Chapter 6
Itold Dana in a fast food parking lot, because I didn't want to do it in either of our houses, both of which had energy I could no longer trust. And because Dana, when given catastrophic news, needs a milkshake in her hand the way other people need a Xanax.
I'd called her and said only, "I need you to come to the burger joint by the highway and not say I told you so," and Dana, to her eternal credit, had not said I told you so.
Not once, not even when I laid it all out in the front seat of her car with the engine running for the AC and a spoon going slowly in her chocolate milkshake.
The trays marked B. The contact saved as a warning to himself. The green dress. Two years. The second location, ours, hers. And Larissa. I saved Larissa for last, the way you save the worst for last, and when I got to the line, you know there's nobody but you, block, Dana's spoon stopped.
She set the milkshake in the cupholder. She put both hands on the wheel of the parked car like she was about to drive us into the building.
"He passed the test," she said slowly, working it out loud, because that's how Dana thinks, out loud, like she's reading a number off a screen, "because he was faithful. To her."
"To her."
"We sat in your driveway." Her knuckles went white on the wheel. "I built that woman. I picked her photos. I gave her a job in pharma. And he looked at the most beautiful woman I could invent and he said no thank you, I'm a married man, and the marriage he meant wasn't yours."
"That's the one."
"Kelly." She turned to look at me, and her eyes were doing the gentle thing again, the rare thing.
This time I didn't want it, I wanted the other Dana, the loud one, the one who cases Residence Inns.
"Kelly, I am so sorry. I told you he was a good one.
I sat across from you at your patio with your lasagna in my mouth and I told you that you picked the steady one. "
"You did."
"He IS steady." And here it came up out of her the way the laugh had come up out of me on the kitchen floor, from underneath the asphalt, a horrible black laugh, "he's the steadiest man in Cedar Hollow, he's monogamous as a swan. He’s just, he's monogamous to the WRONG WOMAN," and then she was laughing and I was laughing and we were two grown sisters howling in a parking lot over a melting milkshake, laughing the way you only laugh when it's really crying that got dressed up to go out.
The whole time, a teenager in a paper hat watched us through the drive-thru window with real concern.
When we ran out of it, the laughing, we sat in the engine hum and the cold air, and Dana wiped her face with a napkin and went quiet, and then she said the thing that started everything.
"Okay," she said. "What do you want to do?”
And I'd thought she'd say leave him. Or lawyer up. Or burn it down, the thing people say. But Dana, who finds the lying number for a living, asked me what I wanted, and I realized I knew. I'd known on the kitchen floor with my coffee not spilled, I'd known in the cold clean place I'd gone to.
"I don't want to scream at him," I said.
"Okay."
"If I scream at him, he wins. He gets to be sorry.
He gets to be the man who made a mistake, and I get to be the wronged wife who screamed, and in six months at the Chamber gala people will say poor Spencer, it was messy.
She didn't handle it well, and he'll have his second location and his nobody-but-you and I'll have a settlement and a casserole rotation. "
I watched the drive-thru kid hand a bag to a minivan.
"I don't want to be handled well. I don't want to be the wronged wife. I built that practice, Dana. I did the books in the strip mall. The aquarium, the foam machine, the mural, his name in gold script, every brightest-smile-in-Cedar-Hollow inch of it. I was there for it all, and he gave it to her. He gave her my chair at the front desk and my side of the future and he kept me like a prop.”
"Kelly."
"So I don't want to leave," I said. "Not yet.
I want to stay until I've taken it apart.
All of it. The practice, the name, the brightest-smiles-in-Cedar-Hollow of it.
Both of them. I want everyone who ever called him Dr. Jacobs to know exactly what he is, and I want it to be his own work that does it.
His own ledger, his own smile, not me screaming, not a scorned woman, just the truth, laid out clean, with my fingerprints nowhere on it. "
Dana looked at me for a long time. The AC ticked. Somewhere a burgerwas being assembled.
"You know," she said, "I have spent twenty years telling people you're the soft one. The folder of laundry. The one who alphabetizes the spices when she's sad."
"I am the soft one."
"You are a stone-cold psychopath and I have never been prouder to be related to you." She picked her milkshake back up and pointed the spoon at me. "Here's what we're going to do."
And this time, when Dana said here's what we're going to do, I leaned in.
She broke it down the way she breaks down a fraud case, which is what this was, she said, a fraud case.
Two of them, the personal fraud and the professional one, and the trick with frauds is that they almost always travel together.
Because a man who'll lie to his wife for two years has a low opinion of the truth in general, and a low opinion of the truth tends to show up in his books.
"Faithful men," she said, "honest books.
Cheaters, you find things in the numbers.
I'd bet your house on it." Then she winced, because it was, technically, my house, for now, the perfect house with the bad-energy laundry room.
And then she said, "I'd bet HIS house on it," and we both liked that better.
The plan, as it stood in the lot, had three legs, and Dana drew them on a napkin with a pen, which I still have.
One: the money. I'd get back into the books.
I knew where every dollar in that practice slept because I'd tucked most of them in myself, and if Spencer and Brielle were cutting corners, and Dana would put her professional reputation on the line that they were, I'd find it.
I'd document it, clean, copied, dated, the way you build a thing you can hand to a state board and an insurance fraud unit and a local reporter who'd been sniffing around dental upcoding for a year (Dana knew her; of course Dana knew her).
Two: the reputation. Spencer's whole life was image, gold script. The mural, the foam, Cedar Hollow's Brightest Smiles, Business of the Year three times running, the photo of him in the Chamber newsletter handing an oversized check to the youth hockey league.
You don't fight a man like that with a divorce filing. You let the image eat itself, in public, in front of the exact people whose good opinion is the only thing he's ever actually loved.
Three. Dana wrote the third one and then tapped the pen on it twice.
"The whitening," she said.
I'd told her about the new system. True white in one session.
Brielle the first guinea pig, the walking billboard, the staff getting the full treatment so they could be the before-and-afters at the practice's tenth-anniversary gala.
The big one, the charity night, the one with the local news crew and the silent auction and Spencer in a tux handing out another oversized check.
And Brielle on his arm in some green dress, the green dress, smiling her lit-from-within smile for the cameras of every person in Cedar Hollow who'd ever believed the mural.
"You did the books," Dana said. "You know the practice. You know the supply closet."
"I know the supply closet."
"And whitening gel," she said, with the particular joy of a woman who has found the one number that lies, "is just chemistry in a syringe. And you, my soft little psychopath sister, were a chem major before you let that man talk you into doing his front desk."
We sat with the three legs on the napkin between us, and the milkshake went fully to soup. Dana got quiet in the serious way, and she put one finger on the napkin, on all three legs at once, and she said the only rule.
"Whatever we do, you stay clean. Every piece of this has to be a thing he did, or a thing the world did, or a thing nobody can prove anybody did.
You do not key his car. You do not post a single word online.
You do not send one anonymous letter. The second your fingerprints are on it, you stop being the woman it happened to and you start being the woman who did it, and then poor Spencer gets his story back. "
She looked at me. "Can you do that? Can you take apart the thing you love most and not once let anybody see it was you holding the wrench?"
I thought about my mother at a funeral, finding out, too late, in front of everyone, and being the wronged one, the pitied one, the woman who got handled well. And I thought about the cold clean place on the kitchen floor where my coffee hadn't spilled.
"I do the books in pencil," I said. "I always have. You never see the pencil. You only see the total."
Dana folded the napkin and handed it to me, and I put it in my purse, three legs, all of it. The whole quiet total of the rest of my life, and we drove out of the lot, and I went home. I made dinner.
I looked at the napkin. Three legs. The money, the name, the teeth. Outside, the drive-thru kid in the paper hat had stopped watching us, having decided we were fine, two ladies in a Honda, laughing, no concern here.
He had no idea.