4. Marnie
Marnie
Imake the chicken.
Erin sets the table with the everyday plates on purpose. My daughter is seventeen and vicious in ways I didn't teach her.
"Put the good ones back," I say.
"You said no fuss."
"I said no fuss, I didn't say send a message in Morse code."
She swaps them, grinning, and Nathan says "brutal" from the couch without looking up from his phone.
Sherry arrives just after five with grocery store flowers as a hostess gift, and here is the thing I was not prepared for.
She's short.
That's it. That's the shock. In my head she has been ten feet tall for two decades and in reality Sherry Corbett is five foot two in flat sandals, standing on my step in a cardigan in August because she's the kind of woman who's always cold, with a hand pressed flat against her sternum like she's holding her own heart in.
"Marnie," she says. "Hi. I'm sorry. I practiced this in the car and I forgot all of it."
"Come in before the bugs do."
She hands me the flowers. Then, before I can get out of the way, she puts both arms around me.
She's shaking. I can feel it through the cardigan, an actual tremor across her back, and she says it right against my shoulder where nobody else hears it.
"I don't know how to thank you for loving her when I didn't know how."
Almost twenty-four years of preparation and she takes me out in eleven words.
I stand in my own entryway with somebody's flowers in my fist and my throat closing and my daughter watching from the hall, and I put my free hand on Sherry Corbett's back and pat it twice like an idiot.
"You don't have to thank me," I say. "She was easy to love."
Dinner goes fine.
Dinner goes better than fine, which is its own kind of strange.
Drew asks about Bloomington. Nathan does his bit about the yacht.
Erin, who has no filter and never has, asks Sherry point blank if she has other kids, and Sherry says no, and the table gets quiet for exactly one second before Sherry says, "It's okay.
That's a fair question," and Erin says "sorry" and Sherry says "don't be," and it passes.
April brings out her phone and the box of pictures from the hall closet.
That's when it gets hard.
Because Sherry doesn't know any of it. She doesn't know April was a terrible sleeper until she was six.
There's no way for her to know about the year of the purple boots, or the fact that April hated being sung to, any singing, birthday songs included, or that she once ate an entire tube of Cheeky Cherry Chapstick and we called poison control at 2 a.m.
She looks at a photo of first grade April, front teeth gone, ponytail crooked because I did it, and she makes a sound I have made myself over my own children and she puts her hand over her mouth.
"Her hair," she says.
"It never held a barrette," I say. "Not one."
"Mine either." Sherry laughs and wipes her face with the heel of her hand. "My mother used to tape them in. Actual Scotch tape."
April is glowing. My daughter is lit up like a front porch, going through that box, handing pictures across the table, saying do you want this one, you can have this one, we have doubles.
We do not have doubles. I know exactly which of those we have doubles of.
Keith is watching Sherry with an expression I can't parse, and I decide it's relief. He's been carrying almost twenty-four years of being the man whose wife left, and here she is at his table crying over teeth, and something in his shoulders has come down two inches.
By eight o'clock I'm feeling like a small, mean person.
I sit at my own kitchen table with a glass of wine and think about my suspicions, and feel the way you feel when you accuse somebody of taking a twenty out of your purse and then find it in your coat.
Sherry offers to help with dishes. I tell her to sit. She insists, and April says, "Mom won't let anyone in the kitchen, it's a whole thing," and everybody laughs including me.
Then Sherry excuses herself to find the bathroom.
The bathroom is off the front hall. Take the first left and you're there. Take the second and you're in the back hallway by Keith's office, which is where I find her four or five minutes later when I go looking for the good corkscrew.
She's standing in the doorway of his office.
Not inside it. She's very careful about that, one hand on the frame, feet on the hallway side of the threshold, looking at the wall where Keith hung the framed front page of the business section from the day after the listing.
His photograph. The headline. The number in the third paragraph, which the paper printed in a pull quote in enormous gray type because that's what papers do.
"Oh," she says, when she hears me. "Sorry. I got turned around."
"It's the second left."
"I saw the picture of him and I got nosy." She laughs at herself, easy, self-deprecating. "He looks so uncomfortable. He always hated having his picture taken. Did he ever get over that?"
"No."
"Some things stay." She looks back at the frame. "Marnie, is that number real?"
I stand in my hallway with a corkscrew in my hand.
"Which number," I say.
Half a second of nothing. Less than that.
Then Sherry laughs, and touches her collarbone, and shakes her head at herself.
"Listen to me. None of my business. It's just, you see something like that in a newspaper and your brain can't hold it, you know? It might as well say four hundred billion."
"It's the valuation," I say. "It doesn't mean much."
"No. I'm sure it doesn't."
She goes to find the bathroom. Second left. She finds it immediately.
I stand there.
Here's what she did wrong: nothing.
Nothing at all. A woman got lost in a strange house and looked at a picture of her ex-husband and asked a normal question that ninety percent of the population would ask, and then she took it back before I even had to be uncomfortable about it, and if I described this moment to any of the people at my table they'd look at me with actual concern.
She left one fingerprint. It's the which number that did it, because I asked her which number and she said the valuation, instantly, no hunting, no scanning the frame.
She already knew where in that article the number was.
She'd read it before.
I go back to the dining room and pour her more wine, and she tells a story about April's colic that makes Keith laugh out loud, and I laugh too.
I have no evidence of anything. What I've got is a follow date and half a second of hesitation in a hallway.
I put it away.