Good Little Wives

by Abby Drake

  Does she feel it, too? Dana wondered. Does Caroline feel the same dread—no matter how seemingly remote—that she, that any one of them, was just one Yolanda away from being cast aside, too?

  “Caroline,” Dana said as epiphany struck, “we have to help her.”

  There was a pause of time and space and social class. Then the woman said, “My husband would be furious.”

  Dana didn’t think Steven would be as furious as Caroline thought Jack might be. Unlike most of the husbands, Steven saw the world the way it was. He often, in fact, laughed out loud at their own behavior as much as at the behavior of their friends.

  “Well,” Dana said carefully, “I understand. But I can’t sit here knowing that Kitty is in trouble and that I might be able to help.” It was hard to admit that, like the rest of them, she hadn’t once called Kitty since the marriage broke up.

  Caroline paused again as if she were smoking a cigarette with her new plumped-up lips. “Give her my best” was all she said.

  It was spring, too warm a morning to wear the Polarfleece Dana had on. She could not, however, rid her mind’s eye of the image Caroline had planted there: that Kitty was cold and scared as hell. Besides, Dana didn’t suppose she’d run into the fashion police at the county jail where the newspaper article said Kitty was being held pending arraignment.

  She wondered if the guards would let her give Kitty the jacket. Then again, she thought, as she wheeled her Volvo past the tall chain-link fence that was topped with barbed wire corkscrewed like a big, unfriendly Slinky, maybe one of Kitty’s kids had bailed her out by now.

  She parked, she turned off the ignition, she got out of the car and locked it as if she were simply going into the market, or into the nail salon for a manicure. Unlike the other New Falls ladies, Dana did not find jail a foreign land.

  She remembered the drill:

  “Name.”

  “Driver’s license.”

  “Inmate number.”

  Crossing the parking lot, Dana zipped the Polarfleece, glad she’d remembered to wear a jacket that did not have a hood. As she recalled, a hood was deemed a suspicious hiding place for a packet of cocaine or a loaded gun.

  Pulling open the heavy glass door, Dana wondered where on earth Kitty had gotten a gun and when she’d learned how to shoot.

  The waiting room was harsh from too many fluorescent lights. A large, uniformed young man sat behind a desk next to a wall of computer screens. There had been no computers thirty-plus years ago.

  What was familiar, however, was the air. It was stale and still, scented by bodies that had not been washed often or well enough. Dana knew if she closed her eyes, she might think she was back home, that it was Monday evening visiting hours, and she’d come to see Daddy.

  “May I help you?” the uniformed young man asked.

  Dana blinked. “Yes,” she said, her voice just a whisper, as if not to disturb her long-ago ghosts. “Can you tell me if Kitty DeLano is being held here or if someone has posted her bail?”

  The young man smiled. Well, that was certainly something else that was different from the stern, bullying looks of the Indiana guards. Maybe the prison system had decided to soften its approach.

  “She’s here,” he said. “Are you her attorney?”

  It should have occurred to Dana that she might not get in to see Kitty without some credentials. At home, after all, she’d been “family.”

  She considered leaving, then realized that because Kitty was still there, her children apparently hadn’t yet appeared. Not her children, not even an attorney. Perhaps Kitty was so cold and so scared that she hadn’t known what to do or whom to call. Perhaps she truly was all alone.

  Dana cleared her throat. “We haven’t decided whether or not Ms. DeLano will retain me.” Her journalism voice had returned, the voice that implied she was a professional and she was in charge. As long as the guard didn’t ask for a card that stipulated she was a member of the bar.

  He looked at his watch. “Her arraignment isn’t until one. The judge is real busy this morning.”

  “I know,” Dana said, as if she did. She was glad the guard did not question why an attorney would wear Polarfleece.

  Then he stood up and leaned across the desk. “May I see your driver’s license?” he asked, and Dana’s heart skipped a past-memory beat. She dug into her purse and extracted the document.

  His eyes scanned it briefly, then he pointed to a tall, white archway that looked like the metal detectors in airports. She sucked in her breath and stepped toward the arch, thankful she hadn’t put on an underwire bra when she’d dressed that morning.

  Three

  It was a small, square room—not a big, open one like the one George Kimball had been escorted into so he could receive Monday night visitors.

  There was a lone table the same size as the cozy kitchen table in the split-level where Dana had grown up—not a configuration of bureaucratic, banquet-style tables shaped into a “U” with inmates parked on one side and visitors directed to the other.

  It was almost friendly—not at all like in Indiana.

  Dana waited in the room alone, looking out a window that had wire honeycombed inside the glass. She clicked her fingernails together and wished Kitty would get there before she spent too much time thinking about her father and wondering if he was still alive.

  A heavy door creaked open.

  Kitty stood in the doorway. Her jaw went slack; her eyebrows knitted into a waxed “W”. “Dana,” she said.

  Dana wrung her hands. “Kitty. Are you all right?”

  She didn’t look all right. Her muddy brown hair was sticking up as if she’d had an electric shock; her skin was pale, in grave need of a good foundation and a little blush. The body that Kitty used to hate (no matter what diet or exercise regimen she followed, she could never quite flatten her tummy) had grown thin and frail since Dana had last seen her.

  But Kitty said, “I’m fine,” because that was what the women of New Falls had been trained to say. “The bed’s not very comfortable, but I didn’t feel like sleeping anyway.”

  Dana sat down because her legs were suddenly weak. “Are you cold?” she asked. “You can have my jacket.”

  “That would be nice. I’m freezing.” She wore only linen pants and a short-sleeved sweater, which must have been the outfit she’d had on yesterday when they’d found her standing over Vincent, a trickle of blood oozing from his left ear, a gun slack, still smoking, in Kitty’s right hand.

  Short sleeves and linen, Dana thought. No wonder Kitty was freezing.

  Dana unzipped the jacket and wondered how Caroline would have known that. Did she, too, have a father in another state that she didn’t talk about? She handed the jacket over to Kitty, who slipped it on quickly and huddled against its warmth. A guard in the doorway didn’t seem inclined to take it away. In fact, he didn’t seem to be paying attention to them at all.

  “Your arraignment’s scheduled for one,” Dana said as if Kitty didn’t know. She lowered her voice. “Has your attorney been here?”

  Kitty sat down across from her. “I don’t have one.”

  Surely Dana misunderstood. “What do you mean? Of course you have an attorney.”

  “Only a court-appointed one. A young girl right out of law school. I’m her first murder case.”

  Dana leaned closer. “Kitty, that’s ridiculous.”

  Kitty shrugged.

  “What about the man who did your divorce?”

  But Kitty shook her head. “Sean isn’t a criminal lawyer. I don’t know any of those, do you?”

  Dana could hardly say the only one she knew was back in Indiana. “No. But if you need help…”

  Kitty shrugged again.

  “What about your children?”

  “I guess they’re too busy making funeral arrangements.”

  Dana wondered what her boys would have done if she’d been arrested for killing Steven. Would they rally to her side or his? She stared out the window agai
n.

  “It’s nice of you to come,” Kitty said. “Thank you for the jacket.”

  “It was Caroline’s idea.”

  The eyebrows scrunched back into the “W”.

  “We’re all concerned about you, Kitty.” She said it as if all the women who’d been at the rite-of-spring luncheon were now lined up at the barbed wire with fleece jackets of their own.

  Kitty didn’t respond, perhaps because she knew better.

  “I’ll come to the arraignment,” Dana said. She didn’t say she’d post her bail because even tolerant Steven might draw the line at that. “In the meantime, is there anything I can do? Call your kids? Anything?”

  “You can find Vincent’s killer,” Kitty said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said you can find Vincent’s killer. You don’t really think I murdered him, do you?”

  “Mrs. DeLano killed her husband?” It was Sam, calling from Dartmouth. He sounded anxious, the most sensitive of Dana’s boys, the one who cared too much about other people.

  “Mom?” Michael was next. “What’s going on?” He was between meetings, had heard the news on Wall Street.

  Steven did not call. Apparently the Kitty/Vincent saga hadn’t made USA Today yet.

  She had just finished assuring Michael that Mrs. DeLano was fine when the doorbell rang. It was Bridget.

  “You went there?” she accused as she pushed past Dana and moved into the living room without being invited. She wore a pink jogging suit that accented her round boobs—“all-natural, no implants, merci beaucoup,” Bridget was fond of saying. (Unlike Lauren, Dana, and Caroline, who wore sizes four, six, and eight respectively and had heights according to that, Bridget, at five-five, was a twelve on the top, six on the bottom; so much for French women being scrawny.) She also wore too much Chanel for this time of day, not even lunchtime. She went to the twin love seats by the fireplace and made herself at home.

  “Coffee?” Dana asked.

  Bridget shook her head. Her black curls danced and bounced. “Answers. I want answers. How is our dear Kitty?” She pronounced “is” like “ees” and “Kitty” like “Keety.” Sometimes her accent was more than annoying.

  Dana dropped onto the sofa across from her. “She didn’t do it,” she said.

  The phone rang again. That time it was Lauren.

  “Whatever has happened?” Lauren cried in tiny, childlike sounds.

  “I’ll tell you both at the same time,” Dana said. With her eyes on Bridget and the phone to one ear, she drew in a long breath and said how she’d gone to see Kitty and how she’d given her the jacket and how Kitty said she didn’t do it. She did not tell them how terrible Kitty had looked. That fact seemed too much like the gossip that Dana detested.

  When she was finished, she handed the phone to Bridget. “Talk to Lauren if you want. I’m going upstairs to get ready for the arraignment.”

  Neither Bridget nor Lauren offered to go with her.

  Caroline sat at her vanity table, pulling her short, sun-colored, painted hair under a terry headband. She studied her reflection, pleased at the absence of the finest lines around her amber eyes, her now-full, coral lips. She wondered if she’d need another facelift when she turned sixty-four. Would twelve years be too much time between her second and her third?

  “Everyone is different,” Dr. Gregg had said. “You have exceptional skin tone. You may be able to wait fifteen years.”

  It wasn’t as if he needed to drum up more business. Though his waiting room was like a therapist’s—with an entrance and an exit positioned so patients did not see one another—Caroline knew that, in addition to the women of New Falls, Dr. Gregg had amassed a clientele of men who wanted to be nipped and tucked, too, who were desperate to avert the onrushing train of that hideous thing called time.

  One would think we lived in L.A., Caroline mused as she picked up the silver pot of face powder and dabbed the sable brush.

  “Do you think New Falls will make the evening news?” her husband, Jack, said as he entered her dressing room, the New Falls Journal in his hand.

  “Doubtful,” she said, curving the brush from nose to ear with a swift, circular sweep. “It’s not as if Vincent was an up-and-coming player.”

  She knew, because Jack had told her in confidence, that Vincent’s client list had begun to shrivel a year or so ago, that his edge had lost its sharpness, his drive had slowed its pace—a lethal combination when money was at stake. It had happened around the time that he’d met Yolanda and, according to Kitty, his brain was lobotomized by his dick.

  Still, Vincent DeLano had found a way to survive until now.

  Setting down the pot of powder, she picked up a light brown eye pencil and started to enhance the half moons above her eyes. In the mirror, she saw Jack sit on the velvet side chair and cross his legs as if he were a girl.

  “I don’t think I have to suggest that it’s best if you stay out of this,” he said.

  He had on a light blue shirt, a gray-blue tie, and gray flannel pants. He was dressed for the office today (an increasingly rare occurrence), though he wouldn’t leave for the city until noon, leaving rush hour to the “amateurs” and lunch to the hungry. Jack Meacham, after all, no longer hungered for anything. He had started his own mutual fund a number of years ago, sold out when mutual funds were hot, made a great fortune, and only dabbled now and then for fun: a few million here, a few there. Mostly Jack played golf.

  “I do not intend to get involved,” Caroline replied. She noted that Jack looked older in his reflection, his face showing wear, his eyes downcast as if he were tired. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Me?” He raised his head. He stood up. “I’m fine, Caroline. I just find this sort of thing extremely sad.”

  “That a friend of mine is in jail?”

  “No,” he said. “That a friend of mine is dead.”

  It was about the men, of course. It always was.

  “Oh,” she answered, and resumed the task of her makeup.

  She was aware he still stood there, though she didn’t expect he was looking at her, thinking about her. When they’d been young she’d often thought his pensive moments were spent in obsessive thoughts about her; how she was the most regal of all their friends; how she strode so elegantly into a room and paused to be admired; how only Jack knew that beneath her silk and satin, she wore nothing at all; how they’d had awesome sex the night or the week or the month before (he especially loved to watch while she masturbated, an act that always engorged his member and resulted in power-thrusts she did not understand).

  It had taken a few years for Caroline to realize that in those pensive moments, her husband had not been thinking about her at all, but about his next mega-deal, the next client he would land, the next eagle/birdie/hole-in-one he would score.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m off to work then.”

  He left the room without kissing her good-bye, no doubt because he hadn’t thought of that, either.

  She set down the eye pencil, picked up the palette of blush, blended peach with rose, and applied it to her cheeks, wondering what Jack would say if he knew that, not so long ago, she had considered having him disposed of, not unlike the way Vincent was disposed, deposed, yesterday.

  Four

  Kitty’s son, Marvin, showed up at her arraign ment and posted his mother’s bail. Then he asked if Dana would mind taking her home. “I must get back to work,” he said, pushing his round, black-framed glasses up onto the bridge of his sloping nose. Though not quite thirty, he was a top proctologist at Cedars-Sinai. It was a profession so fraught with innuendo that most people didn’t say a word, they just tried to hide their smiles.

  Kitty kissed her son and thanked him for the bail. As dispassionate as Dana’s life had become, she was grateful that she was not Kitty.

  “Shall we stop for lunch?” Dana asked, once they were seat-belted inside the Volvo.

  Kitty sort of nodded. “If you’d like,” she said, her head
tipping curiously to one side, her arms wrapping themselves around her too-thin middle, her gaze fixating on the dashboard.

  They went to The Chocolate Flan because it was on the way to the apartment where Kitty had been staying since the movers had absolved the marital house of its furnishings. Like the apartment, the restaurant was in Tarrytown, so it would not matter that Kitty looked like a zombie, or that she wore Dana’s Polarfleece with linen pants.

  They ordered salads. Kitty also ordered wine.

  “You need a real attorney,” Dana said.

  Kitty flinched as if she only just then realized that they were in the restaurant and not still in the car. “It won’t matter,” she replied. “I was the one who was holding the gun. No one’s going to believe I didn’t do it.”

  Dana spread the mocha-colored napkin across her lap. “What happened, Kitty?”

  Kitty zipped the fleece as if it were as cold in there as at the jail. Her eyes did not meet Dana’s but attached themselves to the small sunflower in the center of the table. “I went to the house to meet him.” The waiter brought her wine. She took a long, slow sip. “Vincent was already dead. Right there in the living room.” She took another drink. Dana wished she’d ordered wine, too. “I got scared,” Kitty added. “I took out my gun.”

  “Your gun? I didn’t know you owned a gun.”

  “Vincent bought it for me. He was so worried about all the cash he always carried. He was afraid someone would think I carried a lot of money, too.”

  Dana didn’t ask why a futures trader—or his wife—would carry a lot of cash. Steven rarely had more than a hundred dollars, relegating the space in his wallet to American Express. Dana wasn’t much different.

  “But…” Dana stumbled for the words. “The article said the gun was still smoking.” Since the boys had grown and gone and Steven was traveling so much, Dana spent too much time home alone, watching too many Law & Order reruns. She supposed it was a throwback to her early years as a cop’s daughter and her brief journalism dreams. But even before Lennie Briscoe and Jack McCoy, Dana would have known that when a gun was “still smoking,” it had just been fired.