Chapter Seven
Walt's report came in on a Thursday, and it was one page long.
I'd expected a binder. I'd braced all week for spreadsheets, for the kind of dense financial archaeology I'd need translated, and instead Chris sat me down at his kitchen island, slid a single sheet across, and said, "Walt writes short.
Forty years of practice telling rich men bad news, you learn to take the runway out of it. "
The page said this. The money Chris sent his son every month went four places. Business, house, cards, and, for the last two years, four thousand a month increasing to six thousand last year to a name neither of us had ever heard, tagged in the memo line, every single time, as consulting.
"Sasha Kovacs," I read out loud.
"Mean anything?"
"Nothing." I turned the page over as if the back would explain. "Penny doesn't know that name either, I'd bet anything. It's not club circle, it's not the city crowd." I looked up. "Who consults for two years at the same fee every month and never sends a different invoice?"
"Nobody," Chris said. "Walt made one phone call. She's not a consultant. She's twenty-seven years old and she works in the events office at the club." He sat quietly and let me reach my own conclusion.
The kettle ticked on the stove. Outside his window the sprinklers came on in perfect arcs, and I sat very still on the stool and felt the ground of the last month tilt again, because I'd thought I had the whole map now, and here was an entire country I'd never heard of.
"Two years," I said. "The payments run longer than Penny."
"Yes."
"So whatever this is, it was already happening when he started up with her." I heard my own voice go flat and careful. "Penny's the second one, Chris. Or the second one I know about. She thinks she's the love story, she's planning her new life at lunch, and she's the other woman's other woman."
Chris rubbed his jaw with one hand and looked out the window for a while.
"There are explanations that aren't an affair," he said, without any conviction at all. "Blackmail. A debt. I can build you three innocent structures out of these numbers."
"Do you believe any of them?"
"No," he said. "But we don't go to September twelfth on belief.
We go on facts. I want eyes on her, and it happens that we have the world's most boring excuse, because you are currently planning a large party, and the events office coordinates vendors for members' home events, and Diane in that office has been trying to get me to host something at the house for ten years.
" He picked up his phone and started typing, one finger, already moving.
"We'll go Monday. You'll be a woman with a seating chart problem.
I'll be an old man thinking about a Labor Day dinner.
Nobody looks twice at either of those people. "
The events office lived off the back hallway of the clubhouse, past the trophy cases, a bright room with fabric samples on the walls and a view of the tennis courts, and Diane received us like royalty and talked linens at me for half an hour.
I nodded and sampled and asked about tent sidewalls in case of rain, and I was, I think, flawless, and the entire time some second set of eyes I'd grown that summer went walking around the room.
Third desk back. A nameplate that said S. KOVACS. The desk was tidy, the chair pushed in, and beside the chair, folded flat against the wall, out of the way, with a muslin cloth over the handle, stood a stroller.
"Is the whole team in today?" I asked Diane, light as linen. "If I'm going to be a nightmare for the next six weeks I should apologize to everyone in advance."
Diane laughed. "Nearly. Miles you met, Josie's at a site visit, and Sasha's around somewhere, she had to bring the baby in, poor thing.
Her sitter canceled and I told her we've all been there.
" She lowered her voice, warm, indulgent.
"Eight months old and better behaved than most of the membership. "
"I'm sure that's a low bar," Chris said, and Diane laughed again, delighted to have him in her office at last, and I smiled and turned a page of table settings, and my heart was going very hard and very slow.
We got another ten minutes of napkin talk.
Then the side door opened, and a young woman came in carrying a baby against her shoulder, saying, "Sorry, sorry, he's fed, he's changed, he's run out of complaints," and the room did its small cooing shuffle, and I turned around in my chair, unhurried, a woman being polite about a coworker's baby, and looked.
Sasha Kovacs was pretty in an unarmored way that the women of my circle spent fortunes trying to imitate.
Dark hair in a knot she hadn't checked in a mirror, a cardigan with a spit-up cloth still over one shoulder, tired around the eyes in the specific way of someone doing it alone.
Twenty-seven and carrying it. She said hello to us pleasantly, apologized again to Diane, and settled the baby along her forearm to reach for something on her desk, and the baby's face came around toward the light of the window.
I heard Chris stop breathing.
He was a beautiful baby. Dark wisps of hair, fat and content, jaw working on his own fist, and there in the middle of that small new face sat the chin.
The Duke chin, square and definite with the shallow cleft, the chin I'd kissed on my husband a thousand times, the chin in every photograph on Chris's stairwell wall going back four generations of builders..
Chris's grandson looked out the window at the tennis courts. Nobody in that bright room knew what was happening in it except the two of us, and we sat in it together, in hell, discussing sidewall options.
I don't remember leaving. I remember Diane's warm goodbye and the trophy hallway and then the parking lot, white sky, gulls somewhere, and Chris unlocking the truck and the two of us sitting in it without either of us reaching for a belt.
"You saw," I said.
"I saw."
"The payments started before he was born.
They doubled around when he'd have been born,” I was doing it again, reciting, stacking facts like sandbags, and my voice stayed level right up until it didn't. "He has a son, Chris.
He has a whole child, at your club, and Penny doesn't know, and I didn't know, and that girl in there is twenty-seven and doing it alone on four grand a month while he steals my jewelry for his other mistress and everyone at that party in September is going to toast his marriage, and I…
" and the level broke, right there, mid-sentence, and I put my hand over my mouth.
Chris didn't tell me it was all right. He reached over and put one hand flat between my shoulder blades, steady, warm through the linen, and left it there while the wave went through me, and when I got quiet he took it back without a word and started the truck.
"Come to the house," he said. "Neither of us should be alone with this tonight, and you shouldn't be across a dinner table from him. Call it party planning. It's even true."
We sat on his back porch until midnight.
He made dinner, simple, pasta and a tomato salad from his own garden, and he poured me one glass of wine and himself one whiskey and made them last, and we didn't work.
For the first time since the walk at the Point, we didn't build the ledger or plan the twelfth.
We just talked, in the dark, with the crickets going and the water invisible below the lawn, and I let him see all of it.
I told him the thing I'd been ashamed of all afternoon, which was that the baby hurt worse than Penny, and I couldn't work out why. Chris listened with his glass on his knee.
"I can tell you why, if you want," he said.
"You can still be angry at Penny. Penny's a betrayal, and betrayal has a villain, and a villain gives you somewhere to put it. The boy is just true. A child is a fact about the world, and the fact is that your marriage had a whole second thing running underneath it, years deep, with a crib in it, and you can’t be angry at a baby.
" He turned the glass slowly. "I know something about it.
Eleanor was sick for a year before she told me.
She wanted to spare me, she said, and I've had six years to be angry about being spared, and there's nowhere to put that either, because the person I'd need to shout at was doing it out of love.
Some hurts don't have a door out. You just get bigger until they fit inside. "
The crickets went on. Somewhere down the shore a boat knocked against a dock.
"Does it work?" I asked. "Getting bigger?"
"It's working right now," Chris said, quietly, not looking at me.
"This summer is the first time in six years this house has had someone in it worth cooking for.
I'm sixty feet from the worst thing my son has ever done, and I keep catching myself glad of the company.
Make of that what you like. I've stopped making anything of it, it kept coming out the same. "
I looked at his profile in the porch dark, this steady, careful man with his whiskey going warm, and something turned over in my chest that had nothing to do with Mark at all, and I didn't say anything, and neither did he, and the not-saying sat between us on the porch like a third chair.
At midnight he walked me to my car. The grass was wet. At the door he paused, and for one second the air went tight, and then he stepped back and put his hands in his pockets.
"Monday we confirm it," he said. "Records, dates, all of it, no guessing.
And Lily. Whatever we find, the boy's blood.
Mine. When this is over, that girl and that child get looked after properly, whatever his father does or doesn't deserve. I need you to be all right with that. You don’t have to like her.
I might not like her. But my grandson is innocent. "
"I was going to insist on it," I said.
Chris smiled then, the first one all day, slow and real.
"Eleanor said you'd be a good addition to the family," he said. "Ten minutes. She was never wrong."
I drove home with the windows down and my hand tingling where he'd almost touched me but hadn’t, and I lay down next to my sleeping husband and stared at the ceiling and understood, clearly, coldly, and far too late to stop it, that September twelfth had stopped being the only thing I was counting toward.