Chapter 4
Jacobs Family Dentistry was Spencer's whole heart in drywall form. He'd designed it himself, or rather he'd hired a consultant who specialized in "the dental patient journey" and then taken credit for it, which is a fine summary of Spencer in general.
The waiting room had the aquarium, two hundred gallons built into the wall, lit blue, full of fish that cost more than my first car, and one of those fish was a yellow tang named, by the staff, Bitey, because Bitey had killed every other yellow tang Spencer ever introduced and now ruled the tank alone like a tiny aquatic dictator.
There was a coffee station with a machine that made foam.
There were magazines from this decade. There was a mural of a sunrise over a beach with the practice's slogan painted across the sky in a font that cost four hundred dollars, "Cedar Hollow's Brightest Smiles," and underneath it, in the same gold script, "Dr. Spencer Jacobs, DDS. "
And there was Brielle.
I'd met Brielle plenty of times, in the way you meet your husband's staff, at the Christmas party, at the open house when they opened the new building, in passing when I dropped off his forgotten lunch.
She was the dental hygienist who'd become the office manager who'd become, somewhere along the way, the person Spencer meant when he said "we" about the practice.
She was younger than me by maybe eight years, which is the worst possible amount, close enough that you can't dismiss her and far enough that you feel it.
She had teeth, of course. Everyone at a dental practice has aggressive teeth, it's like a hair salon where everyone's blowout is a threat, but Brielle's were spectacular, lit-from-within white, and she had the trick of smiling with her whole face, and patients loved her, and Spencer's online reviews mentioned her by name.
"Brielle made my root canal a joy," one of them said, which I'd read once and thought was a typo, and was not.
I went to the office on a Friday in April to bring Spencer the lunch he'd left on the counter, a sad Tupperware of the leftover branzino, because I'd kept some from the no-prices place and he'd forgotten it, and I want it understood that I was not snooping.
I was being a wife.
I was being the kind of wife who drives across town with a Tupperware because her husband forgot, the kind of wife I'd recommitted to being three weeks after Larissa Penn taught me to trust again.
The waiting room was empty except for Bitey patrolling his blue kingdom.
Brielle was at the front desk with her hair in the careful messy way that takes longer than neat, and she looked up when the door chimed, and for a quarter of a second, before her face arranged itself, I saw her see me and not be glad.
It was fast. She covered it instantly with the whole-face smile. But I'd spent a winter learning to read a face for the half second before it composes, and I'd had a husband pass a test, and I knew what a face looked like the moment before it lies.
"Kelly! Hi! Oh my gosh, you didn't have to come all this way.
" She was already coming around the desk, hands out for the Tupperware, intercepting me, and I noticed that, the intercepting, the way she moved to take the lunch from me at the desk so I wouldn't carry it back to his office myself.
"I'll run it back to him, he's between patients.
You look amazing, is that a new lipstick? Dr. Jacobs is so lucky."
Dr. Jacobs. Not Spencer. She called him Dr. Jacobs to my face the way you'd say a stranger's name, very crisp, very proper, and that was the first thing, the very first thing, a tiny wrong note I filed away without filing it, the way you'll remember the song that was playing during a car crash without knowing yet that there's going to be a crash.
"I'll just say hi," I said, and I went around her, because I am taller than Brielle and I had a Tupperware and I wanted to see my husband, and she made a small sound and followed me down the hall past the operatories with their TVs on the ceilings (another patient-journey thing, you watch HGTV while a man drills your molar), and I came to Spencer's private office, and the door was open, and Spencer was sitting at his desk laughing into his phone, and on his desk, next to the framed photo of me from our wedding, was a coffee from the foam machine with a heart drawn in the foam, gone flat now, brown around the edges, and a little folded note tucked under the saucer that I did not read because I am not a snoop.
He looked up. "Hey! What are you doing here?" Glad to see me. Genuinely. That's the part that broke me later, that he was always, every time, genuinely glad to see me. "Is that the branzino?"
"You forgot it."
"You're a lifesaver." He took it, kissed my cheek, and Brielle hovered in the doorway, and I watched my husband and his office manager not look at each other, the specific not-looking of two people who have spent a lot of energy on where their eyes go, and I told myself I was being insane.
That the test had come back clean, eleven seconds, that I was a happy woman who had nearly ruined everything with suspicion and was not going to do it again over a coffee with a heart in the foam, because Brielle probably drew hearts in everyone's foam, it was probably a brand thing.
"Who was on the phone?" I said.
"Supply rep. We're switching whitening systems." Smooth.
No flick of the eyes. "The new pro-grade stuff, the Lumi line, it's incredible, takes you to a true white in one session.
I'm going to roll it out to the staff first, let them be the before-and-afters, walking billboards.
" He grinned at Brielle, a colleague's grin, a boss's grin.
"Brielle's our first guinea pig. She's getting the full treatment Thursday. "
"Lucky me," said Brielle, with the whole face.
On my way out I stopped at the front desk, because my car keys had migrated to the bottom of my bag the way keys do, and while I dug for them I looked at Brielle's desk, not snooping, just looking, the way your eyes go somewhere while your hands are busy, and I saw the small ecosystem of a person who lives at a job.
A travel mug. A phone charger run to the wall.
A little potted succulent. And a second coffee, a foam-machine coffee, sitting at her elbow with a heart drawn in it, identical to the flat one going brown on Spencer's desk down the hall, except hers was fresh, the foam still high, the heart still crisp, which meant somebody had made two, at the same time, and carried one back, and kept one here.
I found my keys and I said thanks again and I did not let my face do anything at all, because I'd learned that too. I’d learned to keep a face still while you do math, and the math I was doing was very simple.
Two coffees. Two hearts. One of them already going flat in front of the wedding photo, and one of them fresh at her elbow, and not a single thing in the whole bright office that I could have pointed at and called proof, just two hearts in two cups, and a quarter second of a face not being glad to see me.
I drove home. I unloaded the dishwasher.
I put the sixteen tumblers away, and somewhere in the middle of the eighth tumbler I stopped, with the glass in my hand, and I thought about the heart in the foam, gone flat and brown, and the note I didn't read.
I thought about the way she'd moved to take the lunch so I wouldn't walk it back myself, and her calling him Dr. Jacobs, and the half second before her face arranged itself, and I put the tumbler down very carefully on the squeaking counter so I would not throw it.
I did not call Dana, because Dana had bought me a year of lasagna on a promise that she was wrong.
Instead I did the thing I do. I made the world more orderly.
I reorganized the pantry. I labeled the canisters.
I wiped down the baseboards in the hall with a microfiber cloth and the lemon spray, on my knees, in the good light, and the whole time a sentence went around in my head on a loop, the way a song does, except it wasn't a song, it was the thing Dana said the day she walked in with the casserole dish.
You go around with your eyes shut and a mop in your hand.
I was on my knees with a cloth. My eyes were open. And I understood, in the cold clean way you understand a number that's lying among numbers telling the truth, that the test we'd run had measured the wrong thing.
We'd asked whether Spencer would chase a beautiful stranger.
We'd never asked whether he was already chasing someone he saw forty hours a week, someone who drew hearts in his coffee foam and called him Dr. Jacobs to my face so the word "Spencer" could stay private, stay hers, a word she only used when I wasn't in the building.
I finished the baseboards. I made the chicken. He came home at six forty, smelling like nothing, scrubbed clean, and he said the chicken smelled great, and he meant it.
I smiled at him across the squeaking island and decided, very calmly, that I was going to find out. Not run a test. Not send a Larissa. Tests are for people who want to be told they're wrong.
I wanted to know.
There's a difference, and it took me thirty-eight years and a Tupperware of branzino to learn it.
A test is a question you ask hoping for a no. An investigation is what you start when you've stopped hoping.