On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) (10 page)

Then Hester remembered a small thing she heard and let slip by. It was what Frances had implied about Al marrying her because she was pregnant. It made her feel bad. Honestly, she hadn’t wanted to trap Al. Once in her life, being pregnant had ruined everything; she couldn’t let not being pregnant ruin her life now.

She knew a good thing when she saw it now, and Al Murphy was better than good—great job, great personality, great in bed. If somebody like Janine would’ve gotten him instead her, it would’ve driven her crazy. It would have been all downhill from there. She pictured herself bludgeoning Beth Humbolt to death with a stapler the next time she tried to correct Hester in class or stabbing Robby Pherson with a pair of scissors. That’s how she would’ve ended up: insane.

And if she ever did reconcile with her parents and her sister, wouldn’t they be so happy that she’d made a good life with someone stable like Alexander Murphy?

Hester looked up at her new husband, and the priest’s word came back to her from the morning service: “You are no longer two separate people. By the grace of God, you have become one. What one of you does, so also does the other.”

Odd way of putting it, like one of them had to disappear into the other in order for a perfect union to exist. She knew enough about Al already to know he wasn’t about to fade away the least little bit. So what was left? Adam would take back his rib.

Stop it, stop overanalyzing
, she told herself. But the terrible idea that she’d be the one who would have to give in, would always have to give in, had already taken hold of her.

They were still dancing, but for Hester the magic of the moment had passed. Two spots on her fingers were sore. She spread them apart on Al’s back, tucked her head into his shoulder, and tried like hell to get even a small bit of happiness back.

Sixteen

A month and a week after the hurricane, Hester was in the kitchen chopping parsley and basil for a salad. She looked out the window in time to catch the sun burst from behind a thick slab of gray clouds.

Al was on the patio sipping a Miller Light. In the shadow of what remained of the Bo tree, he looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. He wore a faded pair of surfer trunks and an old Sourland High basketball shirt. His hair had grown long and was wavy from the humidity. His
Best of Italy
CD was playing on his boom box. He sang along to “Santa Lucia Lutana.”

Al’s injuries required four weeks of rehab, and his insurance paid for him to stay at the rehab center. While he was gone, Hester slowly returned to the land of living. There was nothing she could do to change things. Her feelings toward Al ran cold and hot. She missed Nina, but not as intensely as she had at first. Hester, lately, found herself thinking more often than not that there was a chance, though slim, Al hadn’t done anything wrong.

During Al’s absence, Eve and Dee nagged Hester into getting back to water aerobics. On Friday nights they invited her to play pinochle at the clubhouse. They even dragged her to shuffleboard, and that’s where she met Barb Hendleman.

After a tournament Barb won, she invited Hester back to her place to celebrate. Hester thought there’d be other women there, but discovered when she arrived, it was only the two of them.

Barb lit the tiki torches that lined her patio and bought out a bottle of Gallo zinfandel—the white kind that Hester was not at all fond of.

“You know, Hester, my husband, Cliff never bowled in his life till we came down here. He comes home from recycling the trash and tells me he joined the bowling team, which didn’t sit well with me. ‘What about your back, Cliff? If your back goes out again, I’m the one who suffers. Remember when you couldn’t get out of bed and had to pee in a jar? Who jumped up and got the jar, held the jar, emptied the jar? Me. No way, Cliff. I won’t allow it,’ I said to him. Quite frankly I was a little sick and tired of his back going out. He was such a big baby about it.”

Barb took a sip of the zinfandel and Hester did too, and almost gagged on it.

“Cliff, of course,” Barb continued, “started bowling every Friday with the Pleasant Palms’ team. He promised to be careful, and it seemed he was, about his back anyway, because soon he was out four nights a week practicing. I began not to mind because I had the remote control to myself and got to watch my own shows. At the end of the season, though, when the bowlers held their banquet at the Ocean Club House, I was surprised to learn the team was coed—seven men and this Lola Matson, a tall, raven-haired woman with milky skin, who looked like she was still in her early fifties for crying out loud!”

“I thought, no wonder Cliff can’t wait to go bowling. He’s been bowling with goddamn Snow White. Of the seven stupid dwarfs, Cliff must’ve been Dopey. Hester, you should’ve seen those men falling all over this Lola. Anyway, each member got a gag award for things like gutter balls, splits, and so on. I was sitting with Cliff, having a pretty good time despite being annoyed with him for not telling me about Lola, when it was announced that Cliff was getting the award for the biggest flirt!

“Everybody laughs. Then I catch Lola staring at Cliff, and Cliff raises his glass of Scotch in her direction and smiles this suave smile. I was furious, but decided to let it go until we got home. DJ Janet started the music with Carol King’s ‘It’s Too Late.’ Clifford doesn’t say a word to me, gets up, goes to Lola’s table, and asks her to dance. Right in front of me, like I wasn’t even there.

“I tell you, Hester, if I had a gun, I would have shot him. They were the only ones on the dance floor, and the whole place got real quiet. They were doing the cha-cha. I never saw Cliff do the cha-cha! They were staring into each other’s eyes and had these silly smiles on their faces. Cliff spins Lola toward him. The song was over, and right in front of me, he kisses her.”

Tears glistened in Barb’s eyes. “That was it for me. Cliff came back to the table, sat down, and looked at me, but before he could open his mouth, I picked up the bottle of his Johnny Walker and poured what was left in it over his head. Then I threw the empty bottle at Lola. It missed and shattered against the wall behind her into a thousand pieces.

“Hester, we’d been married forty-two years, and it was over in one night. I threw him out, and he moves in with her on Queen Palm Drive. I’ve never spoken to either one of them since, and I never will. They could be right behind me in the blood pressure line, and I act like they aren’t there. I’ve gotten pretty good at pretending they’re both dead.”

Hester didn’t know what to say. It was a terrible story, and the cheap wine was making her head spin. She felt sorry for Barb, but she also felt trapped in the circle of torches and the miasma of the woman’s sadness.

“And you know what, Hester, the worst part is I’m totally alone now. None of the men around here even look at me. If they’re widowed or divorced, they want someone younger, a lot younger. Even the men who are ten years older than me and on their way out want someone young. That horrific bowling banquet may well have been the last time in my life I was out to dinner with a man. And now Cliff goes around acting like a teenager in love, and I’m drying up like a forgotten old prune.”

Hester, trying to make Barb feel better, blurted out, “Barb, you look great for your age, and everybody loves you. I just met you, and I think you’re a wonderful, vibrant woman. How can you think about yourself like that?”

But the truth was Barb did look like a dried up prune, and her situation was depressing. Hester was tired. She didn’t want to be alone with Barb any longer. She didn’t want to hear about how lonely she was, or about how Cliff walked away from that bowling banquet with much more than a gag trophy. He’d bowled his way into a whole new life for himself. And Barb, well, Barb was left behind; and because she was a woman, an older woman, the same kind of second chance would never come her way, and that was just the painful truth.

Barb spoke up before Hester could excuse herself, “You think I still look okay? You know, Hester, I wanted to ask Stanley Upshure over for a drink, but the last time I talked to him, he told me he thought the old billionaire who married Anna Nicole Smith was the luckiest old bastard in the world. He called Anna Nicole the hot blonde with the double D’s. It’s disgusting to listen to a seventy-year-old man talk about a young woman’s body like that, but you know what? Maybe I’m too sensitive. Nobody’s perfect, right?”

Hester felt like saying,
damn, Barb, you can do better than Stanley Upshure
, but she didn’t. The least she could do was leave her with a little hope. It did no good to let on to the world that you’re bitter or your feelings are hurt or your confidence is sagging right along with your aging body. Barb’s nice-sized boobs probably used to look sexy. So what if they looked like hanging papaya now. So what if her arms were flabby, and her wide calves were covered with sunspots and purple veins. She’d put on pink lip gloss and penciled in her eyebrows. Even with her mascara smeared from her tears, Hester could see that at one time she had been attractive, and desirable.

“Barb,” she said, “you may not be Anna Nicole Smith, none of us are, but I like you, a lot, if that makes any difference.” It was easy for Hester to see she made Barb feel better. The woman leaned toward Hester and stared into Hester’s eyes. The zinfandel-fueled look of admiration made Hester uncomfortable, so she added jokingly, “Not that I’m a lesbian or anything,” and then felt stupid for doing so.

Walking home on the deserted lanes of the little trailer park and thinking about Barb Hendleman brought Hester to tears. Then she remembered Rachel Rizzo who had roomed next to Hester at Glassboro. After curfew when everyone else was asleep, they’d sit in the dorm hallway smoking and talking. When Hester was going through her crisis with Arty, Rachel kept telling her not to give up on Arty.

“Hester, the smart woman stays. The smart woman stays.” Rachel missed the whole point, which was that Hester had no choice. Arty was the one who dumped Hester.

But Rachel was right, though, if you looked at Barb’s situation. Barb had every reason to dump a cheater like Cliff, but now Barb was the one who was alone. If she handled things differently, held back and let the dust settle, maybe she could have reined Cliff in. Maybe if she put all those years of being together on the scale before she blew her cork, she wouldn’t be stuck now being the unwanted one.

Al kept calling Hester from the rehab center and Hester kept ignoring him. It wasn’t until the last week of his rehabilitation, she finally gave in and picked up the phone. She’d decided to act like nothing was awry and tell him exactly what she’d told everyone else—Nina had gone back to school in New Jersey.

Hester knew it was a tremendous lie, but, the fact of the matter was, it was a necessary one. Hester wasn’t ready to end things with Al; and besides, as the little voice inside her head kept saying,
you don’t really know how Nina died
. She couldn’t blame Al if she didn’t know what actually happened, could she?

However, Hester could see where the police might jump to the conclusion that Al was guilty, and how horrible would it be if Al was found guilty of a murder he didn’t commit? What if he was sent to jail for the rest of his life? What if he lost his pension?
Their
pension? Her early retirement had resulted in a pittance of a pension for Hester. It would never be enough for her to live on. If Al’s was gone, she’d be broke.

And other men? What hope did she have of finding a man at her age? If she did happen to find one, he’d probably have a ton of baggage, new baggage.
Better to deal with the devil you know, than the one you don’t.
Someone had said that to her a long time ago…probably Rachel.

Life with Al, when she reflected on it, had its upside.

Hester tossed the herbs she’d chopped into a wet mush into the salad. She took the eggplant out of the oven and put it aside to set. She shook olives out onto a small glass plate shaped like a fish and shaved thick curls of sharp provolone over them. She dressed the greens and herbs with oil and vinegar, poured herself a glass of pinot noir, took a sip, and looked out the window again at Al. He was staring at the Bo tree, his beer in his hand.

All for Love
by John Dryden. Hester closed her eyes and thought of the comparative thesis she done in grad school. Dryden’s seventeenth century reworking of Antony and Cleopatra versus Shakespeare’s sixteenth century play. One part of a line came back to her. She’d quoted it near the end of her paper, thinking at the time how pathetic Cleopatra sounded, trying to blame someone else for her own mistakes; and, yet, it was undeniable, the Egyptian queen been taken in and fooled by Antony.

“I would reason more calmly with you. Did you not overrule and force my plain, direct and open love into these crooked paths…” Hester sipped her wine again and thought,
Al, you son of a bitch, you are forcing my open love into a crooked path.

Hester knew Al would never bring the subject of Nina up again. If Hester didn’t bring it up, they would never talk about it. Al had a sixth sense about when it was best to remain in the dark. And he liked to keep others in the dark when it worked to his advantage. He’d been well suited for the job of vice principal of a school like Sourland High because he was good at sweeping things under the carpet, and leaving them there. But Hester knew that beneath his non-confrontational exterior, there was a manipulative genius at work, constantly striving to control everyone and everything around him.

On that balmy December night, Hester couldn’t begin to realize exactly how voracious her husband’s appetite for dominance really was, how ruthless he could be when it came to his survival.

Looking at him through the window, she wondered if he wasn’t only pretending that everything was fine, that Nina was fine, that she, Hester, was fine, that the whole world was spinning correctly on its axis. What was going on in that handsome, scheming head of his? She’d be damned if she could figure him out.

She picked up the insalata misto, and singing along with “Funiculi Funicula,” joined him in the rosy twilight on the patio.

Al smiled at her. “How’s that dinner coming along?”

“
Perfecto mundo
!” Hester’s Italian accent was laughable, and she gave the appearance of being happy. She was becoming almost as good as Al at keeping people in the dark.