Chapter 2
The suspicion didn't arrive all at once. It came the way a leak comes, a stain on the ceiling you tell yourself was always that shape.
First it was the phone. Spencer had never been a phone-down man.
For years his phone had lived face-up on the kitchen counter like a beached fish, lighting up with patient-portal alerts and the group text from his college friends who still called each other by lacrosse nicknames at the age of forty-one.
Then sometime that winter the phone started living face-down.
It started coming to the dinner table face-down.
It started going to the bathroom with him, which I want to be clear is a thing I noticed only because the bathroom is the one place a married person of fifteen years assumes they finally have custody of the conversation, and you can't very well have a conversation with a man and a closed bathroom door and the fan running and the unmistakable knowledge that the fan is running so you can't hear him typing.
Then it was the gym. Spencer joined a gym.
Spencer, who for the entire run of our marriage had treated exercise as a thing that happened to other people, suddenly had a membership at the new place by the highway, the one with the climbing wall and the smoothie bar and the lighting that makes everyone look like they're being interviewed for a documentary about discipline.
He went at five in the morning. He bought the shorts.
He got an app that congratulated him on his streak, and he would show me the app, the little flame icon, fourteen days, twenty-one days, and I would say good for you, honey, and mean it, because what kind of monster doesn't want her husband to live a long time, and it did not once occur to me to wonder why a man would suddenly want to live a long time after a decade of treating his own arteries like a problem for future Spencer.
And then it was the smell. Not perfume. It was the absence of his smell.
The clove and latex would be gone and in its place would be nothing, scrubbed nothing, the smell of a man who has showered somewhere that is not his home before coming to his home, and I would put my face against his neck out of fifteen years of habit and find a stranger's idea of clean.
I told Dana none of this. Whatever happened after, it was not because I ran to my sister with a list. I sat on it. I am very good at sitting on things. I come from a long line of women who can sit on a thing until it suffocates, and I had a Peloton in the nursery to prove it.
But Dana is a forensic accountant, which means she gets paid to find the one number that's lying among a thousand numbers that are telling the truth, and she could read me like a balance sheet.
She came over on a Thursday to drop off a casserole dish she'd borrowed three years ago and never returned, which is the kind of errand Dana invents when she actually wants to look at your face, and she stood in my squeaking kitchen and looked at my face and said, "Okay. What is it."
"Nothing."
"You've reorganized the spice rack."
"It needed it."
"It's alphabetical, Kelly. You did the thing you do when you're upset where you make the world more orderly than it should be. You did the linen closet in October when the Hendersons got the divorce and it wasn't even your divorce."
I made us tea so I'd have something to do with my hands.
I told her about the phone, the gym, the smell, and I told it like a list of small funny things, with the deflection on, the way I tell everything, and Dana listened without the nose-exhale, which is how I knew she was taking it seriously, because the nose-exhale is for when she thinks I'm being dumb and silence is for when she thinks I'm in trouble.
"So Marsha was right," she said when I finished.
"Marsha is never right. Marsha being right would be a sign of the end times."
"The Residence Inn. Four o'clock."
"I don't know what that was. A meeting. A nap. Men nap now, it's a whole thing, there are articles."
Dana put down her tea. "Here's what we're going to do," she said, and I should have stopped her right there, because nothing good in my life has ever followed Dana saying here's what we're going to do, and yet I have followed her into every single one of them.
"We're going to find out. Not snoop, because snooping is what guilty people do and you have nothing to feel guilty about. We're going to run a test."
"A test."
"A clean experiment. One variable." She was already pacing, already pulling her hair up into the bun she does when she's billing someone six hundred dollars an hour in her head.
"We make a profile. A woman. Gorgeous, available, completely his type, and we send her at him, and we watch what he does.
If he blocks her, great. If he ignores her, even better.
You get to stop having this look on your face that you've had since I walked in, and I get to stop driving past the Residence Inn like a creep, which I have been doing, by the way, that's how much I love you, I've been casing a Residence Inn. "
"You can't catfish my husband."
"I can absolutely catfish your husband."
"It's a trap. It's entrapment. Isn't that a crime?"
"It's a crime when the cops do it. When your sister does it it's a wellness check.
" She picked her tea back up, satisfied, like the matter was settled, and the awful thing, the thing I have to own, is that some small ugly part of me was relieved, because I had been carrying the phone and the gym and the smell around like wet sand in my pockets and here was someone offering to weigh it for me.
Someone offering me a number. Either he's lying or he's not. One variable. Clean.
"What if he passes," I said.
Dana looked at me over the rim of her mug, and her face did something gentle, which Dana's face almost never does, so it landed harder than any speech. "Then I'll be wrong," she said. "And I will buy you the good lasagna every Sunday for a year and never say Residence Inn again as long as I live."
"In writing."
"In writing." She stuck out her hand and we shook on it over the casserole dish, the same way we'd shaken on everything since we were kids, the pinkie-and-thumb thing that I'm not going to describe because it's ours.
That was the moment I started doing something instead of stuffing my feelings, which felt, after a whole winter of folding, like the first real breath I'd taken in months.
We built her in Dana's car, in my driveway, because Dana said the house had bad energy for it and also because Dana wanted a cigarette and I don't allow cigarettes in the bad-energy house.
We named her Larissa, because Dana said all the dangerous women she'd ever met were named Larissa, and I said I'd never met a dangerous woman named Larissa, and Dana said that's because they get you before you learn their name.
We gave her a last name, Penn, off a pen in the cupholder.
We found photos of a woman Dana swore was an old college roommate who'd moved to Portugal and would never know, a brunette with the kind of smile orthodontists put in their before-and-after binders, and we gave Larissa a job in pharmaceutical sales because Dana said that explained the travel and the good clothes and the loneliness all at once, and we gave her a profile on every major social media site there is.
We spent a stupid amount of time on Larissa, the way you do when the work is also a way of not feeling the thing underneath the work.
Dana wanted her to be a vegan, and I said a vegan pharmaceutical rep was a contradiction a man like Spencer would actually clock, so we made her a woman who ran marathons and posted about it just enough to seem disciplined and not enough to seem boring, a woman with a rescue greyhound named Atticus because Dana said a greyhound, and a bio that didn't try too hard, three lines, dry, one joke, because the women who try too hard get ignored and the women with one good dry joke get answered within the hour.
We argued about the joke for twenty minutes in a parked car.
We landed on something about flossing, actually, a little dental pun, because I couldn't help myself and Dana said it was perfect, it was bait shaped exactly like his life, and I laughed and then I stopped laughing because I'd just helped my sister build the perfect woman to throw at my husband and the perfect woman had my sense of humor.
Then Dana's thumbs went still over the phone.
"You sure," she said.
Outside the car the streetlight came on, even though it wasn't dark yet, because the sensor on our street has been broken since the Hendersons' divorce, another thing nobody's fixed.
I looked at my house. The porch lights were on a timer Spencer had installed himself, very proud of it, the whole thing voice-activated, and at that exact second they came on too, warm and yellow, lighting up the wraparound porch and the sixteen tumblers I knew were drying in the rack inside, and the perfect chicken house, the perfect squeaking life, and I thought about my mother at a funeral finding out she'd been a guest in her own marriage.
"Send her," I said.