Wanted: Wife (17 page)

“You say that so easily,” I said, “but it’s got to hurt.”

He shrugged again. “Nothing I can do about it now. Anyway, it’s a pretty busy market, even without the holiday Shore traffic, so we ought to do all right. Did so last week, at least.”

Such a master at changing the subject, I once again noticed. So I would, too. “Anybody there you know?”

“A few, and the rest I’ve heard of. Ray should be there.”

“The Fire warden.” His mouth crooked. “Yeah, him. Selling the last of the blueberries, I guess. Plus his wife makes these incredible pies and jam. You’ll like her. Celia’s her name.”

“Really.” Visions of Ma Kettle danced in my head. “Maybe we could pull up the rocking chairs and swap recipes just like good farmers’ wives.”

Andy sniffed. “Maybe you could swap marketing strategies. ‘Celia’s Blues’ has an output of eight hundred pies a day, and during harvest season her jamming operation takes on thirty employees.”

I was properly chastised. “Well, spank
me
. Sorry for being so small-minded.”

“Everyone’s allowed a lapse now and then,” he said, slowing for a light. “Never thought perfection was easy to maintain.”

“You’re too, too kind,” I said. Not to mention a serial evader. I thought to give it another go. “Did you and Ray go to school together?”

“Sure, back in the Dark Ages. Practically grew up as brothers.”

“Really. I supposed you missed him after you and your mother went to France.”

“Yeah, I did.” At that he winced. “We wrote each other for a while, then lost touch. Though he did come over one summer while we were in college to go hiking in the Pyrenees.”

“You nature boys you. Can’t keep you out of the woods, huh?”

“Oh, I didn’t go. I was working and couldn’t get away. Though he did stay with my mother a couple of days. Now, him, she liked.”

“She didn’t like any of your other friends?”

“Let’s just say she had a thing about Americans in general.”

“Yet she had married one.”
Interesting
. “You know, I’ve heard so much about the weeks and weeks of vacation Europeans get, yet you weren’t allowed a couple days off for a friend you hadn’t seen since you were kids? That seems kind of harsh.”

“Nothing I could do about it. I was at sea.” He looked up ahead. “Hey—there’s a Wawa. How about some coffee?”

A rhetorical question; he was already turning in. “Sure.”

Evading again, but wasn’t that just so like him. And realizing that made it odder still. As I waited while Andy ran in the convenience store, I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was seeing him in so workaday a setting. Seeing him filling two cups with coffee, paying the cashier, scanning the headlines on the newspaper rack, holding the door opened for a woman with a stroller. So much more routine than see him birthing a cow or bringing down a rabid raccoon, crossing through his peach orchard or cutting a naked swath through the lake. I couldn’t help marveling, in the few days I’ve known my husband, how fast the outsized had become mundane, and how even ordinary actions became fresh and mysterious and inordinately fascinating. When he came back to the truck and handed me a coffee, his fingers brushing mine, the memory of the night before returned in such a rush I was almost ashamed how much I wanted him.
How strange is that?
this wave of lust, this immediate craving I didn’t know what to do with. Funnier still how I caught his gaze as we pulled back onto the road, and his eyes widened ever so slightly, almost as if he completely understood. Truth was he did, because all at once he veered off onto a smaller road, then onto one of the hundreds of sandy trails etching the Pines, traveling far enough to veer again into a clearing and behind an old shed, where he stopped and opening my door, pulled me into his arms.

“We
are
thinking the same thing,” I whispered, baring my neck so he could kiss it. “How is it you could read my mind?”

“Like species seek out their own,” he said, slipping my panties from me, opening his fly. I gripped his shoulders as he lifted me up.

I gasped like I always did. Yet with him inside me it seemed so natural. “Are you saying I’m just like you?”

“Yes,” he said.
“Yes.”
He gripped the rail of the truck bay and held me against it, my hand fisting a knot of his hair. I arched my back, pulling him in as his fingers dug into my hip, hoping he’d fall further and deeper inside me. Then I couldn’t think anymore, my body alive and my mind spiraling, just as his was I’m sure, feeling his thrum inside me.

Later, our fingers curled around each other’s as we set off down the road, not saying anything at first, just holding on, maybe a bit too tightly. After a few miles I sighed and lay my head against his shoulder, and we returned to our coffee, sipping it companionably. At a light he kissed my temple.

“You’re good for me,” he murmured.

That took me by surprise. Was I supposed to say something? I couldn’t think of an answer. Then the light changed and we went on down the road.

Good
as contrast to what?
For him to know
, a little voice said,
and for me to find out
.

T
HE FARMERS’ MARKET
was a joint venture of several local farms, and was comprised of a couple dozen long tables that carried any assortment of goods—grown, baked, bottled and sewn. Situated in a shady spot off busy Route 70, a popular Shore road in one direction, and toward Philadelphia on the other, it was barely six-thirty by the time we found our table under the umbrella of a big oak and proceeded to set up. The market also had a snack bar and frozen custard stand (and happily, a bathroom), so I was looking forward to lunching on something beyond Andy’s farm fare, even if it had to be a hot dog. Shortly after we hauled the last flat of tomatoes to the table another truck, this one all polished chrome and red paint, angled into the spot beside us.

“Andy!” a man called from the window of it.

A little while later I clasped hands with Ray, a tall, lithe cording of tan and muscle in a Fire Service uniform, and his blonde wife, Celia, so svelte and sophisticated I wondered if she just drove in from the Main Line.

“So this is the new Mrs. Devine,” Ray said, his friendly gaze raking me. “No one could accuse Andy of dragging his feet.” He gave my hand a hearty shake.

“Or settling for the girl next door,” said Celia, placing her cheek to mine. “Welcome, Ms. Random Access.” She leaned back, eyeing me inquisitively. “So, you didn’t chase him out West after all?”

A chill shot down my spine. “What do you mean?”

“Sweetie, you’re the talk of the town,” she said, briefly turning to two workers unloading pies and preserves out of their truck, setting them atop a check-covered tablecloth trumpeting:
Celia’s Blues
. “My sister does mornings for Prowler Traffic—maybe you heard of her? Barbie Coyle?”

Does mornings
was apt. No one could banter double entendre with the deejays better than Barbie “Doll” Coyle, or “Bouncin’ Barbie,” as Richard had referred to her. I recalled the night we watched her strip off her bra atop the bar at a Delaware Avenue club. Of course, the next day he signed her.

But that hardly mattered at the moment. “Why? Did she say something about me?”

Andy shot me a warning look as she shuttled me aside. “The dish is your fiancé went back to his wife—you know, the one you stole him from?”

“What?”
I cried. “He was never married. Where’d she hear that from?”

Her face screwed. “How long have you been off the grid?” She pulled out her phone and, tapping an app, brought up
phillyak,
a gutter gossip site Richard loved to troll. “Look at what Jake the Snake said yesterday.”

I took it from her, aghast:
Where in the wide, wide world of sports is JK? How random is it if she left P-town for the Left Coast, to once again wrench the regal R from the arms of his once and future wife?

“Jesus Christ,” I said, handing it back, barely able to breathe. “It’s so not true. It’s just
gossip
.”

“But that hardly matters now, does it?”

“Of course it does!” A few people looked in our direction, and we ducked behind the nearby frozen custard shack, an overhead cooling vent drowning extraneous conversation. “You have any idea what this’ll do to my professional reputation?”

“And that should matter now because . . .?” She raised a tentative brow. “Didn’t you give that all up when you married Andy?”

“Yes, of course, b-but—” Good Lord, I was practically sputtering. “But I never meant—”

“To give it all up forever? Hey sister, I hear you. No one knows that better than me.” She glanced to her husband, enmeshed in conversation with Andy. It was a glance filled with resignation, and I actually felt for her, especially since I knew it was a portent that’d never apply to me.

“Look,” she continued, “I spent years in public relations. Sometimes it makes no difference if it’s true or not, and denying it only makes the lies more real. But you’re in a good place now. Obviously your Richard’s a shit, and well worth getting out of your life, but if you have to bide your time until it all blows over?” She placed a hand on my arm and dropped her gaze dramatically. “Honey, I could think of worse men to bide time with than Andy.”

I couldn’t speak; I was absolutely comatose. When would it stop? This damage Richard had wrought. How much of a mess would he have to make of my life until his demolition of me was complete? Married? Had he been? Why hadn’t he ever told me? It made so much more sense now, how he couldn’t ever break his hold on Annika. All at once my head was splitting. I looked beyond the farm stand, wanting to bury myself deep in the woods where no one would ever find me. And then it hit me:
wasn’t that what I was already doing?

“Uh-oh, look there,” Celia said, pointing to the two buses pulling into the parking lot. “Here come two busloads of little old ladies with lots of daughters to buy jam for. And who all need peaches to help them poop tomorrow morning.” She tugged my arm. “Come on, let’s get to work. There’s Social Security dollars to be snatched out of those pocketbooks.”

So I went. The rest of the day went by in a flurry of fruits, vegetables, and lots of sweat and car exhaust, and since I was still in the metro-Philadelphia viewing area, I had donned a big straw hat and sunglasses to keep my recognition down to a minimum. Although Andy’s eyes were questioning, we never had the time to talk beyond some pretty utilitarian conversation. Then late in the afternoon, I headed to the bathroom and, taking out my phone, trolled the local news sites until my one bar faded away and my irritation level kicked up to four.

Both Richard and Annika were keeping mum about the marriage thing, but that didn’t stop the gossip mavens from getting to the bottom of it. One had unearthed the six-year-old Maryland marriage license from which Richard and Annika had been married, when Annika was barely eighteen. Three weeks later, her parents had had it annulled. I blew up the image and nearly fell to my knees: it was the same signature I had seen gracing his cards, our checks, my contract. Then another site said they had never divorced and he was still married, leading to another headline that painted him a potential bigamist, which of course, had me looking the perfect fool. What kind of journalist could I be if I couldn’t even get the dirt on my own life?

The “official” story the station was floating was that I had left on sabbatical, saving them the embarrassment of admitting they had kicked me out first. Other sources said I was in Seattle chasing down Richard, while an anonymous source said my bank account had been frozen by my former fiancé, leaving me homeless and penniless. (Gee, I wonder who
that
was?) All of this seemed to attract either sympathy or scorn, depending on whether one backed Team Richard or Team Julie, but one thing was certain. The general consensus was I had left my faithful viewership high and dry, and that was an offense past forgiveness. The whole thing made me so ill I came
this close
to tossing the BlackBerry in the trash. Turned out I didn’t have to when it died. As I came out of the bathroom there was Andy, waiting for me.

“Ready to go home?” he said.

“They hate me,” I said, trudging past him to slump atop a picnic table.

“Who?”

I waved my phone in futility. “All of Philadelphia, it seems.”

He fell to his haunches before me. “Are you in Philadelphia now?”

“No,” I said, glaring at him. “But it also encompasses South Jersey and all of Delaware, and if you’re streaming, then maybe worldwide, too.” I laughed. “Every news site has me either as a victim or an idiot, and I have to tell you, neither is very flattering. I dropped my head to my hands. “Julie Knott’s Random Access is now Julie Knott—Random
Ass
.”

He sighed. A moment later my hands were in his. “Or how about something else? It’s yours if you want it.” He lifted my chin. “How about Mrs. Andy Devine?”

Somehow a tear had weaseled its way down my face, and I swiped it away. “Yeah, there is that.”

“Julie, I told you I’d never let anything happen to you, that I’d always take care of you. Do you believe me?”

On some fantasy level, I did. “Of course.”

“Then who cares what they think, what they’re saying? That was then, and what we have here . . .” He kissed my hand. “Is now.”

He was right, of course. And deep down, I knew that someday I’d prove them all wrong. But to do that then, I had to do
this
now. I snuffled away another tear. “Then get me out of here.”

He rose with me. “The truck is packed. Let’s go home.”

And for now, I did.

Chapter Twelve

Lesser Homes & Gardens

S
O
I
RETREATED
to the woods, to hide and to heal, and to make a temporary go at this happy home thing. I desperately needed to keep from dwelling on my imploding life and keep my eyes on the prize; I had work to do, after all. And although Andy was generally the best diversion a girl could ever hope for, there was still the ghetto rest of our house, which we absolutely had to do something about and fast. I could put up with the rusty barrels, a broken-down tractor, rotting lumber, and other assorted remains from the estate’s glory days, but neither of us could abide a living room that’d bring on an asthma attack every time we entered it, and I was really tired of eating cold or off the grill every day. What I wouldn’t give for baked chicken or a mango smoothie, not that I could get either until a refrigerator and a working stove materialized. Until then it’d take a lot of hefting and hauling, some twelve-hour days, and of course, a forty-yard Dumpster.