Good Little Wives

by Abby Drake

  Dana deduced that Kitty was drunk.

  Caroline stayed composed. “Yolanda purchased tickets in advance,” she said, then cupped Kitty by the elbow. “Now I must insist that you leave.”

  “But wait,” Kitty said, “I see her now. She looks rather shrunken standing next to that beautiful redhead—oh, look! That’s my daughter. It seems she’s stolen her, too.”

  “Kitty, stop it,” Dana said, at last finding her voice. “Get out of here before you ruin the whole event. Which, in case you didn’t notice, has nothing to do with you.”

  But before Kitty made another sound, her eyes suddenly grew wide and her unlifted jaw went slack. “My God,” she said, her voice thundering now, “is that little hussy with child?”

  Like the audience at a runway show, coiffed heads rotated toward the subject at hand, who now stood in profile to them.

  “Mon dieu,” Bridget said again, “it surely looks that way.”

  Kitty laughed. Then she took off toward Yolanda before the wives could shout, “NO!”

  They watched in horror as Kitty wagged her finger at Yolanda’s face. “I suppose you’re going to try to say that baby belongs to Vincent.”

  Yolanda blinked, but did not answer. She turned her back.

  “Mother, go home,” Elise said, placing a protective arm around Yolanda’s shoulder.

  “Go home? Well, my darling daughter, I don’t have a home.”

  Her voice continued to hover above street level. The orchestra slowed, the sole focus turned to the pregnant young woman in pink, the redhead in yellow, the disheveled woman wearing last year’s light green.

  Caroline raced toward the musicians, telling everyone along the way to please have a good time, that everything was under control.

  But it wasn’t.

  Kitty laughed again.

  “You might fool the others, you little slut, but just so everyone knows, my husband could no longer father children. After Elise was born, Vincent had a vasectomy. A vasectomy. Do you know what that big word means, little girl?”

  Thankfully, Dana spotted Detective Johnson, even though he wore a tux. She was grateful that, this time, Steven did not step forward, knight in shining armor that he so often was.

  She signaled the detective with a plea for help.

  He approached, he smiled, he whisked Kitty away, her final refrain resonating through the hall:

  “That baby is not Vincent’s! Vincent had a vasectomy! That baby belongs to some other worthless soul!”

  The rest of the evening was a little edgy. Yolanda and Elise departed right after Kitty, which meant there were two empty chairs at their table after all, not counting the spaces where Lauren and Bob should have been. Caroline acted distracted; Jack was unusually quiet; Dana and Steven, Bridget and Randall remained out of duty. Shortly after they presented Caroline with generous checks, the Fultons and the Hayneses gladly left.

  Randall suggested they stop somewhere for a nightcap, but Dana had a headache and said thanks anyway. She did, however, notice the way Bridget held Randall’s arm as they left Hudson Valley Centre. She didn’t think she’d ever seen Bridget do that.

  “Maybe they had a nap together before coming tonight,” Steven said when Dana mentioned it in the car on the ride home. He was, of course, referring to the “nap” they’d had together, after Steven slept most of the day and woke up wanting sex again as if the first time hadn’t been enough.

  They’d decided make-up sex was so much fun that they should fight more often.

  In between, Dana managed to spend some time with Ben (actually, while doing his laundry and repacking his bags for Dartmouth), long enough to be reassured that Cozumel had not changed him into a boy that she no longer knew, not the way New Falls had changed his twin.

  “It’s nice,” she said to Steven now, “that sometimes there can be happy endings, like with Bridget and Randall.” She didn’t mention that Sam and Ben had gone back to school while Dana and Steven napped, leaving a lame note that cited wanting to miss traffic.

  Nor did she mention that she’d seen the sheets of Post-its stacked where she’d left them, as if Sam no longer cared who’d murdered his lover’s husband.

  Talking about those things wouldn’t have made them go away, though it might have cushioned the surprise when they pulled into the driveway and saw Sam on the front steps.

  “Hey,” Sam said, standing up awkwardly. It was the first time he’d spoken to his mother since she’d told him to put on his shirt. “How was the gala?”

  “Boring,” Steven said. “Except that Kitty showed up. She caused quite a scene.”

  Dana winced.

  Sam cowered. “You look nice, Mom,” he said.

  She glanced down at her silver Marchesa gown that looked less tired than she felt.

  “Can we talk?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Steven said, “but I thought you boys had already gone back to school.”

  “Not yet, Dad. But I really just wanted to talk to Mom.”

  “Oh,” Steven said. “Well, sure.”

  He went inside the house because Steven was a good dad and a good husband and knew that mostly this was between Dana and Sam and he’d be called for advice if needed.

  “Honey,” Dana said, “it’s a little chilly to stand outside.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I’m not a little kid.”

  Apparently he thought she was concerned for him, not for herself, which was every kid’s mother-child relationship, wasn’t it?

  “I couldn’t go back to school until I apologized. Until you know how sorry I am for what I did. And for the part about you finding out.”

  “Which is it, Sam? The fact you slept with Kitty or the fact I found out?” Her tone was biting; she wished it wasn’t.

  “Either. Both.”

  She might have said it was okay, but she wouldn’t have really meant it, until she saw the big tears that had sprung up in his eyes. “I told Ben we had to turn around. I told him you and I had a fight. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry and ashamed.”

  Sorry and ashamed. She sighed. She knew those were tough words for anyone to say. Anyone, let alone her sensitive, too-caring son.

  Sorry.

  Ashamed.

  And then Dana remembered when she’d heard those words before. They were in a note, written by her father a long, long time ago. Written on a piece of paper that had been sent from a jail cell, accompanied by her mother’s obituary.

  I’m so sorry.

  And ashamed.

  She sat down on the steps. “I’m sorry, too, Sam. I didn’t mean to judge you. Sometimes parents…well, sometimes we overreact when we think our kid’s welfare is at stake.” That was what her father had done, hadn’t he?

  “But you were right, Mom. It was wrong, what I did with Kitty. It doesn’t matter if it was her fault or mine. It was wrong. I knew that all along.”

  He sat next to her and she put her arm around him. And that’s when she decided it really didn’t matter if they ever learned who’d murdered Vincent. It really didn’t matter if Bridget ever knew that Dana knew Aimée wasn’t Randall’s daughter, or if the entire town knew Caroline liked women. It didn’t really matter if Lauren resurfaced after the supposed quarrel with Bob.

  What mattered was taking the time to try and understand one another. Having patience, learning tolerance. What mattered was forgiving and being forgiven.

  “Honey,” Dana said, stroking Sam’s hair, “how would you like to help me with a little project?”

  He groaned. “I’m off the case, Mom. I’m thinking of changing to corporate law instead of criminal stuff.”

  “What if it’s something we can do on your ‘indispensable Internet’? Something simple, like a missing person search?”

  He sat up straight. “Missing person?” He might be like his father, but he had Dana’s knack for gathering details, for wanting to craft the world’s problems into a solvable puzzle.

  “Yes,” she said. “We need to start in Ind
iana. It’s time we found your grandfather.”

  Thirty-seven

  The house looked the same but smaller, closer to the sidewalk, dwarfed by the giant oak trees that now were way too big.

  It was made of red brick and was almost cottage-size, with a single dormer above the roofline of the small front porch. The dormer held the window that had been in Dana’s bedroom.

  How many times she’d sat there watching for her father to walk up the street on his way home from work, his navy uniform still neat and clean, his gold badge shining in the late afternoon.

  How many times she’d come home from school and found her laundry neatly stacked on her bed, smelling like bleach and strong detergent, sprinkled and ironed and folded by her mother.

  How many times she’d sat at her desk, working on her homework, the aromas of her mother’s cooking wafting up the stairs, though all Dana really wanted was for dinner to be over so she could go to the library with Becky or to Burger-town with Jane and Sue.

  She sat in the passenger seat of the Chevrolet Impala rental car and studied the porch post where black metal numbers read 6–8–2–0. She remembered going with her father to the hardware store to buy them, then helping him screw them into the post. He’d always planned a Saturday project when she was young, something they would do together. It was years before Dana realized it had less to do with accomplishing a project and more to do with spending time with her, making memories, like the 6–8–2–0.

  “Do you want to go in?” Steven asked. He sat behind the wheel, her patient, understanding husband, having skirted a business trip to Chicago to go with her to Indiana. “I’m sure if you rang the bell…”

  But Dana shook her head. “I just wanted to see the house. I don’t want to bother anyone.” Turning back to the MapQuest printout on her lap, she said, “Okay, let’s go. According to Sam, he lives on the other side of downtown. I think I can remember how to get there from here.”

  Like the house, the streets seemed smaller, the intersections narrower, the trip across town shorter. Before Dana was prepared, a sign in front of a two-story townhouse complex read Meadowe Crest. She pushed aside the MapQuest printout and got out of the car before she could change her mind.

  He was old. His hair was white, his shoulders drooped, he stood a little shorter, his blue eyes seemed lighter. He was old, but it was he.

  “Daddy,” she said, because that was what she’d still called him when she—when he—had been sent away.

  His eyes came to life. His mouth turned up into a grin. He opened the screen door and took her into his arms.

  “Your mother was sick,” he said to Dana while they sat, with Steven, in the small living room that had tweed-upholstered furniture and an old-fashioned ham radio set up in one corner. She’d forgotten he’d loved that, that he’d sit for hours and listen to the crackle waiting for voices to come from Russia or Europe or even Australia right into Indiana.

  She hadn’t forgotten the picture of her mother with a baby—her!—that now stood on an end table. He’d taken it at the Ohio State Fair in front of the exhibit of the world’s biggest tomato.

  She wondered what Bridget and Lauren and Caroline would think about that.

  “You knew Mom was sick before…before you were arrested?” As they sat on the sofa, Steven lightly touched her leg, his hand a surge protector in case her emotions sparked. She was grateful that unlike Randall Haynes or Bob Halliday or Jack Meacham, Steven had always known about his wife’s not-so-perfect past.

  “Laetrile treatments were thought to be a miracle cure,” George Kimball, once the head of the police union, said. “The treatments were illegal here, but not in Mexico. The trouble was, we had no money. The medical bills were already huge…”

  She listened to the rest. How he’d embezzled all the money but then he’d been caught.

  “When I went to jail, only five thousand dollars was left. It kept your mother going for a while.” He laughed a sad laugh. “It wasn’t as if I used the money to buy her diamonds, though I often wished I had. I mean, I lost my job, I lost you, and she died anyway.”

  Dana’s throat was dry, tears leaked slowly from her eyes. “But you came back here. Why did you come back? Wasn’t it…hard? To face everyone?”

  He smiled a half smile. “I was away ten years. I came back in case you ever tried to find me. Even though I lost the house, I figured if you came to town, you’d ask around and someone would know where old George Kimball was.”

  They sat quietly together, after more than thirty years. Then Dana asked her father if he’d like to move to New York. “You have three terrific grandsons,” she said, “who would love to know you. And we live in a nice town, if you ignore some of the stuff.”

  Thirty-eight

  Bridget strutted into the oncology department Monday morning in teal satin pajamas trimmed with silver sequins that were great for staving off hot flashes. The Haynes family had spent Sunday afternoon at Victoria’s Secret, where Aimée selected and Bridget modeled and Randall sat in the “gentleman’s chair” and laughed at his two jeunes filles. Before heading home they stopped at the nutrition store and loaded up on immune-boosting wheatgrass and ginseng that Randall announced he would use to create a new cocktail for Bridget, a temporary (she hoped) substitute for wine.

  Today she’d downed the drink, then jumped into the teal, which she now wore with dangling sequin earrings and silver satin mules. Randall said she never looked more ravishing. She warned him he might regret those words if she threw up on the ensemble.

  He marched up to the reception desk beside her, having canceled golf with Jack Meacham, the epitome of New Falls sacrifice.

  “If anyone’s going to poison my wife,” he kidded the woman behind the desk, “I want to be here as a witness.” But as he said it his voice quivered and his eyebrows knitted together and a touch of moisture filled his eyes.

  Bridget smiled at her corny husband and his ill-fitting toupee and took him by the arm. It was nice now that her cancer was out in the open. It was nice that Luc was back in France, four thousand miles away by land and sea, a million miles and a lifetime away from her heart.

  “No golf today?” Caroline asked her husband as she strolled past his bedroom and realized he was still under the covers and his draperies were still drawn though it was after ten.

  He didn’t answer right away, then said, “Caroline, come here.”

  “Are you ill?” Yesterday she’d gone with Chloe to the Cloisters for the day. She’d greatly needed to get away from New Falls and her husband and the bitter aftertaste of the gala.

  “Come here,” he said again.

  Aside from announcing he was bringing someone or other home for dinner, or expecting her to keep their social calendar arranged with all the have-tos and the RSVPs RSVP-ed, Jack rarely asked Caroline for anything.

  “Please,” he said.

  She moved into the room with tentative steps.

  “I’m sorry about the gala,” he said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t everything you’d hoped.”

  “We raised four hundred and sixty thousand dollars. It wasn’t a total waste.” One of his hands was under his head, under his pillow. The other was still under the comforter, perhaps holding his penis.

  “Please,” he said, “sit down.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  He didn’t push the issue. Instead he asked, “Do you love her, Caroline?”

  She waited for the longing to crush her chest. When it did not, she asked, “What is love, Jack? Was it what we had?” It certainly wasn’t being cruel, as Elise had been cruel to Caroline at the gala, almost mocking it, mocking her, using the gala as a soapbox for Yolanda’s shock-news.

  “I don’t know what love is, Caroline. I can’t remember. We’ve spent so many years being the Meachams, I’ve forgotten who Jack and Caroline really are.”

  Her eyes adjusted to the light; she saw the questions in his. “Jack was a young man out of business school who wanted to take on t
he world,” she said. “Caroline was her father’s perfect hostess who wanted a husband.”

  “I’m not sure, but I think you’ve sold us short.”

  “No I haven’t, Jack. The problems started when we took ourselves too seriously. The rest of the world did, too.”

  He seemed to think about that. Then he said, “I once loved having sex together.”

  She blanched. “You did?”

  He rolled onto his side. “I always thought no matter what the next deal would net or what the market did or didn’t do or what my golf score was, well, I always thought of you as the one thing I could count on.”

  “It wasn’t always about you, Jack.”

  “You made me think it was.”

  “I did?”

  “Well. Yes. You were the doting, dutiful wife. And when you weren’t doting on me or on Chloe, you were doting on New Falls. Why would I have ever thought that wasn’t what you wanted?”

  She sat down on the bed because she had grown weak.

  “I’m sorry if I didn’t measure up to your expectations,” he continued. “If you’d rather be with Elise, I’ll go quietly. Or let you go quietly. Don’t worry about money. I’ll take care of everything.”

  He slid his arm from beneath the pillow. He started to reach for her, then was content to rest his hand on the straight pleat of her pants. How long had it been since he’d touched her like that? Since he’d touched her at all?

  “I thought about asking you to stay,” he continued. “But that sounded stupid. I couldn’t come up with a way for the three of us to live here. Especially since it would be four now that Chloe is back home.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted that, Jack.” Despite the lust, the craziness she’d felt for Elise, she’d never entertained the idea of having her live here, in the house that Jack built. Just as she’d never really imagined not being a New Falls wife.