Chapter 2
Walt did not ask about the frame.
He saw it. She came down Zane’s front steps with it under her arm like a book, and he opened the rear door for her and looked at it for exactly one second, and then he looked at the street.
He closed the door without a sound. On the drive home he turned the radio off without being asked.
That was all. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her all day, and she had to look out the window so he wouldn’t see what it did to her face.
The house was dark when they pulled in. Denise had gone home. The pool light was on out back, turning the lawn a strange blue.
“Thank you, Walt.”
“Ma’am.” He held the door. Then, as she went past him, quietly: “He said fifteen minutes.”
She stopped.
Walt kept his eyes on the drive. “I’m only saying. He said fifteen minutes. It’s been an hour.” He closed the car door. “Good night, Mrs. Fletcher.”
* * *
She did not turn on the big lights.
She turned on the small lamp over the kitchen table, the round oak table by the glass doors where they ate breakfast on Sundays. She put the frame down in the middle of it, facing the chair where Lucas always sat. Then she sat across from it and waited.
She thought she would cry. She had been waiting to cry since the study. It didn’t come. What came instead was heat, rising slowly, filling her chest and her throat until her face burned with it. She sat with her hands flat on the cool wood and let it rise.
The cleaner on 28.
Not even her name. He had not known her name. That was the point, wasn’t it. That was the joke. He had picked the one person in the building so far beneath his notice that he didn’t even know what to call her.
She looked at the blue ink. She looked at the small round handwriting, a woman’s handwriting, that she didn’t know. She looked at his signature with the long tail on the F.
At ten to midnight she heard his car at the gate.
The front door. His keys in the dish, his steps in the hall. He stopped when he saw the lamp. Then he came into the kitchen, loosening his tie, already starting to say, “You didn’t have to wait up, I’m sorry, it ran—”
He saw the frame.
He stood in the doorway with his hand still at his collar. He didn’t move. For a long moment nothing in the room moved at all, not him, not her, not the blue light on the lawn.
Then his hand came down from his tie. The stillest hands she had ever known started to shake.
“Amelia,” he said.
“Is it true?”
He looked at her. He didn’t look at the frame again. He looked at her face as if he were trying to learn it.
“Yes,” he said.
* * *
She had thought about this the whole way home. She had pictured every version.
In one he laughed and said it was Zane’s idea of a joke, something they had made up later, a stupid thing on a stupid wall. In another he said what are you talking about and she had to hold up the frame and read it to him. In another he got angry and asked what she had been doing in Zane’s study.
She had not pictured this. She had not pictured him simply saying yes.
“Sit down,” she said.
He sat. He sat in his own chair, across from her, with the frame between them. He put his hands on the table and then took them off again and put them in his lap, where she couldn’t see them.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you it’s a misunderstanding. It isn’t one.”
“Good. Tell me what it is.”
He took a breath. And then, God help him, he told her the order of things.
“I was drunk,” he said. “It was a stupid bet. It was the kind of stupid thing you say in a bar at two in the morning, and somebody wrote it down, and I should have torn it up that night. I didn’t.
” He stopped. He started again, lower. “But you have to understand what happened after. I went up to twenty-eight that week because of the bet. I did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.
But four months in, Amelia, four months, I was in love with you.
By the new year I was in love with you. I have been in love with you every day since.
That part was never a bet. That part was never—”
“Stop.”
He stopped.
She had her hands flat on the table again. She pressed them down hard, so hard her fingertips went white, because it was that or throw something.
“Four months,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re telling me that like it helps.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
“We got married in August,” she said. “Eleven months after this.” She pointed at the frame without looking at it.
“If you knew you loved me at four months, then you had seven more months. Seven months of knowing. You didn’t fall into it by accident.
You knew, and you kept going. You’re not telling me it was an accident, Lucas.
You’re telling me you did it on purpose, with your eyes open, and you want credit for the eyes. ”
He looked like she had hit him.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said.
“I know what you meant. I’m telling you what you said.”
The pool pump clicked on outside. Somewhere upstairs the air conditioning sighed through the vents. It was such an ordinary night. That was almost the worst of it. The house didn’t know.
“Why?” she said.
“Why what?”
“Why did you make it? Why me? Why that? Why would a man whose father had been dead for a week go to a bar and bet his friend a dollar he could marry the woman who emptied his trash?” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it, and she kept going.
“It was that week, wasn’t it. It was September.
It was right after the funeral. I know the date, Lucas. I can read.”
Something closed in his face, like a door swinging shut in a house down the street.
“It doesn’t matter why,” he said.
She stared at him.
“It doesn’t,” he said. He said it gently, the way he said things to men in meetings when he had decided the meeting was over.
“There’s no reason that makes it better.
There isn’t. I’m not going to give you a reason and have it sound like an excuse.
It was wrong. It was wrong and I did it and I’m sorry. ”
“You’re managing me.”
“I’m not—”
“You are. You’re doing it right now. You’re sitting in our kitchen at midnight deciding what I get to know.” She laughed, a short awful sound. “Heather knows, doesn’t she.”
He went still.
“That’s what she meant this morning,” Amelia said.
“She said, you know how he gets about the year he turned twenty-nine. She said it to me in my own kitchen like it was something we both knew. And I smiled at her, Lucas. I stood there and smiled like I knew what she was talking about. I was in that year. That was the year you learned my name. And I didn’t know what she meant, and she did. ”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
* * *
She got up. She couldn’t sit anymore.
She went to the glass doors and stood with her back to him, looking out at the blue lawn. Her own reflection looked back at her from the glass, a tall woman in a green dress with her hair down for performing. She looked like someone at a party. She looked like someone who belonged in this house.
“Who else knows?” she said to the glass.
Behind her, a long silence.
“Some people,” he said.
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned around. “You don’t know?”
“I don’t know exactly. I didn’t—” He stopped. “Zane. Heather. Some people Zane told. I don’t know how many people Zane told.”
She thought of the men behind Zane, laughing. The two women by the bar. Five years of dinners. Five years of people being delighted, over and over, like she was a dog on a skateboard.
They hadn’t been delighted at her. They’d been delighted at the joke.
“I have one more question,” she said. “And I want you to answer it right away. Don’t think about it. Don’t manage it. Just answer.”
“All right.”
“When you asked me to marry you. That night. On the roof of the parking deck, with the city lit up and you so nervous you forgot what you’d planned to say.” Her voice was steady now. She didn’t know where the steadiness came from. “Was the bet still on?”
He didn’t answer right away.
That was the answer. She knew it before he spoke. He tried to find a way to say it that wasn’t what it was. He failed. The seconds went by one at a time.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did you ever call it off?”
“No.”
“You never told Zane it was over. You never tore it up.”
“No.”
“You let yourself win.”
He closed his eyes. “I told myself it didn’t matter anymore,” he said. “I told myself nobody would ever bring it up again. That if I just didn’t touch it, it would go away, and you would never have to know, and it would be like it never—”
“Zane brought it up tonight,” she said. “To my face. At his party. Who would have bet on that? And everybody laughed. Did you know that? They laughed. And I laughed with them, because I thought it was the old joke. The one about where I came from. I thought I knew what the joke was.”
He put his face in his hands.
She looked at him sitting there, her husband, the most certain man she had ever met, with his face in his hands at their breakfast table.
Some old part of her wanted to go to him.
Five years of going to him. It was in her legs, in her arms, the habit of it.
She stood where she was and felt the pull and did not move.
“And Heather,” she said.
He lifted his head. “Nothing happened with Heather.”
“I know.”
“Amelia, I swear to you, I have never once—”
“I know.” It came out louder than she meant. She brought it back down. “I know nothing happened. I know you didn’t sleep with her. You wouldn’t. That’s not who you are. That’s what makes it so much worse.”
He looked at her, lost.