The Other Widow (12 page)

She walks back to the kitchen and sticks the Arthur Reinfeld note on the fridge with a magnet. She'll investigate at some point; she'll call him. She grabs a cup of decaf and heads back to Joe's office, shakes out all the papers from the back of the day planner, and puts them in a tiny pile. No dates, so she isn't sure of the order; there's no cohesion, really. They're like little random upchuckings that he's jotted on the pages, often just one line.

Brakes pulling. Ask Karen to take car in.

Vagrant in garage at work this morning. Sketchy guy. Talk with security.

Antoine to vet if Karen can't
. (
Wouldn't
was more like it. She had trouble with Antoine on a fun frolic—forget about trying to get him in the car.)

Airbag light on. Check this.

She sips the cooling decaf. She had taken Joe's car in, but Hoods is only mediocre now.
Take it back in
, Joe had said, after the brake job.
You got rooked
. But she didn't take it back. It was only the memories of Tomas, of the happy times with him that made her go back there at all.

This glimpse of her late husband's thoughts has made her hungry for more. Karen tugs at all the drawers in the file cabinet, rifling through them quickly, coming up with nothing but some old bank statements. She sticks the last of the files in the drawer—tries to, anyway. There's something jammed at the back, stopping them from fitting. A box. She tugs it loose—a gift she'd given Joe three Christmases before. A stocking stuffer, something she'd imagined he could use at work, or in his car, or his files, as he apparently has. She stares at it. He's locked the silly lock on the outside—a lock like the one Lydia had on her diary in the fifth grade, designed to keep out snoopy little sisters, which it had not done. Karen remembers popping the thing open with a paperclip, spilling Lydia's secrets out into her eager, eight-year-old hands. She does this now, picking the lock with a hairpin. Deftly, but with care and much anticipation, she pulls up the lid. Other people's secrets are intoxicating.

She breathes in the cedar odor of the box and thumbs through its contents, feels a stab of guilt as she glances down at ancient letters from Joe's mother, now long dead, the occasional short note from his father, also dead. Pictures slide from a frail envelope into her hand—old photos from Joe's childhood, his mother, young in shorts, his father stern, in white trousers and a jaunty sport coat—a grim man, the opposite of Joe.

She tugs at a newer, far less fragile envelope, stuffed full of pictures from their life together. Joe, shaggy-haired in Miami the year they lived down near the bay—Karen with her hair tied back, her shoulders tan in a sundress, her feet in handmade sandals from the Grove.

She stares at the pictures and forgotten moments float up from their curling edges—laughter from the docks, the creaking of a ship's rigging, Joe's crumbling old apartment on Loquat Street, the first time they slept together, the bumpy bus with stuck-open windows, cold air puffing in as she rode to his place in winter, the jalousies in his apartment that never really closed or opened all the way, the cold and heat that seeped in through the glass. She remembers music playing, her foot tapping, bare, tanned toes, remembers touching, skin to skin, the passion, the lovemaking, waking to the smell of salt air drifting through the bedroom window. At night the wind blew through the flapping screen door, caught them where they lay, their naked legs dark in the moonlight. Sometimes, in summer, it was so still, the sound of crickets roared in the side yard and pot smoke hung thick and sweet in the air.
Who said punning is the lowest form of humor?
Joe asked once, stretched out across a straw mat on her sister's porch, and she'd said he was only jealous—he felt left out when they launched into their routine. It was an acquired taste in their family, Lydia told him, “like opening veins,” and they'd laughed, and Joe stared out through the screen as if he weren't even there.

Is that when it started, she wonders now—the space between them? Where does it go, the falling into each other's arms, the passion, the lovemaking? And afterward—lying together talking, dredging up all your stuff from the past and breathing it into the other person, while his pores are still open from making love, like you can, in some way, make him know you, how you've come to be what you are at that moment, with your hair piled on top of your head and your nineteen-year-old hands lying palms up on tangled sheets?

She sighs. Tears trickle down her cheeks. And here's their marriage license, the bill from that little restaurant where they had their reception. A small one. Intimate, with poetry on fancy place cards, hand-dipped candles on the tables, Edith Piaf warbling from speakers on the walls.

And then another envelope with nothing in it but a solitary picture, a special little niche for this photograph she would never have known to look for. She coughs. She holds the picture out, away from her body, as if it were on fire, this photo of her husband with another woman. She stares at the photograph and her hand shakes with rage, with disbelief. She knows her, recognizes the face, something about the face, the expression. Who
is
it? She closes her eyes. This woman was at the funeral, at the cemetery. Karen saw her when she turned around, when she thought she saw someone in the trees. Even then, she hadn't quite remembered where she'd seen her . . . Was it a neighbor? Someone at the company? Yes. Karen stares at the picture. She'd seen her at a Christmas party at the office. Last year's party. Joe introduced them. Darlene, she thinks, or, no. Dorreen.

She sits down on the daybed. The springs give under her weight. An old daybed, a junk-shop find. She should really throw it out. She'll phone the people from St. Vincent's. Dorreen. But they called her something else. Dorrie. Of course. Dorrie. She was married. Karen remembers meeting the husband at the same Christmas party. The smoker, obliviously inhaling nicotine while his wife was in a hotel room with her boss, with Joe. And if Karen needed any more proof, the look on Dorrie's face at the cemetery—the raw expression in her eyes when Karen turned around—
that
, if she had stopped to think about it at the time, if it had registered in her distracted brain, would have been proof enough.

She forces herself to look at her husband's face in the picture, at the lines across his forehead, the crease between his eyes. She studies his haircut, his clothes, distracts herself with trying to guess exactly when the shot was taken. Really, it doesn't matter now. And yet, in some odd way, it does.
A year ago
, she says out loud in the silence, in the ashes of her husband's life, in the room filled with his things, where he kept his girlfriend's picture in a box his wife gave him.
In the spring,
she says.
I bought this shirt at a Macy's sale. I pulled it off the rack and brought it home a year ago this spring
.

She leans against the wall on the daybed Antoine has completely ruined. She sits on a tattered quilt the dog has twisted into a large swirl from turning around three times before he sits. Or lies.

Lies
, Karen says aloud, and she looks back at the photo in her hand. Once, in the waiting room at the doctor's office, she'd read an article on infidelity. Men cheat for different reasons, it said, but, contrary to popular belief, the other woman is usually not all that attractive—that isn't what the straying husband really wants. He wants someone genuine, even plain, according to the article, someone who can offer him a little understanding, validation. Basically, he wants a wife without the kids and dirty dishes—without the years of baggage.

Yet Dorrie is beautiful. At least in this picture. And she loved him. It's in her eyes, how much she loved him, the way her head tilts slightly toward his shoulder, her small, slight figure leaning back against his arm. In the photograph, her hair blows over her shoulder as she turns to look at a group of what look like mimes. A street fair.

For a minute Karen can't get her breath. She's furious. Hurt. Shocked. In her head she knew Joe was seeing someone else, but now, with this tangible and blatant truth, she knows it in her heart. She'd rationalized. Just as she always has, she'd stored away her knowledge, her anger, for later. Really, she knew there was someone else even before she found the e-mails. She knew it from the way her husband touched her—and from the way he didn't, the nights he slipped in bed without a sound, without a whisper. No more “Karen? Are you awake?” No more of that.

She looks back at the picture. It's the eyes she notices. Large and green and slightly sad. The eyes of a victim. Joe has always had a soft spot for victims. But only pretty ones.

She slides down to sit cross-legged on the floor. She feels as if her entire married life has been a lie. And, at the root of it, it was. Their sons, of course, their sons are real and perfect—nothing can take that away from her or from her marriage. But Joe. She drops her head into her hands. He was a lie. She closes her eyes, and sees his face, and then, for just a fraction of a second, she sees her father's face, the round white moon of it, shining through a murky window, her father, ripping through the early fabric of her life. Preparing her. Setting her up. For this. For the lie that was her husband.

Suddenly she wants the photo gone, this testament to Joe's affair. It has no place here in her house, and this she finds to be the most outrageous thing of all—that he would bring this fucking picture
here
to their home, to the place where she cooked dinners, gave Christmas parties, raised their sons. Here! And the
Samuel
in the e-mail. Of course. His name was Samuel! Dorrie's husband. Sam, she thinks was how his wife presented him that night.
This is my husband, Sam
.

She wipes her eyes and rips the photograph in half and then she rips it again and then again, until there's nothing left but tiny slivers, tiny flakes of flesh and hair, of sad green eyes and white lace blouse and Macy's sale-rack, sky-blue shirt. When she's finished, she goes to the basement for a broom, dumps the tiny scraps into a bin she'll wheel out to the street for Wednesday morning pickup.

Joe has managed this last blow.
From the grave
, her mother would have said, with a slight vindictive sneer—she'd never liked him.
I told you so
. For a moment Karen thinks of shredding everything her husband valued, his entire lifetime of collections—the photos he does not deserve. Not now. The letters from the past thirty years—what right has he to any of them? To anything at all? No matter that he's dead. She thinks about burning his things, about not passing them along to either of his sons. She considers going to Dorrie's house and banging on her door, of outing her to her stupid husband who smokes cigarettes and leaves his empty packs on the dining room table.

She grabs the box
she
purchased, the box
she
wrapped and put under the tree one Christmas, the box, polluted now by that one picture. She rifles through the few remaining papers with a careless and exacting hand. She'll throw it out. All of it. Unless it has to do with the company or with her, with Robbie or Jon directly, there's no point in holding on to anything Joe's—

She stops. She leans back on her heels and nearly drops the envelope—second to the last in a stack of letters bound together with a sticky, crumbling rubber band.

She stares at the writing on the envelope addressed to her. Opened, but addressed to her. She flips it over, but even before she does, she knows whose name she'll find there on the back. She knows it's from Tomas.

XIII

DORRIE

D
orrie leaves the glove on Samuel's workbench and slips back through the garage door. By the time she's reached the living room, she's already texting Viv.

We need to meet tonight!
She skips the details, gets straight to the point.
Seven? In the lobby?

Okay,
Viv texts her back,
I'll meet you down in the
— But Dorrie doesn't read the rest. She sticks the phone in her purse and glances at the empty cobbler plate on the kitchen counter. A note peeps out from under it. Lily. Damn.
At the library
, she's scrawled,
doing research
. She must have left with Mia. Or maybe with the new boy, the science geek. Dorrie doesn't even know his name. Michael, is it? They—
Lily
—must have left while Dorrie was plowing through her husband's things in search of Goop. She's slipping. She hadn't even heard a car honk in the driveway.

You are in serious trouble,
she texts Lily.

Sorry, Mom. I couldn't find you. I'll be back as soon as we're done at school. Study group. Home by nine.

Who is we?

Mia and me.
Smiley face. Heart. Smiley face.

She texts Samuel, props Lily's note against his precious Keurig. She'll take the train, avoid the traffic, especially with ice still on the roads, but she is careful, walking to the station. She stays along the lit sidewalk. She keeps her eyes open, watches for approaching cars. She moves quickly, erratically. Once inside the station, she averts her eyes, waiting. Odors stick on the dank thick air, and Dorrie breathes them in, the smell of grease and electricity, of crowded bodies, damp wool, and cold. Lights flicker. Brakes scream, echoing in the hollow space. She scrambles into the first car when the train shrieks to a stop. She sits beside a window, happy when an older man sits down beside her. Hefty as he is, he blocks her from the aisle, makes her almost invisible, and she stares at the black window, so close the glass fogs with her breath.

Dorrie sits in the restaurant at the hotel. She's chosen the bench side, where she feels less exposed, and she fluffs the bright, orangey pillows at her back. Across the table, Viv fidgets with her silverware, moves her glass, twirls up the edges of the tablecloth. She glances around the room as if she's looking for a sniper.