The Woman Next Door (14 page)

“Gretchen?” Georgia asked. “What’s wrong with Gretchen?”

Karen caught the last comment and said a wry, “Nothing that two more months and another eighteen years won’t solve.”

Georgia frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“Didn’t Russ tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That Gretchen’s pregnant,” Karen said. “Ah-ha. He didn’t tell you. I wonder what that means.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

Amanda took pity on her and explained. “Gretchen is pregnant. We found out yesterday.”

“Pregnant?” Georgia looked from Amanda to Karen and back. “I was under the impression she didn’t go much of anywhere.”

“She doesn’t.”

“Then does someone come here?”

“Not that we’ve noticed.”

“So who’s the father?”

Dryly, Amanda said, “That’s the million-dollar question. No one seems to know.”

“Has anyone asked?”

“I came close,” Karen offered, “but she didn’t take the hint. She did give a couple, though. She said that the father didn’t know, and that he had other responsibilities. Those qualifications fit any of our husbands.”

Georgia laughed.
“
Our
husbands? Cute. Our husbands wouldn’t fool around with Gretchen.”

“They talk about her enough,” Karen said.

“All men talk,” Georgia reasoned. “That’s the nature of the beast. Talking about women—eyeing the pretty ones—that’s what they’re about. Actually
doing
it is something else. Besides, you’re talking about the woman next door. None of our men would be that dumb.” She settled down on the curb. “How did Lee react when you told him?”

“He seemed surprised. But he helped her out a month ago when her water heater burst. She would have been six months pregnant then. How could he not have known?”

“The same way we didn’t,” Amanda said. “All it takes is a big sweater or one of Ben’s shirts to hide something like that. She’s small for seven months.”

“Seven months,” Georgia echoed. “That means it happened in October. Who was around then?”

“Carpenter, plumber, electrician,” Amanda said.

“And Russ,” Karen added.

***

Georgia’s immediate reaction was a flash of irritation, but sympathetic to the pressure Karen was under, she decided instead to indulge her. Rather than denying the suggestion, she chuckled. “Well, he certainly is around.” She glanced back at her car, alone in the driveway. “Or should be. He was meeting his editor for lunch. They must be having a good talk.”

“I asked him twice about Gretchen,” Karen said, “once before I talked with her and once after. He swore he didn’t know a thing about the baby.”

“Then I’m sure he doesn’t,” Georgia decided. If Russ had chosen not to tell her that Gretchen was pregnant, it was because he didn’t think it was important, or because he didn’t know who the father was, or because he had been sworn to secrecy by one of the other men. Hell, Graham could as easily have fooled around with Gretchen as Russ. Graham had worked with her last fall, and he and Amanda were having a nightmare of a time.

Of course, Lee was still the one with the history of cheating, though Georgia wasn’t spiteful enough to remind Karen of that. Instead, grateful for the approaching rumble of the school bus, she said, “Russ thinks gossip is for women. He prides himself on not playing that game, and he’s right. When you come down to it, there’s no reason why any of us has to know who fathered that baby. It’s Gretchen’s business. Not ours.”

“We hope,” Karen murmured as the school bus rounded the curve. It was a large yellow box on wheels, shiny and new as school buses went, carrying the two creatures who were nearest and dearest to Georgia’s heart. She remembered waiting just like this when first Allison, then Tommy, returned home from kindergarten, then first grade, then second grade. They were older now, coming home from ninth and fifth grades, respectively, but the excitement of
catching that first glimpse of them never quite went away. This was what she missed when she was gone.

Brushing off the seat of her pants as she rose, she scanned the row of windows until she saw what looked like one, then the other, of her children moving up the center aisle. With the squeal of brakes, the bus came to a stop. The doors clattered open. Karen’s Julie was the first off, then the twins. Then came Tommy and Allison, giving Georgia hugs, telling her they were glad she was home, alternately demanding her attention as they walked off toward their house—and then came Russ, driving down the street, returning late from his lunch.

Surrounded by her crew, Georgia didn’t give Gretchen’s pregnancy another thought, and wouldn’t until later that night.

***

Gretchen stood at the dining room window behind sheers that began with gathers at the sill by her hip and ended with the same just under her eyes. Even with the swelling limbs of a towering oak in her yard, she had a clear view of the three women out by the curb.

She always saw them. It was as if a bell rang in her head when they gathered, as if some spiteful being wanted her to see what she missed. She had always wanted to have female friends. When she married Ben, she had thought she might find them here. She was wrong.

Give it time,
Ben had said.
They don’t know you. When they do, they’ll warm up.

They didn’t warm up, neither while Ben was alive, nor when he died and she was alone. Oh, they stopped by from time to time, much as Karen had done the evening before. But there was little genuine warmth, and no friendship bloomed. It might have helped if she had been outgoing, but she had never been that. Worse, she
felt intimidated in the presence of these women, each so accomplished in her own way. They had their own little group, and she was an outsider. She was unworldly, uneducated, and ill-bred.

You are my beauty,
Ben used to say, and coming from him, she believed it. Coming from him, beauty referred to things beyond the physical. He made her feel beautiful inside.

Ben had been one of a kind. But Ben was dead, and here she stood, hiding behind the dining room sheers, envying her neighbors their friendship. She would have given just about anything to go out and join them. Amanda was the closest to her age and seemed the gentlest, but what did Gretchen have in common with her? Amanda had a Ph.D., for God’s sake. At least Georgia and Karen had been through pregnancies. They would be able to tell her that the contractions she felt were normal, that the pain in her hip each time she rose from a chair would go away, that having a baby was the most awesome thing, and that anyone who tried to tell her she couldn’t do it herself should be shot.

But she couldn’t go out there. She wasn’t welcome. They wanted June, and she wasn’t June. They wanted a contemporary of Ben’s, an older woman, a mother figure. They wanted someone who was easy and gentle and wise.

They wanted someone ugly, someone their men wouldn’t look at twice, but Gretchen couldn’t accommodate them there, either. Her looks had been her ticket out of a life of squalor in rural Maine. Her looks were all she had.

Well, not anymore. She’d had Ben for a time. Now she had his house and the things in it. She had an investment portfolio. And she had a baby growing.

Smiling at that thought, she slid a slow palm over the swell of her belly. Her baby. All hers. One day in the not-too-distant future,
she
would be out there at the curb waiting for the school bus.

Would the women accept her then? She didn’t know. Perhaps by then she wouldn’t care. Taking her baby places, she would meet other mothers. They would become friends. They would be more open-minded, she suspected. They certainly wouldn’t stand out there in clear view of her, speculating on the identity of her baby’s father. Oh, yes, that’s what they were doing, of that she was certain. Karen had come to her house last night with a purpose, and it wasn’t delivering cookies. She wanted to know with whom Gretchen had slept.

Let her worry, Gretchen decided, deeply annoyed just then. Let her sweat it out. Same with the others. If they couldn’t find it in their hearts to show her a little compassion, she didn’t owe them any in return. Let them wonder which of their precious husbands had fathered her child.

Turning away, she went through the front hall into the living room. Carefully, lest she jostle the baby and cause pain for them both, she lowered herself onto the sofa, slipped off her shoes, and folded up her legs. The painting hung on the opposite wall. Focusing on it, she let the tension seep away.

La Voisine.
It had been a wedding gift from Ben, purchased in an art gallery in Paris during their honeymoon, and for that alone it would have held a special place in her heart. But she also loved the painting itself. She had loved it from the minute she had first seen it hanging on the gallery wall in its sculpted gilt frame. The artist wasn’t a master; he wasn’t even dead yet. But he had captured a contemporary scene in the soft pastels and gentle brush strokes of the Impressionist school, making it the most romantic, most sensual, most idyllic thing Gretchen had ever seen.

The subject was a woman clipping roses from a trellised vine. Her dress was yellow with gentle scallops at the neck and wrists; a sunhat hung down her back. She was on the far side of a white
picket fence that separated her yard from the viewer. Her house and those beyond it were built of stucco, with lavish greenery climbing their sides. At the end of the narrowing street was the ocean.

What made it so sensual? Gretchen wondered. She had spent hours sitting before it, and she had yet to come up with a definitive answer to that question. There was no outward suggestiveness, certainly no nudity. The woman was full-breasted, so the simple swell of her breasts, uplifted with the rise of her arms, might have done it. Or it might have been the touch of pink on her cheeks, or the rosy tint on faintly smiling lips. Either one gave her radiance. Or it could have been the wisps of blond hair that had slipped from a loose topknot and curled around her face, or the subtle hint of sweat on her neck and throat. Gretchen marveled at the way the artist had done that. More than once she had gone right up to the painting and touched those luminescent dots, half expecting her fingers to come away damp.

Sweat was sensual. Then again, the sensuality of the piece could have come from nothing more than the faraway look in the woman’s eye.

Gretchen identified with that faraway look. It was the look of a woman whose thoughts were of the kind of love that she had herself spent most of her life dreaming about. For a short time, she had found it with Ben. He had made her feel just as sensual, just as radiant as the woman in the painting. He was one of a kind.

For a short time, she had thought there was another like him. But she had been wrong. And that was fine. Her baby didn’t need a father. It had a mother who would love it—a mother who could support it and offer it a stable life.

Ben’s sons weren’t going to be happy when they learned she was pregnant. Both grown, both married with kids, both older than

Gretchen herself, they were upset enough that Ben had left her as much of his estate as he had. This would give them new cause to make noise. They would want to know who the father was. They would suggest she had been involved with whomever it was before Ben’s death. They would talk about morals and call Gretchen a slut.

She had been called that before. Tensing up at the thought, she drew in a deep breath and refocused on
La Voisine.

Self-contained. That’s what the woman in the painting was. Self-contained. Perhaps that was what Gretchen identified with. Ben had always said that
she
was self-contained. And she had heard it before him. Self-contained—distant—aloof. People often saw her that way.

But self-contained was a euphemism for alone, and Gretchen knew about that. She had been alone from the time she was eight, when her father had come to her bed in the night and her mother had blamed her for luring him there. Self-contained was a cover for frightened, which was how she had spent so many of the years after that.

But no more. She was moving forward. Ben had given her his name. He had given her a taste of love. He had given her financial security. She liked to think he had given her this baby, too, and in a roundabout way, he had.

***

Amanda’s parent meetings were more productive than those with students earlier in the day had been. During the first, she convinced a couple to let her meet with their daughter, a junior who was showing signs of stress on the matter of going to college. During the second, she convinced a newly separated couple to seek outside help for their son, a freshman, whose grades had tumbled since the separation. In both instances, watching the interaction of
the parents gave her insight into the students’ home situations, and hence greater understanding of the students themselves.

She was feeling better when she left school today, but her self-confidence fled when she arrived home and found that Graham hadn’t returned yet. He had left a message on the answering machine, though, in a neutral voice that gave her no hint of his thoughts.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m on my way to Providence. I got a call from a potential new client this morning. The guy’s building an indoor mall, and he wants someone to design and plant an atrium in the middle. It could be an interesting job. I’ll be with him for an hour or two. Then it’ll take me a couple of hours to get back, so don’t wait on me for dinner. I may be late. See you then.”

The message was left only half an hour before, which meant that he was right. He would be back late.

There was also a message from Emily, in response to the brief one that Amanda had left earlier that afternoon. “Hi, Amanda. I got your message. I know you’re disappointed, but we’re far from done. Give me a call tomorrow and we’ll plot the next step.”

Amanda erased the message. The last thing she wanted to do was to think about Emily or the clinic. The
last
thing she wanted to do was to anticipate more of what she’d just been through. There were other options—adoption, for one. She wouldn’t need Emily or Clomid or impersonal technicians to help with that.