Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
NAOMI
He didn't explain some of it that night. He barely explained any of it.
He got home at six and stood in the kitchen with his coat still on, telling me Lila was dealing with something private, that he'd been helping her with "logistics," that the café was a mistake.
He said he never should have lied about Conshohocken.
He said that part three times, three different ways, as if the lie about Conshohocken were the worst thing in the room.
When I asked what logistics meant, he said he'd promised her. When I asked what he'd promised, he looked at the floor.
We went to bed at ten. He lay on his back with his arm over his eyes, and I lay on my side facing the wall. Sometime in the night his hand found the small of my back and rested there. I didn't move toward it, but I didn't move away either.
On Saturday morning he went to the gym with his gym bag and came back sweaty. I checked. I hated that I checked.
Mid-morning the gutter man called to say he'd finished the back of the house and wanted a check, not a card.
Graham kept the checkbook in the top drawer of his desk.
I was the one who paid our bills, and I had been since the electric bill on Passyunk.
Graham earned most of the money now, but I was the one who knew where it went.
Before I wrote the check, I opened my laptop at the dining room table to move some money over from savings. The sun was coming through the front windows in long, dusty bars.
The balance was wrong.
Not dramatically, not the kind of wrong that sets off alarms. I knew that number the way I knew my own weight, roughly, within a margin, and this was under the margin. I scrolled down.
September 14. An outgoing transfer. $7,800.00.
PINE STREET RESIDENTIAL LLC.
I sat very still in the sunlight until the gutter man knocked on the front door. I told him I needed five minutes. He said no problem and went to wait in his truck with the radio on.
I'd been in Graham's office a thousand times. I'd dusted his bookshelves and carried his coffee cups off the windowsill, but I had never once opened a drawer in that room without a reason. I told myself I had one now. The checkbook.
The top drawer held the checkbook, a stapler, a tangle of charging cables, a roll of antacids and a green hanging folder with no label. I lifted out the folder.
Inside was a lease.
Residential Lease Agreement. Premises: 1411 Pine Street, Unit 3R, Philadelphia, PA 19102. Term: September 15 through March 14. Monthly Rent: $2,600.
My eyes went down the page like something was pulling them.
Tenant: Lila A. Mercer.
Guarantor: Graham R. Bennett.
Both signatures were at the bottom: my sister's, round and loopy, the L big as a sail, then my husband's tight scrawl, the one I'd seen on a thousand birthday cards.
Keys issued: 2.
Clipped to the back was a receipt for first month, last month and security, $7,800, with a sticky note in his block capitals. CALL LOCKSMITH RE: CHANGE — OR DO SELF.
Or do self. A Schlage deadbolt, single cylinder. South Street, 8:03 p.m.
I put the lease back in the folder, the folder back in the drawer, and took out the checkbook. I wrote the gutter man a check for $940 and walked it out to his truck. He thanked me and said the downspout on the northeast corner was bad, that I'd want to keep an eye on it after a heavy rain.
"Thank you," I said. "I will."
Then I went back inside and sat down on the stairs.
My sister had an apartment on Pine Street. My husband had paid for it out of an account with both our names on it, and he'd signed as guarantor. There were two keys, and I didn't know where the second one was.
For the first time, I let the word come all the way into my head.
Affair.
I'd been circling it for three weeks without letting it land.
Something private. Logistics. A scare. I'd let him stack all those soft words between me and the thing itself.
Now I was sitting on the stairs in my own house doing the math, and the math only came out one way.
A man doesn't lease an apartment for his wife's sister without telling his wife.
Unless.
At four Graham came downstairs in a clean sweater, the dark green one, checking his watch.
"I'm going to grab a drink with Mark," he said. "He's still grieving the swamp."
"Tonight?"
"Just a couple hours. Home by ten." He came over to kiss my cheek. "You want anything? I'll stop by that bakery."
"No."
"Okay." He hesitated. "I love you, Nay."
"Okay."
He looked at me a second longer, then left.
I lasted until 8:15.
I told myself I was going to Tess's. I put on my coat, got in the car, and drove down Lincoln Drive through the dark trees along the creek, then onto the expressway, getting off at Vine. By the time I was driving through Center City my heart was going like I'd run there.
Pine Street between 14th and 15th was narrow, old, lined with trees, brick rowhouses with black shutters, tiny front steps, iron boot scrapers. It was the kind of block a man picked when he wanted someone to feel taken care of.
1411 was a four-story brick building cut up into apartments, with a row of buzzers by the door. The two front windows on the third floor were lit. Half a block down, Graham's Range Rover sat with two wheels up on the curb and a yellow parking ticket already tucked under the wiper.
I pulled into a loading zone across the street and turned off the headlights, but I left the engine on, because it was cold.
The third-floor windows had no curtains.
Through one of them I could see part of a white ceiling, a bare bulb in a fixture, the edge of what might have been a stack of cardboard boxes.
A woman walked past the window carrying something, dark hair up in a clip, and disappeared.
A minute later a tall shape in dark green crossed the other window.
I watched for thirty-seven minutes.
They never stood together at the window. Nothing happened that would have looked like anything to anyone else, just two people moving back and forth in a lit apartment on a Saturday night. I kept thinking, how long? How long have there been two keys?
I texted him. How's Mark?
Up on the third floor, the tall shape stopped moving. After a minute my phone lit up.
Good. Sad. Home by 10.
I put the car in drive and went home. On Broad Street I ran a red light without meaning to.
At the dining room table, I unrolled a sheet of trace paper from my work bag and turned over an old site plan.
I wrote down everything I knew in a column.
Not what I thought, only what was true. Dates.
Times. Amounts. Addresses. The oat cortado.
The kitchen box. KITC. L. Eddie sleeping like a baby.
A folder with his hand on top of it. Keys issued: 2.
It filled the whole page. I folded it into quarters and zipped it into the inside pocket of my laptop bag.
At 10:07 the Range Rover came up the drive.
He came in rubbing his hands against the cold. "Mark says hi. He says he's buying the swamp anyway."
"Sounds like Mark."
He came over to where I was sitting, bending to hug me from behind, his arms around my shoulders, his cheek rough and cold against mine. The collar of his green sweater was right against my nose.
Fig. Fig, with something white, heavy and sweet underneath it, so strong I could taste it.
I held very still inside his arms until he let go.