by Wendy Wax
Madeline stepped closer, appalled at how natural Steve sounded. She wanted to reach up and grab him by the shoulders and give him a good shake. “Will you be able to get away from the office?” she asked. “If it’s a problem, I could pick your mama up.”
“Nope,” he said all casual, as if he weren’t lying once again. “There’s nothing pressing on the calendar.”
Madeline grasped the bed rail to steady herself as Steve fussed over his mother. She felt brittle, like Edna’s bones; one wrong move and she might snap. As she studied her husband, she tried to understand how the person she thought she knew best could be so unfathomable. He had lied to her. Every day when he got up with his alarm, showered and dressed, went through the same old morning routine, and left the house as if he were going to the job he didn’t have had been one more lie.
The question, of course, was, why? Why not just tell her, why not share the loss of this job like she’d assumed they’d shared everything else for the last quarter of a century?
Her hand shook. Dropping it to her side, she told herself not to panic and definitely not to assume the worst, though she couldn’t actually think of a good or positive explanation for Steve having kept this little bombshell to himself.
Once again she noticed a silence and felt Steve’s gaze on her. She looked into the wide-set gray eyes that she’d always considered so warm and open, the full lips that were bent upward and stretched so easily into a smile. For the first time she noticed a web of fine lines radiating out from those eyes and grooves, like parentheses, bracketing the lips. A deep furrow ran the width of his forehead. When had all these signs of worry appeared, and how had she missed them?
“So, I’ll stay with Mama for a while,” Steve said, dismissing her. “Then I’ll run by her house to make sure it’s locked up and maybe pick up some things she’ll want at our house.”
Madeline wanted to drag him out into the hall and demand the truth, but the image of hissing out her hurt and anger in the hospital hallway held the words in check.
“Okay.” Madeline stepped forward to drop a dutiful kiss on her mother-in-law’s paper-thin cheek, keeping the bed between herself and Steve, certain that if he touched her she would, in fact, snap. “You get some rest now and feel better.”
On the way out of the hospital she focused on her breathing. “Just stay calm,” she instructed herself. “When he gets home you’ll tell him that you know he lost his job and ask for an explanation. He must have a good reason for not telling you. And surely he has some kind of plan. Just ask for the truth. That’s all. Everything will be okay as long as you know what’s going on and you’re in it together.”
This sounded eminently reasonable. For the time being she needed to push the hurt and sense of betrayal aside. They were not paupers—Steve was an investment advisor and had built a large cushion over the years for just such an eventuality. They could survive this. And Steve was highly qualified and well respected. Maybe he’d just needed some time off and now he could start looking for a new position. Trafalgar Partners wasn’t the only investment firm in Atlanta.
She’d agreed to “for better or for worse.” She was no hothouse flower who couldn’t deal with reality. Once again, her hurt and anger rose up in her throat, nearly choking her, and once again she shoved it back.
As she drove the minivan through the crush of afternoon traffic, Madeline contemplated the best way to handle the situation; she even thought about what wine might complement this sort of conversation and what she might serve for dinner. She’d just tell him that she loved him and that she would stand by him no matter what. As long as he respected her enough to tell her the complete and unvarnished truth.
It was only later that she would remember that the truth did not always set you free. And that you had to be careful what you wished for, because you might actually get it.
Two
Steve didn’t get home until six P.M. Madeline was in the kitchen adding strips of grilled chicken to a large Caesar salad and had already opened and sampled a bottle of red Zinfandel when she heard the automatic garage door open. She’d decided not to blurt out what she knew, had vowed to act normal and work her way calmly up to the subject. But now that Steve was here, Madeline could actually feel drops of sweat popping out on her forehead and an unwelcome burst of heat flushing her skin. For once this was not a result of her whacked-out hormones. How in the world had Steve managed to do this for a half a year?
“How did Edna’s house look?” she asked carefully.
Steve sighed and took a long swallow of his wine. “The kitchen’s a nightmare. Between the fire and the water from the fire hoses, the inside is practically gutted.” He looked up at her. “It’s a miracle she came out as unscathed as she did. You don’t mind if she moves in with us?”
“No, of course not.” For once, Edna’s antipathy felt insignificant. “She can stay as long as she needs to or until we can get her kitchen put back together.” After all these years, Madeline could wait another month or so to start her “new life.” Steve had worked construction summers through high school and college and would know what had to be done at his mother’s. Madeline could help supervise the renovation of the kitchen herself if necessary, and maybe Steve would have a new job by the time Edna moved back into her own home.
“I don’t mean temporarily,” Steve said, though he kind of mumbled it into his wineglass. “She can’t live on her own anymore. I’ve been putting off the inevitable, but now that you don’t have the kids to deal with I thought . . .”
“You want your mother to move in with us . . . forever?” The cheese grater slipped out of her hand and clattered on the granite countertop. The square of Parmesan landed at her feet, but she made no move to pick it up.
“She’s eighty-seven, Madeline. Unfortunately, I don’t think forever is going to be all that long.”
But it would feel like it. “Your mother doesn’t like me, Steve. She never has.”
“That’s not true.”
“We’ve been married for twenty-five years, I see her at least twice a week, we eat dinner with her most Sundays, and she still calls me Melinda half the time.” This was no slip of the tongue or mental gaffe. Melinda had been Steve’s high school girlfriend.
“She just likes to yank your chain a little bit. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“Do you know what she gave me for Christmas this year?”
Steve pinched a crouton from the salad. “It was a book, wasn’t it?”
“It was called Extreme Makeover, Personal Edition: How to Reface Your ‘Cabinets’ and Shore Up Your Sagging Structure.”
“It was not.”
“Yes,” Madeline said. “It was.”
Steve frowned as always, unable to accept that the mother who loved him so fiercely had so little affection for his wife. But how could she worry about this now when Steve’s lies and lack of job loomed over them? She bent to retrieve the Parmesan, which had been left there far too long to invoke the three-second rule. She carried it to the trash while she struggled to tamp down her emotions so that she could broach the subject of his unemployment with some semblance of calm.
Steve was refilling their glasses when she returned to the counter with her shoulders squared. It was clear he wasn’t planning to let her in on his not-so-little secret. She wondered if he’d told his mother.
“I spoke to Adrienne today,” Madeline said.
He went still much like an animal scenting danger might.
“I called your office trying to reach you after I heard from the hospital. She told me you don’t work there anymore. That you haven’t worked there for six months.” She swallowed and tears pricked her eyelids even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry. “Is that true?” she asked. “Could that possibly be true?”
The air went out of him. Not slowly like a punctured tire, but fast like a balloon spurting out its helium. His shoulders stooped as he shrank in front of her, practically folding in on himself. Any
hope that he might deny it or laugh at Adrienne’s poor attempt at humor disappeared.
“Yes.”
She waited for the explanation, but he just sat on the barstool with all the air knocked out of him, staring helplessly at her.
“But what happened? Why were you let go? Why didn’t you tell me?” The pain and hurt thickened her voice and it was hard to see through the blur of tears. Steve actually looked like he might cry himself, which did nothing to reduce the soft swell of panic. Why was he just looking at her like that; why didn’t he just tell her? “I need to know, Steve. I don’t understand how you could keep a secret like this from me. It’s my life, too.”
He took a deep breath, let it out. “The institutional accounts I was handling were actually being funneled to Synergy Investments. Malcolm Dyer’s firm.”
It was Madeline’s turn to go still. She was not a financial person, but even she had heard of the now-notorious Malcolm Dyer, whom the press had labeled a “mini-Madoff.”
“I should have known there was something off,” Steve said. “But the fund was performing so well. The returns were so . . . high, and they stayed that way for over five years.” He swallowed. “It’s hard to walk away from that kind of profit. I missed all the signs.” His voice was etched with a grim disbelief. “It was a classic Ponzi scheme. And I had no idea.”
He swallowed again. She watched his Adam’s apple move up and down.
“They closed down our whole division in September, but by cooperating with the government investigators, Trafalgar managed to keep it out of the papers while they regrouped. There was some hope that if the feds could get their hands on the stolen funds that they might be able to return at least a portion to our clients. A lot of them are nonprofits and charities.”
A part of her wanted to reach out and offer comfort, but the anger coursing through her wouldn’t allow it. For twenty-five years they’d told each other everything—or so she’d thought. “I can’t believe you think so little of me that you’d dress and go through that kind of pretense every day rather than tell me the truth.” She drained her wineglass, hoping to slow the thoughts tumbling through her head, maybe sop up the sense of betrayal. “How could you do that?”
Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, Mad. I just felt so guilty and so stupid. And I didn’t want to worry you or the kids. I figured I’d find something else and once I did—when there was no cause for panic—I’d tell you.”
Steve looked her in the eye then. His were filled with defeat. “Only I couldn’t find another job. Half the investment firms in the country have folded and the rest have cut back. Nobody’s hiring. Especially not at my salary level. Or my age.” His tone turned grim. “I’ve spent every single day of the last six months looking for a job. I’ve followed up every lead, worked every contact I have. But, of course, my reputation’s shot to hell. And I don’t seem to be employable.”
They contemplated each other for what seemed like an eternity. Madeline felt as if their life had been turned at an angle that rendered it completely unrecognizable.
“And that’s not the worst of it.” Steve dropped his gaze. He ran a hand through his hair and scrubbed at his face. As body language went it was the equivalent of the pilot of your plane running through the aisle shouting, “Tighten your seat belts. We’re going down!”
For the briefest of moments, Madeline wanted to beg him not to tell her. She wanted to stand up, run out of the room and out the front door, where whatever he was about to say couldn’t reach her.
“I, um . . .” He paused, then slowly met her gaze. “Our money’s gone, too.” He said it so quietly that at first she thought she might have misheard.
“What?”
“I said, our money’s gone.”
“Which money are you talking about?” she asked just as quietly. As if softening the volume might somehow soften the blow.
“All of it.”
There was a silence so thick that Madeline imagined any words she was able to form would come out swaddled in cotton. Gary Coleman’s trademark response, “What you talkin’’bout, Willis?” streaked through her mind, comic intonation and all, and she wished she could utter it. So that Steve might throw back his head and laugh. Which would be far superior to the way he was hanging his head and staring at his hands.
“How is that possible?” Her voice was a whisper now, coated in disbelief.
He met her gaze. “We were getting such a great return from the fund, that I put our money in.” He paused. “Every penny we didn’t need to live on went to Synergy.”
“But I thought most of our money was in bank CDs,” Madeline said. “Aren’t they practically risk free?”
“Yes, real bank CDs are secured by the bank. Nonexistent CDs backed by a nonexistent offshore bank? Not so much.”
Madeline felt as if she’d ended up in a train wreck despite the fact that she’d never set foot on a train or even gone to the station. The twisted metal of their future lay strewn across the tracks.
“I invested my mother’s money in the same fund.”
“Is there anything left?” Madeline thought her heart might actually stop beating. She could hear herself gasping for breath, but no air seemed to be entering her lungs.
“Just this.” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, smoothed it out, and laid it on the cocktail table in front of her. “The feds are looking for Dyer. In the meantime, he’s been judged guilty in a civil suit; apparently if you don’t show up, you’re found guilty. I filed a claim against Dyer’s seized assets.” He shoved the paper toward her. “This came yesterday. In addition to our house and what’s left of my mother’s house we now have a third ownership in a beachfront ‘mansion’ in Florida. In some booming metropolis called Pass-a-Grille.”
Madeline didn’t know where Steve slept or even if he did, and she was too numb to get up and find out. She spent most of the night tossing and turning on her side of their bed, realigning her pillow every few minutes as if simply finding the optimal position would grant her admission to oblivion. Several times she heard Steve moving around downstairs. At one point the family room TV snapped on.
Sometime after three A.M. she finally managed to drift off but slept fitfully, bombarded by disturbing dreams. One involved her mother-in-law in a pointy black hat pedaling a bicycle across a tornado-tossed sky. The Wizard of Oz theme played out all night. Steve appeared as the Scarecrow, and then as both the Cowardly Lion and a heavily rusted Tin Man. The worst scene featured Malcolm Dyer as the unscrupulous Wizard caught behind his curtain with Glinda the apparently not-so-good witch giggling in his lap.
Not surprisingly, Madeline awoke groggy and out of sorts. Steve’s revelations stole back into her consciousness to command center stage, and she buried her face in her pillow and cried. When the bedroom door opened and Steve padded into the room, Madeline squeezed her eyes shut and feigned sleep. While he showered and dressed in the bathroom she lay staring up into the ceiling. Although she felt him hesitate beside the bed, she kept her eyes shut and her breathing regular. She didn’t get up until she was certain Steve was gone.
By the time he returned with his mother, Madeline had put away the sheet and pillow Steve had left on the couch, tidied up the guest room and bath, and put on a pot of soup. Determined to make things look as normal as possible in front of her mother-in-law, she kept a smile on her face and her conversation casual. But pretending her world had not been shaken to its core required an Oscar-worthy performance.
“You seem a bit quiet, Melinda,” Edna said as Madeline tucked her into the guest room bed and aimed the remote at the television. Madeline willed herself to ignore the insult; it hardly rated in comparison to Steve’s revelations. “I’m sorry to be imposing on you. I wouldn’t have come if Steven hadn’t insisted.”
“We’re happy to have you,” Madeline said, straightening as the hosts of HGTV’s Hammer and Nail appeared on-screen and wishing this were true. She handed the remote to her mother-in-law, wh
o was already focusing on the remodeling show. “But it would make me even happier if you stopped calling me Melinda.”
Edna’s gaze left the TV. Shock that Madeline had commented on the dig flared briefly in Edna’s eyes.
“I hate to think your mind has really slipped so much that you can’t remember your daughter-in-law’s name,” Madeline said. “Maybe we should do some cognitive testing. We never did go for that follow-up with the neurologist.”
Edna snorted. “They’re all just looking for any excuse to take away a person’s rights. First it’s the car. Then they don’t think you can live by yourself.” She strove for her usual belligerence but Madeline heard the note of fear underneath and chastised herself for putting it there. Her own fear was like a living, breathing thing. “There’s nothing golden about the golden years from what I can tell so far.”
“No,” Madeline agreed, reminding herself that her mother-in-law’s jabs were a very minor thing. “Getting older is definitely not for sissies.” But then neither, it seemed, was marriage.
Three
Madeline spent the weekend alternately grilling Steve about his plans to regain their financial footing and trying to figure out what she might do to produce income after twenty-five years as a full-time wife and mother. The answer to both of these questions appeared to be “nothing.”
She read through each and every want ad, but cleaning, cooking, and carpooling with heavy doses of prodding and organizing didn’t seem to qualify her for any of them. At a time when highly skilled and experienced people were out of work, her chances of finding a decent paying job ranged from “not anytime soon” to “not in this lifetime.”
By Sunday night she was exhausted from practicing “Would you like fries with that?” and pretending for Edna’s benefit that everything was as it should be. On Monday Steve, whose strength of will had been the first thing she fell in love with and whom she’d always considered a veritable “rock,” began to crumble. It seemed that now that he’d confessed, Steve felt free to wallow in his despair. For the first time he didn’t dress or leave, but assumed what became a favored position on the family room couch with the TV remote clutched loosely in one hand.