Chapter 4
Chapter Four
NAOMI
On Saturday morning Graham put on his old jeans and the work boots he kept in the back of the closet for site visits.
"Is it a swamp?"
"Everything Mark loves is a swamp."
He kissed me by the front door. His mouth tasted like toothpaste, and he held on a second longer than usual, his thumb moving once under my hairline.
"Home by four," he said.
Then the Range Rover was backing down our steep driveway, its tires popping over the acorns, and I stood in the doorway until I couldn't hear the engine anymore.
The receipts had been in his coat pocket for two days. I hadn't touched them since, except once on Friday morning, while he was in the shower, to check that they were still there. They were. Somehow that felt worse than if he'd thrown them out.
I made a list of things to do, because that's what I did. Pay the water bill. Call the gutter people. Cut back the garden. Call Lila about Mom's birthday.
My mother was turning sixty-eight on October tenth. Every year the two of us handled it, which meant I handled it. I made the reservation, bought the card, collected the money, and then Lila signed her name under mine in handwriting bigger than mine.
I called her from the back step with a mug of coffee.
She picked up on the fifth ring, out of breath. "Hey. Hi."
There was an echo behind her voice, the hollow sound of a room with no furniture or rugs in it.
"Is this a bad time?"
"No. Kind of. What's up?"
"Mom's birthday. I was thinking Lucca again, since she liked it last year. I want to book before it fills up."
"Oh. Yeah." Behind her came a long screech of packing tape pulled off a roll. "Lucca's good."
"Where are you?"
"I'm helping a friend move."
"The friend with the contractor?"
The pause went on so long I checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.
"What?" she said.
"Graham said you had a friend who got ripped off by a contractor."
"Oh. Right. Yeah, same friend." More tape. "It's been a whole thing."
Somewhere behind her a door banged, followed by heavy footsteps on bare wood. Then a man's voice, low and hoarse, a little way off from the phone.
"Li, where do you want the kitchen box?"
I went completely still.
It was one sentence from across a room, and it got muffled right away, because my sister pressed the phone against her body. All I could hear was fabric rustling, then her voice, far off and sharp. "On the counter. Just, one sec."
Then she was back. "Sorry. Sorry, it's chaos."
"Who was that?"
"My friend's brother."
"He called you Li."
"Everybody calls me Li, Naomi." She laughed, and it had the same wrong shape as her laugh on the porch. "Hey, can Graham book Lucca? He knows the manager. He'll get the corner table, and Mom loves the corner table."
"I can book a restaurant, Lila."
"I know you can. I just mean he knows the guy."
"How do you know he knows the guy?"
"He mentioned it." A pause. "I think. I have to go, the truck guy's here. I'll call you."
She hung up.
I sat on the back step with the phone in my lap while my coffee went cold. A squirrel ran along the top of the fence with a whole walnut in its mouth, its cheeks stretched around the shell.
I wanted to be able to say I hadn't recognized the voice.
But I thought I had, the way the car behind you on the highway always looks like a cop until it gets close enough to be a minivan with a bike rack.
The pitch was right. So was the hoarseness, the way it said Li, flat and familiar, like he'd said it a hundred times.
Then again, lots of men had low voices. Lots of men were hoarse on moving day.
I texted Graham. How's Norristown?
Nothing came back. I put the phone face down on the step, got the shears and canvas bag out of the shed, then went to work on the back beds.
In June I'd torn out the hydrangeas along the back fence.
They'd come with the house, huge blue needy things that wilted whenever it got over eighty.
I'd replaced them with a meadow strip: little bluestem, mountain mint, New England asters.
It had taken me three weekends and blistered my hands right through my gloves.
Now the asters were blooming, a hundred small purple faces with yellow centers, humming with late bees.
I cut back the spent coneflowers, then pulled bindweed out of the mint by its long white roots until my knees soaked through my jeans.
Forty minutes later the phone buzzed on the step.
Flat. Muddy. Mark's heartbroken. Home by 4.
I read it with dirt on my thumbs. It sounded exactly like him.
He got home at 4:20. I was at the kitchen sink scrubbing my nails with the brush when the Range Rover pulled into the drive. He came in through the mudroom with both knees of his jeans gray with dust and a raw scrape across the knuckles of his right hand, beaded with dried blood.
"What did you do?"
He looked at the hand like he'd forgotten it was his. "Caught it on a door frame."
"In a field?"
"There's a barn on the parcel, falling down." He was already heading for the stairs. "I smell like a barn. Give me ten minutes."
The shower came on.
I dried my hands on the dish towel, folded it in thirds, hung it on the oven handle.
Graham didn't shower when he got home from a site. He took his boots off in the mudroom, put his feet up on the ottoman and asked what was for dinner. Showering was for the gym, or for after he'd been somewhere he wanted off his skin.
I went up while the water was still running. The bathroom door was shut. His jeans were on top of the hamper in the corner of our bedroom, inside out, the way he always left them, and I told myself I was going to put them in the wash.
They were heavy with dust when I picked them up, but there wasn't any mud on them, not on the cuffs or the knees, just pale grit. A long strip of clear packing tape had stuck to the right thigh and folded over on itself. Stuck to the tape was a torn corner of brown cardboard.
Someone had written four letters on it in black marker, in square block capitals.
KITC
Graham had printed in block capitals since before I met him. He'd told me once that his handwriting was so bad in college a professor made him type his exams, so he'd taught himself to print like an architect. Every label in our basement was in those letters. XMAS. TAXES 2019-2021. NAOMI WINTER.
The shower shut off.
I peeled the tape off the denim and folded it over the cardboard. I had no idea what I planned to do with it. I put it in my cardigan pocket anyway, then dropped the jeans back on the hamper, inside out, the way he'd left them.
He came out of the bathroom rubbing his head with a towel.
"You're filthy," he said, smiling at my knees.
"I was in the garden."
"The asters look incredible, by the way. I noticed on the way in. Did the landscaper finally fix that fence line?"
I looked at him.
"Yes," I said. "He did."
Downstairs, I took the fold of tape out of my pocket and looked at it for a long time. Then I put it in the junk drawer, under the takeout menus, next to the spare keys to a house we'd sold six years ago.
It was the first thing I had ever hidden from my husband.