July 18, Saturday
ON SATURDAY, everything I'd been deferring all week arrived at once and expected to be dealt with immediately.
I was up at seven. By seven-fifteen I had walked Tucker and identified four full laundry baskets, a kitchen suggesting nobody had wiped a counter for days, and a refrigerator containing one Greek yogurt, a jar of olives, and an empty milk jug.
By seven-thirty I was at the grocery store, which on a Saturday morning is its own endurance event.
The next six hours were a relay race with no baton.
Groceries unpacked. Lily to conditioning.
First load of laundry in. Back out for Josh.
Bathroom scrubbed. Second load. Walk Tucker again.
Lily picked up from conditioning, dropped at the nail salon—do not ask about the nail salon.
Kitchen floor mopped; something sticky of unidentified origin near the refrigerator, now neutralized.
Third load. Josh's soccer snack bag assembled, because apparently he is still in elementary school.
Lily retrieved. Fourth load. Dinner eaten by teenagers in under six minutes because they both had evening plans. Teenagers gone.
By seven p.m. the house was clean, stocked, and empty, and I felt like I'd qualified for something that didn't offer a medal.
I called Elaine.
"Can't talk, I'm on a date," she said, with the warm distraction of someone standing somewhere considerably nicer than my kitchen. "Call you later?"
I told her sure, to have fun, hung up, and stood in the hallway considering the wall.
Which is when I noticed the photo.
It had been hanging there for three years without me really seeing it—the four of us at Tybee Island, the summer Lily was thirteen.
Warren was tan and laughing at something off-camera.
Both kids squinting into the sun. I was in the middle, arm around Lily, looking directly at the lens with an expression that seemed, in retrospect, less like happiness and more like determination.
As if I were willing the moment to be as good as it looked.
My hand went up. I nearly took the frame off the wall, then I dropped my hand. The kids didn't need to come home to a pale rectangle on the wallpaper. Their past wasn't mine to dismantle.
I went to the couch, picked up my knitting, and turned on the television.
The news was mid-report on the Blackthorne trial—jury selection expected to conclude soon, preparations underway—and then a photo of the defendant filled the screen.
Robert Blackthorne, in a very good suit, with the expression of a man who had never once doubted his own impunity.
A jutting chin. A smile that didn't extend past his mouth.
My pulse kicked up a beat.
Right. Not supposed to watch this.
I changed the channel and landed on a true-crime mystery, which felt like a reasonable compromise. The plot caught me immediately—a closed circle of suspects, competing motives, evidence that kept rearranging itself.
By the forty-minute mark I had my conclusion firmly in hand.
"It's that guy," I said to Tucker. "Obviously. Since the second scene."
I was so confident I actually relaxed. I knitted four rows with the comfortable ease of a woman who'd already solved the mystery.
When the final reveal came—a completely different person, a completely different motive, telegraphed by clues I had apparently stared at directly and dismissed as irrelevant—I sat back.
If I could be expertly steered to the wrong conclusion by a television writer, what exactly was I proposing to contribute to a federal organized crime trial?