CHAPTER 10
I woke up on the sofa in my house wearing the same grungy clothes and smelling like a basket of sweaty socks, so I knew I must have driven home from the office. But the distance between there and my den was a wrinkle in time, and I didn’t remember getting from one to the other.
My mouth was crusted with drool, my right hand was numb from sleeping with my arm tucked under my head, and my entire body ached from hauling the weight of grief. The room was dark except for the glow from the television and an infomercial for some workout that required more agility than I’d ever have. The streetlight sliced through the silk drapes. The platinum-gray ones I’d angsted over and finally given myself permission to order from Pottery Barn. The ones—when Wyatt finished hanging them—that caused him to say he’d rather hang himself than do that again. The ones that were now guilt-free. There’d be no death by curtains for Wyatt.
I blinked, adjusting to the murky darkness, as I pushed myself to slouching and pressed the button on my phone to check the time. Impossible. It couldn’t be only 8:45. But I hadn’t Rip van Winkled myself through a time-zone change, so it had to be right.
I checked my missed calls. The usual suspects. My parents, Mia, my grandmother, and—unexpectedly—Cara Coen, one of the owners of Virtual Strategists, the boutique public relations company I worked for. The last time we spoke, I told her she needed to assign my clients to someone else because I didn’t know when I’d be ready to return. It wasn’t until I listened to her voicemail that I realized two weeks had passed since that conversation. How was it that days that seemed endless turned into weeks that passed in hours? She wanted to discuss some options and asked if I could call to set up a time we could meet. Since she didn’t say options like it was synonymous with termination, I figured her call wasn’t a strategy to get me into the office so she could fire me. Gently.
My stomach growled its discontent. If I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, then it had been too long. The only things my refrigerator offered were a rush of cold air and the two wheat bagels I hadn’t tossed out with everything else in there on its way to becoming lab samples.
I called an order in to Sammie’s Burgers, which they promised to deliver in the next twenty minutes. Which meant thirty. Enough time for me to shower.
My wet hair was still wrapped in a towel when the doorbell rang. I peeked out the kitchen window before I opened the front door. An almost habit that started when Wyatt and I moved into the house. He said opening the door before I knew who was there wasn’t safe, especially since I was home alone when he worked late at night. “I’m going to install one of those doorbells with a monitor. You can’t ever be too safe.”
He never got around to that. Guess you weren’t too safe yourself, huh? You should have followed your own advice. You didn’t just wreck your truck. You wrecked our lives.
The car in my driveway had a Sammie’s logo attached to the hood. Dinner had arrived early. I swiped my never-ending supply of tears with the edge of the towel, then opened the door.
“Here’s your order . . .” The guy on my porch tilted his head, looked at me, shifting from his customer script to a friendly smile. “Hey, Miss Olivia. I didn’t realize this was your address.”
That this kid could recognize me wearing a canary-yellow towel turban and faded sweats was both remarkable and humiliating. “Yes, but just for the past few months.” He looked familiar, but my brain couldn’t access the file.
He handed me the bag, the smell of the burger and fries distracting me from focusing on identifying this face in front of me.
“You probably don’t remember me,” he said, a shy grin that likely charmed his teachers and any girl looking in his direction. “I’m Ethan—”
“You’re Evan’s brother,” I blurted, delighted my neurons connected. “You’re so . . . grown.” Had it been that long since Evan and I had stopped dating? I didn’t remember this kid having to look down to speak to me the last time I saw him.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m a senior in high school. Just found out I’ve been accepted at LSU. Started working at Sammie’s to earn some money to pay for my car, you know?”
I nodded. One thing I admired about the Gendusa family is that they didn’t believe in kid welfare. Even though both parents were affluent, successful attorneys, their children learned to work for the things they wanted. That compensated for everyone in the family having a first name that started with the letter E, which made for an extravagant monogram on their Christmas cards.
He handed me the receipt to sign. I left a generous tip and, while we weren’t making eye contact, asked him how Evan was doing.
“Still living in Baton Rouge.” Ethan handed me my copy of the receipt. “He’s, um, getting married in December.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, trying hard to sound like I meant it.
“I gotta make another delivery, so guess I need to take off. Nice to see you again. And . . . I’m . . . We’re all sorry . . .” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. We both knew what he meant.
“Great to see you again, Ethan. And thanks.”
I leaned against the closed door, bag in one hand, wiping tears away from my eyes with the back of the other.
I bet Evan won’t be taking any trips the morning of his wedding. And his bride won’t be left standing at the altar wondering what happened. He’s getting the happily-ever-after. And I got a baby gift.
And it wasn’t even for our own baby.
A pepper-jack cheeseburger topped with fried pickles and fried onions and a side of cheese fries was probably not the best meal of choice two hours before midnight. But anyone who might have tried to pry the globs of melted cheese and drippy burger from my greasy hands could have lost a finger or two.
Maybe I was trying to fill the hole Wyatt and that baby gift had posthumously dug in my soul. The gift I left in the car. Like a vagrant trespassing on my property, it wasn’t entering my home. It didn’t get to be in the one place I shared with Wyatt and no one else.
But keeping it out of sight didn’t keep it out of my mind. Or my heart. It was a splinter, burrowed in me, and even when I couldn’t see it, I always knew it was there, ready to inflict pain.
I needed, more than ever, to know the truth. About that, my parents and I could agree. But I wanted the truth to prove Wyatt was honorable and trustworthy. My parents wanted it to prove I had been about to marry a man whose deception was cruel and unforgivable.
CHAPTER 11
By three o’clock the next morning, I truly understood why parents wept and moaned when the late-afternoon nap monster descended upon their children.
The long nap plus the food overload meant no sleep for me. Haunted by my grief and everything that had happened, once again giving way to rage, resentment, and bags of M&Ms, I tore through the house like a Tasmanian devil—screeches and screams included—trying to scavenge a clue. Anything I could use as a wedge to pry open a door in the parts of Wyatt’s life that I didn’t know existed.
I ripped through clipped stacks of papers in our desks and dressers, scrolled through our credit card and bank statements online. Receipts and bills drifted to the floor as I tossed them, one by one. By the end, I’d created a pile of pink, yellow, and white papers, like useless leaves shed before winter. Not one provided even a whisper of a clue. They spoke of clothes and furniture and meals and the mundane. Artifacts of a life stolen from me.
Maybe he had credit cards and a checking account I didn’t know about. But if he did, then that answered questions I didn’t want to ask.
I left the mess I’d created and walked into our bedroom. My bedroom. Where I dragged my forefinger along the dust covering my dresser and wrote my initials O. H. But I never became Olivia Hammond. I smudged the letter H out with my bare hand, leaving the O by itself. Just as I was now.
All of Wyatt’s clothes were still on the bed where I’d left them a few nights before. Someone could have had a sizable bonfire with that pile of rumpled cotton and linen and silk
. Like the bonfires we’d watch on Christmas Eve on the levee. Dozens and dozens of them, over thirty feet high. We came home smelling of smoke and night air and memories.
I tugged a blue pin-striped shirt from the bed and slipped it on. Wyatt’s eyes twinkled when I wore his shirts. He found it sweet, seductive. I told him he’d been conditioned by too many movies. But later, my eyes would twinkle, too.
Bruno Mars singing “Just the Way You Are” woke me up.
Not the real Bruno, of course, and gratefully. I knew the song told a woman she looked beautiful as she was, but it would be a difficult buy-in seeing me roll off the sofa in sweats with Wyatt’s shirt over a T-shirt I used for painting, and hair that pointed in every compass direction.
I’d finally fallen asleep, exhausted more from clicking through hundreds of television channels and wondering why there wasn’t one program or movie worth stopping for.
One decision I made before my eyes closed was that I wanted to sell the house. Living here was a daily wrestling match with pain. Here, where the walls pulsed with the energy of our lives together, where almost anything I touched sparked Wyatt’s image, and where I wondered who this man was who had loved and left me.
I called our real estate agent, Amanda Green, after I woke up and ate my breakfast of leftover cheese fries. She returned my phone call within minutes. She wasn’t surprised I wanted to list the house, but she still wanted to give me a day to think about it to be sure. “Your house may sell before I even have a chance to put up the For Sale sign. Remember?”
The neighborhood had become the place to live. Trendy hipster types next door to grandparents who were next door to upwardly mobile couples with children no taller than the wrought iron fences that kept them safe in their yards. Homes not renovated became teardowns, and not many properties hit the market. Wyatt and I had found out about the house because it was owned by one of my father’s clients. We called Amanda the morning she listed it and made an offer. Sixteen phone calls from people wanting to buy the house came in after that.
“I’ll think about it, but unless you hear otherwise, let’s plan to meet tomorrow to sign the papers.”
She said she’d be over in the morning since I wanted time to go to the office to check in with Cara about whatever it was she wanted me to do.
“Do you want me to start looking for another place for you? A house or maybe a condo?” She asked the questions with such kindness, I suspected she understood how difficult this all was for me.
“Not yet. There’s still so much I need to figure out.”
The scariest of which was learning how to be a single mother. Maybe it would be less frightening if I could depend on my own mother for emotional support. It wasn’t just that her moralizing frustrated me. I didn’t need a judge in my life. I needed my mother.
I’d just made voice contact with Mia when my doorbell rang.
My grandmother’s car was in my driveway, which could only mean she was at the door.
“Oh, this is just what I need right now. A visit from the voice of reason,” I told Mia. “Can’t I pretend to not be home?”
“If your car is there, and you don’t answer in five minutes, she’s calling 911 and telling them to bring the Jaws of Life.” Mia laughed, but we both knew how close to serious she was.
I said, “You know you’re pathetic when someone sees your car and always expects it means you’re home. Like I wouldn’t have friends who’d pick me up to go somewhere.” I didn’t even attempt to make that a joke. “She’s ringing again. Hold on. I’m going to play the pity card and hope for a reprieve.”
I huffed, and I puffed, and I opened the door, hoping my blah-ness was stage-ready. “Hi, Ruthie—”
“About time you answered,” she said, her hands already perched on her hips. “Are you going to invite me in, or should I just stand here like I’m passing out Bible tracts?”
“It’s not a good day. Would you mind if we get together another time? I’m just not feeling well . . .” I sighed, bit my lower lip, and did my best to conjure my forlorn, exhausted, and in- need-of-solitude self.
She tightened her lips, narrowed her eyes, and, as usual, elbowed her way past me. “Matter of fact, I’m not feeling so well myself. Last night, the girls and I went to Chinese Garden after shopping. Woke up this morning feeling fat as a tick from all that MSG. It’s that Moo Goo Pan.”
“It’s Gai Pan, Ruthie. Gai Pan.” Since my phone had been on speaker, I knew Mia wasn’t only hearing the conversation, she was relishing every second of it. I told her I’d call later.
“Good luck,” she said and clicked off.
My grandmother surveyed the den, measuring the extent of the clutter, her face unreadable. For the moment.
I cringed seeing the room through her eyes. Newspapers scattered on the floor, towels that needed to be folded on one end of the sofa, my pillow and blanket on the other end. A few empty plastic water bottles on the coffee table alongside a bag of chips and a half-eaten apple. My one futile attempt at healthy snacking. The bag from Sammie’s still on the floor from the night before.
She moved the bundle of towels off the sofa and onto the lap of Wyatt’s dreadful brown recliner. I’d always hated the nubby fabric that covered it because it reminded me of rows and rows of hunched-over, furry caterpillars. Having cleared a space for herself, she sat and asked me, “Who’s Guy?”
“Not who. What. The dish you ate was Moo Goo Gai Pan.”
“That’s why my order amused our waiter. I couldn’t figure out why he was laughing,” she said and crossed her arms, her nonverbal hmmph.
“Granny, I doubt he was laughing at you.”
“Well, he wasn’t laughing with me, because I wasn’t laughing. Maybe he doesn’t understand the exponential damage of one scathing review on Twitter.” She pulled her phone out of her striped Burberry crossbody purse. She had a wireless network, and she was armed and dangerous.
“If you plan on returning there to eat, you might want to rethink what you’re about to post. You wouldn’t want your Twitter profile taped over the food-prep station.”
“Good point,” she said and tucked the phone back in her purse.
Her agenda was on the verge of shifting. I could tell by the way she scooted forward, crossed her legs, and overlapped her hands on her knee. Just like my mother.
“Now, the reason I’m here. My yoga class is in an hour. I want you to come with me. You have to get out of this house.”
I smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m about to do.”
CHAPTER 12
Really? You want to go to yoga?”
I heard the unspoken “Oh dear” in my grandmother’s question.
Ruthie liked yoga about as much as I liked Zumba. She hated feeling like a pretzel, and I hated looking as if my limbs were attached in all the wrong places.
Today she wore her favorite Lululemon gray cuffed trousers and matching pullover, but she’d already confessed months ago that the yoga outfits were darling. The classes, not so much.
“No, and neither do you.” I moved the pile of towels off the recliner onto the floor and sat, folding my legs underneath me. Wyatt had told me he knew I really loved him when I approved his dragging that chair into our house. At the time, it wasn’t the hill to die on in our efforts to move in. But now? I picked at the loose tufts on the chair arm and realized I didn’t need his permission to dump it. If he wanted it, he could come down—assuming he was in the upward direction we want to find ourselves in after death—and get it himself.
“. . . your parents are so deceitful,” my grandmother was saying.
Whoa. Where’d that come from? “Exactly. That’s exactly what they are,” I said. Finally, an ally. I almost high-fived her.
She stared at me as if my head had just popped off my neck. “Have you paid attention to anything I’ve been saying?”
“Obviously not.” I yawned, then cringed realizing I hadn’t brushed my teeth. Great, Olivia, you’re so ready for this mothering
thing.
“I’m not agreeing with you. What I said was you’ve not placed any blame on Wyatt for his deception, but you think your parents—”
That I paid attention to. The resentment stirring in my gut pushed me forward in the chair. What was it about my family that the issue was never really the issue? “Why weren’t you honest with me, and why didn’t you tell me the real reason you’re here?”
I continued, counting off on my fingers as I spoke, “I’m hungry. I need a shower. I’m in desperate need of a housekeeper. I’m alone. I’m pregnant. Isn’t that enough? I don’t need anyone else on the team for the prosecution.”
I pushed myself off the recliner and darted around the den, picking up trash, folding the blanket I’d slept with . . . anything to move. All of these conversations lately were cranks winding, winding, winding my sanity, my tolerance, my life. I was dangerously close to understanding what it meant to fly off the handle.
“Has it occurred to anyone? Anyone?” I snapped a garbage bag open and tossed in the trash I’d collected. “That Wyatt must have had a reason for that trip?” A straw poked out from under the sofa, but I shoved it back with my foot fearing what might be attached to it.
“Honey, I sure hope he did.” My grandmother watched me scurry around the room like she’d scored a front seat at a performance-art theater.
I tied the bag closed and tossed it into the waste can in the kitchen. I sat in the recliner again and started folding the towels I’d dumped on the floor. I wasn’t certain how long I’d ignored them and hoped they hadn’t retaliated by getting that musky wet-dog smell.
“You’re assuming, like my parents, that gift was for his child. That’s why you’re here, right?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I didn’t need to. “Let’s not pretend you didn’t know about that. Has anyone bothered to consider it was for someone else’s child?” But even as I pushed the words out of my mouth, they tasted sour and unconvincing.
“I’d like to believe that’s true, but—”
Since You've Been Gone Page 6