Читать книгу The Other Wife - Shirley Jump - Страница 13

To say Susan was surprised to see me on her Rhode Island doorstep the next morning would have been an understatement. She lived a little over an hour away from our house in Newton, in a small ranch with a magnolia in the front yard, which was starting to bloom in the bright early April sunshine.

When she saw me, Susan teetered on her high-heeled boots, enough that I thought she was going to faint. Then Harvey sprang out of my arms and into her house, and Susan recovered her wits.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“Reverse lookup of your phone number in Dave’s cell. The Internet is a dangerous thing.”

She nodded, as if that all made sense, then opened her door wider. “Want to come in?”

“Actually,” I said, drawing in a breath, “I want you to come out. And go to Tennessee with me.”

She blinked. Behind her, Harvey was running in circles around the perimeter of her braided rug, apparently seeing its endless oval as a challenge. “A road trip? To Tennessee?”

“Did you know about Annie?” I asked.

She thought a second, running the name through a mental phone book. “No.”

“Well, it seems she might be Dave’s wife, too. Meaning Mrs. Reynolds number three.”

“He had another? Besides you and me?” Susan gripped the doorjamb. Now I really did think she was going to faint. I knew those feelings, having had them myself quite recently.

“Listen, why don’t we sit down, have a drink and talk about it? I’ve already had time to digest this.” I paused. “More or less. But I could still use a stiff one. Or two. Or ten.”

Susan nodded, stepped back and turned to go down the hall, leaving me to follow. I shut the door, left Harvey to his circles and walked into Susan’s bright yellow kitchen. It was a nice room, small but tidy, decorated in sunflowers and navy accents. The kind of kitchen I imagined a neighbor having. The kind of kitchen where I could see myself sitting down for a cup of coffee on a Thursday morning and gossiping about the guy across the street who mowed his lawn in his Speedo.

It wasn’t, in other words, what I had expected from Dave’s 36D wife.

“I have rum. And…tequila,” she said, searching a cabinet above the Kenmore stove.

“Do you have Coke?”

She shook her head. “Diet Pepsi.”

“It’ll do.” Heck, I would have had the rum straight, but I figured Susan didn’t know me well enough to see me get drunk, something I’d done more in the past few days than in my entire life. After all that had happened, I was beginning to see the upside of staying perpetually toasted.

She poured two rum and Diet Pepsis over ice, then returned to the table, sliding one in front of me. Apparently Susan also wasn’t paying attention to the clock when it came to having a respite from the shock and awe campaign executed by Dave’s funeral.

I drank deeply, then pushed the glass away and folded my hands over each other. Susan was one of the keys to what had happened with Dave, to why he had married another. I needed her, even though I didn’t want to.

“The way I see it,” I began, “both of us have been screwed, pardon the pun, by Dave.”

She nodded. Slowly.

“And I want to know why. I was married to him for fifteen years.”

Susan raised a palm, wiggled her fingers. “Five here.”

I swallowed that fact, allowing it to hit my stomach and churn in the empty pit with the rum. Five years. That meant he’d married her the year I was in the hospital having my appendix removed. I tried to think of when Dave had been gone then, but my brain had become a fuzzy mess of dates and lies.

For a second, I thought of telling Susan the whole thing was a huge mistake. Thanks for the rum, but I gotta go.

Then I realized leaving wasn’t going to do anything but put me back to square one, and instead I stayed where I was, taking another gulp of my drink from a glass decorated with flowers around the edge, and tried to regain some kind of normalcy.

Ha. There wasn’t any of that here. What I had was a whole lot of questions and a piano-playing dog who kept looking at me with expectant eyes, as if I was supposed to do some amazing trick, too.

“Well,” I began again, trying to drum up the courage to press forward, to force myself out of the comfort zone where everything was a known quantity. “I don’t know about you, but I want some answers.”

Susan shook her head. “I—”

“Don’t say you don’t want to know.” I waved the glass at her, the ice clinking in the emptiness. “Because you will. An hour from now, a day from now, you’ll wonder why. You’ll look in the closet and see his shoes—”

Oh, God, his shoes were under her bed, too. In her closet. Was this where his favorite blue shirt had gone? The one I’d torn the closet apart looking for last May? Or the yellow striped tie I told him I hated that he’d never worn again in my presence?

I clutched the glass tighter, to keep myself from running to her bedroom to peek and see how much of my husband was here.

“And you’ll want to know,” I went on, pushing the words past my lips, “because you’re some kind of masochist who hates to have a mystery unsolved.”

“I kind of like mysteries,” Susan said, a bright smile on her face, as if I’d just handed her a new Nancy Drew.

“Work with me, Susan.” I bit off the aggravation in my voice. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to know. About Annie. About where he went when he wasn’t with you.” I swallowed. “Or me.”

She toyed with her still-full glass. Silence descended over the kitchen, seeming to darken the bright, pretty room. “I left him that day, you know.”

“Yeah, the EMTs told me.”

“We had a fight,” she said.

I tried not to let on how much it weirdly pleased me to hear that he and Susan had had a fight.

“We had the fight after we…well, you know.” A faint sheen of red filled her cheeks, a surprise in this woman who seemed so Manhattan. “Anyway, I left and took the train back to Rhode Island, figuring he’d catch up with me at home. If I had known—” Her voice caught on a sob and held the last syllable. “I’m sorry, Penny.”

She was apologizing to me for leaving my husband. For not being there when he’d had a heart attack. She made it impossible to hate her. “I’m sorry for you, too.”

She nodded, then picked up the tumbler, knocked back half the drink and slammed the small glass back onto the wooden surface. Brown liquid sloshed over the rim. “You’re right. I want to know, damn it. I loved that man and I want some answers, too.”

To hear her say she loved him hit me in the gut, hard. I rose, poured myself another drink—skipping the cola this time—and the feeling went away. A little.

Harvey the Wonder Dog trotted into the kitchen, his nose to the floor, looking for scraps, or maybe another rug to circle.

“I say we take him,” I said, gesturing to the Jack Russell terrier, “to this doggie show and ask everyone there about Dave. They knew him, they know Harvey.”

“And if they won’t tell us anything?”

I grinned at my strange new ally and raised my glass. “We’ll break out the rum.”

As she toasted my glass with her own, I had a flashing nightmare of the two of us ending up on Jerry Springer, telling our tale of woe while Harvey did tricks in the background.

Surely, it wouldn’t come to that.

I’d go on Oprah before I’d ever sink to Springer.

Maybe.