by Stephen Frey
Angela glanced down at the foyer’s gray slate. This was Caroline Reese, Sam’s wife of two years. It was the first time they had ever met, but Angela recognized Caroline immediately from newspaper and magazine photographs. Caroline and Sam had quickly become one of Richmond’s most prominent couples. She was from a well-to-do family of Savannah, Georgia, and no charity event or social gala was an A-list affair without the Reeses.
Angela had read about Caroline in the society pages of theRichmond Tribune when the engagement was announced. Caroline was the daughter-in-law Chuck Reese had always wanted, a rich debutante from an old-money neighborhood in a stylish southern city. In fact, he’d probably arranged the marriage himself. Rosemary had been his wedding gift to them, according to the newspapers. He still stayed there on weekends, but according to the press, Rosemary had been deeded to Sam.
“I’m Angela Day.”
“Oh,Angela, ” Caroline said, her Southern accent becoming more pronounced as she emphasized Angela’s name. “I’m Caroline. Sam’s wife.”
“I know.”
“It’s nice to meet you after all this time.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” Angela said coolly.
“You must be here to pick up Hunter.”
“Yes.”
“Well, please come in.” Caroline opened the door wide, beckoning her inside. “It must be cold out there.”
“It’s not bad.” The temperature had turned warm around noon, climbing into the fifties and quickly melting yesterday’s snow. But here it was after dark, and Caroline didn’t know it had gotten warmer. She probably hadn’t been out of the house all day. And, if she had, it would have been through a heated garage and straight into a waiting limousine. Angela was well aware of the charmed life Caroline Reese led.
“I believe Hunter’s still at the pool with his father. He’s such a wonderful little boy. I really love spending so much time with him.”
Angela said nothing.
“Do you want to wait here or would you like to go out to the pool?” Caroline asked.
“I’d like to go to the pool,” Angela replied quickly.
“Of course you would,” Caroline agreed, reaching out and patting Angela’s hand. “I understand completely. Let me get someone who can take you. I would, but Sam and I are going out later, and I was just headed upstairs to start getting ready when you rang the doorbell. I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Okay.”
In person, Caroline wasn’t as pretty as she was in photographs. She was tall and blonde, but very pale, almost ashen, and not at all exotic. Plain, in fact. So many times Sam had told Angela how he found exotic women—like her—so much more physically alluring. Like the woman she had caught Sam in bed with. Just as often Sam had told her how he could never be attracted to a woman like Caroline. But perhaps that had been a lie, as so many other things he said had turned out to be. Maybe, like most men, he could be physically attracted to almost any woman—at least for a time.
Caroline returned a few moments later with a scowling, middle-aged black woman in tow. “Alice will take you out to the pool, Angela.”
“All right.” Alice wore a gray and white maid’s uniform, complete with a lace bonnet.
“It’s been nice to meet you, Angela,” Caroline said with a smile.
“Yes, nice to meet you, too.”
“Get along, Alice,” Caroline ordered, gesturing to her right with a flip of her fingers as she headed toward a staircase and the second floor. “Take Ms. Day to the pool.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Alice said tersely. “Please come with me, Ms. Day.”
Angela followed the woman through a maze of rooms to a long set of steps at the bottom of which lay the underground passageway leading to the pool. The passageway was wide, carpeted, and dimly lit by lamps affixed to its dark green walls. Off the corridor were guest bedrooms and recreational rooms. Some of the rec rooms were furnished with wide-screen televisions surrounded by comfortable sofas and chairs, others with pool tables, Ping-Pong tables, or exercise equipment. Angela shook her head as she walked with the maid. Hunter had all of this available to him twenty-four hours a day. How was she ever going to compete?
The air in the corridor turned warm and humid, and they reached the far end of the corridor and the bottom of another stairway leading up to the pool. As Angela neared the top step, the pool came into view. It was massive, fifty yards long and thirty wide, with a huge sliding board as well as two diving boards at the far end.
Her eyes widened when she spied her son. “Hunter!”
The young boy stood at the end of the pool’s high-dive board, poised ten feet above the water’s surface. “Mom!” he yelled back, waving excitedly. “Watch this!”
“Hunter, no!” Instinctively Angela began running down the deck toward the high-dive, her hard-soled shoes clicking on the cement as she raced past lounge chairs and tables. “Don’t, honey!”
But the boy paid no attention, swinging his arms by his sides three times, then leaping fearlessly from the board, shouting as he fell toward the water.
Her only thought was that Hunter was about to drown. He shouldn’t be jumping off a high-dive. He was only six years old, for God’s sake. She was going to kill Sam for being so irresponsible.
She watched in horror as Hunter hit the water and disappeared beneath the surface with a splash. But he popped up almost instantly, laughing and whooping as he dog-paddled toward a ladder on the side of the pool.
“Hunter, you scared Mom to death,” Angela admonished, relief washing over her as she knelt down and helped him climb up the ladder. “Please don’t ever do that again.”
“It was easy,” he said, throwing his arms around her neck and giving her a loud kiss on the cheek. “How ya doing, Mom?”
Angela closed her eyes, hugging him back and laughing, feeling the water dripping all over her but not minding a bit. “I missed you so much,” she whispered.
“I missed you too, Mom. Love you.”
She adored those words. Adored the emotion he could evoke so quickly. “I love you too, sweetheart.”
“Watch me do it again,” he said, pulling back and giving her a smile.
“Hunter.”
“What?”
“You lost a front tooth. What happened?”
He giggled and pulled his lip back. “It fell out yesterday,” he explained, his words almost unintelligible with the finger in his mouth. “The big tooth is already coming in,” he said, tilting his head back. “See?”
“Yes, I can,” she said softly, spotting a tiny line of enamel protruding through his upper gum where the baby tooth had been.
Hunter hadn’t mentioned the tooth being loose when they had spoken by phone last Sunday evening—the night before she had left for Wyoming—and suddenly she was overwhelmed by how quickly he was growing up, struck by the fact that she hadn’t been around for the loss of his first baby tooth. And that, because of the situation, there might be many more of these once-in-a-lifetime events she would miss.
“The Tooth Fairy gave me fifty dollars, Mom. The money was under my pillow when I woke up this morning.”
“Fifty dollars?”
“Yup.” A puzzled expression spread across the young boy’s face. “Fifty dollars. Is that a lot?”
“I would say so.” To her maybe, but not to Chuck Reese. “Too much.”
“You know what?” Hunter asked, his voice dropping.
“What?”
“I don’t really think it was the Tooth Fairy that gave me the money.”
“You don’t?”
The boy shook his head deliberately. “No. I think it was Caroline.”
“Oh. Why?”
The smile danced back to his face. “Because I was awake when she came into my room,” he said, giggling again, pleased with himself. “I peeked when the door opened, and I saw it was her.”
“Well, maybe the Tooth Fairy asked Caroline to help her out. Maybe the Tooth Fairy was too busy to get to everybo
dy last night. There are a lot of children who lose teeth every day.”
“Santa Claus gets toeverybody in one night.”
“That’s true,” Angela agreed hesitantly, wondering how to argue with his logic. Aware that she probably wouldn’t be around to comfort him when he figured out that Santa Claus had help too.
Hunter shrugged his small shoulders. “I like Caroline. She’s nice.”
“Mmm.” Angela looked away, unable to bring herself to giving the other woman any endorsement at all.
“I’m going off the high-dive again,” Hunter announced, pulling away and scampering toward the ladder leading up to the board, the bottoms of his wet bathing trunks sagging down to his knees. “Watch me, Mom.”
“Hunter, no!”
“He’ll be fine.”
Angela glanced down. Sam was hanging on to the edge of the pool a few feet away, submerged in the water up to his neck. She hadn’t even noticed him in her panic-induced sprint down the deck. “But he’s only six years old.”
“Relax.” Sam chuckled. “He’s growing up. You’ll just have to accept that, Angie.”
The world blurred before her momentarily. Other than her father, Sam was the only one who had ever called her “Angie.” She loved the sound of it, even if it was Sam saying it. Maybe she loved itbecause it was Sam. She swallowed hard and looked away. She still wasn’t over him. Despite all the grief he had caused her, she still couldn’t shake him. Perhaps she never would.
Sam hauled himself out of the water without using the ladder, sitting on the side of the pool for a moment, then rising to his feet. “How you been, Angie?” he asked, striding confidently to a lounge chair and grabbing a towel.
“Fine,” she answered, still not looking at him.
He wanted her to look at him, she knew. Look at him in just his bathing trunks, his tanned body glistening with drops of water. She’d been attracted to Sam from the first moment she’d seen him across the Duke business school classroom. It had never been that way for her before, or since. Not with anyone else.
When they were introduced two days later—during a coffee break between marketing and finance classes—Sam had had the audacity to gently take her hand, lean forward, kiss her on the cheek, and whisper in her ear that he couldn’t take his eyes off her in class. That he’d noticed she couldn’t take her eyes off him, either. And that he could think of a much more exciting way to spend an hour and a half than sitting in a classroom listening to a professor drone on about finance.
Had it been any other man, she would have tossed her coffee in his face for saying something forward. But for some reason she’d simply gazed at him as he’d pulled back, marveling at his ability to calmly say what he’d said. He’d said it in the same way he spoke in front of the other eighty students in class when professors asked him to lay out the case they were working on that day. Without a trace of fear or hesitation in his voice. Unlike the nervous tones she and everyone else had spoken in during the first few days.
The most incredible thing was that, even now, she didn’t have any regrets about meeting Sam. It wasn’t as if she wished they had never been introduced. Or wished that she’d actually thrown the coffee in his face that day, which would have saved her the emotional anguish she’d endured since that day she’d discovered him in bed with another woman and realized he wasn’t hers anymore. The thing of it was, she didn’t blame Sam. Not for most of what had happened anyway. She blamed Chuck Reese. If he had supported their marriage, they would still be together. She was sure of it.
“You’re late, Angie. You’re never late to pick up Hunter. What happened?”
“My boss wouldn’t let me go.”
“Mom!”
Angela glanced up. Hunter had made it to the end of the high-dive again. “Careful, baby,” she called, her voice echoing around the huge room.
“Can’t call him ‘baby’ anymore, Angie,” Sam chided gently, moving next to her. “He’s growing up. Pretty soon you’ll be watching him on the football field. He’s got a good arm for a six-year-old. You should see him.”
Sam’s voice was like the gentle purring of a cat: low and smooth and soothing, with a hint of a Southern drawl in his words. The enticing inflections of his voice brought everything hurtling back, the way sounds sometimes stir latent, nearly lost memories more powerfully than sight ever can. “Careful, Hunter.” She was trying not to think about the memories, but it was hard.
Sam clapped, urging his son on. “Come on. Make this one a real good one.”
Hunter followed the same routine, swinging his arms by his sides three times, then leaping fearlessly into the water.
Angela brought her hands to her mouth as he fell, her heart in her throat. But once again, Hunter popped right to the surface, and was already paddling determinedly toward the ladder before his head had fully emerged.
“Good job, son,” said Sam. This time he reached down and helped Hunter up the ladder. “Now you’ve got to get ready to go with Mom.”
“Aw, Dad. One more time. Please.”
“No. It’s getting late.” Sam waved toward the other end of the pool, where the maid stood. “Alice,” he called loudly, “please take Hunter to the house and get him dried off and into his clothes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go on, Hunter. Go with the help. Your mom and I will be back over to the house in a minute.”
“Oh, all right,” Hunter agreed dejectedly, walking head down and shoulders slumped for the first few steps. Then, sneaking a look back, he broke into a trot, then into a full sprint, yelling and shouting as he ran.
“Careful,” Sam shouted. “The deck’s wet. Watch out.”
But Hunter made it to where Alice was waiting without incident, and then they were gone, heads disappearing down the steps leading to the underground passageway, the boy’s first, then the maid’s.
“I better get going, too,” Angela murmured, taking a step in the direction Hunter had just gone. She felt Sam’s fingers curl around her wrist.
“Not yet, Angie.”
He might as well have glued her shoes to the deck. She tried pulling away, but it was impossible.
Sam chuckled. “It’ll take Alice a half hour to get Hunter ready to go. The boy will run her ragged. You know that.”
“This isn’t right. We shouldn’t be here like this.”
“Why not?” Sam asked, turning her toward him. “What’s so wrong with this?”
She gazed down at the puddles beneath her shoes, wishing he would take his hand from her wrist and, at the same time, hoping he would keep it right where it was. She tried to keep her head down, tried to count the tiny decorative tiles embedded in the deck at the water’s edge, but in the end she had to look up, up into the confident eyes of a man she knew lived only in the moment.
She’d known that the first time she’d kissed him—a week after they had met. He was not safe, not stable. Far from it, in fact. But she’d kissed him anyway, trying to resist at first, then just trying to maintain control.
Sam wasn’t a physically imposing man. He wasn’t overpowering like John Tucker. And he didn’t have Jake Lawrence’s pretty-boy looks, either. Sam was lifeguard handsome: blond, slim, and taut. But it was his presence that had caught Angela’s attention so long ago, the cool confidence in his light blue eyes and his I-know-something-you-don’t smile. The way he could hold a class full of cynical graduate students and professors in the palm of his hand while he calmly presented his solution to the day’s case. Somehow, he made even the most boring material seem fascinating as he wove personal stories and anecdotes into his tale so that, when he had finished his presentation, the room was pin-drop quiet until the trance was broken by the professor. Sam was part evangelist and part politician, with a little bit of the devil thrown in somewhere. And he had that swagger too. The one John Tucker had. He’d hooked her in a heartbeat.
“I’ve got to go.”
“No,” Sam said firmly, “you don’t.”
“Sa
m.” He was leading her toward a little room off the pool, a private dining area with a table and chairs where people could take a break from swimming and look back at the mansion through the woods while they ate. “What are you doing?”
“I just want to talk.”
“About what?”
Sam backed Angela gently against a wall just inside the door, then moved back a step to reassure her. Keeping his distance for the moment. “We never talk.”
“That would be because you divorced me.”
Sam shook his head. “My father did that to us. You know that.”
“Yes, just the way he made you get into bed with that other woman.”
“That was terrible, Angie,” Sam admitted, sliding his forefinger beneath her chin and tilting her head back. “I’m guilty as charged there. I was very immature back then. I wish I could take it all back.”
Angela looked away. “I met Caroline.”
“Oh?”
“She greeted me at the front door.”
“You mean she actually opened the front door?” Sam asked sarcastically. “She actually lifted a finger?”
“Yes. Why?”
He laughed. “She must have been going past the door just as you rang the bell.”
“That’s right. That’s what she said.”
“Figures. Caroline certainly wouldn’t go out of her way to do that—or anything else around here, for that matter.” Sam put a hand to his head. “No, wait. I take that back. She might move quickly if it were toward the limousine and an afternoon of shopping.”
“She said she was going upstairs to get ready to go out with you tonight.”
Sam groaned. “Don’t remind me. We’ve got to go to some damn museum opening to cut a ribbon. Then there will be the requisite party afterward and a night of all the same people and all the same conversations.”
“Don’t sound so enthusiastic.”
“It’ll be awful.” Sam sighed. “But Caroline will be happy. And that’s what’s important,” he said nodding gravely, then breaking into a smile.
“Poor baby.” Angela patted his chest then made a move back toward the pool. “I feel so bad for you. You lead such a difficult life.”