The House in Amalfi (4 page)

I ordered lasagna and Jammy the spaghetti with ragù sauce. We tasted each other’s food, mmming with pleasure. We were on our second glass of wine when Jammy dropped the bombshell.

“Matt and I are thinking of taking a trip to Italy this year,” she said oh so casually. “We were hoping you would like to come with us.”

I put down my fork and stared hard at her. “Did you just invent this, right now, this minute?”

“Of course not.” She stuck her chin in the air, looking defiantly at me.

Twirling my glass in my fingers, I watched her squirm. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said, grinning, and then we were laughing again.

“Oh Jesus, Lam, it’s just so good to hear you laugh again, I don’t know if I can stand it,” she said. Her long blond bangs
fell over her eyes again and, as was her habit, she shoved them impatiently to one side. “Oh, so what if I did lie. I had good reason. What if Matt and I
were
to take a trip to Italy, would you say yes?”

She looked so solemn and earnest, the way she had when she was a little girl, it jolted me again to my own memories of being that little girl in Italy and the happiness I had remembered only hours ago. I thought of Jon-Boy and the small golden house in Amalfi with its wonderful green gardens tumbling down the cliff to the turquoise sea.

“Maybe I’d go,” I said, suddenly tempted, “if I could guarantee I’d find that kind of happiness again.”

Elated, Jammy grabbed my hand across the table. “You’ve gotta take chances in this world, kid. No guarantees.”

I thought for a second, then I took it on the chin. “No guarantees,” I agreed, “I promise I’ll think about it.” But as she linked her pinkie with mine in a wish for the trip to become true, I knew what I was wishing for. To have Jon-Boy and Alex back again.

When Jammy got back from dinner with Lamour, her husband, Matt, was sitting on the flowered chintz sofa with Bramble, their ancient black Labrador, sprawled next to him. Matt’s eyes were closed, and he was listening to the Stones playing loudly on his Bang & Olufsen.

“Remember we danced to this the night we met?” Jammy said. She patted Bramble, then sank into the cushions on Matt’s other side, snuggling her head into his shoulder. He slid an arm around her neck and pulled her closer, dropping a kiss on her windblown hair.

“Didn’t know you remembered,” he said, but she heard the grin in his voice.

“There’s a lot you don’t know that I remember,” she said with a tone of such dark foreboding that he laughed.

“And what exactly does that mean, dear Jammy?”

“Well, I remember we didn’t have a honeymoon.”

He pushed her away. “Are you gonna hold that against me forever? I was a poor business school student. You knew it when you married me. And you were a poor nineteen-year-old art student.” He scowled suspiciously. “So what’s the point of this little scenario, Jammy? You’ve got something up your sleeve; I can tell.” She smiled too brightly at him and he groaned.

“I have no secrets from you,” she said.

“For god’s sake, tell me the worst.”

“We’re going on a trip to Italy this year. You and me. And Lamour.”

“Lamour
’s coming on our honeymoon?”

“This is not our honeymoon. It’s our ‘getting Lamour over the bereavement’ trip.”

Matt closed his eyes and leaned his head against the flowered cushion. Jammy watched him anxiously. She could tell he was mulling over what she’d said and that he wasn’t happy.

“You and I both know there’s only one way to get Lamour over the bereaving ‘hump,’ ” Matt said at last. “You have to tell her the truth about what happened with Alex.”

Jammy had been afraid he would say that. “But how can I?” she asked, her voice strangled with desperation. “It’ll kill her for sure.”

“Or cure her,” Matt said.

Jammy sat up and looked at him. She stared into his honest gaze until she could bear it no more and she turned her head away. “I don’t want to be the executioner,” she muttered, clutching his hand.

He held it to his lips. “Jammy, my love, did you ever think that you might in fact be the
liberator
? Tell her; then let’s see if she wants to go on this trip to Italy.”

She suddenly spotted a loophole in his reasoning. “You mean if I tell Lamour and she says yes, the Italian trip is on?”

Matt’s laugh was muffled in her tumbling blond hair as he said, “I thought I was winning this round.”

But Jammy was still thinking about Lamour and her heart was full of dread because now she had committed to telling Lamour about Alex. “I almost wish you had,” she whispered. “Oh, how I wish you had.”

Serge, the concierge, was his usual surly self, keeping Jammy waiting, her foot tapping, as he took his time about dialing Lamour’s apartment on the house phone, but this time Jammy didn’t even spare him a conciliatory smile. Fuck you, Serge, she fumed silently. I have more important things on my mind than keeping you happy.

“Ms. Harrington says to go right on up, Mrs. Haigh,” he said, full of self-importance as usual. Jammy gave him a brief nod of thanks as she hurried into the elegant mirrored elevator and pressed the button for the twentieth floor.

The elevator opened directly into Lamour’s private foyer, something both she and Jammy had considered incredibly grand in the early days of Lamour’s marriage to Alex Monroe, coming as they both had from modest suburbia and progressing only as far as an equally modest rental apartment. Lamour said Lake Shore Drive had taken her at least a year to get used to, but get used to it she had, along with many other luxuries, because she had married a man of substance. Well,
a rich man,
anyway, Jammy quickly amended that thought, because in her view Alex Monroe had no “substance” whatsoever.

“Hi,” she called, heading into the long living room with its thirty-foot spread of floor-to-ceiling windows and the view over the lake, calm this evening with a rosy sunset pinking the gray.

Lamour’s sleek apartment with its minimalist decor never failed to make Jammy rethink her own sprawling ranch-style home. “Why is it when I come here I always feel insecure about my own place?” she grumbled as they hugged. “Why do I immediately want to lose all the tchotchkes and change the flowered chintz to black leather?”

A spark lit Lamour’s amber eyes as she grinned. “As long as it’s
Italian
leather.”

“Back to Italy again, huh?” Jammy flung herself onto Lamour’s own tan leather sofa, Italian of course, groaning at its unresponsiveness to her rear end. “Does it have to be so hard?”

“That’s what makes it look good.” Lamour knelt on the black rug in front of the oval glass coffee table centered with a bunch of perfect anemones in a perfect round glass vase. She poured martinis from a plain silver shaker into iced glasses, then added three olives to each.

“This is getting to be a habit,” Jammy said, accepting the drink, but she sat up and took notice when Lamour suddenly said, “I’m just getting up my courage to tell you something.”

“That you’re not coming to Italy,” Jammy finished the sentence for her. “I knew it! I just
knew
that’s what you’d say. And that’s why I have something I need to say to you.” Shoving back her bangs, she looked nervously at Lamour from under her lashes. “Well, actually I have something to tell you. Something I think you should know.”

Lamour looked surprised. Then her face dropped, “Oh no, don’t tell me the college kid’s in trouble?”

Jammy and Matt had married when she was only nineteen and they’d had a child by the time she was twenty. Now Jammy’s daughter had just started college. She had never lived away from home before and the sudden freedom was going to her head.

“I almost wish it was about her.” Jammy avoided Lamour’s eyes and took a quick gulp of the martini.

“Jeez, then this must
really
be serious.”

“Oh, it is, Lam. And for the life of me I don’t know how to start.”

Lamour uncurled herself from the floor and went to sit next to her best friend. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said, patting her hand soothingly. “You can tell me
anything;
you know that.”

“Trouble is,” Jammy said, “this is something I should have told you years ago, only I wanted to believe it wasn’t true. It’s about Alex.”

Lamour looked puzzled. “What could there possibly be to say about Alex that I don’t already know?”

Jammy seemed to inhale all the air in the apartment before she finally caught enough breath to say it. “Alex was unfaithful, Lamour. He was having an affair.”

There was a stunned silence. Then Lamour snatched her hand away. “Are you
crazy? Why
are you saying this? Oh,
I
know, it’s to try and jolt me out of my grief, isn’t it? You think you can shock me out of it by telling me my dead husband was a two-timing bastard, right?”

“Right on both counts. He
was
a two-timing bastard, and I
did
want to jolt you out of it and back into
your
life again.”

Lamour was looking at her with such cold contempt, Jammy’s innards shriveled with foreboding.

“How terrible of you, Jammy,” Lamour said. “How
terrible
to demean my husband’s memory; he was a good man, a wonderful husband. . . .”

“He cheated on you, Lam. He was leaving you for another woman.”

“You are
contemptible,
Jammy Mortimer.”

Lamour’s voice was thin with the kind of inner rage
Jammy had never heard in any person before, but she was committed and went remorselessly on.

“The night Alex died in the car crash, he was on his way to meet the other woman. Her number came up on Alex’s cell phone, as did Matt’s—but not yours. The police called her first. When she showed up at the scene, Matt was already there. He said she was distraught, crying for Alex. She said he was her fiancé, that they were going to get married that fall. Matt swore she wore a diamond as big as the Rock of Gibraltar on her left hand. He had to tell her that there was already a wife—
you
—waiting at home. At first she refused to believe him, but when she heard Matt tell the police about you, she knew it was true. But after all, Alex was dead and there was no point in getting into a fight with you. She did the only decent thing: she left, and she never contacted you. Though she did keep that ring,” Jammy added thoughtfully, “and judging from Alex’s behavior she probably deserved it.”

Lamour struggled to her feet. She stared blankly out the windows for a long moment. Then she swung round and with one wild sweep of her arm cleared the coffee table of the glasses and the martini shaker and the anemones. Silent with rage, she stomped the glasses into shards, grinding the olives into the black rug, kicking the silver shaker so hard it hit the window with a clang.

Her dark curly hair had escaped from its ribbon and flew wildly around her head as she turned on Jammy. “Please leave,” she said in a low hard voice unrecognizable as her own. “Leave here, Jammy Mortimer, and never come back. You are not my friend.”

Jammy was crying so hard by the time she got home, she could hardly see to drive. The car was a Lincoln Aviator SUV that Matt had said was too big for her because she was used to the smaller Volvo she’d had for years. Now she swung too close into the garage, groaning as she heard the left wing mirror scrape the wall.