The Other Widow (15 page)

“I'm not ready for that yet, Edward,” she manages, as Antoine returns from the kitchen, barking loudly at the sofa and leaping forward in tiny increments, on all four legs, toward Edward. A timely if embarrassing disruption.

“I know. And I'm sorry, Karen. I don't mean to rush you. The only reason I'm even suggesting it so soon after Joe's death . . .” Edward stops. He sighs. “It's this insurance investigation—the likelihood they'll try to paint the accident as a suicide, like I said the other day. It's easier for them. No payout that way. Insurance companies always try for suicides. That's their job, and really Maggie Brennan's—a big part of it anyway. I've been doing some research on this company, but it's almost impossible to really see what—” Edward stands up. He's almost yelling over Antoine's barking. The dog jumps backward as Edward tromps toward the kitchen with his empty plate.

“Has she said anything to you about the claim? This Maggie Brennan?”

“No. Nothing. She just—” He glances at the refrigerator and for a few seconds, he doesn't say a word. “I could just see her wheels turning. She was a cop with the Boston PD so—” He shifts his gaze to Karen. “I'm telling you—as your friend—that if you sell, I will do right by you, Karen. You know that. Listen,” he says, and he buttons up his coat and hurries to the front door before Antoine can launch a fresh attack. “I've got to get back to the office. Let me know, though, when you've had a chance to think things over. Watch the dog,” he says, as Antoine gallops out from the hallway. A second later the door smacks shut behind him as Edward's slick shoes skate across the icy porch.

Karen walks back to the kitchen and stares at the refrigerator. Once there were a variety of things fastened there with multicolored magnets—drawings, postcards, photos of the boys, lists for the market. Now she almost never puts things up—there are only tiny tidbits she jots down from time to time, little reminders she might leave here and there around the house. The only thing on the refrigerator now is the
PROSPER
magnet, sticking Arthur Reinfeld's name above the handle. Did Edward see it? He did seem to fade out for a second there, staring at the fridge. And then he left. Abruptly, now that she thinks of it. Of course the dog was nipping at his heels. Literally.

Her cell dings in the living room and Karen pours herself a glass of water, runs the tap over the empty plates. She takes a swig of water, and when she's stalled for several seconds, wanders to the living room and dumps out her purse. She glances at the new text on her cell: Of course, Tomas has texted back.
Tell me where. I will be there happily. I am off work until the evening
.

XVI

DORRIE

D
orrie still works on her own on Tuesdays. Now she tries to cram in as many calls as possible, as many visits as she can, into this one day of the week she often spent with Joe. When he was in town. When she finished her work early. It wasn't every week, but it was often enough for her to hate Tuesdays now, to waken with a sick feeling, with a knot in her stomach and memories running through her head. Her body knows it's Tuesday, even before she opens her eyes. She's on the sofa. Fully clothed. The cat purrs on the chair arm. “Why am I—?” Purrl yawns, opens one large amber eye and Dorrie shakes away the remnants of her headache, smells the faint sweet smell of weed in the tangled ends of her hair. She groans.

Samuel and Lily have already gone, and Dorrie drags herself off the sofa, feels the Tuesday-ness envelope her. She heads for the bathroom, turns on the water, and reaching for the shampoo, remembers showering with Joe.

It was the day of their third lunch together in an earthy little restaurant in the North End. Italian, it was nearly dark, even in the middle of the day—a rainy, gloomy day. It was noisy in the restaurant and they leaned over the table to talk. Joe lit a candle in a glass lantern that reminded her of the one Samuel stole for her when they were young and barely scraping by—he'd brought it home from Papa Pasta's, where he worked three nights a week around the time Lily was born, and she had felt a sharp, quick stab of guilt. Behind them, the owners argued in Italian, their hands making shadows, like puppets, on the wall.

“My mother was Italian,” she'd said. “Half Italian.”

“Do you speak it?”

“A little.” She tilted her ear toward the kitchen. “I understand it pretty well. Like now. The chef's saying, ‘Isn't that an adorable couple out there at table five,' and the waiter's saying, ‘Yeah! Especially the woman. What a cutie. Boy is that guy a lucky son of a—' ”

“Really?”

“No,” she said, and they'd both laughed as Dorrie picked at her lasagna. “Your wife,” she'd said. “What's she like?”

“Smart,” he'd told her. “Witty. Puns a lot, like you, which I've always hated. Probably because I can't do it.”

Dorrie nodded, chewed, forced a smile. “She sounds really—”

“She's great.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “And
we
were. We were great.” He stuck his hand up for the waitress. “Things change. People change.”

“That's life, though, really, isn't it? Change?” Dorrie polished off her wine. “I mean,
we
certainly have. Samuel and I. He hasn't got the slightest idea what's going on in my head most of the time. Or, really, in my life. I don't think he even cares. Not unless it involves him directly or his job or—”

“You sound like her.” He'd caught the waiter's eye, motioned for more wine, and Dorrie let all thoughts of Karen slide back into that vague region of Joe's life, so much less real than the spilled marinara sauce on the checked tablecloth, the aria drifting out through speakers near the entrance.

“Thought I'd show you how to use the design program,” Joe said, and he'd pulled out his laptop, set it up on the table, patted the booth beside him. “You'll need to come over here to really see what I'm doing.” And she'd scooted in beside him, watched his hands on the mouse, his long fingers, watched the different rooms invented, born, the virtual tubs, the colored walls, the floors, converted with a click.

“Here.
You
try,” he'd said after a minute or two.

“I always wanted to have this for our house,” she'd told him. “I always loved to watch the transformations on TV, but I didn't know this software was available. For just normal people.”

“Normal?” He'd leaned over her shoulder, squinting at the bathroom she'd created, slightly unaligned, walls the color of eggplant.

“Well,” she'd said. “People.”

“It's okay,” he'd said. “Normal is vastly overrated.”

“I agree.” She'd pointed to the bathroom. “Just look!”

They slept together that day. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the rainy, dreamy weather, or the music in the restaurant or Dorrie wanting to erase Joe's words—
you sound like her
. He'd called ahead, reserved a room at the Harborside Inn, with rosy quilts, a red brick wall behind the bed. She felt his breath, warm on her face, warm against her body, his skin against hers. Warm. Outside the rain pattered down, making splattering sounds, as the world walked by on cracking sidewalks, lumbered past on thick black streets, sloshed by in shiny rubber coats. Across the Charles, a train shuttled down the Red Line and a flock of pigeons flew off, making flapping sounds, like the shuffling of a thousand decks of cards, the swishing of a million gowns. Somewhere Lily whispered with her friends in study hall and Karen ran her hands down her perfect thighs in her perfect house in Waltham, but inside that room, there was only Joe. Afterward, they lay like spoons, his chest against her back, his lips against her hair. She listened to their breathing, listened to the rain. She closed her eyes and clung to that brief moment between passion and the guilt she knew she'd feel for being what she'd told herself she'd never be—the other woman, betraying Samuel. Karen. But she had. And would again. She'd risk everything to be with Joe, to feel him next to her.
Come on out, Dorrie. There's no reason to be all locked up inside like you have been, butting up against your own bones and lies.
She'd risk everything she had to feel alive.

XVII

DORRIE

D
orrie heads to Brookline. Maple Street. A couple with three grown sons wants to open up their house a little more. Eileen and Albert. For entertaining, Eileen said. Mostly for her husband's job—she's been so slack in that department. She's thinking about a sunporch. She's wanted one for years. And since Home Runs did such a fantastic job on their kitchen recently . . .

Dorrie turns off Boylston. Maple is a pretty street, more so in the spring, when the trees aren't bare, when they frame the yards in lush green, when grasses edge the fence that curves along the sidewalk. The houses are diverse, brick and wood. Dorrie parks and Eileen Ramsey lets her in, putters in the kitchen, making coffee. She sets a cup in front of Dorrie. “Sugar?” she says. “Cream?”

Dorrie shakes her head. “Nice kitchen,” she quips. “Whoever your designer is, she must be—wait. What's—?” Eileen smiles. A small and unconvincing smile. “Don't you like it?” Dorrie says, surprised. It is nice. The rest of the house is stuffy and airless. Crowded with heavy mahogany. Sealed in by dark long drapes and ancient papered walls.

Eileen Ramsey sighs and sits down on the sofa next to Dorrie. “Of course,” she says. “The kitchen is great! It's just that new crew leader . . . at the end of the renovation it was . . .” She shrugs.

Dorrie sets her coffee cup back on the table. “New crew leader?”

“Well,” Eileen says. “Yes. I had nothing but respect for the first one, the way he worked with his guys, but that other man, the one who replaced him—”

“What? He—?”

“
Slobs,
” she says. “Their stuff was strewn all over the yard. They left early most days, even when the weather wasn't bad. Got here late. Nothing like the old crew.”

“I'm so sorry,” Dorrie says. “I had no idea! I don't actually work in that
part
of the company. I'll pass this along, though. I'll see what I can—”

“I don't know.” Eileen sits up straight suddenly. “No. Don't say anything. Maybe they were just—getting used to the job or something. They came in at the very end. The last week or so. And I do love the kitchen.”

Dorrie turns on her tablet, brings up the back part of the Ramseys' house. “On another, happier note,” she says. “How about this for the sunporch? And we can do a teardown here, between the dining and living rooms. That way, you won't feel so . . .” She looks around; the smell of damp is everywhere in the house. Damp and mildew and age.
Depressed
is what she wants to say.
That way you won't feel so depressed.
“Crowded,” she says. “The house will feel so much more open!”

“I absolutely
love
it!” Eileen says. “But I don't want that last group here again. I'd rather not have any work done if you can't—”

“I'll tell Edward,” Dorrie says. “I'll make sure they send another crew.”

“Fine.” Eileen picks up their empty coffee cups and sticks them in her new oversized kitchen sink. “I'll talk to Al. See when he wants to . . .” Her voice is lost in the turning on of water, in the clatter of the cups and saucers, a neighbor's car pulling up across the street. She reappears, finally, runs her wet hands down the sides of her jeans as she walks Dorrie through the stuffy entryway to the front door. “I'm so sorry about Mr. Lindsay,” she says. “We read it in the papers. Awful. Absolutely horrifying.” She tsks, shakes her head.

“It was.” Dorrie concentrates on the wallpaper, old and slightly peeling in the upper-right-hand corner, just above the door. “So the crew leader.” They stand on the front steps. Snow drips down in tiny flecks and sticks to Eileen's hair. “What was his name? The one you liked?”

“Paulo.” Eileen fastens her hair into a clip and a few flakes fall like dandruff onto the front porch. “Paulo something. Italian, I think.”

“Androtti?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Paulo Androtti. That was it.”

When Dorrie gets back to her car, she sits for a few seconds, replaying Eileen's last words in her head. None of this makes sense. Why would Paulo Androtti leave in the middle of a job? And, more important, why did Joe e-mail his name along with the newscast link? Most likely Paulo was the crew leader on the house that burned, but, really, he handled most jobs in Boston. Had handled. He'd not only left Eileen's kitchen project, but the company as well. And very suddenly, according to Jeananne. Some kind of brouhaha with Joe, she'd said when Dorrie asked about him a few days after she'd read Joe's e-mail. Over money, Jeananne thought Edward had said.

Dorrie glances at her beeping cell. Samuel's left a message. He'll be late, he says. He has a meeting in town. But at the moment he's in Amherst, looking at an old Volvo. He might use the parts, he says, for the car he's fixing up for Lily.

If she liked him at the moment, Dorrie wouldn't hesitate to tell him how impressed she is that he's trekked out to Amherst in this freezing weather, but she doesn't. Anyway, she really hasn't got much of a point of reference. Her own father is a blotch, like a Rorschach. He could be anything or anyone—it all depended on the angle. Often working out of town, he drifted through her early childhood, a vague and quiet presence so that, when her mother died, he was of little help to Dorrie, still the awkward, flimsy presence he had always been. When her mother was alive, she always turned on the small glass lamp in the space beneath the stairs. “So he can find his way to us,” her mother used to say, but it didn't help him find his way to Dorrie. He remained, until his death, a kind but distant figure, the antithesis of Samuel, with his wild and crazy hair, his boundless energy. Opposites. Or so she'd thought.