Hardly Knew Her

by Laura Lippman

  She never would have noticed the father on the other side of the field if his son hadn’t collided with Scott, one of those heart-stopping, freeze-frame moments in which one part of your brain insists it’s okay, even as another part helpfully supplies all the worst-case scenarios. Stitches, concussion, paralysis. Play was suspended and she went flying across the still-dewy grass. Adrenaline seemed to heighten all her senses, taking her out of herself, so she was aware of how she looked. She was equally aware of the frumpy, overweight blond mother who commented to a washed-out redhead: “Can you believe she’s wearing Tod’s loafers and Prada slacks to a kids’ soccer game?” But she wasn’t the kind to go around in yoga pants and tracksuits, although she actually practiced yoga and ran every morning.

  Scott was all right, thank God. So was the other boy. Their egos were more bruised than their bodies, so they staggered around a bit, exaggerating their injuries for the benefit of their teammates. It was only polite to introduce herself to the father, to stick out her hand and say: “Heloise Lewis.”

  “Bill Carroll,” he said. “Eloise?”

  “Heloise. As in hints from.”

  He shook her hand. She had recognized him the moment he said his name, for he was a credit card customer, William F. Carroll. He had needed a second more, but then he knew her as Jane Smith. Not terribly original, but it did the job. Someone had to be named Jane Smith, and it was so bogusly fake that it seemed more real as a result.

  “Heloise,” he repeated. “Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Heloise. Your boy go to Dunwood?”

  His vowels were round with fake sincerity, a bad sign. Most of her regulars were adequate liars; they had to be to juggle the compartmentalized lives they had created for themselves. And she was a superb liar. Bill Carroll wasn’t even adequate.

  “We live in Turner’s Grove, but he goes to private school. Do you live—”

  “Divorced,” he said briefly. “Weekend warrior, driving up from D.C. every other Saturday, expressly for this tedium.”

  That explained everything. She hadn’t screwed up. Her system simply wasn’t as foolproof as she thought. Before Heloise’s company took on a new client, she always did a thorough background check, looking up vehicle registrations, tracking down the home addresses. (And if no home address could be found, she refused the job.) A man who lived in her zip code, or even a contiguous one, was rejected out of hand, although she might assign him to one of her associates.

  She hadn’t factored in divorce. Perhaps that was an oversight that only the never-married could make.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you.” He smirked.

  This was trouble. What kind of trouble, she wasn’t sure yet, but definitely trouble.

  WHEN HELOISE DECIDED TO MOVE to the suburbs, shortly after Scott was born, it had seemed practical and smart, even mainstream. Wasn’t that what every parent did? She hadn’t anticipated how odd it was for a single woman to buy a house on one of the best cul-de-sacs in one of the best subdivisions in Anne Arundel County, the kind of houses that newly single mothers usually sold post-divorce because they couldn’t afford to buy out the husband’s 50 percent stake in the equity. She had chosen the house for the land, almost an acre, which afforded the most privacy, never thinking of the price. Then she enrolled Scott in private school, another flag: what was the point of moving here if one could afford private school? The neighbors had begun to gossip almost immediately, and their speculation inspired the backstory she needed. A widow—yes. A terrible accident, one of which she still could not speak. She was grateful for her late husband’s pragmatism and foresight when it came to insurance, but—she’d rather have him. Of course.

  Of course, her new confidantes echoed back, although some seemed less than convinced. She could almost see their brains working it through: if I could lose the husband and keep the house, it wouldn’t be so bad. It was the brass ring of divorced life in this cul-de-sac, losing the husband and keeping the house. (The Dunwood school district was less desirable and therefore less pricy, which explained how Bill Carroll’s ex maintained her life there.) Heloise simply hadn’t counted on the scrutiny her personal life would attract.

  She had counted on her ability to construct a story about her work that would quickly stupefy anyone who asked, not that many of these stay-at-home mothers seemed curious about work. “I’m a lobbyist,” she said. “The Women’s Full Employment Network. I work in Annapolis, Baltimore, and D.C. as necessary, advocating parity and full benefits for what is traditionally considered women’s work. So-called pink-collar jobs.”

  “How about pay and benefits for what we do?” her neighbors inevitably asked. “Is there anyone who works harder than a stay-at-home mom?”

  Ditchdiggers, she thought. Janitresses and custodians. Gardeners. Meter readers. The girl who stands on her feet all day next to a fryer, all for the glory of minimum wage. Day laborers, men who line up on street corners and take whatever is offered. Hundreds of people you stare past every day, barely recognizing them as human. Prostitutes.

  “No one works harder than a mother,” she always replied with an open, honest smile. “I wish there was some way I could organize us, establish our value to society in a true dollars-and-cents way. Maybe one day.”

  Parenting actually was harder than the brand of prostitution that she now practiced. She made her own hours. She made top-notch wages. She was her own boss and an excellent manager. With the help of an exceptionally nonjudgmental nanny, she had been able to arrange her life so she never missed a soccer game or a school concert. If sleeping with other women’s husbands was what it took, so be it. She could not imagine a better line of work for a single mother.

  For eight years, it had worked like a charm, her two lives never overlapping.

  And then Scott ran into Bill Carroll’s son at the soccer game. And while no bones cracked and no wounds opened up, it was clear to her that she would bear the impact of this collision for some time to come.

  “WE HAVE TO TALK,” said the message on her cell phone, a number that she never answered, a phone on which she never spoke. It was strictly for incoming messages, which gave her plausible deniability if a message was ever intercepted. His voice was clipped, imperious, as if she had annoyed him deliberately. “We have to talk ASAP.”

  No we don’t, she thought. Let it go. I know and you know. I know you know I know. You know I know you know. Talking is the one thing we don’t have to do.

  But she called him back.

  “There’s a Starbucks near my office,” he said. “Let’s meet accidentally there in about an hour. You know—aren’t you Scott’s mom? Aren’t you Billy Jr.’s dad? Blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda.”

  “I don’t think we really need to speak.”

  “I do.” He was surprisingly bossy in his public life, given his preferences in his private one. “We need to straighten a few things out. And, who knows, if we settle everything, maybe I’ll throw a little business your way.”

  “That’s not how I work,” she said. “You know that. I don’t take referrals from clients. It’s not healthy, clients knowing each other.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about. How you work. And how you’re going to work from now on.”

  HE WASN’T THE FIRST BULLY in her life. That honor belonged to her father, who had beaten her when he got tired of beating her mother. “How do you stay with him?” she had asked her mother more than once. “You only have one true love in your life,” her mother responded, never making it clear if her true love was Heloise’s father or some long-gone man who had consigned her to this joyless fate.

  Then there was Heloise’s high school boyfriend, the one who persuaded her to drop out of college and come to Baltimore with him, where he promptly dumped her. She had landed a job as a dancer at one of the Block’s nicer clubs, but she had gotten in over her head with debt, trying to balance work and college. That had brought Val into her life.
She had worked for him for almost ten years before she had been able to strike out on her own, and there had been a lot of luck in that. A lot of luck and not a little deceit.

  People who thought they knew stuff, people on talk shows, quack doctors with fake credentials, had lots of advice about bullies. Bullies back down if you stand up to them. Bullies are scared inside.

  Bully-shit. If Val was scared inside, then his outsides masked it pretty well. He sent her to the hospital twice and she was pretty sure she would be out on the third strike if she ever made the mistake of standing up to him again. Confronting Val hadn’t accomplished anything. Being sneaky, however, going behind his back while smiling to his face, had worked beautifully. That had been her first double life—Val’s smiling consort, Brad’s confidential informant. What she was doing now was kid stuff, compared to all that.

  “Chai latte,” she told the counterwoman at the Starbucks in Dupont Circle. The girl was beautiful, with tawny skin and green eyes. She could do much better for herself than a job at a coffee shop, even one that paid health insurance. Heloise offered health insurance to the girls who were willing to be on the books of the Women’s Full Employment Network. She paid toward their health plans and Social Security benefits, everything she was required to do by law.

  “Would you like a muffin with that?” Suggestive selling, a good technique. Heloise used it in her business.

  “No thanks. Just the chai, tall.”

  “Heloise! Heloise Lewis! Fancy seeing you here.”

  His acting had not improved in the seventy-two hours since they had first met. He inspected her with a smirk, much too proud of himself, his expression all but announcing: I know what you look like naked.

  She knew the same about him, of course, but it wasn’t an image on which she wanted to dwell.

  Heloise hadn’t changed her clothes for this meeting. Nor had she put on makeup, or taken her hair out of its daytime ponytail. She was hoping that her Heloise garb might remind Bill Carroll that she was a mother, another parent, someone like him. She did not know him well, outside the list of preferences she had cataloged on a carefully coded index card. Despite his tough talk on the phone, he might be nicer than he seemed.

  “The way I see it,” he said, settling in an overstuffed chair and leaving her a plain wooden one, “you have more to lose than I do.”

  “Neither one of us has to lose anything. I’ve never exposed a client and I never will. It makes no sense as a business practice.”

  He looked around, but the Starbucks was relatively empty, and in any event, he didn’t seem the type capable of pitching his voice low.

  “You’re a whore,” he announced.

  “I’m aware of how I make my living.”

  “It’s illegal.”

  “Yes—for both of us. Whether you pay or are paid, you’ve broken the law.”

  “Well, you’ve just lost one paying customer.”

  Was that all he wanted to establish? Maybe he wasn’t as big a dick as he seemed. “I understand. If you’d like to work with one of my associates—”

  “You don’t get it. I’m not paying anymore. Now that I know who you are and where you live, I think you ought to take care of me for free.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’m going to tell everyone you’re a whore.”

  “Which would expose you as my client.”

  “Who cares? I’m divorced. Besides, how are you going to prove I was a customer? I can out you without exposing myself.”

  “There are your credit card charges.” American Express Business Platinum, the kind that accrued airline miles. She was better at remembering the cards than the men themselves. The cards were tangible, concrete. The cards were individual in a way the men were not.

  “Business expenses. Consulting fees, right? That’s what it says on the bill.”

  “Why would a personal injury lawyer need to consult with the Women’s Full Employment Network?”

  “To figure out how to value the lifelong earning power of women injured in traditional pink-collar jobs.” His smile was triumphant, ugly and triumphant. He had clearly put a lot of thought into his answer and was thrilled at the chance to deliver it so readily. But then he frowned, which made his small eyes even smaller. It would be fair to describe his face as piggish, with those eyes and the pinkish nose, which was very broad at the base and more than a little upturned. “How did you know I was a personal injury lawyer?”

  “I research my clients pretty carefully.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time that someone researched you pretty carefully. Cops. A prosecutor hungry for a high-profile case. The call girl on the cul-de-sac. It would make a juicy headline.”

  “Bill, I assure you I have no intention of telling anyone about our business relationship if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “What I’m worried about is that you’re expensive and I wouldn’t mind culling you from my overhead. You bill more per hour than I do. Where do you get off, charging that much?”

  “I get off,” she said, “where you get off. You know, right at that moment I take my little finger—”

  “Shut up.” His voice was so loud that it broke through the dreamy demeanor of the counter girl, who started and exchanged a worried look with Heloise. A moment ago, Heloise had been pitying her, and now the girl was concerned about Heloise. That was how quickly things could change. “Look, this is the option. I get free rides for life or I make sure that everyone knows what you are. Everyone. Including your cute little boy.”

  He was shrewd, bringing Scott into the conversation. Scott was her soft spot, her only vulnerability. Before she got pregnant, when she was the only person she had to care for, she had done a pretty shitty job of it. But Scott had changed all that, even before he was a flesh-and-blood reality. She would do anything to protect Scott, anything. Ask Brad for a favor, if need be, although she hated leaning on Brad.

  She might even go to Scott’s father, not that he had any idea he was Scott’s father, and she was never going to inform him of that fact. But she didn’t like asking him for favors under any circumstances. Scott’s father thought he was in her debt. She needed to maintain the equilibrium afforded by that lie.

  “I can’t afford to work for free.”

  “It won’t be every week. And I understand I won’t have bumping rights over the paying customers. I’m just saying that we’ll go on as before, once or twice a month, but I don’t pay for it anymore. It will be like dating, without all the boring socializing. What do the kids call it? A booty call.”

  “I have to think about this,” she said.

  “No you don’t. See you next Wednesday.”

  He hadn’t even offered to pay for her chai or buy her a muffin.

  SHE CALLED BRAD FIRST, but the moment she saw him, waiting in the old luncheonette on Eastern Avenue, she realized it had been a mistake. Brad had taken an oath to serve and protect, but the oath had been for those who obeyed the laws, not those who lived in flagrant disregard of them. He had already done more for her than she had any right to expect. He owed her nothing.

  Still, it was hard for a woman, any woman, not to exploit a man’s enduring love, not to go back to that well and see if you could still draw on it. Brad knew her and he loved her. Well, he thought he knew her and he loved the person he thought he knew. Close enough.

  “You look great,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t being polite. Brad preferred daytime Heloise to the nighttime version, always had.

  “Thanks.”

  “Why did you want to see me?”

  I need advice on how to get a shameless, grasping parasite out of my life. But she didn’t want to plunge right in. It was crass.

  “It’s been too long.”

  He placed his hands over hers, held them on the cool Formica tabletop, indifferent to the coffee he had ordered. The coffee here was awful, had always been awful. She was not one to romanticize these old diners. Starbucks was ta
king over the world by offering a superior product, changing people’s perceptions about what they deserved and what they could afford. In her private daydreams, she would like to be the Starbucks of sex-for-hire, delivering guaranteed quality to business travelers everywhere. No, she wouldn’t call it Starfucks, although she had seen that joke on the Internet. For one thing, it would sound like one of those celebrity impersonator services. Besides, it wasn’t elegant. She wanted to take a word or reference that had no meaning in the culture and make it come to mean good, no-strings, quid pro quo sex. Like…“zephyr.” Only not “zephyr,” because it denoted quickness, and she wanted to market sex as a spa service for men, a day or night of pampering with a long list of services and options. So not “zephyr,” but a word like it, one that sounded cool and elegant but whose real meaning was virtually unknown and therefore malleable in the public imagination. Amazon.com was another good example. Or eBay. Familiar yet new.

  But that fantasy seemed more out of reach than ever. Now she would settle for keeping the life she already had.

  “Seriously, Heloise. What’s up?”

  “I missed you,” she said lamely, yet not inaccurately. She missed Brad’s adoration, which never seemed to dim. For a long time she had expected him to marry someone else, to pursue the average family he claimed he wanted to have with her. But now that they were both pushing forty with a very short stick, she was beginning to think that Brad liked things just the way they were. As long as he carried a torch for a woman he could never have, he didn’t have to marry or have kids. Back when Scott was born, Brad had dared to believe he was the father, had even hopefully volunteered to take a DNA test. She had to break it to him very gently that he wasn’t, and that she didn’t want him to be part of Scott’s life under any circumstances, even as an uncle or Mommy’s “friend.” She couldn’t afford for Scott to have any contact with her old life, no matter how remote or innocuous.

  “Everyone okay? You, Scott? Melina?” Melina was her nanny, the single most important person in her employ. The girls could come and go, but Heloise could never make things work without Melina.