A Good Friend
August was almost over now.
It felt as though I’d lived a whole lifetime since I’d begun my surveillance activities and borne witness to Forrest and Brenda making love on the moss, the day I heard Brenda’s plan and shared it, disastrously, with Regina. Life went on—seemingly—as it had before. But not really. Not even close.
Sometime in the late morning—a day when the children had gotten a ride to tennis with one of the mothers—Regina received a call.
Sitting with her in the kitchen, waiting for her to type up my list for the day—Prudence having taken the day off, Forrest on his way to play golf—I studied Regina’s face as she held the receiver.
A strange combination of emotions appeared to pass over her as she listened to what the caller had to tell her.
It looked like a mixture of fury and—weirdly—pleasure.
She barely said anything for the duration of the call.
Just before it ended, she spoke for the first time.
“Thank you,” she told the caller. “I appreciate your telling me.”
“That was Pam Oliver,” she said. Pam Oliver, the woman with whom, Regina was convinced, her husband had been carrying on his annual affair the summer before.
“You won’t believe what that bitch said to me,” Regina said.
As usual, she seemed to have forgotten completely that I wasn’t some forty-year-old woman down at the club, sitting on the chaise lounge next to her with a G&T in hand, or sharing a glass of wine on the patio.
Now she launched into a surprisingly accurate imitation of Pam.
“‘As your friend, and a wife and mother like yourself,’ she tells me, ‘I couldn’t in good conscience hold on to the knowledge of what’s going on with your husband and a certain woman who’s been renting a place on the other side of the lake.’”
“My friend,” Regina hooted. “That’s a good one.
“She started in by telling me how she was ‘always on the woman’s side.’” She reached for a celery stick—her version of stress eating. Seldom a person to crack a smile, Regina had made a sound resembling laughter, though it wasn’t, really.
It occurred to me that Regina had crossed over a line now. She was pacing the room, waving her hands. She might have lit the curtains on fire. Nothing would have surprised me.
“Evidently Forrest hasn’t been keeping up with his golf foursome much this summer,” she went on. “Pam found out this much from her husband, who told her they’d had to find a substitute the last two times they’d hit the links.”
It hadn’t taken Pam long to spring into action.
A few weeks before this—having learned that Forrest had once again called in requesting a replacement—she’d driven past the Barnetts’ place.
(Their rental place, Regina was careful to point out.) This was when she’d spotted Forrest’s Porsche parked behind the barn where the town road crew stored their equipment for the winter.
Snowplows, salt, sand. Not the kind of place frequented by the people who showed up at Lake Catherine strictly in the summer months.
Once she’d calmed down, Regina filled me in on the details of what Pam had reported.
The lot used by the road crew was a short walk from the Barnetts’ house—no more than one hundred yards—another clear indication, Regina had noted, that the house the Barnetts were renting was hardly normal Lake Catherine caliber.
Pam had watched what happened next from a safe distance. She happened to have a pair of binoculars on her at the time.
She saw Forrest walking into the Barnetts’ house.
He’d felt no need to knock first, evidently.
While he was still in the doorway, someone—she couldn’t make out who, but it wasn’t difficult to guess—extended a long, slim arm, which she wrapped around his neck as she kissed him.
The two of them disappeared into the house.
Pam must have been something of a sleuth herself.
She’d taken it upon herself—it was her moral obligation, she’d explained to Regina—to approach the window of what would have been the master bedroom.
The blinds had been drawn, but the sounds emanating from the room made it plain what was going on in there.
She did not add—but Regina and I understood this part without anyone needing to point it out—that the sound of Forrest Emerson having sex (Forrest Emerson making love, if you wanted to get sentimental about it) was all too familiar to Pam Oliver.
She only had to go back a year in her memory bank to remember that sound from when she’d been the one to inspire his expressions of joy.
This part had not featured in her report to Regina.
On the call, evidently Pam had explained that at first she’d kept the information concerning Forrest’s visit to the Barnetts’ place to herself. “I didn’t want to upset you,” she’d told Regina. “But this morning, I saw his car over there again, and I decided that if it were me, I’d want to know.
“Of course it’s up to you what you choose to do with this information,” Pam had added. “It’s none of my business.”
This was supposed to be a golf day—the men’s final round of the summer.
Forrest had hoisted his clubs into the back of his sports car, letting Regina know that the boys at the club were counting on him to fill out their foursome again.
She should not expect him home until late afternoon.
They’d be golfing the full eighteen holes.
“I wish I could just stay home with you and the kids,” he’d told her, stroking her face. “I want to put the finishing touches on my plans for the fireworks. Then I’ve got the outrigger to attach to your grandpa’s old canoe.”
The birchbark one. Too tippy to use without modifications.
As he headed to his car, Forrest turned around one more time with a wave in Regina’s direction. “Love you, babe,” he called out.
All of this had taken place less than two minutes earlier.
Now—her conversation with Pam having concluded—Regina stood at the counter, still gripping the phone and gnawing on her celery.
Her face, which had been twisted in rage moments before, took on an odd appearance now.
Not glee, certainly, but not despair either.
I might call it the look of anticipation an animal gets right before sinking its teeth into a piece of meat.
“Go get your bike,” she said to me. She was not a woman to waste her breath on niceties. “Get yourself over to Brenda’s house.”