The Glass Wives (11 page)

Missing someone who had moved across town was different from missing someone who had died.

*   *   *

Evie pulled back into the garage, turned off the car, but stayed inside. She was alone. It was quiet. Sophie had gone into school as if it were any other day. Now Evie didn’t want to go back into the house and deal with Sam, coax him out of bed, watch him watch TV all day, waiting as he had for the past week for his friends to come home from school. Those six hours seemed like twelve. She didn’t want to yell at Sam or lecture him, but she didn’t want to be complacent, as if his behavior didn’t matter. It mattered that he wasn’t in school. It mattered to Evie’s sanity. It had only been three weeks since Richard died, and she hadn’t even looked at a newspaper or a magazine or a book and barely been online. She knew the kids needed time to grieve, time to adapt. Lots of time. But to give Sam and Sophie the time
they
needed, Evie needed time of her own. She didn’t know if that was reasonable or selfish.

She shivered at the thought of ignoring the kids’ needs. That wasn’t what she wanted. She just wanted a little bit of Evie time—even if she was just making insurance phone calls or filling out online job applications. She pushed away thoughts of how Nicole could help.

Out of the car and into the house, Evie developed a plan. Sam out of bed, into clothes, and helping with a few chores. A little sweeping and vacuuming never hurt anyone. Maybe he’d realize school was better than staying home if he spent more time with a broom in his hand than a remote. Then, after that, they’d review some old worksheets. Anything that would focus his attention away from himself and onto something else—anything else—would be a good thing.

Someone else had had the same idea.

“Hey,” Evie said as she walked into the kitchen. She poured a cup of coffee, added the requisite stream of half-and-half.

Nicole smiled and raised her eyebrows. “Sam is reading to Luca.” She pointed at the boys.

Sam held a chubby board book on Luca’s high-chair tray and was turning the pages, reading the words and pointing to pictures. He didn’t look at Evie, but he did smile.

“I figured that was better than more TV,” Nicole whispered.

In twenty minutes Nicole had gotten Sam to do what Evie hadn’t been able to get him to do in a week. Engage. Do something for someone else. Why hadn’t she realized that someone else could be Luca? Why hadn’t she realized that Nicole was good for more than a check?

Nicole followed Evie into the living room, leaving the boys in the kitchen. “Thanks,” Evie said. “What did you do?”

“I just yelled up the stairs that Luca missed him and asked him to come down. He’s not going to say no to me. I’m not his mom.”

This was true, just the way the kids would eat broccoli at Laney’s and drink orange juice at Beth’s, but do neither in their own home. When Evie and Lisa were growing up, they always ate tomato soup with oyster crackers at Bubbe’s, but when their mother made it—right from the can, with milk, just like Bubbe—they said it didn’t taste the same because it didn’t.

“So are you comfortable downstairs?” Evie didn’t know what else to say.

“It’s sort of lonely. But it’s fine.”

Evie would have loved a little lonely time right about now.

“Well, I never expected to raise Luca alone.”

Silence dug a gorge in the living-room floor. Nicole looked far away and small, not size-two small, but Thumbelina small. Evie’s nose itched but she stayed still. Did Evie need to remind Nicole that
her
life hadn’t turned out as planned, not once but twice?

“I’m sorry,” Nicole said. She picked up Luca’s primary-color plastic doughnuts from the floor. She took her finger out of the hole in the dam. “I don’t know what Richard told you about me, I don’t. But I loved him, I truly loved him.”

Evie was not buying a ticket to Nicole’s Richard-fest. “What do you want me to say?”

Nicole shrugged.

“I appreciate that you’re living here and helping out, I do. But I can’t thank you twenty-four/seven, and I can’t listen to you blabber about Richard. That’s not my job. My job is to take care of my kids.”

“I know.” Nicole picked at her cuticles. “I just want you to understand.”

Evie understood. Richard had a Ph.D. in math and was on the tenure track at Pinehurst College. Nicole worked in the campus salon cutting coeds’ and professors’ hair. Without an equation or theorem, Evie knew that Nicole’s barber chair was Richard’s pedestal. Evie understood better than Nicole would ever understand.

“Nicole, look at me.” She did. “None of that matters. Let’s just move on, okay?”
But don’t push me.

Nicole nodded and sniffed. The crying in Evie’s presence would have to stop; Nicole needed a new mother figure and some new friends. Evie could get behind that, help her do it; Evie was good at making friends. Or, she used to be.

“You have a mom and extended family—and probably old friends back in Iowa. Why aren’t you packing up Luca and heading west when there’s nothing for you here?” Evie pictured a covered wagon bumping down the road, stopping in Nicole’s driveway, her and Richard’s matching luggage tossed through the opening in the tattered cover.

“I can’t live with my mother, and Iowa has too many sad memories for me.”

The entire state of Iowa was off-limits? Lakewood didn’t have sad memories? “Why did you leave home in the first place?”

Nicole nuzzled Luca and whispered baby talk. She turned toward the window and pointed outside, still muttering. The sides of Evie’s neck tingled and then itched. She rubbed her neck but the feeling remained.

“Are you going to answer me?” Evie said.

Nicole’s hair flopped back and forth as she shook her head.

*   *   *

Beth’s laptop lay on her family-room floor between Evie and Laney.

“This is wrong,” Beth said, opening it. “We shouldn’t snoop.”

“That’s what the Internet is
for,
” Laney said, turning the laptop toward her and tapping the power button. In a convoluted tug-of-war, Beth turned the laptop back to herself. Then Laney turned it. Then Beth. Then Laney. Then Beth.

“Fine! If somebody is going to do it, I’ll do it,” Beth said, whisking the laptop off the floor and onto her outstretched legs. She huffed at Laney, admonishment usually left for someone who didn’t do the dishes. “Unless you want to do it yourself,” Beth added with raised eyebrows, looking at Evie.

Evie sank into the corner of the oversize love seat, faux-fur blanket around her covering everything but her face. She couldn’t shake a chill. “I don’t want to do it, but I have to know. Please?”

“You don’t feel just
a little
bad that Nicole is home with Luca and Sam and you’re over here digging into her past?”

“Why should she feel guilty?” Laney stood from the floor in one seamless motion without using her hands for leverage or balance. Upright, she was several feet taller than Beth. “If the widow is hiding something, Evie has a right to know. What if she shot a man in Iowa just to watch him die?” Beth looked up at Laney, then back at the laptop. She shrugged, then typed, the tap-tap-tap-tap-taps pounding in Evie’s head like a jackhammer.

“Maybe it’s a bad idea,” Evie said. “No, go ahead, do it. No, wait, don’t.”

“She’s making me crazy,” Laney said to Beth.

Beth just stared at the monitor and typed. “Leave her alone, she can’t help it.”

“
She
is right here,” Evie said, but she didn’t care. They were talking about her in front of her, which she knew was better than when someone talked behind her back.

“Take a nap,” Laney directed.

Evie closed her eyes. For once, she liked being told what to do, liked knowing someone else was taking care of business. Evie was tired. Tired of taking care of the kids without a break. Tired of having to have Nicole in the house. Tired of her neighbors not knowing what to say when they saw her in the grocery store. She was tired of wondering what would happen next. Keeping her eyes closed meant the next thing would be opening them. Sometimes, it was the little things. But closed eyes seemed to open a portal for her thoughts.

Why didn’t she pressure Nicole to tell her about Iowa? Was she respecting Nicole’s privacy? That did not seem prudent considering Nicole’s privacy once included Evie’s husband. It was just easier to invade Nicole’s privacy online than in person.

“I’m going to look into the public court records in the county where she lived in Iowa. If you want me to stop, say so now,” Beth said.

“Do it or don’t, I don’t care,” Evie said, eyes open, portal closed.

“If you don’t care, why are we doing this?” Beth said. “It’s really not right anyway. If Nicole wanted you to know about her life in Iowa, she would have told you.”

“You mean like with Richard? Look, I have to figure out how I’m going to live.
You
figure out what she’s hiding.”

“Our pleasure,” Laney said as she sat back down next to Beth and took the computer for herself. Beth didn’t argue. Beth didn’t like doing this because Beth liked Nicole, and Evie knew it.

“Hey, what if Nicole is on the Internet looking up things about me?” Evie said.

“What’s she going to find?” Laney said. “A bake-sale scandal?”

“Touché.” Had Evie been that suburban? Yes. She was the volunteering, baking mom who brought a thermos of pink lemonade to the park with a stack of Dixie cups.
No one should be thirsty at the park.
She had only turned her back on the burbs on her weekends without the kids.

“Laney’s right,” Beth said. “Nicole doesn’t need to look up anything about you. She knows everything she wants to know. Probably has since she met Richard.”

“Right, I’m sure she had you all scoped out,” Laney said.

Evie and Nicole’s relationship—
Wait, they had a relationship?—
was like a one-way street, all roads leading to Evie. Now it was Evie’s turn to see the world from Nicole’s point of view. It wasn’t a matter of trying to walk in Nicole’s shoes as much as it was knowing just where those shoes had been and possibly what they’d stepped in.

“Just go home and ask her why she doesn’t want to go back to Iowa,” Beth said. “I think if you give her a chance—”

“She’ll lie,” Laney interrupted. “Once a liar always a liar.”

Evie nodded. “Keep looking.”

Maybe it was a mistake. Uncovering secrets didn’t always solve problems, sometimes it was better not to know. If she didn’t know for sure about Richard, maybe they would have stayed married. Instead of a Stepford wife, Evie could have become a
Lakeford
wife and just walked around in a daze, wearing pearls. Evie knew that the dissolution of her marriage became less about
what
Richard did than
how
he did it. Everyone thought he’d earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics, when really his doctorate was in breaking promises. The half-built shed. The postponed vacations. The missed family dinners. The promises to stop breaking promises.

Unlike Richard to Evie, Evie had promised Nicole nothing.

“I’m hungry,” Evie said. “And sweating.”

“Should we get Sam, Nicole, and the baby and go out for lunch?” Beth said.

“No,” Laney blurted. “I don’t want to have lunch with her. Why can’t the three of us go out for lunch?”

“I’m broke, remember?”

“I’ll order Thai,” Laney said. “My treat. Nicole can give Sam lunch.”

“No, my treat,” Beth said, looking at Evie. “I’m sorry that I made you feel like you shouldn’t know whatever is going on with Nicole. You should. I know that. I don’t want you to get hurt by her or anyone else. After pad thai and spring rolls, I’ll keep searching.”

“Might not need to. What was Nicole’s name before she married Richard?” Laney said, drumming the sides of the laptop.

“Roberts,” Evie said.

“And before that?”

“What do you mean
before that
?”

“Roberts was her
first
married name.”

*   *   *

Evie paced. Then she sat. Then she stood, straightened throw pillows in the corners of the couch, moved framed photos around and then put them back. Then she paced some more.

Nicole was taking too long. Evie had asked her to come upstairs ten minutes ago. The kids were in bed. Awake, but in bed. If Nicole and Evie talked in the living room, with the TV on, the impending conflict would be muffled by the nightly news. Probably.

Nicole strolled in and sat on the couch. “What’s up?”

“You were married before?” Evie blurted. So much for easing herself into it.

“Yeah?” Nicole said with the nonchalance of a teenager.

“What do you mean,
yeah
?”

“What do
you
mean? Of course I was married before.”

Evie replayed Nicole’s words in her head. What had she missed?
Of course she was married before?
With her mouth open, Evie jutted her head forward and stared at Nicole, waiting for more. Was the girl naive or taunting her? Or was she just plain stupid?

Evie threw her hands in the air. “Talk!”

“Wait a minute,” Nicole said, even though Evie was clearly in no mood for waiting. “You didn’t know about Peter?”

“Who’s Peter and how am I supposed to know about him?” Evie raised and then lowered her voice. She sat at the far end of the sectional and tapped her foot as if she were listening to music with a fast beat.

“Peter was my husband. He was my high school sweetheart. You really didn’t know?” Nicole scrunched her eyebrows together. She seemed to be concentrating, trying to figure out how this gaffe could be possible.

“I really didn’t know.”

“Well, now I know why you keep referring to Luca as my only child.”

“Sam and Sophie are not your children.” Evie was tiring of the word games, of drawing lines in the parenting sand.

“I’m talking about Lucy.”

“Who’s Lucy?” Evie’s voice and intolerance rose.

“My daughter.” Nicole rolled up her sleeve to reveal the rose tattoo. Evie leaned in and squinted. The tattoo said
LUCY.

“You have a daughter?” A stifled scream scraped Evie’s throat as she reversed into her spot on the couch.