Chapter 3
The flowers came Saturday.
Not a bunch. A van. Two men in polo shirts unloaded white roses onto her mother's porch for ten solid minutes, and Laura stood in the doorway in her mother's robe and watched them do it, and when they were finished the younger one held out a clipboard and said, "Ma'am? If you could just sign."
"No," Laura said.
He looked at the clipboard. Then at the porch. Then at her.
"Take them back."
"Ma'am, we can't — there's no—"
"Then leave them on the road."
She shut the door. Through the window she watched the two of them have a conference by the van, and then load every last box back in, which took even longer, and she stood there for all of it with her coffee going cold in her hand.
White roses. Two dozen of them had come to the gate in April with no card on them, at twenty to seven in the morning, and she had stood in that driveway and been pleased.
Because white roses were what Jake sent. Ten years of them — birthdays, apologies, the week of her mother's funeral. She had carried the box inside and put them in her mother's cut-glass vase and texted him a photograph of it, and he had written back, twenty minutes later:
what roses
That was the second entry in the folder. That was the one that turned a car in a mirror into something she could not explain away, because a man who wanted to frighten her would not have needed to know what flowers her husband sent, and whoever this was had known.
And now here they were again, two dozen of them, on her mother's porch, from him this time.
She thought about that for a long time after the van left.
The car came Sunday.
An actual car, on an actual trailer, a silver thing with the dealer plate still on it, and the driver had a folder with her name on the outside. She sent it back without going out on the porch.
Then a woman called from a hotel in Nashville to confirm a suite.
Then a woman called from a private office in Green Hills to confirm an appointment with a doctor Laura had never heard of.
Then, at eleven on Sunday night, her phone lit up with a voice memo, four minutes and six seconds long, from a number that was not his but was obviously his.
Laura looked at it for a while.
Then she forwarded it, unplayed, to Susan Reeves, and typed: Please tell him again. Nothing direct. Everything through you.
Susan called at eight the next morning. She had a voice like a woman doing three things at once, which she was.
"You didn't listen to it."
"No."
"Good. Don't. If you do, don't tell me, and don't tell anybody else either." Paper moving. "All right. Here's where we are. I sent the letter Friday. Their side responded in ninety minutes, which never happens, and it's the strangest response I've had in nineteen years."
Laura sat down on the arm of her mother's recliner. "Meaning what."
"Meaning they're not fighting. Anything. He's instructed them to agree to whatever we ask for on an interim basis, no conditions." A pause. "Laura, I want to be careful with you here, because in my experience there are two kinds of men who do this. One kind is telling the truth."
"And the other kind?"
"The other kind is buying time and making a record. A man who never contests anything looks very good in front of a judge, and looks even better in the newspaper." Susan let that sit. "I'm not telling you which one he is. I'm telling you I've seen it twice and it was the second kind both times."
"What do I do."
"You take nothing. You sign nothing. You let me do the talking, and you keep your name out of everything, and — this is the important one — you don't have one single unrecorded conversation with him. Not one. Not in a parking lot. Not for four minutes."
"He hasn't called."
"He will," said Susan. "They all do."
He didn't.
That was the thing that got under her skin as the week went on, more than the roses had, more than the car.
Nothing came directly. Everything came through the office.
He had been told a boundary and he was keeping it, and he was keeping it so exactly that she started to feel the shape of him on the other side of it, standing there, not knocking.
She would have preferred the knocking. Knocking, she knew what to do with.
Tammy came Monday and did not leave.
She arrived at ten in the morning with three grocery bags, a case of the diet soda Laura had drunk in high school, and a cardboard box of clean towels, and she walked into the kitchen and put it all down and looked around and said, "Well. This is a mausoleum."
"Hi, Tammy."
"Hi, Tammy, she says." Tammy Fowler was a head shorter than Laura and about twice as loud. Her hair was aggressively red this season and her reading glasses were up in it. "Eleven days I've been calling you."
"It's been three days."
"It's been three days that feel like eleven, and I'm the one who had to hear it from my cousin's boy who works nights at the Marathon." She started putting groceries away in cupboards she clearly knew better than Laura did. "You look terrible."
"Thank you."
"You look like a woman who hasn't eaten since Thursday." Tammy stopped with a can in her hand. Then she put it down and came over and put both arms around her, hard, and Laura stood there stiff for a second and then didn't.
Neither of them said anything for a minute.
"Okay," Tammy said into her shoulder. "Okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to eat, and then I'm going to say every ugly thing I've got about that man, and you don't have to agree with any of it, you just have to sit there."
"Tammy—"
"You just have to sit there," Tammy said.
So Laura sat there, and Tammy said them, and some of them were so specific and so anatomical that Laura laughed out loud for the first time in four days and then put her face in her hands and cried, and Tammy let her do both.
The town found out on Sunday. The rest of the country found out by Tuesday.
It went like this: a stringer for something with Sports in the name got a photograph of Laura's car in the driveway on Quarry Road from up the hill.
By Tuesday morning the picture was everywhere with a caption under it about where the wife had gone, and the town of Sawyer's Bend, Tennessee, population 2,900, discovered it was a location.
By Tuesday there were two cars parked on the shoulder at the bottom of the hill, and by Wednesday there were four, and one of them had a man in it who ate lunch in the front seat every day at noon.
On Tuesday one of them walked up.
Laura was at the mailbox. She heard the gravel and turned around and there was a young woman coming up the road with a phone held out in front of her like a badge, already talking, already halfway through a sentence.
"Mrs. Hayes, hi, I'm so sorry to do this—"
"You're on my road."
"—I just want to give you a chance to say your side, because right now everybody else is saying it for you, and I don't think that's fair to you.
" She had a nice face. That was the worst thing about her.
She looked very young and genuinely kind and completely certain she was being helpful.
"Just one line. Anything. Even 'I'm doing okay. '"
Laura stood with her mother's mail in her hand — a seed catalog, three years late, addressed to a dead woman.
She thought about saying it. I'm doing okay. Four words, and the girl would go away, and the cars might go away with her.
And then she saw the whole thing, the way she had seen it in the kitchen at two in the morning: those four words on a screen with her face beside them, and a panel of people in a studio deciding out loud what she had meant by okay, and whether a woman who was okay was strong or in denial or, most likely, a liar.
"No," Laura said, and went back in the house.
After that she stopped going out the front.
And the phrase started. She never found out where it started — whether some producer said it first, or whether it came up out of the ground the way those things do — and by the time she went looking it had been everywhere for three days and had no author at all.
By Sunday it was a caption under the fourth frame. By Wednesday it was in every comment and out of every mouth on every panel show in America, and it had been sanded down to three words that did not need a sentence around them anymore.
The hometown wife.
The hometown wife, who never came with him. The hometown wife, who was a physical therapist once, apparently. The hometown wife, who was never going to be able to hold onto a man like that, and honestly, if we're being honest, and I hate to say it, but — did anyone actually think she would?
That was the part that took the floor out. Not the pity. The relief inside the pity. She could hear it in their voices, all of them, the little lift underneath — the pleasure of a thing turning out the way everybody had privately expected it to all along.
And underneath that, a second thing, which took a day longer to arrive and never entirely left: the phrase was about the town too.
Every time one of them said it on television they were saying Sawyer's Bend and meaning a size.
Half the county heard that immediately. Some of them never forgave the people who said it and some of them never forgave her.
Half the town was outraged on her behalf. Tammy's salon on Depot ran hot all week with women saying so.
And the other half — and Laura knew exactly which half, and could have named them — was saying it a different way. Well. A pause. She did marry up.
On Wednesday she went to the salon, because Tammy made her.
"You can't hide in that house," Tammy said. "You hide four days, that's grief. You hide two weeks, that's a story, and then it's a story about you being fragile, and I will not have it."
The salon sat on Depot between the bank and the empty pharmacy, and it had been Fowler's since Tammy's mother ran it, and it smelled the way it had smelled when Laura was nine — chemicals and hairspray and, under that, coffee that had been on the burner too long.
Four women were in there. All four stopped talking.