was the only proof I had that I hadn't sat motionless the whole time. I would have sworn on a stack of holy books that I hadn't moved.

Once they'd reassured me I wasn't pregnant this time, they offered me birth control.

I actually soothed myself for quite some time with the deflection that it hadn't been my idea. They offered. I accepted. Simple. Unplanned and undevious.

That night, having not said a thing to Patrick about the worry or its solution, I imagined I could still feel the dry, little pill on the back of my throat. I checked in on my mother before I went to bed. She was, as she almost always was in those months, propped on a mountain of pillows, book in hand, nerd glasses somehow invisible under her eagle brows that arched over the frames. But she was smiling, too. I was stabbed straight through in that moment, washed in a preview of how much I would miss her looking up from her reading, distracted at my interruption, but warming up instantly to become all the way mine whenever I walked through the door. I often went through those days in a fog of sleepiness for how often our “good-night” turned into hours of talking. But I didn't mind.

I confessed the whole day to my mother—the bargaining with God, the frenzy, the pills, the secret. The whole time she was with us, my mother was sharpest at night. She was often foggy during the days, warm and sweet and subtly soft around the edges, but as she was dying, her glinting clarity rose with the moon.
Are you allergic to babies or just Patrick's babies?
We talked it through in hushed voices late into the night, behind the closed door, and only managed to clean and polish the obvious: my little, off-white lie wasn't a sturdy barge pole to push off with. It wasn't going to get me very far from my concerns.

“So did you give her a ration of shit like you're giving me?” Simon asked.

“To be fair, she was a lot smoother than you are.” I stirred my drink.

“She always was.”

Which, of course, steered us onto the rocks of our mother as a topic of conversation, her life and times, and what secrets she took to the grave.

“What's really bothering you, Dee?”

“What do you mean? I don't have an agenda. I just wonder, that's all.”

“No. No, you don't. That's not all. You never wonder about her work, not out loud anyway, unless something else is bothering you. What is it? What's going on? Whenever you itch, you scratch it with that. Why?”

“I don't know that I do that,” I said, fluttering the sweetener packets in their white china holder.

“Do I have eyes? Do I have ears?”

“Do you have a big, obnoxious mouth?” I hit him on the shoulder and shut him down with a burst of horseplay until his beer got knocked over.

Our two identical checks came and went. I hugged my brother hard, then went home to a stiffly apologetic husband and an hour's stint at the computer with Google and my mother's name, and Paul Rowland's, and now Brian Menary's.

T
he
corner of your eye is the watchdog of the brain.
My mother was big on what we might or might not catch in the arc of our peripheral vision. She made games of the lessons that sharpened the farthest reaches of our sight. She'd write things, sometimes quite small, on a piece of paper, and if we could read it, off to one side or the other, without moving our heads or eyes, we scored points. But she was tricky. I got caught out on
to be or not to be
because she'd actually written
to be or not do he
. Of course, my brain had taken the shortcut and my overall score had taken the hit.
Never trust a shortcut
, she'd say.
Use one if you have to, but sacrifice a goat in thanks if it didn't land you on your ass.

I remember seething with envy over Simon's points bonanza for translating
Your chores are (B), but you (Ar) to (Fe) your shirts anyway.
He'd been studying the periodic table of elements for an upcoming exam, so our mother took out two birds with
Your chores are boron (B), but you argon (Ar) to iron (Fe) your shirts anyway.

The unreliability of the watchdog was also a way for our mother to teach us to take our own mental temperature. If a sharp pull from the corner of the eye resulted in anything useful, well, there you go. And if it didn't spotlight anything important or even anything interesting for more than a few times in a row, then it meant you had been working too hard and probably needed to power down and read a comic book or something.

My mother loved comic books. She memorized operas and devoured rich literature. She read novels, pored over poetry, and studied the newspapers. But none of that is love, and nothing lit her up like a stack of new comics. Simon caught the fever, but I never did. I was happy enough to avoid it because the medicine was expensive. I saved for a new bicycle while Simon's allowance evaporated weekly at the hobby store.

Now, in the food court, at my usual table, a male-shaped blur tugged in the margin of my right eye. Brian Menary took up a seat at a high table off to one side and midway to the exit from where I sat.

It could be that he lived nearby. People lived places. People, in fact, lived here. I lived here. My mother had lived here. Certainly, he had to live somewhere. So why not in this town? And if he lived here, he'd go out sometimes. Why wouldn't he eat here at this food court and take late lunches as I tended to do and . . . oh, hell. What if it wasn't even him?

And just like that, I derailed my first reaction, the crucial instinctive reflex, and accordingly, I also murdered its firstborn plan, which was to walk right over to his table, sit down, and look him in the eye with a fire that pinned him to his seat. We'd have a chat about the weather and the football scores and what he'd been up to for the past nineteen years—and just what exactly the hell did he mean by being aggressively in the same place as I was, at the same time that I was there, and on more than one occasion to boot.

Oh, boy. Not crazy-sounding at all.

Now gripped in doubt, I furiously pretended to read my phone, keeping my head cocked so that perhaps-Menary shifted, backlit and indistinct, at the farthest reach of my eye. I wouldn't let even his shoulder drift out of the frame. I couldn't bear the thought of his leaving the room, which would also have his leaving me with this ridiculous uncertainty to tote back home later.

My cheeks stung with the heat of my imagined audience's curiosity. Surely everyone was looking at me. I'd certainly be looking at me. They must have been able to feel the thrumming of my pulse and the pressure change it boomed into the room. Somehow it didn't help at all that not a single head had swiveled in my direction.

I bought a buffer of privacy in plain sight by mock-startling at the phone that had not rung or moved in my hand. I pretended to swipe the screen with a flourish, tucked the phone in under the curtain of my hair, and took a call that no one had made. Safe in the sanctuary of oh-she's-on-the-phone, I examined and discarded several options of how I could leave this food court knowing more than I had coming into it. It had to happen.

And why, exactly, should I be the only one in the room feeling branded and spotlighted? At least I knew I belonged here. Let him see me looking. Let's see what he does with that.

I raised my head, phone still at my ear, and let probably–Brian Menary see me find him in the crowd. A flicker of surprise zipped between our locked stares, and my bravery lasted only one tick of the second hand. I dropped my eyes to my knees and, for a heart-knocking moment, desperately wanted the previous minute back. A do-over.
No such thing, Plucky. You're in the soup now, little girl.
The memory of my mother's voice rang clear and smirking.

For the benefit of anyone who might be looking, I said my good-byes to the nobody on my silent phone and stood, snatching up my purse and jacket. On my feet, I found that I'd resolved myself to the only option that would guarantee any progress. I'd have to go ahead and walk over th—

Shit. He was gone.

In no more than a blink and a glance down to find the strap of my bag, Menary had slipped from his chair and faded into the thin crowd.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered, sorely disappointed and uncomfortably brimming with unexploded courage.

But God bless my mother and her games, I caught sight of him again, out of the direct line as was his trained habit. He was watching for me. There was still a chance to leave here wiser.

I walked past the shop window where he'd slouched low to browse some gadgety thing on the shelf in one of those electronic-wizardry gift shops. I stopped in the trickle of midday shoppers, made a small show of looking around, and turned on a purposed heel and headed back the way we'd both come.

I had to trust that he'd noticed the feint and would try to keep up with me. I would not risk looking around, even discreetly, to see if he was still there. If he wasn't, I'd feel foolish only to myself. And if he
was
there, I'd blow it. I slowed, knowing that he'd have to rein it in, too, then I took off at fresh pace, less than a dash but more than a stride.

The food court restrooms were set into the right side of the corridor: men's room first, then the ladies'. With more of a flail than a plan, I hit the ladies' room door hard enough so that it swung to the full range of its hinge and banged an echo down the short hallway. I blocked out the objections of my saner mind and doubled back instead and, quietly, slipped into the men's room.

Thankfully, the man at the urinal was done and just zipping up. I leaned my ear to the door, held up one finger against the startled outburst that might have launched from him, and mouthed,
I'm sorry!

The din of the ladies' room door would have carried into the food court. If Menary hadn't seen me duck into the hallway, he would surely at least have noted the noise. I heard footsteps pass the men's room. The footfalls stopped in front of the ladies' room, but the door didn't open. I had him, or someone at least, in my trap, such as it was, with me between him and the exit.

Sorry,
I mouthed again to the slack-jawed, red-faced man who stood holding his hands away from his sides, too stunned to make a break for the sinks. I pulled open the door and stepped into the buzz of the faltering fluorescents. Brian Menary turned easily, then with full flinch, to face me.

“Well, that was easy,” I said.

P
ardon
me?” he said. It was one of those passive-aggressive, trifly word-gnats that irked me in some indefinable way.

“Hang on.” I raised a finger to put the scene on hold, in much the same way I had in the men's room. The door beside me opened. My lavatory hostage had at least rinsed his fingers, but whether he'd had time to properly soap up was in question. Maybe he was just really fast. He burst from the men's room shaking the water from his hands and scowling. Catching sight of me did nothing for the blood in his cheeks, and he bloomed even brighter and hustled away, muttering.

I let the man clear the entrance back into the food court, buying some time to pull in what I hoped weren't obvious deep breaths, before I turned back to Menary.