Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  “This isn’t going to work,” he repeated, “unless I…”

  “What?” I asked when he didn’t finish, hating myself for even prompting him to say another word.

  A smile took over his face and then I knew he had me. “Unless I show you this.” He pulled out a sheaf of papers from his inside jacket pocket and handed them to me. I tucked the daisies under my arm and flipped through the documents.

  It took a second before they made sense, then I started to laugh. “You started an investment fund?”

  He nodded. “I’m responsible. As of three days ago. And, I called a Realtor. Told her to start looking for a house in the suburbs. Three bedrooms, a fence and a garage, hopefully room for a workshop, too.” He drew in a breath. “Plus, I told Ernie that the band and I can’t play anymore on Thursday nights—”

  I put a hand over his mouth. “Stop. I didn’t mean for you to become Ward Cleaver, Nick.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Hey, I was stressed and I took it out on you. I want you to have your dreams. I want you to be happy. And if playing in a band on Thursday nights makes you happy, do it.” I thought of my father, and wondered if there might have been something that would have made his smile real, not cardboard. Maybe for both my parents. Maybe my mother would have enjoyed life more, not been so wooden. It had taken her sixty-plus years to find her joy. I didn’t want Nick and I to turn out that way. “We can have both, Nick.”

  He drew me into his arms, his chest warm, solid. I could have stayed there forever. “Okay. You can open your own restaurant, and have this really cool band, with a sexy guitarist and all the women—”

  “Will steer clear or I’ll hit them with a frying pan.”

  He laughed. “Of course.”

  We stood there for a while, seagulls circling overhead, screeching to each other. On a dock a few feet away, sea lions barked, then slid into the water and disappeared before the storm set in.

  “I’m glad you came,” I whispered.

  “I’m glad you asked me.” Then he stepped back. “Speaking of things that need to be asked, I need to ask you a question, Hilary Delaney.” My heart caught and held. He still wanted me. I had hoped, but wasn’t sure.

  Then I saw him begin to bend down, the small, handcrafted wooden box in his right hand. Daisies were carved into the cherry exterior, a looping, intricate pattern that had to have taken him days. Was that where he had been all those times I’d called? In his workshop? Not out with other women at all?

  “Hilary, will you—”

  “Stop.” I reached out, grabbed his arm and hauled him back to his feet. “Don’t, Nick. Don’t get down on one knee. Don’t propose.”

  His hand curled around the box, a man’s hand, large enough to cover it, and it disappeared from my view. Nick shut his eyes and shook his head, cursing. He let out one long sigh, then without a word, turned on his heel.

  But I hadn’t let go of his arm and he jerked to a stop. “Let me finish. Don’t propose, Nick, because…”

  He looked at me, waiting.

  “Because I think you’ve asked me more than enough times.” I came around to the front of him and dropped to one knee. Still holding his arm, I thrust up the flowers and gave him a smile. “Nicholas Warner, will you marry me?”

  His jaw dropped. “Are you proposing to me?”

  “Are you going to make me ask you again?”

  That smile I loved more than anything else about him curved across his face. “Yeah. I think I am.”

  I laughed. “Marry me, Nick.”

  “Why?”

  “Because life is short. Because I used to be afraid that you’d keep the most important parts of yourself hidden from me, that you’d lock up your heart and never let me see inside. And damned if your heart isn’t the most open book I’ve ever read. Mine was the one that I wouldn’t let you check out of the library.” Tears had started streaming down my face, but I let them fall, unchecked, no longer worried about keeping any of myself held back. I loved this man more than I could ever imagine and I trusted him, with all of myself. “I don’t want to do that anymore, Nick. I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with that door open.”

  He hauled me up against his chest, the daisies caught between us in the rush, casualties of the moment. His mouth sought mine, his kiss tender but hungry, familiar and yet new, filled with a taste of a future I hadn’t expected, hadn’t really known I wanted until just now. And oh, how sweet it tasted. His fingers tangled in my hair and for a moment, I forgot we were on a public beach, until he pulled away, his gaze dancing with desire, my heart still hammering.

  “I love you, Hilary,” he said against my mouth.

  “Nick,” I said, the word a breath, “I love you, too.”

  He wrestled the daisies out from between us, then laid them on the ground. “Sorry. I’ll have to get you some new flowers.”

  I didn’t care. “We’ll plant some. When we buy that house.”

  He arched a brow. “You really do want to buy a house? With a fence?”

  “When I’m done with this trip with my mother, yes, I do. As long as we have a dog and not a potbellied pig for a pet.”

  He laughed. “That is one thing we definitely agree on.” Then he paused, searched my face—probably making sure I wasn’t about to bolt—and asked me one more question. “Down the road a bit, maybe even a couple of kids?”

  “Maybe even,” I said, then wrapped my arms around him and drew into his strength. I closed my eyes, picturing a future. “Yes, definitely.”

  “You forgot something.”

  I glanced up. “What?”

  “This.” He held out the box, then pulled away from me long enough to open it up and showed me a perfect round diamond. Not too big, not too small. Not at all showy. He slid it onto my finger, then wove his hand into mine. “It’s perfect.”

  “Yes, it is.” I looked up at him, then pressed a kiss to his lips. “The whole package is perfect.” It always had been, I just hadn’t realized it.

  But the weather didn’t agree. A breeze whipped up off the water and whisked a drop in temperature past us. I shivered. “There’s a storm coming, Nick.”

  He glanced up at the sky, then at me. “I think we better hit the road.”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking his hand and heading for the minivan together. Whatever paths we took in the weeks and months ahead, I knew he’d be there for me, and I’d do the same for him. The road, I already knew, wouldn’t always be smooth sailing, but we’d find our own way, even if we had to be creative in our detours. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the keys. “This time, Nick, you’re driving.”

  When he took them, his hand curled around mine. “Where to?”

  “Anywhere you’re going.” I leaned into him, and then he wrapped his arm around my waist, buffeting me from the coming storm.

  We’d found our common ground—all of us had—and I finally felt ready to face the trip ahead. In an RV, a minivan or a Mustang, it didn’t matter, I realized. As long as I had the people I loved along for the ride.

  The Other Wife

  To my good friend Janet Dean, who has helped me make every book better and supported me even when I thought there was no way I could pull off a funny story about a two-timing husband and his piano-playing dog.

  Also, a big thanks to Joe Murphy and his adorable wonder dog, Katie, who has brought smiles to hundreds of people over the years.

  Finally, as the owner of a shelter dog myself, a huge thank-you to all the hard workers and valuable volunteers at animal shelters across the country. Consider opening your heart and home to a rescue animal. Yours might not sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but will undoubtedly bring some wondrous fun to your life.

  one

  The last person I expected to see at my husband’s wake was his wife.

  Yet, there she stood, to the right of his casket, wiping away her tears with a lacy white handkerchief, a fancy one with a tatted edge and an embroidered mon
ogram, the kind your grandmother hands down to you because tissues aren’t as ladylike.

  She was tall, this other wife, probably five foot eight, and wearing strappy black heels with little rhinestones marching across the toe. I wanted to grab her, shake her and tell her those stupid shoes were completely inappropriate for the funeral of the man I’d been married to for fifteen years. Go get yourself some pumps, I wanted to scream. Low-heeled, sensible, boring shoes.

  I wasn’t mad at her. Exactly. I was madder than hell at the man lying on the top-grade satin in an elaborate, six-thousand-dollar cherry box, a peaceful expression on his cheating face.

  Even in death, he looked ordinary and normal, the kind of guy you’d see on the street and think, oh, he’s got the American Dream in his hands. A slight paunch over his belly from too many years behind his desk, the bald spot he’d been trying to hide with creative combing, the wrinkles around his eyes from finding humor in everything from the newspaper to the cereal box.

  Just your typical forty-year-old man—a forty-year-old whom I had loved and thought would be sitting beside me on the porch, complaining about the neighbors’ landscaping habits and debating a move to Florida, long into our old age. A man who could make me laugh on a dime, who’d thought nothing of surprising me with flowers, just because. He’d been a typical man in a hundred different ways—and so had our marriage.

  Sure, a little dull at times, marked by trips to the dry cleaner on Tuesday and scrambled eggs every Sunday morning. But it had been a marriage, a partnership.

  Or not, considering the two-wives-at-one-time thing, something I’d discovered last night in a picture of his double-wedded bliss, stuffed behind the AmEx in his wallet.

  Forty-eight hours ago, my life had been normal. While I was picking out a roast for dinner that night, paramedics had been rushing him into the hospital. Someone found my number on his cell phone because I, being the practical one, had seen some commercial about setting up an I.C.E. list, in case of emergency, and inputted my cell number. Dave, the spontaneous one, had laughed at me, but kept the number there.

  The voice on the other end told me he’d had a heart attack. I’d rushed to Mass General, then stayed by his bedside fretting, pacing, shouting at the doctors to do something. But there wasn’t anything they could do.

  The Big Macs and Dave’s habit of burning the candle on all ends had caught up with him.

  Either that or the weight of his conscience had squished an aortic valve. In my less-charitable moments, I wanted to think it was the latter.

  “Penny,” someone said, laying a hand on my arm.

  Kim Grant, my next-door neighbor, who had baked cupcakes to welcome Dave and me to the neighborhood last month, stood before me in the receiving line with a look of true sympathy on her face. A flash of guilt ran through me. I still hadn’t returned her Tupperware container.

  I hoped she wasn’t in any rush for her plastic.

  “Hi, Kim. Thanks for coming.” The words flowed automatically, the same ones I’d said already a hundred times today, feeling sometimes that I was the one giving out comfort instead of receiving it.

  Yet, even as I stood in Kim’s embrace, in my peripheral vision, I was always aware of her, standing at the edge, blending in with the other mourners, as well as someone could blend when dressed like Marilyn Monroe. The insurance company my husband had worked for was large, and nearly a hundred people from the offices were there. I doubted anyone noticed her.

  How many of them, I wondered, knew about her? Did anyone? Or did everyone?

  Had I been the only one left out of the secret? The poor, silly wife, sitting at home with a pot roast waiting on the table, completely oblivious to the train wreck that had derailed her marriage.

  I still didn’t know her name, where she lived, or how long she’d been married to him. All I knew was that she’d been with my husband, in the Biblical sense, that day. Dave, the man who preferred T-shirts over sweatshirts and cotton blend over straight cotton, had been rushed into the E.R. naked. I knew he’d left the house dressed that day—I was the one who’d finished pressing his shirt while he hopped into the shower.

  I thought of that shirt, remembering how I’d run my hand over the flat fabric while it was still warm, pleased with the neat creases, then, later, the kiss Dave had given me as a thanks. The way he’d smelled of steam and starch and Stetson.

  “That’s the way we found him in the Marriott, ma’am,” one of the paramedics told me, shrugging, as if it were completely ordinary to bring in a naked guy on a gurney.

  “The Marriott?” I’d asked—twice—trying to get my head around that. Had it been a meeting gone wrong? A robbery? And then, the worst had hit me. “Was he—” I paused, my entire marriage flashing before my eyes like a jerky home movie, with edits I couldn’t see, moments left on the cutting-room floor “—with anyone?”

  “The, ah, bellhop said he checked in with his wife.” The paramedic had looked at me hopefully. I didn’t answer, letting the silence push him to add more. “She wasn’t there, though. Apparently already left because they were, ah, done.”

  Done. I didn’t have to ask what Dave had done. The nudity was a pretty good clue.

  “I’m so sorry, Penny.” Kim’s voice drew me back to the present. “Dave was such a great guy.”

  I used to think that. Had even bragged about him to my friends when we met, about how I got the last great guy on earth.

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one.

  She crossed my line of vision again, as she read the tags on the flowers to the right of the casket. I maintained my position in the receiving line, stoic and reserved, the portrait of the grieving widow.

  Lillian, Dave’s mother, stood beside me, tears flowing nonstop, shoulders shaking a little as she cried. Still, Lillian Reynolds maintained a level of reserve, as always the gracious former debutante who’d married a lawyer. She didn’t know about the second wife and I wasn’t going to announce it between “ashes to ashes” and “dust to dust.”

  Maybe, I thought, if I never spoke the words, I could pretend it had never happened, that this other wife was a figment of my imagination.

  “It was so sudden,” Kim said, shaking her head as she looked at Dave.

  As Kim continued speaking words I didn’t hear, I glanced at my husband, lying there in his good blue suit, the one with the silver pinstripe that we’d picked out at JCPenney last Christmas, and for a second, felt a pang of grief so sharp I wanted to collapse. He was gone. Forever. For five seconds, I didn’t care about the bigamy, didn’t care what else he had hidden from me, I just wanted my husband back.

  I wanted my life back, damn it. Rewind the clock, stop the tape, just get me out of this lily-scented twilight zone.

  I wanted to be able to wake up, knowing that today would be the same as yesterday, that the numbered boxes on the wall calendar in the kitchen would follow one another with the reliable sameness of ironed shirts and scrambled eggs.

  Insanely, I stared at his chest, willing it to rise and fall. It didn’t.

  So I stood there in Perkins & Sons Funeral Home, wearing a black suit I’d had to borrow from my sister because I was in no condition to shop, and trying not to picture my husband having a heart attack while he was on top of another woman, probably using the same well-practiced missionary moves he’d used on me last Saturday.

  The Marriott, I’d found out, after pumping the paramedic a little more, was in downtown Newton. A convenient location. But for whom? For him? For her? The hotel was only three miles from our house. Close enough that he could have stopped by for a little afternoon delight with me. Also close enough that had I gone to my usual Thursday manicure instead of going to a last-minute client meeting, I would have passed right by the hotel parking lot and maybe seen the “Insurance: The Investment for Those You Love” bumper sticker on his Benz.

  For a guy who worked in risk management, he’d clearly liked to live on the edge.

  I stepped back from the casket, from t
he cloying fragrance of the enormous white bouquet sent by the company, pressing a tissue to my eyes, willing my own tears to stop. I was mad at him, mad at myself, mad at the world. And yet, another part of me just wanted to curl up in the corner.

  Kim finished whatever it was she had to say to me, so I smiled politely and thanked her for coming. She released me and moved to stand in front of Dave, dropping to the kneeler and making the sign of the cross over her chest.

  I had a few uncharitable thoughts about God just then, ones that I was sure were going to get me sent to hell, so I turned away from my husband to do what needed to be done.

  Face the other wife.

  She skipped signing the guest book and had stopped at the casket, her hands gripping the velvet-covered rail, tears flooding her eyes. Now that she was closer, I could see that she wasn’t Marilyn Monroe—she was a mess, all wrinkled and jumbled. The perfectionist in me wanted to get out the iron and the starch, maybe a lint roller, too, and straighten her out before sending her back out the door.

  She was pretty, I’d give her that. Buxom and blond, the typical other woman. Except, I was a blonde, too. Just not so well-endowed.

  Had it been that simple? He’d needed some 36Ds to keep him company so he’d married another woman? My 34Bs weren’t enough? I could have gotten a Miracle Bra, for God’s sake.

  Her diamond ring, the same shape as mine—apparently Dave hadn’t been inventive enough to get something other than a marquise cut when he proposed a second time—sparkled in the muted light. Her mascara ran in dirty little rivers along her cheeks, and for a moment, I felt sorry for her. Had she known about me before today?

  Had she loved him?

  And would it really make a difference to me if she had?

  She stepped back from the casket, but hesitated, clearly wondering if she should do the receiving line. Always the polite girl I had learned to be, I stepped forward, reached for her hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, before she could turn away or, worse, say it first.