by Margot Hunt
“You can do as you please,” I said. I took another bite of my omelet, although I could barely taste the food. It felt as though the trip had already been soured. Despite the lavish accommodations and beautiful surroundings, I suddenly wished I was home—even if that meant another Saturday spent getting caught up on the laundry. Unfortunately, Kat and I had driven down together in her Porsche convertible. I was stuck here. Despite my earlier protestations, I took a sip of my mimosa.
“You’re angry with me,” Kat commented.
I put my fork down and looked at her. “I thought this was our weekend to get away. To relax and spend time together.”
“We are! Look,” Kat said, sighing, “I’m sorry I deserted you last night. I shouldn’t have.”
I nodded, accepting her apology. “It just feels...well, awkward, I guess. It’s like I’m suddenly the third wheel on a very steamy first date.”
Kat laughed and flushed slightly. “Yes, well, last night might not have been my best moment. And I am sorry that I left you alone—that wasn’t cool, I know it wasn’t—but honestly, I have zero guilt when it comes to Howard. I don’t know what that says about me. Maybe it means I’m a horrible person, but I suddenly feel weirdly alive. It’s like I finally woke up to the fact that I can have a life after divorce. I know that sounds trite, but whenever I’ve tried to picture myself leaving Howard, not being married, I just...shut down.”
I softened. Maybe I was being too harsh, too puritanical. Kat had been through a lot with Howard, but she’d been married to him for more than half her life. Of course the idea of leaving him, of building a life for herself without him, would be daunting. Perhaps having a brief fling with a younger man would prove to be the catharsis she needed to move on.
“Although it’s possible that thanks to Hudson, I now have an entirely unrealistic vision of what postdivorce life would look like,” Kat continued, leaning in and lowering her voice. “Without going into too much detail, he was absolutely amazing.”
I raised a hand, wanting to staunch this confessional flow. “It’s okay. You don’t have to go into detail.”
Kat made a face. “I wasn’t going to,” she said. “And you really are a prude.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Anyway, all I was going to say is that it’s probably not very likely that my future will be filled with hot young bartenders.”
“You never know,” I commented. “There could be thousands of them out there, waiting for a beautiful divorcée to walk into their bars.”
Kat shuddered. “I hate that word. Divorcée. Ugh. Never say that again. It’s almost as bad as madam. Hurry up and finish your mimosa.” She drained the last of hers. “I want to go for a swim.”
* * *
Despite the rocky start, it ended up being a lovely day. We spent most of it on the beach, stretched out on lounge chairs, the sun warming our skin. Kat had gone up to our room to change. When she returned, she brought down a stack of fashion magazines. We paged lazily through them, reading actress profiles—all of whom claimed they never dieted and maintained their whippet-thin figures through yoga and healthy lifestyles—and articles advising the perfect shade of red lipstick for every complexion. When we got hot, we waded into the clear aqua ocean and floated on our backs while we gazed up at the cotton-ball puffs of clouds in the sky. When we were hungry or thirsty, we raised the flag attached to the beach chairs to summon a waiter. Someone would rush over to supply us with whatever we desired. Then, when we grew tired of being on the beach, we went up to our shared suite, where we each showered and changed before heading back down for cocktails.
We returned to the outside bar, where Hudson was working. He brought us our drinks and a plate of hummus and pita chips and stopped back to chat with us when he had a lull in customers. I had to admit he was a pretty charming guy, and it was less awkward talking with the two of them than it had been that morning.
Hudson had promised to find us after his shift, so I was surprised when later, just before dinner, Kat asked if I wanted to go back to the beach.
“It’s so beautiful out,” she said. “Let’s go for a short walk. It will give me a chance to clear my head so I can figure out what I should do about Hudson.”
I nodded, and we strolled back down to the beach, which was now deserted. The sun was setting, turning the sky into ribbons of pink and orange. The ocean was calm, its waves lapping gently onto the beach. Kat and I stood side by side and looked out at the water, neither of us speaking.
Finally Kat broke the silence. “As I’m sure you can guess, things aren’t going well with Howard and me.”
Kat rarely talked about the state of her marriage with me. I knew that right after she found out about Howard’s affair, she had confronted him. He’d denied it at first, but once Kat showed him the pictures her private investigator had taken, he’d finally admitted to it. She said they discussed separating but decided to try to work things out, on the condition that he ended his relationship with the Alana Dupree. He’d agreed. Since then, she’d rarely mentioned him to me. This had struck me as odd, but I knew how painful his infidelities had been for Kat. I didn’t want to press her. Anyway, I wasn’t sure what working things out meant for them, since as far as I knew, they hadn’t been to couples therapy or made an effort to spend more time together, nor make any other meaningful changes. Or maybe they had done all of those things and Kat just hadn’t told me.
“Did something happen?” I asked.
“A few somethings happened.”
Kat sounded so strange, her voice tight and higher than usual. I turned to her, reaching a hand out, but she didn’t seem to see me. Her face was blank and she had her arms wrapped around herself.
“Kat, what is it?”
Kat breathed in deeply, and when she exhaled, she puffed her cheeks out. I noticed then that tears were sliding down her face.
“Kat? Tell me.”
“I’m sorry. I probably should have told you everything before, but somehow telling you makes it more real, I guess,” Kat said. “Okay. There are actually two things I haven’t told you about. The first is that I found out Howard is still having an affair with the bartender. Or maybe he never stopped the first time.” She shook her head and laughed without humor. “And now I’ve gone and slept with a bartender. What do you think that says about us?”
“Oh, Kat,” I said. I put an arm around her and squeezed her. She didn’t resist, but she also didn’t hug me back.
“I just feel so incredibly stupid.” She exhaled loudly. “Why did I think he was suddenly going to start being faithful? Because he said so?”
“That is sort of how it’s supposed to work,” I said softly. “He says he’ll be faithful and you believe him.”
“Only if you’re an idiot. Which apparently I am.”
“How did you find out?”
Kat sighed again and kicked her sandaled foot into the soft white sand. “In the most humiliating way possible. I followed him.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yeah, there’s nothing like finding out that you’re a cliché.” Kat sighed. “Anyway, he was apparently so looking forward to getting his dick sucked that he didn’t notice I was driving right behind him. I followed him all the way to her condo.”
“I’m sorry I was so shitty and judgmental earlier,” I said. “About Hudson.”
Kat shrugged. “You didn’t know.”
“But still. I should have given you the benefit of the doubt.”
“The worst of it is, that’s not even the worst of it.”
I waited, dreading what was coming next.
“I didn’t confront him then, in the parking lot of her building. It just seemed so...well, tawdry, I suppose. And I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me outside her apartment, yelling at my husband. So I drove home, and while I waited for him to return, I dra
nk two large martinis.”
I could picture her sitting alone in her beautiful kitchen, drink in hand, trying to stop herself from visualizing her husband romping with his girlfriend.
“Did he come back that night?”
Kat nodded. She was still looking out at the water, her arms still wrapped around her, as though by doing so, she was holding herself together.
“He did. And I told him that I’d followed him, and he...he hit me.”
I inhaled sharply and turned to look at her. “Oh, my God, Kat. He hit you? Where?”
She returned my gaze, her blue eyes steady and sober.
“He backhanded me across the face.” She shook her head like she still couldn’t quite believe it. “He hit me so hard, I saw stars. You know, like in cartoons when little stars and birds rotate around a character’s head?”
Kat laughed, and it was such a sad, broken sound that I nearly cried.
“Has he ever hit you before?”
“No. He’s grabbed me a few times, you know, hard on the upper part of my arm,” Kat said, demonstrating this by squeezing her own arm. “And he pushed me once, actually pushed me really hard, but he was so drunk that he didn’t remember it the next day. So I’m not sure that counts.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “What are you talking about? Of course it counts.”
“No, I mean, I know it wasn’t right, but I also don’t think it was intentional. When he slapped me—” Kat stopped and shivered “—that was intentional.”
I listened, trying to absorb what Kat was telling me. Of course spousal abuse occurred across the socioeconomic divides. I knew it did. It just had simply never occurred to me that anyone I knew—much less someone I knew as well as Kat—was being battered. It was like one of those terrible made-for-television movies, the ones with titles like Abandoned and Betrayed.
“What are you going to do?” I finally asked.
Kat looked at me blankly. “About what?”
“What do you think?” I said. “About Howard. You can’t stay with him. You have to move out or get him to move out. Right away.”
“I told you before, if I divorce him, he’ll get half my money, half the house, probably even half of K-Gallery.”
I could feel a flash of anger push up past my original shock at her sad confession.
“Kat, you can’t stay married to someone who beats you.”
“He doesn’t beat me. He slapped me. It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s still abusive,” I argued. “Look, I’m not going to say the money doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. But even if you had to give him half of everything, you’d still be an incredibly wealthy woman.”
“But that’s just it. Why should I have to give him half?” Kat asked, turning to me, her voice suddenly angry. “What has he done to deserve that?”
“I’m not saying he deserves it. But your safety is more important.”
Kat looked at me, her expression so savage that she was almost unrecognizable. Her eyes were narrowed into slits, her lips pulled back in a snarl.
“I wish he’d just die,” she said through clenched teeth. “That would solve everything.”
“Waiting for him to die is not exactly a good action plan,” I pointed out.
“Why not? Drunks die all the time. They get into car crashes, they fall down stairs.” Kat spoke as though in a trance.
I wondered if this was an oblique reference to my brother-in-law’s death. Brendon, the drunk who had died after falling down the stairs on Thanksgiving. I didn’t like thinking about that night and pushed the memory away.
“You can’t count on Howard having a car accident,” I said.
Kat turned to stare back out at the water. The light was fading and the sky was turning smudged gray. But there was just enough light for me to see the tears still rolling down Kat’s face. I wrapped an arm around her again, and she briefly rested her head on my shoulder.
“I wish he would die,” she repeated. “It would solve everything.”
19
Present Day
Howard’s funeral service was set for ten days after his death at the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea on Palm Beach. It was the same church Kat and Howard had been married in, which I knew only because Kat had pointed it out to me a few years earlier, when we were driving by on our way out to lunch.
“That’s where the shit show began,” she’d joked. “For better or worse. Emphasis on the latter.”
I still hadn’t heard from Kat.
Instead I’d learned about the location and time of the service from Howard’s obituary in the Palm Beach Post. I wasn’t even sure if I should attend. Todd had argued against my going.
“I think you should stay the hell away from the whole thing,” he said in a lowered voice the night before the funeral.
Todd and I were sitting on the couch, watching a movie with the kids. I’d made hot chocolate and popped a big bowl of popcorn. Liam and Bridget were lounging on beanbag chairs in front of the television, the popcorn between them. I glanced down at my children, hoping they hadn’t overheard their father. They appeared to be too absorbed in the movie, which was one of the seemingly endless superhero films Hollywood churned out. I had stopped paying attention within the first five minutes and was instead brooding on whether I should attend the funeral. Todd was apparently reading my mind.
“Something weird is going on,” Todd continued. “And I don’t like you being dragged into it.”
“I’m not being dragged anywhere,” I murmured back.
“You know what I’m talking about. Being questioned by you-know-who.”
This coded speech was for the benefit of the children, who didn’t know about my meeting with the police.
“Are you talking about Voldemort?” Liam asked, not taking his eyes off the television screen.
“What?” Todd asked.
“You know, he-who-must-not-be-named. That’s what they call Voldemort in the Harry Potter books,” Liam said.
“Oh. No, I was talking about something else,” Todd quickly replied.
“What?” Liam pressed.
I widened my eyes at Todd, trying to communicate silently that this clearly wasn’t something we should be talking about in front of our children, even obliquely. People always underestimated how much attention kids were paying to what was being said. In my experience, they missed very little.
But Todd wasn’t ready to give up the argument.
“Watch the movie,” he urged our son. Liam lapsed into silence. Todd seemed to assume that meant Liam was following the directive. He leaned closer to me and said softly, “If Kat wanted you there, you would have heard from her by now.”
“Maybe,” I said, also speaking sotto voce. “I agree, it’s odd I haven’t heard from her. But it is possible that she’s just been swallowed up by everything that’s happened. Grief can make people act strangely.”
Todd snorted. “I don’t know that I buy Kat in the role of grief-stricken widow. She’s too selfish, for one thing.”
“You think she’s selfish?” I asked, surprised. “She’s one of the most generous people I know.”
I didn’t mention her loan to us. I didn’t have to. The fact that we still hadn’t paid Kat back weighed heavily on both of us.
“Not with money,” Todd conceded. “But emotionally, absolutely. She always has to get her way, or watch the hell out.”
I sipped at my hot chocolate, considering this. Usually when Todd made a disparaging comment about Kat, I became defensive. But in light of all that had happened in the days since Howard’s death, I was suddenly more open to alternate theories on what sort of a person my best friend really was.
Todd was right. Kat could be selfish. Not when it came to things like writing us a twenty-thousand-dollar check, obviously. She was always quick to pic
k up the lunch check and had insisted on treating me when we went to Key Biscayne for the weekend.
And yet I had seen her become coldly furious when the car dealership wouldn’t fit her in the same morning she called to make an appointment. And then there was the time she’d berated a sales clerk at Neiman Marcus when the young woman struggled to ring up the pair of shoes Kat was purchasing.
Kat had watched, growing increasingly impatient, as the girl looked blankly at the computer, clearly not sure how to operate it.
“What exactly is the problem?” Kat had asked, tapping her titanium Amercan Express Black Card against the counter.
“I think she’s new,” I’d whispered to Kat.
“Why should that be my problem? Good God. I thought Neiman Marcus was supposed to be known for customer service,” Kat had snapped. She turned to the clerk, who looked close to tears. “If you don’t know how to ring this up, can you please call someone over here who does?”
But the worst example I could remember was when Kat’s housekeeper, Marguerite, brought her three-year-old granddaughter with her to work one day. Neither Kat nor Howard was supposed to be home, so I’m sure Marguerite didn’t think it would be an issue. Kat, however, had closed K-Gallery that day and returned home earlier than expected. When she walked into her kitchen and found the little girl sitting at the table, coloring on scrap paper, she had confronted Marguerite. The older woman had explained that her pregnant daughter-in-law had gone into labor and Marguerite’s son had taken his wife to the hospital. There wasn’t anyone else available to watch the little girl.
Kat listened to this explanation, then coolly told her housekeeper of eighteen years that she needed either to leave or to call her son immediately and have him pick his daughter up.
I hadn’t been there when it happened, but Kat had casually recounted this to me a few days later when I met her for lunch.
“But why?” I’d asked. “Did she get crayon marks on your table or something?”
“No. But why should I have to deal with a noisy, sticky toddler running around? It’s my house. Marguerite works for me,” Kat had replied. “I never brought Amanda to the gallery when she was little. It’s unprofessional.”