Mary Bliss stood there, unable to answer. She was rooted to the kitchen floor. She didn’t want him in her kitchen, didn’t want his naked pain so close, so close it could be catching, like cooties, or cancer, or the plague. Go on back across the street, she wanted to tell Randy Bowden. We’ll both wave and pretend nothing bad has happened to either of us.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” she said finally, gesturing toward the bottle on the table. She took the atlas and shoved it under a stack of cookbooks on the shelf.
Randy looked around the room. “Is, uh, Parker at home?”
She stared down at the table. He knew. He had to know. And if Randy Bowden knew, it must be all over Fair Oaks that Parker McGowan had run off and abandoned his family. Everybody at the club, everybody on her block, even the big-haired lady at the dry cleaners and the girls on her tennis team, even that pimply, hormone-charged lifeguard at the pool knew that Mary Bliss’s husband had discarded her like an empty cigarette pack.
“No, um, Parker’s out of town on business. Can I take a message for him?” The lie came easily, and she took a long sip of wine.
Now it was Randy’s turn to blush. His pale blue eyes blinked rapidly behind the tortoiseshell-framed eyeglasses. He shifted from one foot to the other, ran a pale tongue over his lips.
“Maybe, if you don’t mind, I’d love a glass of wine. If it’s not any trouble.”
“No trouble,” she said smoothly, and was glad to occupy her hands getting down a proper wine glass, a paper napkin, pouring and handing it to him.
The two of them nearly emptied their glasses in one embarrassed gulp.
Randy leaned a bony hip against the kitchen counter.
“Actually, Mary Bliss, you’re the one I really need to talk to. It’s kind of embarrassing. In fact, it’s embarrassing as hell. Could I have a little more of that wine?”
She nodded and poured it out, hardly spilling any.
“You know Nancye and I are separated, right?”
She nodded and looked down at her wine glass, then up at Randy. “Somebody mentioned it yesterday,” she said. “I’m always the last to know about these things. I’m so sorry, Randy.”
For some reason, it was important that she let him know that she hadn’t been gossiping about him. Even though, of course, she had. But everybody in Fair Oaks was talking about the Bowdens. And that was understood. In a small town like theirs, juicy gossip was the coin of the realm.
Randy pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. He’d lost so much weight, even his glasses were too big.
“She walked out. Just up and walked out on all of us. My lawyer says I can’t get custody of the kids without a fight. He says it’s gonna get nasty.” He laughed, but he didn’t smile. “I didn’t think things could get any nastier than they already were. Guess I was being naive. Right now, we’ve got joint custody. But, uh, Nancye’s behavior has gotten kind of, uh, you know.”
“Really?” Mary Bliss coughed. “I had no idea.”
He picked at his thumbnail. Mary Bliss knew he worked in downtown Atlanta, doing something at the bank that used to be C&S but was now called something else. His hands were unusual for a banker, though, callused, red, crisscrossed with cuts and scrapes.
“God,” he blurted. “I can’t do this.” He sighed. “I was going to ask you to do something for me. It’s disgusting. So, never mind.” He shook his head, jerked abruptly away from the counter, and knocked over the wine glass. He grabbed for it, but it fell to the floor, shattering into bits.
“God,” he exclaimed. “I’m sorry. What a moron.”
“It’s nothing,” Mary Bliss said, running to the sink for paper towels and a whisk broom. She was babbling, trying to make him feel better. “Just an ugly old cheap wine glass you got free with a ten-dollar purchase. At the Winn-Dixie.”
She clapped her hands to her mouth as soon as the words had escaped. Winn-Dixie. He must think she was awful.
“I’m so sorry,” Randy said, stooping now, holding out the dustpan. “I’ll replace this. I think we’ve got a set of these glasses at the house. Nancye goes to Winn-Dixie all the time. I think she likes the meat.”
Mary Bliss gasped, then started to choke. Thank heavens Katharine wasn’t here. She would be rolling on the floor, hooting and screaming with laughter. Katharine had a very smutty mind.
The more she thought of Katharine, the more her unintentional faux pas worked on her. She started to giggle but clamped her lips shut, trying to suppress the laughter. Poor Randy would think she was a mental case. The giggle kept welling up, and now tears were streaming down her face, and oh, God, she thought she might wet her pants.
Randy sat back on his heels, astonished. He hadn’t expected anybody, especially one of Nancye’s friends, to sympathize with him. Nancye was telling everybody in town that he was abusive, drank too much, was a control freak. Everybody loved Nancye. She was the life of every party. People were choosing up sides, avoiding him. What other lies had his wife been telling on him?
Mary Bliss stood up, her knees pressed together. She fanned her face with her hand. “I’m sorry, Randy. I really am. I shouldn’t drink wine this early. What was it you were going to ask me? Please.” She touched his arm. “I’d like to help. I can tell you’re in pain.”
He took the dustpan full of glass bits and dumped it in her trash can. “Has Nancye called you? Mentioned anything to you about me?”
Her eyes widened. “She left a message on my answering machine today. I haven’t called her back yet. Why? What’s going on?”
“She’s called all our friends. Practically everybody in Fair Oaks. Even people we don’t know very well. I’m surprised she waited this long to call you.”
“We’re not really that close,” Mary Bliss explained.
“Close enough to hear her scream when I beat her?” Randy asked, gazing straight at her. “Close enough to see her run from the house in her nightgown to get away from her abusive husband?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“That’s what she told her lawyer. That’s why she’s calling up all the people who live around us. To get somebody to go on the record that I used her as a punching bag.”
“That’s absurd,” Mary Bliss said. “I never heard anything like that. In fact, I always thought you two were such a darling couple. I used to tell Parker, ‘Look how Randy Bowden holds hands with Nancye when they go for a walk.’ I saw the two of you, last year, at the Sinclairs’ Christmas party, slow-dancing to Johnny Mathis singing ‘Twelfth of Never.’ The way you held her, I felt so, oh, jealous, I guess. Parker’s not very demonstrative like that. Not in public.”
“The Sinclairs’ party,” Randy said. “How could I forget? She told our pastor I got mad at her for dancing with Charlie Weidman that night and slugged her in the stomach in the car on the way home,” Randy said.
“Nancye danced with Charlie at that party?” Mary Bliss said, surprised.
“Nancye likes to dance.”
In all the years she’d known him, Mary Bliss had never seen Charlie Weidman dance. Not ever. That Nancye Bowden must be quite a piece of goods. Quite a piece, Katharine would say.
Mary Bliss chewed her bottom lip.
“Never mind,” Randy said, moving toward the back door. “It’s not your problem. It just bugs me, you know? The idea that you and Parker might think I was that kind of guy. Nancye and I had our problems, but I swear to God, I never lifted a hand to her. It was never anything like that. Not even when we were separated last time.”
“You were separated before?” This man was full of surprises.
“Four years ago, right after Christmas,” Randy said. “Nancye told everybody I was up in Charlotte, at a bank training seminar. We didn’t even tell the kids, actually. It only lasted about five weeks.”
A training seminar, Mary Bliss thought. That’s what she could tell anybody who asked about Parker. He was out of town. At a seminar. But Nancye Bowden had already used tha
t fib. She’d have to come up with something better. More original. That would be a challenge. To make up bigger lies than Nancye Bowden, the town slut.
“I think it’s horrible, that she would accuse you of physical violence,” Mary Bliss said. “If she calls me back, I’ll tell her straight out. I’ll call her a liar right to her face. And I’ll tell that to your lawyer too, if you want.”
“Thanks,” Randy said. “Thanks for believing me. I hope somebody else will too.” He opened the back door and walked outside.
“And I’m gonna have her kicked off the carpool too,” Mary Bliss called out, watching him plod up the driveway, back toward his own house.
Damn tootin’.
10
Making lists kept the crazies at bay.
She’d always kept lists, ever since she was old enough to write. Boys I like. Mean girls at school. Books I want to read someday. Foods Parker won’t eat. Erin’s Christmas list. Emergency contact numbers.
First thing, Mary Bliss made a list of all the marital casualties in Fair Oaks over the past five years. Alphabetically. It was the schoolteacher in her, she guessed. Wynnie and Robert Adair. Debra and Paul Ammerman. Nancye and Randy Bowden, Sidney and Kip Dubinsky. Rebecca and Mike Killaney.
She stopped when she got to Patti Mitchell and Jake Myers. “The hippies on the hill,” everybody in Fair Oaks called them, because they both drove battered Subarus and had a solar heating unit on their roof. Patti had kept her maiden name and she never shaved her legs or wore a bra and she was always running around recycling all the time. Parker said they were probably never married anyway, so technically, maybe they weren’t divorced. Feeling defiant, Mary Bliss decided to include the hippies on the hill, listing them as Mitchell-Myers.
So many more couples, she had to get out the city directory to remember all the names. Still, there were bound to be marital fatalities she didn’t know about. People who were older than the people the McGowans ran with. People who were younger. Childless career couples, “yuppie scum,” Charlie Weidman called them, couples who were too busy to join the club or socialize with their neighbors, who only thought of Fair Oaks as a “desirable in-town zip code.”
And then there were the people who lived in the Oaks, which was the high-priced cluster home development Manning Jelks had built on the site of the old Fair Oaks Dairy property. The Oaks was a “gated community” with a security hut at the entrance and a guard who would call ahead to see if you were expected. It had great big houses on teeny-tiny lots, everything new and shiny, from the brass doorknobs to the close-mown Bermuda sod at front. All the houses were made of that pale-pink European stucco, and they all had rear entrances to the garages. Although it was only a couple blocks from her own house, Mary Bliss didn’t really know anybody who lived in the Oaks.
The streets over there all had theme names like Live Oak and White Oak and Red Oak and Pin Oak. “Oakies” was what the people in Fair Oaks called them. They might join the Fair Oaks Country Club, but they were still separate, had their own book clubs and tennis teams and supper clubs, their own lives. Their domestic difficulties were unknown to the rest of Fair Oaks.
Mary Bliss decided more research was necessary. She wrote down “The Oaks???” and continued working her way through the alphabet.
When she got to the Weidmans, she put her pencil down. Mary Bliss hated to give up on Charlie and Katharine. To put them on the list was an omen, she decided. The divorce wasn’t final yet. Things could still change.
Without the Weidmans, she came up with seventeen couples who’d called it quits. There were 320 families listed in the Fair Oaks City Directory. Mary Bliss was terrible with math, but if she got the calculator out of Parker’s desk, she could probably figure the percentages. She was cross-referencing the list by street when Katharine rattled the back doorknob.
“Boo!” Katharine said as Mary Bliss unlocked and opened the door. “When did you start locking the barn door?”
“After the stallion ran away,” Mary Bliss said, locking the door after Katherine. “Aren’t you scared, without Charlie living there?”
“Scared he might come back,” Katharine said, picking up the nearly empty bottle of wine and giving her a questioning look. “Anyway, I’m not living alone. Chip’s a man.”
“Chip’s going back to school in August. And you told me yourself, he’s never home.”
“I like having the house to myself,” Katharine said. “I have a rich fantasy life, you know.”
Mary Bliss gave her a searching look.
“What?” Katharine said. “I’m free, white, and twenty-one, aren’t I?”
“I don’t want to know,” Mary Bliss said, shaking her head and folding her arms across her chest.
Katharine smiled dreamily. “My favorite fantasy is the one where I’m asleep, and I wake up, and some thug is breaking into my house, rifling through my lingerie drawer. I stifle a scream, he turns around, looks at me. I’m naked, did I mention that?”
“I just assumed,” Mary Bliss said.
“He walks slowly toward the bed, climbs in, and ravages me.”
“Would he be masked?” Mary Bliss asked.
“With a black silk scarf.”
“Would you be tied up?”
Katharine ripped the top off the half-pound bag of peanut M&M’s she’d brought along. She shoved a handful of candy into her mouth and considered while she chewed. She’d brought along a bottle of wine also. Katharine was an extremely thoughtful friend. Now she poured glasses for both of them.
“Maybe not. I think that would be sick and depraved. I only have healthy, normal fantasies, you know. This would be what you would call consensual ravaging.”
“I’ve thought about that myself,” Mary Bliss confessed, emboldened by all the wine she’d been sipping. She tried an M&M, but it tasted like chalk, so she spit it into the trash.
“Only my guy breaks in while I’m in the shower. With the bathroom all steamed up, and he takes his clothes off, and gets in the shower with me, and we soap each other off, and I can’t really tell what he looks like, what with the steam and all. And we do it, standing up, right there in the shower.”
“That’s pretty good,” Katharine said admiringly. “Is there music?”
“Al Jarreau. ‘Masquerade.’ Erin gave me the CD for my birthday a couple of years ago.”
“This shower fantasy of yours. Is it actually original to you? I mean, no offense, but wasn’t that a made-for-TV movie a couple years ago? With Valerie Bertinelli?”
“Absolutely not,” Mary Bliss said proudly. “You know I only watch PBS.”
Mary Bliss tried to flip the pages of her notebook so that Katharine wouldn’t see her divorce list and think she was having a breakdown.
“I’ve been thinking about places Parker could have gone.”
“Good,” Katharine said, nodding and chewing. “We need to know where he is. So we can hunt him down and kill him.”
“Me personally?”
Mary Bliss was raised Methodist. Spiritually-wise, she felt under-prepared to break the First Commandment. After all, it was the first thing she’d ever learned to write, in Sunday school. Thou Shalt Not Kill. Emotionally, however, she could kill Parker right this second, with her bare hands.
“Who did you have in mind?” Katharine asked.
Mary Bliss just looked at her.
“Mary Bliss, I love you like a sister, but if I ever do kill a man, it would be Charlie Weidman, not Parker McGowan,” Katharine said.
They sipped their wine and Mary Bliss idly flipped the pages of the atlas, looking for likely island destinations. Bora-Bora didn’t seem likely. Long plane trips made Parker’s ankles swell. Catalina was off the coast of California, and Parker thought everybody in California was crazy.
“What if I just said he was dead?”
“Huh?”
“I meant to tell you. Randy Bowden was over here a little while ago. And he told me that he and Nancye were actually separated once before, about
four years ago. And Nancye was too embarrassed to tell anybody the truth, so she just said he was away at a banking seminar.”
“He told you that?”
Mary Bliss nodded emphatically.
“I wonder why he came back?” Katharine said. “I remember that time he was gone. The rumor going around was, she had an affair with the boys’ Little League coach while he was supposedly up in Charlotte.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Mary Bliss said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, I could just tell people Parker was dead. Like Nancye told people Randy was in Charlotte, instead of the Days Inn in East Point. It wouldn’t be too hard to make Parker seem dead.”
“I’ll say,” Katharine said, a little too quickly.
“Don’t be mean,” Mary Bliss said. “Listen. I could have a nice funeral. We could make your mother’s chicken salad, maybe some tomato aspic and those little tea cakes. Parker despises aspic, so it would be my chance to use that Southern Living recipe. Nothing too showy. Afterwards, I could collect his life insurance, and I could pay all the bills and Erin and I could stay right here in Fair Oaks.”
Katharine’s jaw hung slack in disbelief. “Let me get this right. Just say he’s dead? But he’s really not?”
She took the wine bottle and hid it behind her chair. “That’s enough wine for you, Mary Bliss McGowan. You’re starting to scare me.”
“You’re the only one who knows he’s run off,” Mary Bliss pointed out. “Everybody else will think he went out of town on business, like he always does. And then he’ll just…die.”
“What about Meemaw?” Katharine said. “Aren’t you forgetting about her? She knows the truth. And she’d never let you get away with that kind of thing.”
“Alzheimer’s disease,” Mary Bliss said, a glint coming to her eyes. “You know how Meemaw is. She’s always been a terrible liar, and everybody knows it. Her memory’s not what it used to be. And she makes up the most incredible stories. Last week she told everybody in the nursing home that she’d been Ethel Merman’s understudy on Broadway. She kept belting out There’s No Business Like Show Business during crafts class. Parker and I had been talking about having her moved over to the memory-impaired unit. That’s nursing-home talk for Senile Street.”
Little Bitty Lies Page 5