A while later, he returned to the kitchen, no laptop in sight.
“Thanks for doing that,” she said. She pointed to the ten. “For you. For lunch tomorrow. Should be enough for a six-inch sub, chips, and a drink. You remember seeing the sandwich place when we drove in, right? A block that way, and then about one and a half to the right?” She pointed in the general direction.
He looked at the bill but didn’t take it. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“I don’t mind talking to them,” he said.
“I know, but still. I mean, I love them, you know I do. And they’ve helped out a lot recently, and I’m grateful. But . . . some family dynamics are difficult, that’s all.”
Jesse reached for the ten and shoved it in his front pocket. “I’ll skip the chips and pop and get a foot-long.” He smiled and gave her a gangly hug. “We can split it.”
Chapter Six
They had been in the bungalow for two weeks, and while all kinds of activity had been taking place on Mrs. Saint’s side of the low wooden fence, none of it had spilled over onto Markie’s property. Their elderly neighbor, true to her word, had been giving them space to settle in.
And settle in they had. The scattered shoes near the door, stacks of dishes on the counter, and the overflowing recycling bin in the corner made it look like they had lived there for months. They had only unpacked the things they would need for six months. In Jesse’s case, this meant he had upended all of the boxes marked J—BEDROOM onto his floor and tossed the empties into a corner of the basement, where they would wait until it was time to move again.
Markie had stacked her unloaded boxes in a tidy pile beside Jesse’s leaning tower of cardboard, and she’d filled another corner with all the still-packed boxes they had decided not to bother opening. Anything they wouldn’t need during the span of their half-year lease remained entombed: the artwork Frédéric was ready to hang on their first day; most of the kitchen tools Markie had collected over the years (none of which were required for zapping frozen meals in a microwave); the board games they used to play after dinner.
Jesse had begun ninth grade only a few days after they moved in. So far, he had nothing good to say about his new school. The teachers were “pretty terrible,” his classes “totally boring.” He had met a few friends, including a guy named Trevor who was “sort of cool.” The others were “not so bad, some of the time,” but they had all known one another “for like, ever,” so it had been hard for him to break in.
The walk home from school was “miles too long” and “way too hot.” Markie kept suggesting he take the bus, but he told her buses for high-schoolers weren’t a thing, which meant either that there weren’t any available or that there was no way he was about to take one. Either way, he was still walking.
She had offered him a ride that morning, as she had done every morning since school began, but he gave her a pained smile, which maybe meant rides from moms weren’t a thing, either, or maybe meant he couldn’t stand the idea of being in the car with her. She didn’t want to think about it for too long, so she smiled and laughed and waved and told him to have a great day, all in a way that made her seem more manic than motherly. She was certain that by the time he reached the end of their walk, he would be at least a little happy about school, if only because it would give him an eight-hour break from the crazy woman he lived with.
Since he left, she had been sipping her coffee on the patio while she gazed with forced serenity around the yard and told herself everything was fine, it would be this way even if he were back at Saint Mark’s, where he had attended from kindergarten through eighth grade. Teenagers never liked the start of the school year, whether they were surrounded by strangers or by the friends they had been with since they were learning to tie their shoes.
Markie walked inside, refilled her cup, and chose one of the many stacks of files covering the dining room table to carry back out to the patio, where she had been working most days. They were having an oppressively hot August, and she was trying to save money by running the air-conditioning only at night. The humidity was at an all-time high, but there was a breeze on the patio and shade from the umbrella, and she had been telling herself every day that those were fine working conditions. That it was comfortable on the patio, not stifling.
That reviewing claim file after claim file for Global Insurance Company was gripping work, not a mind-numbing, humiliating demotion from the high-profile position she had recently held as director of development for Saint Mark’s. That Jesse’s identity as Student No. 2432 at the overcrowded urban high school she had enrolled him in wasn’t a shattering fall from the ivy-covered, marble-staircased, khaki- and blazer-filled bubble of Saint Mark’s.
But she hadn’t fooled herself, and she hadn’t fooled her son. The reason the dining room table was available for her stacks of work files was that Jesse was still carrying his microwaved frozen dinners down to his bedroom every night to eat in front of his TV, his phone, or his gaming system. Or to stare at the wall, for all Markie knew, but in any case, he was still not interested in eating with her or in having the kind of dinnertime conversation they used to have.
Or any kind of conversation. Markie got a “Hey, Mom” when he arrived home from school and a “Night, Mom” when she called good night down the basement stairs, but most days she didn’t get more than that. Some days she got less—a grunt after school, the sound of thunder on the basement stairs, and a slammed door at the bottom.
The nothing-but-grunts-and-slammed-doors days, she guessed, were the ones when he couldn’t reach his father on the phone. Any failure of Kyle’s to connect was Markie’s fault, in Jesse’s mind, not Kyle’s. There was no “I can’t believe he can’t make time for me, his own son.” It was only “I can’t believe you drove my dad away.” Not that he ever said it out loud, but she could tell.
Sometimes, because he was a good kid who felt guilty when he had been hard on her for too long, she got a full-toothed smile, an offer to zap her plate of pizza for her, a sincere “Thanks, Mom,” for some small thing she had done for him. And then she felt guilty, because she knew he had forced himself to be friendlier than he wanted to be.
It wasn’t that she was one of those moms who made excuses for her kid’s bad behavior. When he bit a girl at daycare when he was two, she didn’t laugh it off and say, “Kids will be kids,” or talk about how he was simply one of those toddlers who “used his mouth to explore.” No, she told the daycare teachers and the little girl’s parents that it was a terrible thing her boy had done. And then she glared at Jesse all the way home, sitting there in his car seat in his matching yellow-and-blue tow-truck shirt and shorts with his chubby flushed cheeks, and she told him he had better not ever do it again.
She didn’t make excuses for her own bad behavior, either, and that was why she didn’t blame her son for saying so little to her before he disappeared into the basement every day after school. Because she knew she was the one who had caused all of this: Jesse’s surliness, his demotion to public school, her crappy claims-review job, the tiny house, and the tinier bank account that didn’t even allow her to run the air-conditioning during the day.
She had caused it all by doing one terrible thing: she had looked the other way.
There had been clues—not for their entire twenty years together, but for the last few. Suddenly, Kyle was always having her sign documents, which he described in terms that were equal parts minimal and vague. “It’s just something for the mortgage. You know, since we’re co-owners.” “It’s a bank form—don’t worry about it.” “It’s for the mutual fund. So they have our signatures.” She might have asked for more details, but he always managed to choose the moment she was racing around the house, searching for her purse and keys, late for work. So she would nod at his opaque explanation, scrawl her name, and rush out the door.
She brought the mail in one day and found a FINAL NOTICE statement from the power company. It was an administrativ
e error on the company’s part, Kyle said. Of course he had paid the bill on time—hadn’t he always? In fact, he expected a follow-up letter soon, apologizing for the screwup. When she asked him about it later, he said he had thrown the written apology away. “Only a petty person would hang on to something like that.” Anytime she went to fetch the mail after that, he had already gotten to it.
These things were odd, sure, and it was true he had always had a propensity to spend too much money, but he had taken care of the finances for almost two decades and nothing had gone wrong, so why would she suddenly start asking questions seventeen years in? As for the women, the simple truth, however lacking in brilliance, was that she didn’t want to be cheated on, so she refused to consider that it might be happening.
Kyle suddenly had a work trip every other week, though he’d had none in years past. He wasn’t at the same company—he never stayed in one place long—but he always held roughly the same position (software sales), and it wasn’t like he was moving to better and better jobs, with ever-increasing salaries and travel budgets. So how was it that his work travel kept becoming more extravagant? Maui one month, the Florida Keys another. There was even talk of Paris. “Too bad Jesse and I can’t tag along.” “Yeah, too bad. But he’s got school and you’ve got work, so I think it’s best if I go alone . . .”
What possesses a woman of above-average intelligence to look the other way and keep her head locked firmly in that direction? To blindly accept, “Don’t worry. I’ve got the bills handled. The investments, too. We’re in great shape,” and to never ask to see the statements? To keep her nose averted so she wouldn’t catch the scent of perfume—a kind she doesn’t wear—on her husband’s suit jacket? Markie could answer for only one such woman, and her answer, one that filled her with shame now that she had acknowledged it, was: appearances.
Every morning she stepped over Kyle’s lipstick-collared shirts on the faux Italian marble of their bathroom floor, walked into the attached garage of their highly leveraged McMansion in their too-expensive subdivision, and slid, blissfully ignorant, into her entry-level (leased) German sedan. She hummed a self-satisfied tune as she made her way several blocks west to her office at the school or, depending on the day, a few subdivisions east to the massive home and sculptured gardens of Headmaster Deacon, where she was the life—and, as the director of development, the hostess—of regular fund-raising luncheons, garden parties, and silent auctions designed to bring more money into the most moneyed private school in their part of the country.
She was the epitome of the kind of parent who was attracted to Saint Mark’s, the kind the school wanted to attract more of: well bred, well dressed. Well matched—Kyle Bryant was a stunning-looking man, and since no one suspected what Markie was trying so hard to ignore about the health of their bank account and their marriage, everyone assumed they were the perfect couple. People wanted to be Kyle and Markie Bryant, and if they couldn’t achieve that, they wanted to be near the Bryants, to have their kids attend the school that threw parties that would include the Bryants. She was living the life her parents lived, the one they so desperately wanted for her. The one they had raised her to believe she wanted for herself.
Markie came across as more school ambassador than employee. Surely a woman who dressed like her, who lived where she lived, who danced like that with a man that handsome didn’t actually need the job but only wanted to find a way to put her university degree, along with her considerable social skills, to good use. It wasn’t true. They were private-school parents only because of the work ethic of Markie’s grandfather, who had died when Jesse was four, leaving a sum large enough to send him to Saint Mark’s and then to the private college of his choice. The bequest would pay for Jesse’s education, but nothing else—the Bryants’ mortgage and car payments and everything else counted on two full-time salaries.
Markie would never forgive herself for the fact that, at the time of her grandfather’s death, she was more irritated with her father than she was grateful for her son’s inheritance. “I want your word you’ll put it into a separate account, marked specifically for Jesse’s education, so . . . nothing can happen to it,” Clayton whispered to her inside the lawyer’s office. Had he followed with “Cough, cough—Kyle—cough, cough,” his meaning would not have been more clear.
Surely this was one of those occasions a psychologist would have a field day with, where a child cringes at a parent’s observation not because it is unfair and untrue, but because it is precisely the opposite. In the end, it turned out Clayton had given his son-in-law too much credit, not too little. He thought the fact the money was in an account expressly named “for the benefit of Jesse Clayton Bryant” would keep Kyle from pilfering it.
While Clayton and Lydia held their son-in-law solely accountable for his family’s downfall, Markie refused to let herself off that easily. Kyle’s conduct was reprehensible, but she had sins of her own. She had never set out to collect cars, real estate, and couture the way some of the members of the Saint Mark’s Mothers’ Club did, but she did make sure she had the basic possessions required to back up their membership in the private-school social circle her grandfather’s gift had gained them entry into: a vaulted-ceilinged house in the right neighborhood, a car with an acceptable hood ornament, and a few expensive suits and pairs of shoes.
She wasn’t greedy about it, and she didn’t fund any of it with a single cent of her son’s money. But she used “My son attends Saint Mark’s” to buy her way in, and once she was there, she did what it took to stay. When she figured out people thought she had taken the development job as a means of keeping herself busy rather than paying the bills, she chose not to correct them. She liked having people believe she had the portfolio to be one of the idle rich but the work ethic to forbid herself such sloth. It made her seem that much more principled.
It made her marriage that much more enviable. Sexy, good-looking men like Kyle were even sexier and better looking when people assumed they were single-handedly providing the luxury cars and designer wardrobes and monthly highlights their wives were able to take for granted. Markie had never been the kind of head-turner Kyle was, but in the golden glow of his presumed success, she felt taller, slimmer, more attractive.
She rode so high on her artificial, installment-plan-purchased Golden Couple reputation that she couldn’t see—she chose not to see—that the footing underneath had become unstable. But who would want to face the truth? The divorcing couple around the block, the older pair up the street who had run into financial trouble and now had to put off retirement—those weren’t the people at the top of the invitation list for the best dinner parties in the Bryants’ exclusive neighborhood. They were the ones whispered about at those gatherings, with words that claimed sympathy but eyes that said something less charitable.
So what if the hostess at every party flirted with Kyle when she thought Markie wasn’t looking? So what if he flirted back? Wasn’t that simply good manners? “My wife is in the other room” could be enough to get them stricken from the list when it was time for the next event. And surely Kyle would never do anything to embarrass her in their own town.
Chapter Seven
In April, Markie ran into a group of school mothers having lunch at one of the exposed-pipe-and-brick-wall wine bar/bistro places that dotted the upscale streets at the tasteful commercial edge of their neighborhood, a few blocks from Saint Mark’s. She was there to meet a donor; they were there to kill the hours between their post-school-drop-off Pilates session and their before-school-pickup fair-trade coffee klatch in the school’s courtyard.
There were five of them at a table with six chairs, all huddled over a cell phone. One of them saw Markie and nudged the one beside her, who looked up and nudged the next, and so on, like a group of living, bleached-blonde-and-Botoxed dominoes. In each of their expressions, pity jostled for position with scorn, and when the first one said, “Oh, hey there, Markie,” it was in the tone of a doctor about to deliver the news
that the chemo hadn’t worked.
“Ladies!” Markie said, taking her time to reach them while she ran a few speeches over in her mind to address whatever it was they were so ineffectively trying to pretend they hadn’t been discussing: Jesse would never cheat on a test/steal a classmate’s phone/break into one of your liquor cabinets/sell pot during lunch hour. I’m sure it’s a mistake. If he confessed, he’s covering for someone else—one of your boys, perhaps.
She inclined her chin toward the phone, covered now with a diamond-adorned hand. “What’s this?” They exchanged glances, and she could hear the telepathic debate: We can’t show her. / Well, we can’t very well not show her now—she knows it has to do with her. / I don’t want to be the one to do it. / Fine, hand it to me and I will.
Finally, one of them offered her the phone, swiping it as she raised it toward Markie. “I’m trying to get back to the first one,” she said, as a series of photos carouselled across the screen. Markie thrust her hand toward the phone, but the other woman held the device out of her reach and kept swiping. “I really think it’s easier to take if you start from the first one and work your way—”
Markie snatched it from her. If her child was about to be expelled—
But the pictures didn’t show Jesse sliding a baggie to a classmate over the lunch table. Or angling his head to see the answers on someone else’s test paper. Or chugging a bottle of Chivas in the butler’s pantry of one of their houses.
They showed Kyle. In a bathing suit. On a beach framed by palm trees. Standing behind a woman wearing only the bottom of her bikini, her big, bare breasts spared from total exposure only by his widespread hands. The woman’s arm reached out, presumably holding the phone and snapping the selfie as she tilted her head back and grinned up at him. Kyle’s mouth formed a Cheshire cat’s smile, and his eyes, half-closed, completed the expression that any adult would immediately recognize as the contented fatigue of a man who had just gotten laid.
Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel Page 5