Chapter 2 #2
“You drove her,” she said. “Every morning. Since the summer started. You walked past Walt and put her in your car. Denise saw it. Walt saw it. Everybody who works in this house saw it, and not one of them said a word to me, because what would they say? Mrs. Fletcher, your husband is giving a woman rides? It’s nothing.
Any one day of it is nothing.” She took a breath.
“But you were talking to her in that car. You told her things. You told her whatever it is about that year that you won’t tell me.
You sat next to her for eight weeks and told her the inside of your head.
And you sat next to me for five years and didn’t. ”
The kitchen was quiet.
“You didn’t cheat on me with your body, Lucas,” she said. “You cheated on me with the truth. You gave it to her instead.”
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say, and he was smart enough to know it. He just sat there with his shaking hands, and for the first time in five years she saw him with nothing to fix.
* * *
She packed.
She went upstairs and got the old navy duffel out of the back of the closet, behind the winter coats, where she had kept it for five years without ever deciding why.
It still had a Vega Services patch on the side, half peeled off.
It still smelled faintly of industrial lemon cleaner, no matter how many times it had been washed.
She put in what was hers.
The jeans she had owned before him. Her old sneakers.
The two sweaters her mother had knitted, and the gray hoodie from the night crew, and the cheap watch she had bought herself at twenty-two.
Her laptop, which the Foundation owned, and her scholarship files, which were hers.
Her mother’s Bible. The photo of her mother on the porch in Macon.
Her toothbrush. Her own face cream, the drugstore kind, not the forty-dollar kind in the gold jar.
She left the dresses. She left the shoes, rows of them, in their cubbies.
She left the gold jar. She left the diamond studs in the dish on the dresser and the watch he had given her the second Christmas and the green dress she was wearing, which she took off and folded over a chair, and she put on her old jeans and the gray hoodie instead.
On the top shelf of the closet was a small box wrapped in brown paper. Five years next week. She looked at it. Then she left it where it was.
She did not take off the ring. She stood at the dresser with her hand held out and looked at it, and tried, and found she couldn’t. Not yet. Her hand wouldn’t do it. She put the hand in the hoodie pocket and zipped the duffel with the other one.
When she turned around he was in the bedroom doorway.
He had been standing there she didn’t know how long. He looked at the duffel. He looked at the old hoodie. She watched him understand.
“Don’t,” he said. “Please. Stay here. I’ll go. I’ll go to a hotel, I’ll go anywhere, this is your house—”
“It’s your house. It was always your house.” She picked up the duffel. It was lighter than she expected. Five years and it weighed about as much as a bag of groceries. “I’m taking what’s mine.”
“Everything here is yours.”
“No,” she said. “Everything here is what you won.”
He flinched.
She came toward the door, and for a second she thought he wouldn’t move. He was standing in the middle of it. Then he stepped back, all the way back, against the hall wall, to let her by. He didn’t touch her. She almost wished he would, so she could have something to push against.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“That’s not yours to know anymore.”
“Let Walt drive you. Please. It’s the middle of the night. Just let him take you wherever you want and I won’t ask him where—”
“I’ll call a cab.”
“Amelia—”
“I’ll call a cab, Lucas.” She stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at him. He was still pressed against the wall like a man on a ledge. “You have a driver you don’t use. I’ll call a cab.”
* * *
She went down to the kitchen one more time.
The frame was where she had left it, in the middle of the oak table, in the circle of lamplight. She looked at the blue ink. At the cleaner on 28. At the two names.
She had thought, walking out of Zane’s, that she would take it with her. That she would keep it somewhere, like evidence. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want to be the woman who carried it around.
She turned it, so it faced his chair.
“You keep it,” she said, though he was upstairs and couldn’t hear her. “You won it.”
She walked down the long drive to the gate with the duffel on her shoulder. The heat was still there, even at one in the morning, thick and wet on her face. Behind her the house was lit up in three windows. She didn’t turn around to see if he was in one of them.
She called a cab from the street. While she waited she stood under the old oak by the gate and looked at her phone. She had a dozen numbers she could call. Women from the club, from the Foundation board, from the dinners. Women who would take her in and make her tea and be so, so sorry.
Women who, she understood now, had probably known.
She scrolled past all of them to the one name she had known before any of this. Before the house and the dresses and the table at Christmas. She didn’t call. It was one in the morning. She just gave the cab driver the address.
* * *
Roxanne Vega lived in a small brick bungalow in Grant Park, with a chain-link fence and a crooked mailbox and a porch light that was always on because Roxanne said burglars were cowards and cowards hate light.
It was ten minutes past two when Amelia climbed the porch steps.
She stood at the door with her duffel and her hand raised to knock, and she thought about the last time she had stood here.
It had been years. Too many years. The marriage had swallowed so much, so quietly, that she hadn’t noticed it happening.
Lunch once a month had become once a season.
Once a season had become Christmas cards.
Roxanne had never complained about it once.
Roxanne had just kept the porch light on.
She knocked.
It took a minute. Then the hall light came on, and there were steps, and the door opened on the chain.
Roxanne was forty-six and five foot nothing.
She was wearing a Braves T-shirt that came to her knees and her reading glasses on the chain around her neck, and her hair was in a knot held by what looked like a pencil.
She looked through the gap at Amelia’s face.
Then she looked down at the duffel with the Vega Services patch peeling off the side.
She didn’t say anything.
She shut the door, took the chain off, and opened it wide. Then she stepped back and held it, the way you hold a door for someone carrying something heavy.
Amelia walked in. Behind her Roxanne closed the door and turned the lock, and only then, in the narrow hall that smelled like coffee and floor wax, did the crying finally come.