Emma had woken up at five that morning, a full half hour later than she normally did. She didn’t feel any better rested though—more like a dime-store thief with those few extra minutes slipped into her pocket. She put it down to the wine she’d drunk the night before, two or three glasses, at least—twice as much as she usually did.
At least that was tasty, she thought, berating herself once again for the overcooked pork and those awful vegetables that had turned out nearly raw.
“Hard as rocks,” she grumbled—as if anyone ever cut rocks into neat little cubes and doused them with too much olive oil. She’d hardly been able to drop off to sleep the night before, what with her frustration at the terrible meal.
She didn’t let herself so much as think of her daughter.
Emma was an expert at ignoring the elephant in the room. She focused on the terrible meal instead of Cassy’s cruelty—first to Benjamin, like a warm-up pitch, then a fastball hurled straight at her own head.
“Convicted felon,” Cassy had snarled—scarcely able to suppress her pleasure.
Emma pretended it had never happened.
She marched back over her dinner preparations instead—task by task—hunting in vain for the terrible error, the misstep that had cost her success. Failure tasted a lot like pork, she thought—as dry as dust.
Everyone ate, of course, just as if nothing were wrong. Benjamin took seconds even, but Emma couldn’t forgive herself. She saw the way they heaped that chutney on.
But all that had to wait for now—her dinner and her daughter, her work even. “May I have the number for Forty-four West Realty Corp.?” she asked, the silver receiver pressed up against her ear, her rich brown hair falling all around it.
Emma was meant to be working up a clever variation on a guest room that morning—one that could double as a home office. She was taping a segment for Oprah that afternoon. But she had some personal business to work out first.
She was sitting in Bobby’s study, at his handsome mahogany desk, swiveling a little in that ugly ergonomic chair of his, her lower back and lumbar spine allegedly protected at every turn.
But Emma didn’t feel safe at all.
“You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Emmy”—that’s what her father always said, once she’d crashed hard to earth after aiming too high: losing her bid for student body president, only a runner-up as homecoming queen.
“Damned eagle eyes,” she muttered, scratching a spot of tarnish from the brass trim on Bobby’s desk blotter.
Emma knew she wasn’t entirely to blame for her difficulties that morning. She wouldn’t have found anything, of course, if there’d been nothing there to find. But she didn’t want to be angry with Bobby either.
She hated problems she couldn’t solve on her own—especially so early in the morning.
She was growing annoyed with the operator too.
“No,” she said, huffing out a little breath, “I don’t have an address.” If I had an address, she thought, I wouldn’t be calling you.
Emma had left Bobby in bed that morning, sleeping as soundly as he always did, the rise and fall of his slumbering chest in perfect time with the little puffs of air he spat—puh, puh, puh—all night long, like a speech therapist demonstrating the most perfect p imaginable.
It didn’t annoy her either.
She liked having her husband in bed beside her. She wasn’t much of a sleeper still, but she slept much better since he’d come back home. No question about that. She didn’t even mind it when he flung a sleeping arm over her chest, like a protective mother driving toward an amber light. It startled her awake every time, but it was something like a comfort to her too.
She’d slipped out of bed as gently as she could and walked straight to the dining room. She wanted to see how the new housekeeper had made out—her inspection like a consolation prize, a gift-wrapped package with a silky white bow. She might not be able to lie in bed with her husband, like every other woman in the world, but she could do this, at least: she could see if the new girl had returned the place to any semblance of order.
She hadn’t, of course—not at all.
There were water marks on the sideboard, and a brand-new chip in the Limoges. She saw cookie crumbs on the carpet as big as her fist, and a cell phone beneath the chair where Benjamin sat.
“Perfect!” she growled. “The only blind housekeeper in America.”
She felt herself spinning out of control.
Emma scoured the room for something—anything—the girl might have done right, but there was nothing. She climbed down onto her hands and knees, fingering up a bushel of cookie crumbs and a gargantuan piece of roasted carrot.
She’d have to vacuum later.
Then she picked up the cell phone from beneath Benjamin’s chair, lying dark as an iguana, blending into the faded pattern of the old Persian rug. It didn’t blend near well enough to elude Emma though. That phone called out to her as loudly as if it were ringing.
Benjamin was in such a rush to get out of here, she remembered—wanting to flee the dustup that Cassy caused—that she wouldn’t be surprised to find his hat and coat in the hall closet. He would have left his shoes, she thought, if it would have gotten him out of here any faster.
Emma walked back to Bobby’s office with the cell phone in her hands. She’d have her husband messenger it to him later—at the elementary school, she thought, nearly rolling her eyes at the thought of the place.
Cassy might have had a point—about that, at least.
Emma wouldn’t be seeing Benjamin again until Friday afternoon. He’d need his phone by then. She laid it down on Bobby’s desk, at the center of the green leather blotter, then turned to leave, walking as far as the doorway before she changed her mind.
He’ll just leave it there, she thought—Bobby would—if it’s just sitting out like that. Emma didn’t know how such a thing could happen—with the phone sitting there as plain as day—but she had more than enough experience with her husband to know that he would. So she walked back to the desk and slipped the phone into Bobby’s briefcase, which was standing open on the desk chair in front of her.
A silky lining caught her eye, its bright red fabric gnashed between zipper teeth, as painful to her as a bloody wound. Emma opened the zipper, naturally, and pushed the lining back down inside. She found two silver keys there, on a steely ring. She pulled them out like a fairy-tale princess, as if they were the keys to the kingdom maybe, or to the handsome prince, locked away in some stony tower.
She turned them slowly in her hands, studying them from every angle. They weren’t the keys to her apartment, she knew that much; or to the place in the country either. They didn’t unlock the storage bins in the basement or the wine cellar either. They didn’t look familiar at all. She kept gazing at the long silver prongs—the pattern of raised dots that ran down their shafts—like keys for the blind almost, written out neatly in Braille.
Emma had never seen them before.
She felt a queasy fluttering in her stomach and chest. They weren’t the keys to Bobby’s office. He had one of those electronic card keys that you pressed up against a glassy box. Maybe for his old apartment, the one he lived in before moving back in with her? But she didn’t think so: he’d sold that place months ago. Wouldn’t he have straightened out that lining after all this time?
Of course he would have, she thought.
From there, it was a rather quick jump—for Emma anyway—to Bobby’s checkbook inside his briefcase, and her discovery of the regular monthly checks. They’d begun as soon as he moved back in with her, and they continued straight through to the first of February, just ten days before: checks like Swiss clockwork, written to “44 West Realty Corp.” in the amount of $3,253.
Emma knew.
“Damn that Benjamin!” she muttered, as if to pin this mess on him, for dropping his phone the night before, but she knew in a blink that it would never stick. Benjamin didn’t have a cruel bone in his body; he didn’t want to hurt her.<
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“Lazy maid!” she grumbled then, trying another tack—like a slipper that fit a little bit better. If she’d straightened up the dining room like I asked her to, she thought, I wouldn’t have found that phone at all.
The maid was toast, but Emma didn’t feel much better.
If only I wasn’t so damned observant, she thought with a sad shake of her sleepy head. She brought the chickens home to roost, just like her father had always taught her: no one to blame but herself.
It was six fifteen on Monday morning.
Emma plucked Benjamin’s phone from out of Bobby’s bag. She took the silver keys too, and walked to the kitchen—where the maid had somehow done an even worse job cleaning up.
“Thank God,” she said. It gave her something to do, at least.
She set about cleaning the place as it ought to have been done, starting with the roasting pan and the silvery wire rack. The girl had left them—only halfheartedly clean—on the draining board beside the sink.
“Just filthy,” she whispered, with a song in her heart.
Emma’s mind wandered as she scrubbed. She’d be the first to acknowledge that her keen powers of observation had never served her quite as well as she would have imagined. Little details, she thought—that’s all she ever managed to see. The big picture always eluded her somehow. She hadn’t had so much as an inkling, for instance, that Bobby was going to walk out on her all those years before, much less that he’d come strolling back so many years later. She’d never seen it coming. Or that foolish business with her daughter last night—Emma had no idea she’d raised such a cruel child.
Of course, those were just the hors d’oeuvres, leading Emma straight to the main course, her tried-and-true entrée: an entire nation turning against her in such lockstep that they’d throw her into prison for an entire year—for something that happened in accountants’ offices every day. Just a measly tax return, she thought, and no one in the world to save her. Emma shook her head, marveling at just how clueless an observant woman could be.
She scrubbed that roasting rack until it shone like new—better than new, in fact—grunting out her muscular exertions as she worked.
Is it me, she wondered, staring at the sparkling pan, or am I feeling a little better?
She moved directly to the salad bowl, which looked clean enough, but Emma washed it again for good measure, and all the serving platters too—even the ones she hadn’t used the night before.
Bobby came in for coffee at seven.
“Morning, dear,” he said, hugging her sleepily from behind—his stale breath ruffling the hair at the nape of her neck.
It didn’t interrupt her scrubbing for a second.
“Sleep well?” he asked, giving her shoulders a gentle rub.
Emma flexed her body tight, humming out that she had, “thank you very much.” She was glad he couldn’t see her face.
“Bastard,” she mumbled, the moment he left.
She opened the dishwasher door, moaning aloud as she looked inside, as if she were gazing into a bloody wound, straight through the red and the muck and the dirt.
“Look at this mess,” she whispered, a real agony in her voice.
The disarray was breathtaking: plates and cups and saucers strewn in every direction—sizes and shapes in a riot of clutter, not to mention the jumble of cutlery. It looked to Emma as if a madwoman had loaded the thing.
She took out every single item.
Could the girl possibly think these things were clean? She reloaded the machine properly, the way it ought to have been done in the first place. There was loads of room to spare.
She has to learn, she thought, seething.
Bobby left for the office at eight thirty. “Have a nice day,” he called.
Probably too late for that, she thought.
She wiped down every surface twice.
At five of nine, she dialed the number—44 West Realty Corp.—sitting at the phone in her husband’s study. “Hello?” she said, when a man’s voice answered. The super, she supposed, or the doorman maybe. “I’m calling from Bobby Sutton’s office,” she said. “One of your tenants,” she added, bluffing.
Emma paused for a second. There were any number of paths she could take. “He’s asked me to messenger a package over,” she said—choosing her route. “Can you give me the address, please?”
She scribbled it down: 44 West Seventy-eighth Street.
“And the apartment number?” she asked.
She waited while the man looked it up, turning the contraband keys in her hand. “Sutton,” she repeated. “Robert Sutton.” She wrote the apartment number down and hung up the phone.
That didn’t take very long, she thought.
Emma supposed she should start in on her work. They’d be taping the home-office segment that afternoon.
Maybe next time, she thought, you could miss a trick or two?
But there was a soft note of sadness built into her tune that time. Emma knew very well that she’d be the prime victim of her discoveries that morning: the cell phone, that checkbook, those keys.
WHEN TINA WOKE UP, SHE FELT NEARLY INSPIRED, from the moment she opened her eyes practically, shielding them fast with the crook of her arm. She smelled the chlorine that was lingering on her skin, the residue of their swim outing the night before. Not even a long, soapy shower had erased it entirely.
Smells like medicine, she thought. And then she knew!—before she’d thrown back the covers even, inspiration coming straight through her nostrils.
We’re going to the Free Clinic, she thought.
At her meeting with Benjamin the Friday before, he’d recommended that she take Gracie to see a particular nurse there, a woman he’d worked with several times. Tina had her name stowed away in her purse, written on a piece of notebook paper in Benjamin’s tiny hand. He’d promised to call ahead, to let the woman know that they’d be coming.
Maybe now we’ll get somewhere, Tina thought.
She woke Gracie up the way she always did—standing by her bedside and whispering her name. “Gracie Grace,” she called. Her daughter always pretended to be sleeping a little longer than she was—clamping her eyes shut, as if to fool her.
“Gracie Grace,” she called again, a little louder this time, a swirling loop-de-loop built right in. Gracie closed her eyes even tighter as a smile broke out on her pudgy face. Tina smiled too.
“We’re going to the doctor’s today,” she said—softly still, though her daughter was wide awake by then. She tried to make it sound like good news—opening her eyes as wide as she could—but Gracie wasn’t fooled for a second.
“Are you sick?” she shot back. Gracie was terrified of needles.
Tina could hear that she was on the lookout for one already, hoping it might be meant for her mother instead.
“No, sweetie,” she said, “I’m fine.”
“Am I fine too?” Gracie asked, a little nervously.
“Yes,” Tina told her. “You’re fine too.”
She jostled her daughter’s shoulders, hidden beneath the covers still. “It’s just a checkup, silly,” she said, smiling down at the girl. But Tina could see that she wasn’t convinced; Gracie studied her closely, as if searching for clues.
“It’s time to get up now,” she said. “Okay?”
She got her daughter dressed quickly and served up milky bowls of cereal all around, without so much as a teaspoon of sugar on top—the way she herself would have liked it. Then she called in sick, which she hated to do.
They were just finishing up the January invoices.
“Don’t worry,” she told her boss—a pleasant enough man who owned the place. He sounded concerned. “I’ll be fine,” she promised, twinging with guilt before she hung up the phone, and coughing once more after she had—as if sickness really were a possibility.
She could already picture the mess she’d return to the very next day—her desk piled high with papers, and littered with errors that her well-meaning colle
agues would make. Her just deserts, she supposed. Tina liked to do things right, but there’d be plenty of time to deal with her work, she thought, shrugging into her heavy winter coat. She was taking care of Gracie today.
She bundled the girl up, and herded them out the door.
I’m getting to the bottom of this, she pledged, closing the door so firmly behind her that anyone else might have mistaken it for a slam. Her mind was made up. She now had the name of Benjamin’s nurse in her hip pocket, and determination enough for an army of men. Tina was ready to go—and fast!—all fueled up with that propulsive will that only comes first thing in the morning, before anything like a roadblock has had time to appear.
This is not about what I’m feeding her, she thought.
“Come on, Gracie,” Tina said, prodding the girl, who was already walking as if she were destined to fall behind. “Let’s go, go, go,” she called, swinging her arms briskly as she walked down the subway platform.
Tina pretended not to hear the rustling of Gracie’s labored movements—the endless swooshing of puffy sleeves against that nylon trunk of coat, or the lower-pitched rubbing of thigh against thigh, the sound track of friction that accompanied her daughter’s every step.
Tina just wanted a sensible explanation of what was wrong with the girl.
It was all she’d ever wanted—for someone to explain why Gracie was so fat—and Benjamin’s nurse might be the answer to her prayers. Tina pledged to start off on the right foot with her too. Make it absolutely clear that her daughter wasn’t overeating. She could almost picture the long, sad chapter brought to a merciful end: a diagnosis and prescription—a sharp needle maybe or a handful of pills. She’d take any solution though, so long as it included an explanation, and a course of treatment that shrank her daughter down to normal size again.
Her fantasy unspooled like a reel of silky ribbon beneath her feet.
And what’s more, her brave, new mood held, even as she pushed through the clean glass doors of the Free Clinic—sauntering in, like the new cowgirl in town.
Tina headed straight for the reception desk and checked them in.
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