After every match they went out to breakfast. Starved, flushed from exertion, hair wet from the shower, Dinah felt curiously at ease. She never wore makeup to the club; Wayne had seen her naked face, the angry ghost of her birthmark, and didn’t care. Together they devoured eggs, bacon, stacks of pancakes. He was the first man she’d ever met who ate more than she did. Though he maintained a legal practice, he never seemed to work; he’d spend the whole day with her if she let him. She was glad for the company; since moving to the suburbs she was too often alone.
One morning he failed to show up for a match. He phoned her at the club: dead battery, he explained. She went to his house with jumper cables. They got his truck running and went immediately to bed.
She was overwhelmed by the strangeness of his body, its heat and smells. To her astonishment he talked to her as they touched. What do you like? What can I do?
At the time she had no answer. Since then they’d made love a hundred times; she had learned every inch of him, and of herself.
AFTERWARD THEY LAY in bed, moisture cooling their skin. Summer was ending, the morning light tinged with sadness.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you too.” She and Brendan had gone to the Outer Banks after all; she hadn’t seen Wayne in a month.
His arms tightened around her. “How was Cape Hatteras? Did Ken ever show?”
“He couldn’t make it. Busy, as usual.” She rolled onto her side, away from him. She would talk to him about Ken, but not in bed. It made her think too much about what she was doing.
“Sorry.” Wayne curled up behind her, wrapping her in heat. “Explain it to me again.”
She did. The thought of living on alimony repulsed her; yet independence seemed impossible. She had a half semester of college and a diploma from culinary school; the only decent-paying job she could get meant working nights and weekends. Brendan had gotten into enough trouble already. Without parental supervision there was no telling what he could do.
“At least now he has a good mother,” she said. “If we got divorced, he wouldn’t even have that.”
“That’s awfully convenient,” said Wayne.
She extricated herself from his arms. “It’s not convenient at all. That’s exactly my point.”
Wayne sat up. “I don’t get it. I don’t see how you can compromise yourself that way.”
Dinah stood, naked except for the neoprene brace on her ankle; she wore it for tennis and rarely bothered to remove it before they made love.
“Of course you don’t,” she said, pulling his T-shirt over her head. “You’ve never been married.”
The Godfrey Day School wasn’t the best private high school in Fairfax County, just the most expensive. Ken and Dinah had chosen it together, but only Dinah had been inside: for open houses, conferences with teachers, and, lately, meetings with the headmaster. “I don’t have time today,” Ken always said when she asked him to come along. Yet he made time for the things that interested him: work, social functions, predawn runs on the treadmill.
That October morning Dinah drove Brendan to school. She parked in a visitor’s space behind the library, where he was serving in-school suspension. A teacher had caught him in the woods behind the school, smoking cigarettes with another boy in the middle of the afternoon.
They sat in silence, the motor idling. A silent rain nicked the windshield.
“It’s stupid,” said Brendan. “Sitting there all day, doing nothing. It’s a waste of time.”
“You cut class,” said Dinah. “You must have known you’d get in trouble.”
“It wasn’t class. It was a pep rally.” Brendan stared out the window. “I don’t care about the football team. Why should I have to go to a pep rally?”
“It’s not just that,” said Dinah. “You were smoking. After everything we talked about.” That summer she’d noticed cigarette burns on one of his T-shirts; she’d lectured him for an hour about the dangers of nicotine. He’d sworn he’d never smoke again.
Brendan opened the passenger door. “Can Sean drive me home?”
Sean Guthrie was his only friend, a junior who’d just gotten his driver’s license. Dinah questioned Sean’s skill as a driver, but the school was only ten miles from home; she let Brendan ride with him as long as it was daylight.
“Okay,” she said.
He slammed the door and climbed the stairs to the library. Dinah watched him go, big and slow in his oversize jacket. In the past year his face had changed; his other features had failed to keep up with his new nose and chin. His haircut was just dreadful. Still, he was a handsome boy, if only he’d smile. If only he’d stand up straight.
Puberty had hit him suddenly and violently. First he’d grown long and gangly; then his body had expanded into his baggy clothes like rising dough. As a boy he had loved the beach; Dinah remembered him sturdy and compact, hurling himself into the waves and whooping with delight. Now he refused to swim at all. The last time she’d dragged him to the pool at the club, he wouldn’t take off his shirt.
In the space of a few months, he’d grown slow and sullen. He wore the same clothes day after day: tattered flannel shirts, scrubby T-shirts that hadn’t fit him in a year. Ken made pointed comments about his sudden weight gain: “Don’t they have gym class at that school?” and “How can one kid put away so much pasta?” It confirmed something Dinah had known for years, a basic truth about her husband’s character: he disliked unattractive people. He’d staffed his agency with handsome associates; his secretaries over the years had resembled fashion models. When their son was small and cute, he’d been a mildly attentive father. Now that Brendan was heavy and awkward, Ken wanted nothing to do with him.
Dinah backed out of the parking lot. The library windows glowed with fluorescent light. She imagined Brendan hunched over a book, pretending to read; leaning back in his chair, whistling. The day before he’d fallen asleep and the librarian had scolded him for snoring. He’d told Dinah this with visible pride, his new deep voice thick and phlegmy. It was the longest conversation they’d had in a week.
He’d become strange to her, a thing she’d never imagined could happen. All through his childhood they’d been uncommonly close. They’d lived in the District until he was ten; every Saturday she’d taken him to one of the museums on the Mall. He liked Natural History best, Air and Space a close second. He was fascinated by the names of things: dinosaurs, planets, the moving parts of planes and locomotives. Together they pored over encyclopedias, National Geographic, field guides to birds and trees and marine mammals. His curiosity was a shining thing, educating her in a way that her own schooling had not. She thought of him running through museum corridors, calling her to come and see the giant ant farm, the anacondas; the stuffed carrier pigeons, long extinct, dead and gone forever. Ken couldn’t spare the time to go along; he’d never seen the fossils or the primates or the miniature Spirit of St. Louis hanging in the Smithsonian. Back then he’d handled a few residential properties, million-dollar places in Georgetown. Every weekend he was busy showing houses.
Dinah turned off the highway and into Great Falls. They’d left Washington at Ken’s insistence; he had a fondness for grand houses, the larger and more ostentatious, the better. She’d resisted the idea of moving to the suburbs; she hated the lookalike houses, the neighborhood associations with their silly rules. It was the yard that sold her on the move: a wide expanse of grass, big enough for barbecues and baseball. Big enough for a growing family; they’d postponed a second child for too long.
The barbecues never happened. The commute lengthened Ken’s workday by two hours; Dinah bought a microwave oven to reheat his dinners. Alone in the big house, she found herself waiting: for Brendan to come home from school each day, for a second child to fill her life with chaos and purpose and joy. Then, finally, it happened. “I’m pregnant,” she told Ken, inarticulate with delight.
“No, you’re not,” he said calmly. Then he explained. He’d had a vasectomy years b
efore, just after Brendan was born. He hadn’t felt it necessary to tell her about it.
She never forgave him. He had lied to her; worse, he’d robbed her of everything in life she wanted. Her period came the following day, two weeks late. That summer she met Wayne Day on the tennis court.
Dinah pulled into the driveway. The phone was ringing as she opened the door. Later she’d remember that the ring seemed louder than usual, as though the call was unusually important. The voice at the other end was deliberately calm.
“Mrs. Kimble?” said the woman. “This is Great Falls Memorial Hospital. Your husband has had a heart attack.”
Dinah drove to the hospital in the rain, aware of every sound: the scrape of windshield wipers, rubber peeling off the wet pavement. She drove with spectacular correctness, signaling, shifting, lightly tapping the brake, as if by filling each second with small, impeccable action she could influence the outcome of the day.
The doors of the inpatient wing swung open with a flourish, as if they’d been waiting for her a long time. Inside, well-dressed women chatted in the sunny solarium. A large plate-glass window offered a view of the grounds: a man-made lake and spindly new maples; acres of fresh sod, smooth as carpet.
She gave her name at the desk; the nurse said something with a slow mouth, as if she were speaking to a deaf person. Dinah followed her down the corridor. She felt as though she were walking on water.
In the room an old man lay in the bed. His eyes were closed, his skin a delicate film over the blue veins of his forehead. He looked as if he’d been dead for a day. Dinah smiled helplessly at the nurse. Words eluded her, the polite words to explain that this was not her husband.
The man was breathing; the sheet rose and fell where it covered his chest. On the table next to the bed was a blue plastic container labeled with masking tape: KIMBLE. Dinah looked again at his face, the pale lips and sunken cheeks.
“We took his teeth out for him,” said the nurse. “They always look so different without them.”
“Yes,” said Dinah.
“Your father has a strong heart. He stabilized pretty quickly.”
“He’s my husband.”
The nurse colored. “Excuse me. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“That’s okay,” said Dinah. “You didn’t know.”
“There’s a pay phone down the hall, in case there’s any other family you need to notify.” The nurse glanced toward the bed. “He’s going to be out for a while, but you can sit here as long as you want.”
Dinah pulled a chair close to the bed. She sat there a long time, watching his chest rise and fall, rise and fall. Equipment surrounded the bed like anxious relatives. A clear plastic tube was taped to his hand; others disappeared into his nose and mouth. He’d been driving to a meeting when it happened, racing around the Beltway in morning traffic. She imagined him veering crazily into the breakdown lane, groping behind the seat for the mobile phone he kept in his briefcase.
She reached for his hand, the skin creased and spotted under the bright lights. It felt cool and light in hers, almost hollow. The cruel hospital light exposed the circles beneath his eyes, the lie that age is an attitude.
She touched his face, smoothed the sparse white hair at his temples. As a girl she’d known him dark-haired, in his vests and colorful shirts; she tried to remember him that way and found she could not. He had kept no photos of himself; there was nothing to remind her of what she’d long suspected and now knew: that she had only glimpsed the most alive part of him.
She laid his hand on the sheet. He would recover, the nurse had said so; but she would never forget this day: his chest rising and falling in the hospital bed, his secret false teeth in the plastic box, clearly labeled for her to see. He would wake up without them. She’d no longer be able to pretend not to know.
A luminous red line skated across the monitor, the mysterious workings of his invisible heart.
SHE DROVE home through rush-hour traffic, aware of the time. She was always there when Brendan came home from school; he would know immediately that something was wrong. On the seat beside her lay Ken’s briefcase, across the backseat, the suit he’d been wearing when it happened.
She’d phoned home twice from the hospital. Both times the machine had picked up; Brendan hated answering the phone. Standing in the bright corridor, she’d wondered, briefly, if there was anyone else she should notify. Ken hadn’t spoken of his other children in years. “They’re grown now,” he’d told Dinah once when she broached the subject. “They don’t need me.”
“They still need you,” she protested. “Of course they do.”
“Their whole lives they’ve been listening to lies about me. Lord knows what their mother’s told them.”
“They’re old enough now,” she persisted. “You can tell them the truth.”
Finally he’d gotten angry, one of the few times he’d ever raised his voice to her. “It doesn’t concern you, Dinah. Just leave it alone.”
She had done as he’d asked. All these years she’d left it alone.
She parked in the driveway and took Ken’s things into the house. Brendan’s door was closed; she heard the shower running in his bathroom.
She hung Ken’s suit in the bedroom closet, then opened his briefcase. Inside was his watch, a heavy gold Rolex she’d given him one Christmas. The watch had cost more than their monthly mortgage payment, but it was the only thing he’d wanted. It seemed ridiculous to pay for such a gift from their joint account; but she had no money of her own. She hadn’t worked since before they were married.
She put the watch aside and opened his wallet—plain black calf-skin, smooth as wax. Inside were receipts, credit cards, a crisp hundred-dollar bill. No photos of her or Brendan; she’d given him a framed one for his office but had never seen it on his desk. A scrap of paper fluttered to the floor. It had been torn from the corner of an envelope, a return address label in ornate script.
JODY KIMBLE, it read. 2323 BEECHWOOD TERRACE, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA.
Don’t do this,” said Wayne. “You don’t have to do this.”
They sat in his truck in the country club parking lot, still dressed for tennis. Risky, but Dinah couldn’t think of a better place. She didn’t trust herself to go to his house.
“I can’t live this way,” she said. “I’m not this kind of person.”
“You’re just feeling guilty,” he said.
“Of course I feel guilty. He almost died.” Outside, the autumn leaves were at their peak. A plane buzzed overhead. Dinah imagined how it must look to the pilot, the hills spattered with red as if there’d been a terrible disaster.
“I have to get back,” she said. Ken had an appointment with his cardiologist in an hour; she’d promised to drive him to the clinic.
“Wait.” Wayne touched her shoulder. “I still want to see you. Can’t we at least play tennis?”
“Maybe when things settle down.” Her shoulder burned under his hand. “After the holidays.”
“What are you going to do?” said Wayne. “You can’t stay with him forever.”
She thought of Ken the way she’d left him: lying on the living room couch, wrapped in his bathrobe like an old man. She had built her life around him; leaving him now would make her the sort of person she didn’t wish to know.
“He’s my husband,” she said.
“Come on.” Wayne’s eyes sought hers. “You’re miserable. You’ve wasted enough years on that selfish old bastard.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Am I wrong?”
She looked away, at the cars racing along the highway.
“You can’t divorce him; you’ve got a kid to think about. Fine. I accept that.” Wayne reached for her hand. “I just want everything the way it was before.”
“I do too,” said Dinah. “But it isn’t.” She opened the passenger door.
“I’ve made mistakes,” she said softly. “I married the wrong person. But you can’t undo fifteen years.”
“He’s family,” said Dinah.
Like every Saturday, Brendan slept in. When he came downstairs his mom was fixing his father’s lunch on a tray.
“Why don’t you go watch TV with your dad?” she said. “He could use some company.”
“He’s watching the news. I hate the news.”
His mom sighed. “Go sit down and talk to him for five minutes. Ask him how he’s feeling. Is that too much to ask?”
Brendan went into the living room. His father sat on the couch in a robe and pajamas, flipping through the channels.
“There’s nothing on,” he grumbled. He flipped past music videos, pro wrestling, a Mafia movie Brendan had seen twice but would gladly watch again. They had eighty-nine channels. There was plenty to watch.
“How are you feeling?” Brendan asked.
His father eyed him suspiciously. “How do you think I’m feeling? I can’t just sit here staring at the television all day. I don’t know how you do it.” He tossed aside the remote. He had switched back to the all-news channel. “Tell your mother to come in here.”
“Why don’t you just whistle?” Brendan muttered.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Brendan went into the kitchen. His mom was counting out pills from a bottle and placing them on the tray.
“He wants you to go in there.”
His mom looked up. “Coming,” she called out. And of course, she went.
She had changed. Since the heart attack, she waited on his father hand and foot; she came whenever he called her, like a trained poodle. His father didn’t even appreciate it; he never said “please” or “thank you.” If Brendan’s manners were as bad as his father’s, he’d never hear the end of it.
She seemed not to mind the old man’s rudeness; she cut him too much slack, in Brendan’s opinion. Though of course she cut Brendan slack too. She didn’t care that he was fat. She called him queer things like strong and handsome, which was embarrassing but in a way nice because you could tell she meant it. It made him wonder about her, if she was blind or nuts or just needed to get out more; but hey, she was his mom. He supposed it was because she loved him.
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