Surviving Goodbye

by Morgan Parker

  She laughed. “No! I didn’t sleep with him, if that’s what you’re asking. Gross! He’s ol—um,” she cleared her throat, “so not my type.”

  She changed the screen to images of online bank statements, the Bank of America logo on the upper left corner, reams of numbers next to item descriptions running the rest of the screen’s length. “But Nathan isn’t your daughter’s father. These statements show us that he spent lots of time in Florida in the twelfth, eleventh, and tenth months preceding your daughter’s birthday. During the ninth and eighth months, he was in Europe.”

  I squinted at the screen. How did she get his bank statements? From over seventeen years ago? “The statements go back this far?”

  She shrugged. “They’re archives, which is why they look different than a regular BofA statement.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  She glanced over at me. “So with all of the evidence you’ve got right here, that strikes Nathan off your list, no matter how convenient it seemed. I’m sorry.”

  I looked down into my lap. “Does he know wha—”

  I felt her hand on mine, a soft squeeze. “Nathan knows nothing. Not about why I was there, not about you, not about anything. Don’t worry. For all he knows, I was just a young, needy woman interested in an older dude on a Friday night, because she’s got big-time daddy issues.”

  I glanced over at her. Despite her reassurances, I didn’t feel a whole lot better knowing that she had sacrificed so much (forget about the parts she hadn’t told me) for this little quest of mine.

  “Your secret is safe,” she added, those single mother, determined eyes locked on mine again. Yet their transparency suggested she was leaving out an important detail that I probably didn’t want to know. “Okay?” she asked. “You can trust me.”

  I allowed a nod. “But without Nathan, I’ve got nothing. I don’t know where to turn now.”

  She turned the computer screen toward me. “That’s where my superior investigative skills come in, old man.” She switched to the good-looking man with no forehead. “Meet Andrew Parsons, former PNDP-er.”

  “Former what?”

  “Pontiac Notre Dame Prep student,” she said, proud of her discovery. She reached halfway across the table for Karen’s graduating class yearbook and flipped it open to one of several pages with sticky notes attached to it.

  “They were in the same class?”

  “No, not quite. Andrew here was two years older than your wife. However, he signed her yearbook.” She focused on the page in question. “I quote, ‘Just one taste, pretty please for a pretty pleasing girl.’” She looked up, studying my face. “Elliot, he wrote his phone number down. Nobody asks for a taste unless they want to fu—you know, get a ‘taste.’”

  I ran my hands through my hair, wondering why Andrew’s name seemed so unfamiliar to me. It still hurt, hearing those graphic words, the solicitation… had she hooked up with him?

  “He wasn’t even a student, he was two years into college by this time,” she elaborated.

  “Why would he write in her yearbook?”

  Veronica snapped her fingers. “Exactly the question I had. Because he wouldn’t have returned to the school unless there was a reason, right?” Pause. “Or, he saw her yearbook later, after she graduated. Like if he was inside her dorm room at college and thought, ‘I’m leaving my mark.’ Who knows? But what I do know is that the phone number belongs to his parents. Still. After all these years.”

  “I’m lost, I’ve never heard of this guy. Ever.” I rubbed my eyes, massaging them to get the feeling of deflation and exhaustion out. I had been so focused on Nathan, just like I had been convinced that Erik or some other jackass had sent the text about tonight. I wondered what else I might be missing. “So you’re saying Nathan had nothing to do with this? And what about Andrew’s parents’ phone number, I don’t see why it’s so important.”

  “No, Nathan had nothing to do with Andrew. And if he did, it was all Karen’s doing. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve seen this before.” She made sure I maintained eye contact with her. “A married woman loves another man, but she knows her husband suspects something. In this case, let’s say it was Andrew that she’s in love with—and I’m not saying that it’s him, not without checking a few more details anyway—and she knows you, her husband, is suspicious. After all, you’re trying to conceive, right? So what does she do? She doesn’t point you in Andrew’s direction. No way. She brings up her first lovers, she talks about the guy with the crooked dick who fucked her a little hard or whatever else she mentioned about Nathan. This way you’re distracted, just like you are now. All you see is Nathan, you focus on him, and while you’re looking over there,” she said, extending her left hand and waving it at me, “you’ve got no idea she’s having sex with Andrew over here.” She extended her right hand and waved it. “It’s pretty genius, in an overly simplistic way. Nathan was nothing but a human decoy.”

  I couldn’t help but frown at this form of deception. It would make Karen truly evil, worse than she already was. Not only for having an affair with some guy with a deep hairline who wanted to taste her, but for throwing Nathan in my path to throw me off the scent. But… “I was never suspicious of her. I never had any doubts about her commitment to me, our marriage.”

  Veronica sighed, her shoulders relaxing. “I know, Elliot. I don’t understand it either. I’ve seen the posts on her Facebook wall, I’ve looked into everything you’ve told me. There’s not a whole hell of a lot to suggest she was fucking anyone else, not now and not seventeen, eighteen, or even twenty years ago.” She flicked a finger at the open yearbook. “So I’m stuck with this stuff. I’m stuck with a guy who gave his parents’ phone number to her because he knew it would be the only way she could reach him, then and several years later when he’s changed phone numbers half a dozen times through college, and those early years while he established a career.”

  “Career. What does this Andrew Parsons guy do? For a living?”

  She shook her head. “He sells high-end, luxury used vehicles. And,” she added, grinning, “he still lives at home. Technically, it’s the apartment above his parents’ garage, but his old lady still brings him cooked meals, and it looks like she still does his laundry every week.”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head. “No, it’s not Andrew. Karen hated guys like him.”

  Veronica closed the yearbook and reached for another. It looked like the one from her sophomore year. She opened the page to one of the different-colored sticky notes and poked at a photo of another guy. “How about Edward Walton. Or Eddie?”

  “Eddie,” I breathed.

  “You know him,” Veronica said. “How?”

  Eddie’s name had come up a couple of times in the past, but not because he was a possible romantic interest of Karen’s. As one of her closest male friends at Pontiac Notre Dame, Eddie and Karen had spent a lot of time together. They hadn’t fooled around, except for a drunken kiss at some New Year’s Eve party, but she had assured me that the night in question had been the extent of their “involvement.”

  I believed her, too. Back then, I had no reason to suspect her to lie about any of that stuff. But now…

  “His name is all over her yearbooks,” Veronica said, almost as if accusing me of keeping his name from her. She flipped back to the graduating year, scrolled through the pages to one with a blue sticky note, and read, “’If I could pick one moment to last my lifetime, you know which one I would choose.’” She moved to another sticky note. “‘When you smile, the sun comes out.’ Really, Elliot, tell me about Eddie.”

  I rubbed my hands down my face, fully aware at how ridiculous it seemed that I could forget his name in the first place. So I told her, simply, “There’s no way Eddie is Lena’s father.”

  “Why not? You were so convinced Nathan Darien could’ve been the guy, but from a geographical perspective, it was absolutely impossible. No offense,” she said, shrugging dramatically, “but your Spidey senses aren
’t all that sharp.”

  I considered Veronica’s face for a long time, aware of the Never peeking out from the collar of her shirt. I wanted to ask about that, have her tell me the story behind the words inked into her skin. What does it mean? Why ‘Never let me…’? At last, I nodded. “They were best friends. They kissed once, but nothing evolved.”

  “Why not? I remember the first guy I kissed and, honestly, Elliot? I’d still take him up on dinner if he offered. And, if he didn’t look too bad, if he made me laugh a little and hadn’t lost all of his hair? Yeah, I’d probably let him fu—”

  “Eddie’s a junkie,” I blurted, coming up short of throwing my hands over my ears and singing lalalalalalalala, I can’t hear what you just said about the first guy you kissed! I made a mental note to find out about that first kiss of hers, though.

  “Oh.” Her face dropped like I had just sucker-punched her in the gut. “Bad?”

  I nodded. “Last I heard, he was squatting in the old train station. That was fifteen years ago when it wasn’t as pretty as it is now.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Oh. Yeah, that’s pretty bad, then.”

  “So you see, it’s unlikely he was clean a few years prior to that. You don’t get clean to impregnate some girl you might’ve had a crush on,” I said, nodding at the notes in the yearbook, “only to fall off the wagon and end up living there.”

  Veronica considered my argument, but I could tell she wasn’t entirely convinced. After a beat, she closed the yearbook, pasted a fake smile on her face, and admitted, “You’re probably right, Elliot. We’ll keep him low on the list and focus on Andrew first.”

  “Yeah, that sounds better.” I frowned. “Wouldn’t Lena have some kind of addictive personality traits if Eddie was her father? Some defects or something? I mean, the kid’s brilliant. Notwithstanding the teenage pregnancy, of course.”

  She smiled and, in Eddie’s words, the sun came out. “You’re probably right. Let’s not worry about him.” She reached out and squeezed my hand again. It felt like she understood me, recognized just how badly Karen had wrecked me. And it wasn’t just empathy or pity, it was a non-judgmental understanding that put me at ease for the first time since meeting her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “Next, I need you to do some work for me,” she said.

  “Whatever you want,” I promised. “I’ll do it.”

  “Go through your statements,” she said. “I need you to see what was happening in your life at that time. Bank statements, credit card statements, receipts if you have them—”

  “Receipts?” I shook my head, a little lost. “No, I don’t keep that stuff. I hate clutter,” I lied, remembering the all-nighter I spent tidying up the guestroom, the painful hours spent cleaning the living room the day before our first lunch date. I had spent all those hours getting rid of clutter (and possibly tossed a few of those receipts she was talking about, too). “I can find bank statements online, just like you did with Nathan by searching through the archives. But that would be the extent of it.”

  “Okay. Start there. See what was going on, live it like it’s happening.” She stared straight into my eyes. “Might not be easy, going back and reliving that time, happier times when you didn’t know what you know today.” She turned her palms face-up. “And you know, you might just see something you’re not expecting.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Elliot,” she sighed, reaching for my hands. I liked it when she touched me. A lot. “If she hadn’t told you about this alleged affair, you wouldn’t have known any better, would you?”

  “Then why did she tell me?” If not to clear her conscience before, then why?

  She crossed her arms as she allowed that big smile to sail across her face. “Exactly.”

  I gulped, allowing a defeated sigh to escape at last. “Exactly,” I repeated.

  “So, I guess that’s it,” she said, leaving me with a sense of finality. You’ve got your chores, now fuck off and get them done.

  It felt like my jaw had dropped open. I hated to admit it, but I really didn’t want our evening of brainstorming to end. So I clapped my hands and put that fake grin on my face, the one I had perfected over the years of showing up at a job I had never enjoyed. “I guess that’s it.”

  Veronica left her chair first and escorted me to the tight foyer where I had left my shoes. I bent over and tied the laces, slowly so I could extend my stay, but then my back started to hurt and I felt ancient compared to her.

  What was I thinking by coming here?

  When I stood up, I found her dangerously close to me. The space between us hummed with a tension that I was surely imagining.

  Get your shit together, old man

  But then she reached out with soft, clammy hands and grabbed my face, firmly but not aggressively, nothing too psychotic that would scare me away and have me running off with tears in my eyes. No, she used just enough force for me to know that she wanted this, for me to know that I hadn’t imagined this tension. To know that, at least right now, my shit was together.

  I surrendered to her, felt her body press against me—first her thighs against mine, then her hips, belly, and finally her chest, the feel of her breasts against me (in a different spot than where Karen’s reached) and finally, those lips. Veronica’s lips were full, moist, and as soft as cotton infused with a fuel that had me wanting her, all of her.

  Is this really happening?

  I didn’t wait for her tongue to prod for access; I parted my lips, and she purred. Our tongues danced. She tasted like coconut, and her intoxicating shampoo jolted me into action. I spun her around in my arms and pressed her against the nearest wall, grinding my erection against her. In this moment, I hated clothes. She moved her hips in a steady rhythm, with the same kind of conviction as mine, and wrapped her arms around my neck.

  “I want you,” she breathed in my ear.

  I wanted her more.

  So I lowered myself out of her grip, easing down onto my knees and reaching for the waist of her tight jeans. I slipped the buckle open and peeled the pants down, across those silk-soft thighs and straight off her ankles. Well, one of those ankles, anyway, the one with the foot that had words tattooed on it, words I couldn’t read—they may as well have been inked in Portuguese. I grabbed her ankle with the same firm, non-aggressive conviction that she had shown moments ago. And then I kissed that ankle, first with my lips, and then with my tongue.

  Fuck, I want to taste all of her.

  I kissed a path along the inside of her leg, guided her tattooed foot over my shoulder so she couldn’t escape so easily when I reached those black, lace panties. I tugged the underside of the fabric aside, exposing her core, and I realized that tonight had been planned. She had planned for this moment, had wanted me to get down on my knees long before I ever arrived—the shower, the black lace, walking me to the foyer to say goodbye.

  Aware of this, knowing she had hoped for this moment as much as I had, made me want her so much more. At last, I brought my face to her swollen, inviting lips and flicked my tongue across her clit while my fingers slid along her pussy, a soft and gentle pass at first. I glanced up once I discovered just how wet she was, and she stared down at me, biting down on her lower lip.

  “Elliot,” she said as I slipped my fingers inside her, softly but with enough of a rhythm that she started to move with me. Once, twice, three times, and when I finally knew for sure that her wetness cloaked my fingertips, I eased myself out and away from her, standing up as calmly as I could manage. Not easy for an old guy who hadn’t been laid in over a year.

  “Fuck me, Elliot,” she panted, locking her eyes on mine.

  I placed my fingers in my mouth and licked them clean of her juice. Veronica seemed to waver. When she blinked, her eyes stayed closed a little longer than an alert woman’s would. Like she was dizzy, sleepy, or semi-hypnotized.

  “Oh, fuck, Elliot,”
she breathed, climbing into my arms and wrapping her legs around my waist. “End of the hall.”

  I stepped away from the wall and carried her through the darkness to her bedroom, those tight pants dragging on the floor behind me. By the time I reached her room, my eyes had acclimatized to the darkness. Moonlight flooded into her room, providing just enough illumination to highlight the white sheets on her bed. It seemed to have an angelic, glowing quality, like clouds.

  I placed her carefully on her back, right at the edge of the bed, and reached down to strip her pants away completely. I noticed the ink on the outside of her other foot, but there wasn’t enough light to make out the words. As I eased myself on top of her, I noticed another sentence across her waist. So far, I had seen enough words printed across her body to compose a full paragraph, yet I hadn’t read any of them. If those words provided any kind of insight into who and what she was and believed, I was at a complete loss; the only clues she had provided me came off the tip of her tongue when it danced with mine. And those clues hinted at something I no longer believed in, not only with Veronica but with any woman.

  “Elliot,” she breathed, reaching down to my pants and unbuckling my belt. She moved a lot more efficiently than I had. Before I knew it, she was guiding my pants along the length of my legs, pushing them down with her feet.

  “I want another taste of you,” I said, rubbing my dick against her. I imagined her wetness soaking through the thin fabric of her panties and wondered if she’d leave her mark on the outside of my boxers, but then her toes curled around the elastic waist and pushed them down, freeing me.

  “I want you,” she begged, pulling herself up and pressing her lips to mine again. She moaned, reached down, and stroked me once, twice, and then angled me toward her. “Inside me.”

  “Just a taste,” I said, panting. “Please.”

  She flicked the tip of my dick along the same path that my fingers had traced in the foyer. That simple act ignited a fire inside me. I imagined my pupils turning red with hunger. I abandoned the need to have her on my tongue and started to lean forward, ready to enter her.