Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  “I think…” I dug for the truth that had occurred to me on the long, solitary, memory-filled drive home. “I think Dave needed to be needed. If there was one thing Susan and Annie gave him, it was that.”

  “And you, superwoman of the year, did not?”

  “No. I was all self-reliant and smart. Or so I thought. Looking back, I see that I wasn’t nearly as strong as I’d imagined. This whole trip terrified me.”

  “Yeah, but you made it. That’s strength.”

  I sipped at my wine, waiting for the smooth drink to make its journey down my throat. “I hid all my worries from Dave because I thought he needed me to be strong.”

  “The perfect wife, huh?”

  “Something like that.” A burst of laughter escaped me. “How far from the truth was that? Here I thought I had it all in the palm of my hand, and really, I was just being blind.”

  “What else happened?” Georgia rose to get another glass of wine, then returned to the sofa. “Because I get the sneaking suspicion you did more than meet the other women and take Harvey through his routine.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I toyed with my wineglass, running a finger along the rim. “I kissed Matt, for one.”

  “The dog’s agent?” Georgia slapped my knee. “You kissed him?”

  “Actually,” I admitted, heat filling my cheeks at the memory, “I asked him to kiss me. In a convenience store, next to the snack foods.”

  Georgia placed the back of her palm on my forehead. “No fever. Okay, what have you done with my sister?”

  “I took your advice, that’s all, and I let go of the pier for a little while.”

  “Good for you!” Georgia squealed. “So tell me, is something going to happen with him?”

  “Maybe.” It was too hard a question to answer right now. “If it does, it’ll be down the road. I need time to be just Penny. To see where and who I am. And how I’m going to live this new life.” I drew in a breath, let it out. On the mantel, Dave’s picture looked back at me, the right-hand twin to mine. Three years ago, we’d had them done, as Christmas presents to each other. I’d stood behind the photographer as she snapped Dave’s, which had made him look at me instead of the lens. In that portrait, I saw love in his eyes. “Plus, Dave wasn’t the villain here. It takes two to ruin a marriage.”

  Georgia’s brows knit together in confusion. Leave it to my sister to see me as the hero. “You? What do you think you did?”

  I laughed. “Gee, take a look around the house and I think it’s pretty clear. I was too rigid, too set in my ways and too resistant to anything that came close to looking like change.”

  “Like the idea of having a baby with Dave.” Georgia’s voice was soft with understanding.

  I nodded, willing away the tears that sprang to my eyes. “Yeah, like that.”

  A long silence passed and my sister, the only one who knew the whole story of the Penny who lurked behind the lists and organized shelves, studied my face, reading my thoughts as easily as a novel. “You didn’t want to be a mother ever again, did you?”

  “I couldn’t make that mistake a second time.” The words lodged thick in my throat.

  “Aw, Pen, it wasn’t a mistake. It was an accident. And you did nothing wrong.” Georgia looked at me and took one of my hands in both of hers. “You were so good with me, all those years, I can’t imagine that if you were given a second chance, you wouldn’t have been, or even still be, a great mother to your own kids.”

  “Georgia, I can barely take care of this dog!” Harvey started at the sharp notes in my voice and I ran a hand down his back to soothe him. “Besides, I was never mother material. Look what happened with—” I couldn’t finish that sentence. Heck, I’d left it unfinished for nearly twenty years.

  Georgia grabbed both of my arms and forced me to look at her, seeming stronger than my little sister had ever been. “It was not your fault, Penny. Things happen. Things go wrong every day.”

  I broke away from her and stood, facing the fire, pretending I needed to warm my hands. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “When are you going to?” Georgia said, rising to stand beside me. “You have to someday.”

  “Do you want to know why my baby died?” I said, wheeling on her, unable to hold back the emotions that had waited in some secret corner of my mind for two decades. Undealt with, untalked about, because I had stuffed them away as quickly as they had popped up. “Because I thought I could still do it all. Take care of you, run on the track team, be top in my class. And act as if I hadn’t just screwed up my entire life in one night in the back of Roger Bass’s Chevy LeMans.”

  “Everyone has a night in the back of a LeMans, Penny. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “I lost control. I stepped away from the plan.” I shook my head, not wanting to remember those days when I’d abandoned responsibilities for a guy with a leather jacket and a nice car. “It was God’s way of punishing me.”

  “It was not! You can’t think that.”

  But I did and had for years. I’d always believed it was some karmic revenge for my cockiness, my rash decision to lose my virginity. To break away from all that responsibility and pressure.

  “Georgia, I was supposed to be the responsible one, the one in charge, the one you were supposed to be able to rely on.”

  “You know who was supposed to do all those things, Penny?” Georgia said, dipping her face to meet mine, so that I couldn’t run away from the subject. “Who was supposed to warn us about getting in the back of a LeMans? Who was supposed to tell us to use birth control and wear clean underwear and never wipe snot on our sleeves? Our mother. And she didn’t. She left you to raise me, and whatever mistakes you think you made, were nothing. Look at me, I turned out okay. As far as I’m concerned, you did the best damned job you could. Do not blame yourself for what happened.”

  I made a very unladylike sound. “I got pregnant and I lost the baby. I never even carried it to term. How can I not blame myself?” I turned away. “I couldn’t even do that right. I had to keep on going, pretending everything was okay, that losing a baby at five months was no big deal.”

  “You were sixteen, Penny. You were allowed to make mistakes.”

  I shook my head, and when I did, I realized tears had been streaming down my face. They’d been there all these years, but I’d ignored them, just as I’d ignored everything in my life, my marriage, that had started slipping out of my control. “No, I wasn’t. I had you. I had—”

  “Don’t you dare say responsibilities,” Georgia cut in. “Because you also had a responsibility to live your own life. You have never done that, Pen. You have worked to take care of everyone else—me, Mom, Dave. To keep this house perfect, your job perfect, your life perfect. And at what price?”

  “If I keep it under control, no one gets hurt.” But even as the words I’d told myself nearly my entire life left my mouth, I knew I was lying. I had done my damnedest to control every aspect of my days, from the neat paths I vacuumed into the living-room carpet to the way I folded T-shirts, to the rigid hours I kept at work. And in the end, it turned out nothing had been perfect except for the freakin’ carpet.

  Georgia came around me, her big blue eyes soft with concern. “Did you ever tell Dave about the baby?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe,” Georgia began, laying a soft hand on my arm. “Maybe if you’d opened up to him…” She didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t blame me.

  But I sure did.

  “Dave wanted kids,” I told her, realizing now where the road had diverged. I’d made wrong choices, and so had Dave. If I’d told him then…where would we be now? Divorced? A happy little family? Or something in between? “He wanted them with me and when I didn’t agree, he went to Susan. But she had her own reasons for saying no. And then, he found Annie, who had more than enough kids to go around. Is that where I failed him?”

  “No,” Georgia said, placing a hand on mine. “That’s where he failed you. If
kids was a deal breaker, then he should have had the balls, pardon my French, to divorce you instead of doing what he did.”

  “Yeah, he should have,” I agreed as we took our seats. On that point, I had no argument. It would have hurt, but a divorce five years ago would have had a lot less human fallout than what Dave had done. “I should have spoken up more. Questioned him. Seen the signs instead of being blind.” I drew in a breath, let it go, feeling lighter than I had in years. “Either way, I know the truth now and, hey,” I said, forcing a tone of lightness into a situation that had been gloomy for far too long, “Harvey and I got a trophy out of it.”

  Georgia leaned back against the sofa, surprise in her features. “Wow. You really have changed.”

  “Not too much.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the list I’d made days ago in the hotel. Like all my lists, it had neat little check marks beside accomplished tasks, and a few more added rows for new tasks.

  Georgia laughed. “Now I know you’re my sister and not some pod twin.”

  “There is one more thing,” I said. “And if you could stay while I look at it, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sis, I’m here for the duration. I brought my toothbrush, my pj’s and a jug of wine. I figured I’d take care of you for once.”

  The tears rose to my eyes again, but this time from gratitude and love. “I could use some of that.” I leaned forward and gave Georgia a quick hug. “You’re the best.”

  She hugged me back, her embrace strong and secure, holding me up as much as I had held her up over the years. Odd, really, how this whole bizarre set of circumstances had brought me closer to my sister. It had done something nothing else in our lives had ever accomplished—equalized us. It wasn’t that Georgia had grown up or I had gotten younger. We’d simply found common ground in supporting each other.

  I rose, crossed to my bag and retrieved the box Annie had given me. I’d tried a dozen times on the way home to go through it alone, but every time, I’d hesitated, not quite sure I wanted to see what was in there.

  “A box? How mysterious,” Georgia said when I laid it on the sofa between us.

  I took a deep breath, then turned the latch of the heavy fireproof box and opened the lid. At the top was a letter, in an envelope marked Penny, in Dave’s tight handwriting.

  I gasped. Clearly, he had known that, someday, I would find out. And he had done the one thing I’d never thought Dave was capable of doing.

  Prepared for the future.

  For now, I put the letter aside unread, then dug farther into the box. There were some insurance papers for Harvey. “He insured the dog,” I said, laughing. “Now that I expect out of Dave.”

  “What else?”

  “Not much,” I said, shuffling through an old collar of Harvey’s, a contract signed years ago with Matt, some business cards for a lawyer and a vet, the former I figured would lead to the will, the latter would give me a distemper shot if I needed it after the will was read.

  “There’s a set of keys,” I said, picking them up and holding them to the light. I didn’t recognize them. “House keys, but not to this house.”

  “Oh,” Georgia said. “Oh.”

  Dread sank inside me. “Do you think it means there’s another one?” My heart leaped into my throat. I couldn’t do this again. I couldn’t find numbers four and five and go on indefinitely through an entire country of Mrs. Reynoldses.

  “It could mean something else,” Georgia said. But her face scrunched up in doubt.

  “Like what? That he has a vacation home in Hawaii? A condo in Canada?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe.”

  “Or that he has a whole other life with another family, somewhere else in the country?”

  “Dave had a lot of energy, Pen, but I don’t think he had enough to keep four wives happy.”

  I clutched the keys in my hand and felt the hard metal dig into my palm. After all I had been through, I was a changed person but not a glutton for punishment. I had no desire to make another road trip to hear another woman sing Dave’s praises. “I hope you’re right.”

  “Read the letter,” she said, nudging it toward me. “Maybe that’ll help.”

  Dear Penny,

  If you’ve made it to Annie’s, then you know it all. I’m sorry, Penny. I never meant to hurt you.

  When I married you, I thought…Well, I thought we’d become Dick and Jane. You did, I didn’t. I always felt like I was playing a really long game of charades.

  I started with the dog, and never intended to go any further than that. Then Harvey’s career took off, and before I knew it, I was living a lie that dwarfed them all. I couldn’t share it with you, so I looked for someone I could tell.

  Vinny once told me the key to working with a dog is communication, both the spoken and the unspoken kind. I should have talked more, said more, and most of all, told you before all this got out of hand.

  Please live your life, Penny. Don’t retreat to your office and those damned numbers. Love someone, Pen. And if he asks you about bringing home a dog or a cat, or hell, a bald eagle, think about it.

  In case you doubted it, you were always the first for me. The woman who captured my heart from the very beginning. You were all I dreamed of—and more than I could deserve.

  Love,

  Dave

  “Well,” Georgia said when I was done, “do you think that says he has a fourth wife waiting in the wings?”

  “No.” I clutched the letter to my chest, taking comfort in his words, in the message from the Dave I used to know.

  And love.

  I couldn’t hate him, as much as I wanted to. I didn’t love him as I had before all of this—the betrayals had colored my feelings forever—but I understood him a little better.

  The phone rang, and I rose to answer it, leaving the letter on the sofa. “Hello?”

  “Penny!” Lillian, my mother-in-law, nearly shouted into the phone. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Aren’t you answering your cell phone anymore?”

  “I’m sorry, Lillian. I just got home and I must have forgotten all about my phone. I turned it off when I was away.” I had never told Lillian where I went and wasn’t about to just drop it out there. “And then I never remembered to turn it back on.” If there was ever a sign that I had changed, that was it.

  “That isn’t like you at all.”

  I laughed. “I know.”

  “I hate to ask this, because I know you’ve just gotten home but…” Lillian paused. “I need to see you.”

  “Now? I was planning on coming down for Christmas, Lillian.”

  “It can’t wait that long. I’m…” She paused again. “I’m really worried about Dave’s estate.”

  “If it’s money you need—”

  “No, I don’t need money.” On the other end, she let out a nervous gust. I had never heard prim, perfect Lillian stressed or overwrought, not even during the funeral. She’d cried, yes, but throughout it all, she’d still been her proper self. “There’s something I need to ask you about. Something…extra that Dave had.”

  “You know about Susan?”

  “Who’s Susan?”

  The confusion in Lillian’s voice was real. She hadn’t known about the other wives, which in a weird way, made me feel better, because it meant I hadn’t been the only woman in Dave’s life left out of the secret.

  Nevertheless, this wasn’t the kind of information to tell Lillian over the phone. I needed time to break it to her gently, hopefully with nothing fragile nearby. She’d loved Dave, with a fierceness that bordered on overprotective. Telling her that her son had wives scattered around the country wasn’t going to go well.

  I promised Lillian I’d leave on the first flight tomorrow, then said goodbye and returned to the living room. “Well, Harvey,” I said, “looks like our journey’s not over yet. You ready for another road trip?”

  Harvey sprang to life, dancing on the sofa and pirouetting on my cushions.

&nbs
p; I took that as a yes.

  twenty-three

  Two weeks to the day after my husband died, I got off a plane at the Orlando International Airport, rented a car and drove to my mother-in-law’s house, Harvey at my side. He pranced around the interior of the rental car, clearly glad to be out of the Port-a-Puppy bag I’d used on the plane.

  Every few miles, I stopped and let him out on the grassy roadside. The rental car, after all, wasn’t lined with plastic and I wasn’t taking any chances.

  I pulled up to Lillian’s house, a small town house in a retirement community that sported a golf course, swimming pool and community center where regular bingo nights were held.

  The place also came with several good catches, Lillian had once said, if a lady didn’t mind dating a guy over the age of seventy-five who might or might not have all his own teeth.

  It had been eight years since I’d been to Lillian’s house. Dave and I had been meaning to come down here and visit her, but I was always busy with tax season and by the time April 15 passed, the urge to flee the Massachusetts cold had passed. She came up every Christmas, and Dave had gone to her house quite often over the years, but I’d never seemed to find a good time to make the trip.

  With the warm Florida sunshine on my face and shoulders, plus a forty-degree leap in temperature from the state I’d just left, I couldn’t imagine now what could have been more important, or more relaxing, than this.

  Lillian answered the door on the first knock. Her eyes widened in joy, and at first, I thought she was looking at me, then noticed her focus had dropped about a foot lower, the smile on her face not for me, but for—

  Harvey.

  “Oh, Harvey! You’re here! And you’re safe!” She reached forward, taking the dog out of my arms, holding him close to her chest, nearly smothering him with affection. “I was so worried about you, baby.”

  I stared at my mother-in-law, coddling and cooing to my husband’s secret, money-making dog. “You knew about Harvey?”