Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  I looked down at Harvey and realized I hadn’t managed to avoid a damned thing.

  “Hi,” Georgia said, letting herself in. “I figured you could use some company tonight. I brought wine.” She hoisted a bottle of Lambrusco.

  I have told my sister at least seventeen times that drinking a sweet, full-bodied red is the equivalent of downing sugar straight from the box. Give me something dry, unadorned and I feel I’m actually having a drink.

  Georgia never listened. She’d probably gone and bought the bottle because it was the prettiest one in the aisle at the Blanchard’s Liquors.

  Still, she was here, and no one else was. I had to appreciate her for trying. “Come on in,” I said, gesturing inside. “And meet Harvey.”

  She halted inside the door, blinking at the Jack Russell terrier. “Harvey’s a…dog.”

  “Dave’s dog, to be precise.”

  “When did Dave get a dog?”

  “According to his notes—2000.”

  Georgia’s eyebrows knitted together. She laid the unopened wine bottle on the counter. “Notes?”

  “It’s a long story.” I suddenly felt tired, so tired. I wanted to collapse onto the floor and stay there until a different day dawned. One without a dog looking at me expectantly, waiting for his road trip to Tennessee. One where everything was as regular as a clock and I didn’t have to face a new question around every corner.

  “Here,” Georgia said, pressing me into a chair. “You look like hell.” Once I was situated, she crossed to the counter, opened the Lambrusco and poured each of us a glass. I thought of protesting, but the energy to do it had left me a long time ago.

  “Thanks,” I said, and took a long swig of the wine, forcing myself not to gag.

  “Harvey is Dave’s dog,” she repeated. “And he—”

  She cut herself off. I looked at her face, noticed her staring at the dog, and turned my gaze to him. He was balancing on his hind legs, that silly Beggin’ Strip on his nose. “And he does tricks,” I finished.

  “Oh, my God,” Georgia said. “I recognize him now. I saw him on the Late Show once. He’s, like, famous.”

  “And now he’s mine. Surprise, surprise.”

  Georgia ran a hand through her riot of blond curls. Last month, she’d had it straight and red. The month before, it had been black and spiky. I was surprised Georgia’s hair hadn’t mutinied. “Wait a minute. You didn’t know Dave had a dog?”

  “I didn’t know a lot of things.” I took a second swig of wine. A third. “Like that he also had another wife.”

  There. I’d said the words out loud. Now it was real.

  All I had to do now was figure out a way to make it all go away.

  Georgia opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Another wife?”

  “And apparently a road show with Harvey at the center.” I shook my head. “I swear, I’m in The Twilight Zone.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Do?” I shrugged, then tipped the rest of the wine into my mouth. “Go to work. Try to lead a normal life again. And find a home for Harvey.”

  At that, he slid back down onto the floor and let out a whine.

  “You can’t do that. He’s like—” Georgia gave the canine an indulgent smile “—a lost spirit himself. He’s been through a lot, too.”

  “He’s also, like, a reminder of a husband who betrayed me,” I said to Georgia, “then left me with a mortgage and a funeral bill I can’t afford because God knows Dave was way too cavalier and happy-go-lucky to invest in something like long-term planning.” I drew in a breath, tried not to choke on it. “Or a marriage.”

  Georgia let the heated words roll away. “But aren’t you the tiniest bit curious? Like about why Dave did it?”

  “No.” I paused, finally listening to the thoughts and feelings that had been waiting behind Curtain Number Two in my head. “Okay, yes. I am.”

  “Then I say you investigate.”

  I shook my head, toying with the empty glass. “No. No way. I don’t go running around, investigating. I go to work, pay my taxes and balance my checkbook. Like a normal American.”

  “Who happens to be married to a bigamist.”

  The word hung in the air, heavy, fat. I wanted to pluck it up and toss it away, bury it under the brown carpet I’d never liked but agreed to because Dave had thought it was homey.

  I shook my head. “All I have to do is talk to Kevin. He and Dave were closer than anyone I know.” Or at least, they’d seemed to be. Of course, I’d thought I was pretty close to my husband. But apparently knowing the man’s inseam length and his favorite brand of shaving lather wasn’t intimacy.

  “What about the other wife? Did you meet her?”

  “She was at the wake.”

  “She was?” Georgia let out a couple of curses. “Which one?”

  “The one with the rhinestones on her shoes.”

  “Oh, those were cool shoes,” Georgia said. “But on her, totally inappropriate.”

  I loved my sister for adding that, for saying the words she knew I was thinking.

  “Did you talk to her?” Georgia asked.

  “For about five seconds. She was here when I got home, but only stayed long enough to ditch the dog and run.” I got to my feet, poured Chardonnay into my empty wineglass and returned to the table. “I don’t know where she lives, and with a last name like Reynolds, I’ll be banging on a thousand doors trying to find her.”

  Georgia thought for a minute, twirling the glass between her hands. “Did you check Dave’s cell phone?”

  Of course. He’d undoubtedly stored her number in there, probably with a voice tag, because he’d been incapable of dialing while he was behind the wheel.

  “I got the feeling she doesn’t want to talk,” I said. “Besides, I’m not so sure I want to know what went on between her and Dave. I’ve had enough information to last me a lifetime.”

  “Have you asked the dog?”

  “Asked the dog? Are you nuts? I can’t talk to a dog.”

  “I bet Harvey is your key.” Georgia nodded. “And I bet he knows a lot more than he’s letting on with that little snout.”

  “I am not asking the dog. Or anyone on his upcoming six-city ‘tour.’”

  “He has a tour planned?” Georgia’s turquoise-contact colored eyes grew bright. “Perfect! I see a road trip in your future, sis.”

  “No, no, no.” But even as I said the words, Georgia was off and running, retrieving the road atlas from the den.

  “You have to do it, Penny,” Georgia said. “Where’s Harvey supposed to go first?”

  “The Dog-Gone-Good Show in Tennessee in three days.”

  “How cool,” Georgia said, flipping the pages, moving us visually toward Tennessee. “It could be the key to solving the greatest mystery of your life.”

  There’d been a reason I’d hated Nancy Drew books as a kid. I couldn’t suffer through two hundred pages of mystery. I wanted to know the end before I began. I didn’t want to take a path filled with unknowns. Dave was the one who would read Clive Cussler and Stephen King into the wee hours, who’d watch all eight weeks of an eight-week miniseries, content to wait a month and a half for the story’s resolution. Me, I went for the TV Guide recap, the fast way to cut to the quick and eliminate anything extraneous.

  I thought I’d lived my life the same way.

  Until this week.

  But as I sat in my kitchen, looking around at the sage-green room Dave and I had painted on a sunny afternoon last month, I realized I was living in a house filled with questions, not memories. There wasn’t a corner of this house, a picture on the wall, that I could look at and not feel the doubts crowding in, jostling around in the spaces of my mind. Was any of it real? Or was I just clueless?

  All I wanted to do was return to the life I’d recognized. Not run around the country with a dancing Jack Russell terrier, trying to figure out who Dave Reynolds had really been.

  Even as I held back another round
of tears, as reality slammed into me with the force of a nor’easter, I knew I had no choice but to start assembling this puzzle.

  And the first place to start was with Susan.

  four

  Susan Reynolds’s phone number stared back at me in rounded tiny numbers, displayed on the tiny screen of Dave’s Motorola phone. After my sister left and after two more glasses of Chardonnay, I’d finally gotten up the nerve to scroll through the listings in his phone book. I recognized only a handful.

  What scared me was the names I didn’t know. There was an Annie, a Kate, a Mindy. Two Pats—which could have been men or women—and a Matt. I’d stopped scrolling at the S’s, too afraid to go farther. None of those names were familiar. They weren’t people I’d met at the Greendale Insurance Company Christmas parties. They weren’t names Dave had used in conversation.

  I could, of course, call them and ask, Uh, how did you know my husband? And did he tell you he was married to a Susan or a Penny?

  But no, I couldn’t do that—not yet, anyway. I wanted the truth, but I also didn’t want it, as if I could hold on to my fantasy that everything between Dave and I had been genuine.

  Because if he’d duped me about being married, what else had been fake?

  That was the real question I didn’t want to answer. The one that clubbed my heart and broke it into smaller pieces every time I gave it voice.

  I put the phone down, avoiding it to dig through drawers and filing cabinets, searching for Dave’s will. I came up empty-handed and made a mental note to check his desk at work. Any man who was trying to hide multiple marital beneficiaries probably was smart enough to store that kind of evidence elsewhere.

  Throughout it all, Harvey sat there and watched me, his little face jerking quickly with my every movement.

  I found nothing. Not so much as a matchbook with a number scribbled on it. The only clues I had were in the Motorola.

  I went back to the phone and scrolled through it again, leaving Susan down in the S’s and went to Kevin. I hit Send, then waited for him to pick up.

  “’Lo,” he said. Behind him, I heard rock music playing in his bachelor apartment. Apparently Lillian was gone, because he had heavy metal going at full blast.

  “Kevin, it’s Penny.”

  “Oh, hi, Pen.” His voice softened and he turned down the volume on his stereo. Kevin was the quiet one in the Reynolds family, who’d lacked the charm and sense of humor of Dave, but had the same studious way of watching someone while they talked, making them feel like the only person in the room. “How you holding up?”

  “Fine. Ah, listen, I wanted to talk to you about Dave. About…well, what he did when he wasn’t with me.”

  A pause. “I don’t know anything about that, Pen. Sorry.”

  Across from me, Harvey started nosing at his little denim backpack, his name emblazoned in red glitter across the front. He pawed at it, then sat back and whined.

  “You’re his brother. You knew everything there was to know about him. You guys went everywhere together. Fishing, hunting, you name it.”

  “I didn’t go.”

  The words lingered between us, made raspy by the cellphone static. There hadn’t been an annual hunting trip to Wisconsin. Or the fishing trip to Maine each May. I’d never thought my husband was much of a sportsman, considering I was the one who baited the hooks at our lake vacation last August, but now I realized he hadn’t been out looking for elk at all. He hadn’t gone to any of the places he’d said he’d gone.

  He’d been with her.

  And Harvey.

  It had all been a show. Another batch of lies. And Kevin had known, at least that Dave had been lying to me. The new betrayal slammed into me.

  “I have to go, Kevin,” I said, the nausea lurching up inside my throat again. I closed the phone and tossed it onto the sofa, not wanting to touch it—and the dozens of names I didn’t know—for another second.

  I curled into a chair and drew an afghan over my knees. The worn, multicolored blanket was as old as me, made by my grandmother when I’d been born, a blend of blues and pinks. I pulled its softness to my shoulders, then over my head, burrowing myself inside its comfort and darkness.

  Here, the world was gone, quieted by the muffling weight of the thick, fuzzy yarn. Like I had throughout the rocky, tumultuous years of my childhood, I imagined staying right where I was until the worst was over. Harvey stuck his head under a corner, took one look at me and began wagging his tail.

  The ringing of Dave’s cell phone forced me out of my cocoon. I threw off the blanket and watched the Motorola, its face lighting up in blue to announce the incoming call. For a moment, I hesitated, afraid to answer it. Afraid of who might be on the other end.

  Eventually curiosity won out and I reached for the cell, flipping it open. “Hello?”

  “Hey, is Dave there?” said a male voice I didn’t recognize.

  “No. He’s…” I couldn’t get the words out. I tried, even formed them with my lips, but they refused to be voiced. It wasn’t bigamy I was afraid to say, it was dead. “He’s gone right now. But I’m his wife. Can I help you?”

  “You’re Annie? Hey, cool to meet you. Dave talks about you all the time, you know.”

  Annie? Who the hell was Annie? A nickname for Susan? Or worse…

  Another wife?

  “Who did you say you were again?” I asked the voice.

  “Oh, shit, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Vinny. I’m Harvey’s trainer.”

  “Harvey’s…trainer?”

  “Well, hell, you didn’t think he learned to dance and play the piano all by himself, did you?”

  “He can play the piano?” I looked at the dog, sitting a few feet away, his tail swishing against the floor like a carpet clock.

  “Not Mozart, but he can bang out a pretty good ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ That’s what got him on Good Morning America.”

  I’d entered an alternate universe. Dave, a musically inclined dog and appearances on national television. Not to mention Susan and Annie. And whoever else I didn’t know about.

  “So, is Dave going to be at Dog-Gone-Good?” Vinny asked. “I was hoping he’d get here a couple days early so we can give Harvey a refresher on his dance routine. I tried calling Dave yesterday but he didn’t pick up.”

  “He’s…” I closed my eyes, took in a breath. “He died on Wednesday.”

  Silence on the other end, then an under-the-breath curse. “For real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aw, Annie, I’m sorry. He was a great guy. We’re really going to miss him.”

  I pressed a hand to my stomach, as if putting a palm against my gut would give me strength I couldn’t seem to find today. At least it would help me keep the soggy lasagna the church ladies made from making a return appearance. “And, my name isn’t Annie,” I said. “It’s Penny.”

  A confused moment of silence. “But…but I thought you said you were his wife.”

  “I thought I was, too. Apparently I was sharing the job.”

  “Oh. Oh. Holy crap. Well, uh, I’m, ah, sorry.” I could practically hear him fidgeting on the other side. “Listen, I gotta go. You, ah, take care. And if you want to send Harvey down to me, I’ll make sure he does Dave proud at Dog-Gone-Good.”

  Before I could say anything else, Vinny was gone, leaving me with a phone that only seemed to quadruple the horror of my widowhood every time I went near it.

  The pain of it all—of Dave’s death, his betrayal, of the loss of my life as I knew it—ripped through me in a sob so big it tore through my throat.

  “Oh, God,” I cried, sobbing and yelling at the same time. I banged my fist against the carpet, then pulled back my stinging palm and pressed it against my chest, trying to hold my breaking heart in place.

  Something wet and cold was on my hand, then on my face. I opened my eyes to find Harvey the Wonder Dog licking me, his tail wagging in ginger little movements, his ears perked like antennae, seeking, I supposed, signs of
normalcy.

  Harvey. Dave’s legacy. What had Georgia called him?

  The answer to all my questions.

  Not much of an answer, considering he probably only weighed fourteen pounds soaking wet. But he was all I had, so I was starting there.

  “Harvey,” I said, swiping at my eyes, “want to go on a road trip?”

  five

  To say Susan was surprised to see me on her Rhode Island doorstep the next morning would have been an understatement. She lived a little over an hour away from our house in Newton, in a small ranch with a magnolia in the front yard, which was starting to bloom in the bright early April sunshine.

  When she saw me, Susan teetered on her high-heeled boots, enough that I thought she was going to faint. Then Harvey sprang out of my arms and into her house, and Susan recovered her wits.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “Reverse lookup of your phone number in Dave’s cell. The Internet is a dangerous thing.”

  She nodded, as if that all made sense, then opened her door wider. “Want to come in?”

  “Actually,” I said, drawing in a breath, “I want you to come out. And go to Tennessee with me.”

  She blinked. Behind her, Harvey was running in circles around the perimeter of her braided rug, apparently seeing its endless oval as a challenge. “A road trip? To Tennessee?”

  “Did you know about Annie?” I asked.

  She thought a second, running the name through a mental phone book. “No.”

  “Well, it seems she might be Dave’s wife, too. Meaning Mrs. Reynolds number three.”

  “He had another? Besides you and me?” Susan gripped the doorjamb. Now I really did think she was going to faint. I knew those feelings, having had them myself quite recently.

  “Listen, why don’t we sit down, have a drink and talk about it? I’ve already had time to digest this.” I paused. “More or less. But I could still use a stiff one. Or two. Or ten.”

  Susan nodded, stepped back and turned to go down the hall, leaving me to follow. I shut the door, left Harvey to his circles and walked into Susan’s bright yellow kitchen. It was a nice room, small but tidy, decorated in sunflowers and navy accents. The kind of kitchen I imagined a neighbor having. The kind of kitchen where I could see myself sitting down for a cup of coffee on a Thursday morning and gossiping about the guy across the street who mowed his lawn in his Speedo.