Around the Bend (20 page)

And the first place to start was with Susan.

Susan Reynolds’s phone number stared back at me in rounded tiny numbers, displayed on the tiny screen of Dave’s Motorola phone. After my sister left and after two more glasses of Chardonnay, I’d finally gotten up the nerve to scroll through the listings in his phone book. I recognized only a handful.

What scared me was the names I didn’t know. There was an Annie, a Kate, a Mindy. Two Pats—which could have been men or women—and a Matt. I’d stopped scrolling at the
S’
s, too afraid to go farther. None of those names were familiar. They weren’t people I’d met at the Greendale Insurance Company Christmas parties. They weren’t names Dave had used in conversation.

I could, of course, call them and ask,
Uh, how did you know my husband? And did he tell you he was married to a Susan or a Penny?

But no, I couldn’t do that—not yet, anyway. I wanted the truth, but I also
didn’t
want it, as if I could hold on to my fantasy that everything between Dave and I had been genuine.

Because if he’d duped me about being married, what else had been fake?

That was the real question I didn’t want to answer. The one that clubbed my heart and broke it into smaller pieces every time I gave it voice.

I put the phone down, avoiding it to dig through drawers and filing cabinets, searching for Dave’s will. I came up empty-handed and made a mental note to check his desk at work. Any man who was trying to hide multiple marital beneficiaries probably was smart enough to store that kind of evidence elsewhere.

Throughout it all, Harvey sat there and watched me, his little face jerking quickly with my every movement.

I found nothing. Not so much as a matchbook with a number scribbled on it. The only clues I had were in the Motorola.

I went back to the phone and scrolled through it again, leaving Susan down in the
S’
s and went to Kevin. I hit Send, then waited for him to pick up.

“’Lo,” he said. Behind him, I heard rock music playing in his bachelor apartment. Apparently Lillian was gone, because he had heavy metal going at full blast.

“Kevin, it’s Penny.”

“Oh, hi, Pen.” His voice softened and he turned down the volume on his stereo. Kevin was the quiet one in the Reynolds family, who’d lacked the charm and sense of humor of Dave, but had the same studious way of watching someone while they talked, making them feel like the only person in the room. “How you holding up?”

“Fine. Ah, listen, I wanted to talk to you about Dave. About…well, what he did when he wasn’t with me.”

A pause. “I don’t know anything about that, Pen. Sorry.”

Across from me, Harvey started nosing at his little denim
backpack, his name emblazoned in red glitter across the front. He pawed at it, then sat back and whined.

“You’re his brother. You knew everything there was to know about him. You guys went everywhere together. Fishing, hunting, you name it.”

“
I
didn’t go.”

The words lingered between us, made raspy by the cellphone static. There hadn’t been an annual hunting trip to Wisconsin. Or the fishing trip to Maine each May. I’d never thought my husband was much of a sportsman, considering I was the one who baited the hooks at our lake vacation last August, but now I realized he hadn’t been out looking for elk at all. He hadn’t gone to any of the places he’d said he’d gone.

He’d been with
her
.

And Harvey.

It had all been a show. Another batch of lies. And Kevin had known, at least that Dave had been lying to me. The new betrayal slammed into me.

“I have to go, Kevin,” I said, the nausea lurching up inside my throat again. I closed the phone and tossed it onto the sofa, not wanting to touch it—and the dozens of names I didn’t know—for another second.

I curled into a chair and drew an afghan over my knees. The worn, multicolored blanket was as old as me, made by my grandmother when I’d been born, a blend of blues and pinks. I pulled its softness to my shoulders, then over my head, burrowing myself inside its comfort and darkness.

Here, the world was gone, quieted by the muffling weight of the thick, fuzzy yarn. Like I had throughout the rocky, tumultuous years of my childhood, I imagined staying right where
I was until the worst was over. Harvey stuck his head under a corner, took one look at me and began wagging his tail.

The ringing of Dave’s cell phone forced me out of my cocoon. I threw off the blanket and watched the Motorola, its face lighting up in blue to announce the incoming call. For a moment, I hesitated, afraid to answer it. Afraid of who might be on the other end.

Eventually curiosity won out and I reached for the cell, flipping it open. “Hello?”

“Hey, is Dave there?” said a male voice I didn’t recognize.

“No. He’s…” I couldn’t get the words out. I tried, even formed them with my lips, but they refused to be voiced. It wasn’t
bigamy
I was afraid to say, it was
dead
. “He’s gone right now. But I’m his wife. Can I help you?”

“You’re Annie? Hey, cool to meet you. Dave talks about you all the time, you know.”

Annie? Who the hell was Annie? A nickname for Susan? Or worse…

Another
wife?

“Who did you say you were again?” I asked the voice.

“Oh, shit, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Vinny. I’m Harvey’s trainer.”

“Harvey’s…trainer?”

“Well, hell, you didn’t think he learned to dance and play the piano all by himself, did you?”

“He can play the piano?” I looked at the dog, sitting a few feet away, his tail swishing against the floor like a carpet clock.

“Not Mozart, but he can bang out a pretty good ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ That’s what got him on
Good Morning America
.”

I’d entered an alternate universe. Dave, a musically inclined dog and appearances on national television. Not to mention Susan and Annie. And whoever else I didn’t know about.

“So, is Dave going to be at Dog-Gone-Good?” Vinny asked. “I was hoping he’d get here a couple days early so we can give Harvey a refresher on his dance routine. I tried calling Dave yesterday but he didn’t pick up.”

“He’s…” I closed my eyes, took in a breath. “He died on Wednesday.”

Silence on the other end, then an under-the-breath curse. “For real?”

“Yes.”

“Aw, Annie, I’m sorry. He was a great guy. We’re really going to miss him.”

I pressed a hand to my stomach, as if putting a palm against my gut would give me strength I couldn’t seem to find today. At least it would help me keep the soggy lasagna the church ladies made from making a return appearance. “And, my name isn’t Annie,” I said. “It’s Penny.”

A confused moment of silence. “But…but I thought you said you were his wife.”

“I thought I was, too. Apparently I was sharing the job.”

“Oh.
Oh
. Holy crap. Well, uh, I’m, ah, sorry.” I could practically hear him fidgeting on the other side. “Listen, I gotta go. You, ah, take care. And if you want to send Harvey down to me, I’ll make sure he does Dave proud at Dog-Gone-Good.”

Before I could say anything else, Vinny was gone, leaving me with a phone that only seemed to quadruple the horror of my widowhood every time I went near it.

The pain of it all—of Dave’s death, his betrayal, of the loss
of my life as I knew it—ripped through me in a sob so big it tore through my throat.

“Oh, God,” I cried, sobbing and yelling at the same time. I banged my fist against the carpet, then pulled back my stinging palm and pressed it against my chest, trying to hold my breaking heart in place.

Something wet and cold was on my hand, then on my face. I opened my eyes to find Harvey the Wonder Dog licking me, his tail wagging in ginger little movements, his ears perked like antennae, seeking, I supposed, signs of normalcy.

Harvey. Dave’s legacy. What had Georgia called him?

The answer to all my questions.

Not much of an answer, considering he probably only weighed fourteen pounds soaking wet. But he was all I had, so I was starting there.

“Harvey,” I said, swiping at my eyes, “want to go on a road trip?”

To say Susan was surprised to see me on her Rhode Island doorstep the next morning would have been an understatement. She lived a little over an hour away from our house in Newton, in a small ranch with a magnolia in the front yard, which was starting to bloom in the bright early April sunshine.

When she saw me, Susan teetered on her high-heeled boots, enough that I thought she was going to faint. Then Harvey sprang out of my arms and into her house, and Susan recovered her wits.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“Reverse lookup of your phone number in Dave’s cell. The Internet is a dangerous thing.”

She nodded, as if that all made sense, then opened her door wider. “Want to come in?”

“Actually,” I said, drawing in a breath, “I want you to come out. And go to Tennessee with me.”

She blinked. Behind her, Harvey was running in circles around the perimeter of her braided rug, apparently seeing its endless oval as a challenge. “A road trip? To Tennessee?”

“Did you know about Annie?” I asked.

She thought a second, running the name through a mental phone book. “No.”

“Well, it seems she might be Dave’s wife, too. Meaning Mrs. Reynolds number three.”

“He had another? Besides you and me?” Susan gripped the doorjamb. Now I really did think she was going to faint. I knew those feelings, having had them myself quite recently.

“Listen, why don’t we sit down, have a drink and talk about it? I’ve already had time to digest this.” I paused. “More or less. But I could still use a stiff one. Or two. Or ten.”

Susan nodded, stepped back and turned to go down the hall, leaving me to follow. I shut the door, left Harvey to his circles and walked into Susan’s bright yellow kitchen. It was a nice room, small but tidy, decorated in sunflowers and navy accents. The kind of kitchen I imagined a neighbor having. The kind of kitchen where I could see myself sitting down for a cup of coffee on a Thursday morning and gossiping about the guy across the street who mowed his lawn in his Speedo.

It wasn’t, in other words, what I had expected from Dave’s 36D wife.

“I have rum. And…tequila,” she said, searching a cabinet above the Kenmore stove.

“Do you have Coke?”

She shook her head. “Diet Pepsi.”

“It’ll do.” Heck, I would have had the rum straight, but I figured Susan didn’t know me well enough to see me get drunk, something I’d done more in the past few days than in my entire life. After all that had happened, I was beginning to see the upside of staying perpetually toasted.

She poured two rum and Diet Pepsis over ice, then returned to the table, sliding one in front of me. Apparently Susan also wasn’t paying attention to the clock when it came to having a respite from the shock-and-awe campaign executed by Dave’s funeral.

I drank deeply, then pushed the glass away and folded my hands over each other. Susan was one of the keys to what had happened with Dave, to why he had married another. I needed her, even though I didn’t want to.

“The way I see it,” I began, “both of us have been screwed, pardon the pun, by Dave.”

She nodded. Slowly.

“And I want to know why. I was married to him for fifteen years.”

Susan raised a palm, wiggled her fingers. “Five here.”

I swallowed that fact, allowing it to hit my stomach and churn in the empty pit with the rum. Five years. That meant he’d married her the year I was in the hospital having my appendix removed. I tried to think of when Dave had been gone then, but my brain had become a fuzzy mess of dates and lies.

For a second, I thought of telling Susan the whole thing was a huge mistake. Thanks for the rum, but I gotta go.

Then I realized leaving wasn’t going to do anything but put me back to square one, and instead I stayed where I was, taking another gulp of my drink from a glass decorated with flowers around the edge, and tried to regain some kind of normalcy.

Ha. There wasn’t any of that here. What I had was a whole lot of questions and a piano-playing dog who kept looking at me with expectant eyes, as if I was supposed to do some amazing trick, too.

“Well,” I began again, trying to drum up the courage to press forward, to force myself out of the comfort zone where everything was a known quantity. “I don’t know about you, but I want some answers.”

Susan shook her head. “I—”

“Don’t say you don’t want to know.” I waved the glass at her, the ice clinking in the emptiness. “Because you will. An hour from now, a day from now, you’ll wonder
why
. You’ll look in the closet and see his shoes—”

Oh, God, his shoes were under her bed, too. In her closet. Was this where his favorite blue shirt had gone? The one I’d torn the closet apart looking for last May? Or the yellow striped tie I told him I hated that he’d never worn again in my presence?

I clutched the glass tighter, to keep myself from running to her bedroom to peek and see how much of my husband was here.

“And you’ll want to know,” I went on, pushing the words past my lips, “because you’re some kind of masochist who hates to have a mystery unsolved.”

“I kind of like mysteries,” Susan said, a bright smile on her face, as if I’d just handed her a new Nancy Drew.

“Work with me, Susan.” I bit off the aggravation in my voice. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to know. About Annie. About where he went when he wasn’t with you.” I swallowed. “Or me.”

She toyed with her still-full glass. Silence descended over the kitchen, seeming to darken the bright, pretty room. “I left him that day, you know.”

“Yeah, the EMTs told me.”

“We had a fight,” she said.

I tried not to let on how much it weirdly pleased me to hear that he and Susan had had a fight.

“We had the fight after we…well, you know.” A faint sheen of red filled her cheeks, a surprise in this woman who seemed so Manhattan. “Anyway, I left and took the train back to Rhode Island, figuring he’d catch up with me at home. If I had known—” Her voice caught on a sob and held the last syllable. “I’m sorry, Penny.”

She was apologizing to me for leaving my husband. For not being there when he’d had a heart attack. She made it impossible to hate her. “I’m sorry for you, too.”

She nodded, then picked up the tumbler, knocked back half the drink and slammed the small glass back onto the wooden surface. Brown liquid sloshed over the rim. “You’re right. I want to know, damn it. I loved that man and I want some answers, too.”

To hear her say she loved him hit me in the gut, hard. I rose, poured myself another drink—skipping the cola this time—and the feeling went away. A little.

Harvey the Wonder Dog trotted into the kitchen, his nose to the floor, looking for scraps, or maybe another rug to circle.

“I say we take him,” I said, gesturing to the Jack Russell terrier, “to this doggie show and ask everyone there about Dave. They knew him, they know Harvey.”

“And if they won’t tell us anything?”

I grinned at my strange new ally and raised my glass. “We’ll break out the rum.”

As she toasted my glass with her own, I had a flashing
nightmare of the two of us ending up on
Jerry Springer
, telling our tale of woe while Harvey did tricks in the background.

Surely, it wouldn’t come to that.

I’d go on
Oprah
before I’d ever sink to
Springer
.

Maybe.