“She needs to settle down,” Julia said and sniffed. “She’s getting a little too old for all this running around.”
“She’s thirty-six. That’s hardly old.”
“I was married with two children by that age. So were you,” Julia added. “Okay, I’d better go.” She turned to kiss her sister quickly on the cheek, the slightest brushing of her lips, then she rubbed her thumb under Kathy’s right eye. “You look exhausted. You’ve got bags under your eyes. I’ll bring you some under-eye cream the next time I’m over.” She let herself out of the door and hurried down the path, her footsteps crunching slightly on the frost.
Kathy stood in the doorway, arms wrapped tightly around her chest, and waited while her sister slowly and carefully backed the big SUV out of the drive. Only when Julia straightened the car on the road and revved away, wheels spinning on icy patches, did she step back and shut the door. The hallway was so cold she could see her breath frosting in front of her face.
Brendan and Theresa were in the family room, sprawled in that peculiarly loose-limbed way that only young children and teens can manage, watching TV. CBS was running a Big Brother Christmas Special.
“Did you get your homework done?”
They both grunted.
“Any word from your father?”
“He called earlier,” Brendan volunteered, “but said he’d try you on the cell.”
“I spoke to him.”
“I hope he gets home soon,” Theresa said. “There’ll be snow later.”
“If it gets too bad out, he might stay in the city,” Kathy said, more to reassure her daughter than to repeat the lie he’d told her.
Theresa nodded without looking up. “Good. That’d be better. Safer.”
Kathy went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. Robert was a good father, she had to admit. The children wanted for nothing . . . except perhaps a father. Much of the rearing had been left to her. He had so rarely been home in the early years of their marriage; he’d often gone to work in the morning before the children awoke, and had returned late in the evening when they were in bed and asleep. They only really got to see him on weekends. And even then he was invariably working. Kathy put down her glass and began to clear up the take-out bags and foil containers. She gathered up the plates and opened the dishwasher. The children had a good relationship with him now though....
She stopped and straightened. Did they? Did they have a good relationship? What constituted a good relationship? she wondered.
He bought them everything they wanted. Christmas was no longer special, because he gave them presents out of season and often came home with pieces of jewelry for Theresa and video games for Brendan. They both idolized him; how were they going to react when . . . no, not when, just if. At the moment, it was still if.
But how much time did he give them?
She began to slot the plates into the dishwasher. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent time with them, when he’d simply taken them out with him for the sheer pleasure of their company. The last movie they’d been to see as a family had been . . . She shook her head; she couldn’t remember. He’d missed Brendan’s recitals and Theresa’s games because he’d been working.
Or had he?
Again, the poisonous, insidious thought curled around the question. Had he been genuinely working, or had he been playing with his mistress? Every excuse he’d ever given her was now suspect.
On impulse, she picked up her phone where she had tossed it on the table and dialed his cell. His voice mail picked up immediately; he must have the cell turned off. She went back to her purse and pulled out the sheet of paper with Stephanie Burroughs’s details on it. Then she picked up the phone and was just about to dial the number when she realized that her number would show up on Burroughs’s screen. Sitting at the kitchen table, she spent ten minutes trawling through the phone’s menu looking to switch off Send Own Number. When she’d set it, she phoned her own home to check the caller ID. Private Number showed on the screen. She had a few more sips of wine, and then she called Stephanie Burroughs’s number. It rang and rang. She was just about to hang up when it was answered.
“Hello.”
The voice was crisp, professional, brusque even. There was the tinkling of a piano in the background, the hum of conversation, a clinking of glass. A bar or a restaurant.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Is this Becky?”
“No, you have the wrong number.”
“Rebecca McFeel—” Kathy began, but the phone had already gone dead. Stephanie had killed the call. “Now what exactly did that achieve?” Kathy asked aloud.
“Mom, you’re talking to yourself again.” Theresa padded into the kitchen. She went straight to the cupboard and pulled out a box of cornflakes.
“I thought you had food delivered.”
“I did. But that was hours ago. I’m famished.” Theresa filled a bowl to the brim with cornflakes, then added milk. She glanced sidelong at her mother. “Did you get everything you were looking for in town?”
“Not everything,” Kathy said truthfully. “I made a start.” She turned to look at her daughter. “What do you want for Christmas?”
“I gave my list to Dad.”
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
Theresa concentrated on her cereal.
“Would that be because I might have a problem with some of the items on the list?” Kathy asked.
Theresa shrugged, a mere shifting of the shoulders.
“But you know your dad will get them for you.”
“It’s just one or two small things,” Theresa said defensively.
“You mean one or two pages of small things. I’ll talk to your father about them.”
“He said he’d get them for me.”
“I’ll have a look first.”
“Don’t be mean, Mom. Dad said he’d get them; he had no problem with the list!” She gathered up her bowl and padded back into the family room, ignoring the no-food-in-the-family-room rule. Kathy was too tired, too drained to argue. She could hear Theresa speaking urgently to her brother, no doubt explaining how mean their mother was going to be over the Christmas presents.
They had this battle every year. Theresa would produce a list of just about everything she had seen on TV, on the Internet, found in a magazine, or that her friends had talked about. Kathy would then edit the list down to one or two big presents, plus some small stocking fillers. The trick was always to try and make sure both kids were opening approximately the same number of presents on Christmas morning. More recently, however, Theresa, who was her father’s pet, had discovered that if she asked him directly for something, he would more often than not just get it for her. Last year there had been a major upset on Christmas Eve, when Kathy discovered that Robert had bought Theresa just about everything on her list. She’d had sixteen presents to unwrap. Brendan had had eight.
Robert had promised her that it would be different this year. Obviously he’d forgotten.
Kathy tidied up the kitchen, put her wineglass in the dishwasher, and filled the coffeemaker for the morning. Robert had started to forget lots of things: points on his license, a new credit card account . . . and the fact that she was still his wife.
“Time for bed.”
“Ma.”
“Aw, Mom!”
Kathy crossed the floor in two quick strides and shut the TV off. “Bed. You’ll be on Christmas break soon. You can stay up late then.” She picked cushions off the floor and tossed them back on the chairs. “And, Theresa, when I call you in the morning, get up. If you miss the bus I’m not driving you to school.”
Theresa uncoiled from the chair and marched out of the room, leaving her cereal bowl on the floor. Kathy was going to call after her, but Brendan hopped up and grabbed the bowl and spoon. “I’ll get it.”
“Thanks.”
“Is everything all right?”
She glanced up, struck by the note of concern in his voice. He lo
oked so much like his father. She’d first met Robert when he was in his late twenties, and she had worked for him before they had started dating. He’d been handsome then—still was, she supposed—and Brendan had inherited his father’s dark good looks. He was seventeen now and had had several on-and-off-again girlfriends. She’d discouraged them, trying to get him to concentrate on his studies. The problem was that Robert had already promised him a place in the company when he left school. Brendan had then decided that there was little point in breaking his back studying, inasmuch as he already had a job to go to. Since then, his grades had slackened off. Too many C’s, a couple of D’s. Before he’d talked to his father it had been mainly B’s and a few A’s.
“Mom?” Brendan asked again.
“I’m fine. Tired. Too much to do with Christmas coming.”
Brendan nodded, though he didn’t look convinced. “When’s Dad getting back?”
Kathy shrugged. “Who knows? I don’t.” Something in her voice betrayed her. She caught the frown that appeared on her son’s face and added quickly, “It’s a busy time for him, wining and dining clients. So much of the business he gets comes from networking. He could be home at any time.”
Brendan nodded. But she could tell that something was disturbing him. She opened her mouth to ask, then shut it again. She didn’t want to run the risk of upsetting her son, and maybe have him go to Robert.
“Go to bed, honey. I’ll lock up down here.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, and no computer games,” she added. “It’s late enough.”
She waited until she heard Brendan’s door click shut before she moved around the house, turning off lights and locking doors. She flicked on the porch light, then stood in the hall watching isolated flakes of snow drift past the cone of light.
She wondered if her husband was on the way home to her, or if he was going to spend the night with his mistress.
CHAPTER 12
It was close to two thirty in the morning when Robert finally returned home.
Kathy wasn’t asleep. She’d tried reading for a little while—the new Patricia Cornwell—but she gave it up when she discovered that she’d read the same paragraph at least half a dozen times and it still didn’t make any sense. Dropping the book on the floor by the side of the bed, she’d flicked off the light, then climbed out of bed, pulled back the heavy curtains, and stood by the window, staring down the road. Watching. Waiting. Though she was not entirely sure what she was watching or waiting for.
For the first few years of their marriage, she had never gone to bed until Robert returned home. As the clock ticked on beyond midnight, she’d feel her tension increase as she began to imagine the worst: a drunk driver, a car accident, a carjacking. She couldn’t remember when she had stopped waiting up for him. When he had started staying out regularly, she supposed, when it became the norm rather than the exception.
Finally, chilled through to the bone, she had climbed back into bed and had lain on her back, staring at the patterns cast by the streetlights on the ceiling. She was trying to make sense of the last two days, but she couldn’t.
It kept coming back to questions, with one question dominating all others: Why?
Why would Robert have an affair?
Was it something she’d done? Something she hadn’t done?
Why?
Kathy dozed off with the question buzzing in and out of her consciousness.
The dream was formless, incidents from eighteen years of marriage running together into an endless sequence. In the dream she was always alone, alone in the house, alone with the kids, shopping alone . . . alone, alone, alone.
Weekends alone, weekdays alone, vacations alone.
Alone, alone, alone.
Kathy came awake with a start, suddenly snapping from disturbing images to consciousness.
Even fully asleep she’d heard a key turn in the lock. She was out of bed and at the window before she realized what she was doing. A curious mixture of emotions—relief and disappointment—flooded through her when she saw Robert’s car in the driveway. Then she slipped back into the warm bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin.
Alone.
Listening to Robert moving around downstairs, trying and failing to be silent, she realized that the abiding emotion of the dream had remained with her. And it overpowered her.
She felt lonely.
Where had the boyfriend she’d married gone? What had happened to the man with whom she’d shared everything? Where was the man she’d fallen in love with?
A flush of emotion brought tears to her eyes. She blinked furiously, then brushed her fingers roughly across her face, wiping away the moisture. And suddenly, she was able to identify that empty feeling she’d been living with for the past few years.
She was lonely. She was just so, so lonely.
She filled her time—she took classes, she volunteered—but there was always something missing. She had the children to keep her busy, friends to keep her company, her sisters to confide in and fight with . . . but it still didn’t fill the emptiness.
She heard Robert start up the stairs.
And then she knew that if he walked away and left her in the morning, she’d miss him certainly, miss his presence in the house . . . but probably not much else. He’d withdrawn from her a long time ago, little by little. She was only realizing it now.
Would his departure make any real differences to her life, she asked herself? She didn’t even have to think about the answer, and it burned in her stomach. If he left, it would make very little difference to their lives.
And that realization disturbed her more than any other.
“I wasn’t sure if you were coming home tonight.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t wake me,” Kathy said.
She watched the vague outline of him pull off his tie and fling it in the general direction of the dressing-table chair. She heard the silk hiss as it slid to the floor.
“I only had a couple of drinks, and the roads weren’t too bad.” He pulled off his jacket, folded it over the chair, and began to unbutton his shirt.
“I called earlier.”
“I didn’t get it.”
“It went straight to your voice mail.”
“We went to the Union Oyster House—bad place to get a signal.”
Your precious girlfriend had a signal, she wanted to add, but didn’t. Instead she asked carefully, “How’s Jimmy?”
“Jimmy’s fine. He sends his love.”
“I’m surprised he remembered me.”
“Of course he remembered you.”
“So you didn’t get into Top of the Hub?”
Robert’s white shirt reflected brightly in the streetlights. He peeled it off and dropped it on top of his jacket. “I’m going to call and complain in the morning. They said there wasn’t a reservation.”
“That’s strange. Maureen usually doesn’t make mistakes like that.” Maureen had manned the front desk of R&K from the very beginning, and Robert always said employing her was the best decision he had ever made. She’d started out in the City of Boston Film Bureau as a production assistant, and had spent twenty-five years there before she went freelance. She knew just about everyone in the business.
“It may have been the temp who made the booking. Maureen’s out sick at the moment.”
“You never told me!”
“Oh, I’m sure I did.”
She allowed a snap of anger in her voice. “You did not! I most certainly would have remembered. I worked with Maureen, remember?” For a long time Maureen had been their entire staff, and the two women had worked closely together. When Kathy’s mother had died suddenly and unexpectedly eighteen months earlier, leaving the three sisters distraught, Maureen had made all of the funeral arrangements. “How long has she been out sick?”
“I dunno. Three weeks . . . four,” Robert mumbled.
“And you never told me
!” Her voice rose, and she lowered it again with a deliberate effort. “You never told me. I would have called her, visited her.”
“I’ve been busy. I must have forgotten.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Chest infection or something. Doctor’s note says she won’t be back until January. And it’s the busiest time of year,” he added almost petulantly.
“You make it sound as if she got sick deliberately. I can’t remember the last time she was ill. Can you?” she accused.
Robert didn’t answer. Naked, he stepped into the bathroom, pulled the door closed, and clicked on the light. She heard the buzz of his electric toothbrush. That was another of his tricks: When he was confronted with a question or situation where he knew he was in the wrong, he simply would fail to answer, or he’d change the subject.
“Who’s the new receptionist?” Kathy asked when he came out, flooding the room with light, temporarily blinding her.
“A temp. Illona. Russian, I think. I got her from an agency. She’s very good.”
Kathy had used the few moments while Robert was in the bathroom to cool her temper. She had been close to losing it when she’d learned that her friend Maureen was out sick. For a moment, the conversation had threatened to drift, and she needed to keep it on track.
“Maybe Illona made the reservation?” she suggested.
Robert pulled out a fresh pair of pajamas and tugged on the bottoms. “Maybe. But it was about four weeks ago; I’m pretty sure Maureen was still around then. It’s not a big deal. I’ll complain to the restaurant in the morning, if I get a chance.”
“Do you want me to do it for you?” she asked, expecting him to say no.
He shrugged into the top. “That’d be great. Table for two, Friday night, seven thirty, in either my name or Jimmy Moran’s. I used his name too just in case he got there first.”
Robert got into bed, wafting icy air under the sheets. He leaned across and kissed her politely on the cheek, and she caught a hint of alcohol on his breath. Nothing else. No perfume, no scents of soap or shampoo that would indicate that he’d recently had a shower.
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