Chapter 3
Roxanne’s couch was older than their friendship and had a spring in the middle that found your hip no matter how you lay.
Amelia woke on it at nine with a crocheted blanket over her and sunlight coming through the blinds in stripes.
For a few seconds she didn’t know where she was.
Then she smelled coffee and heard an old country station in the kitchen, and all of it came back at once, like a wave hitting the back of her knees.
She lay there and let it hit.
In the kitchen Roxanne was frying eggs in a black skillet and swearing at them softly. She was dressed for work already, in cargo pants and a Vega Services polo with the sleeves pushed up, and her glasses were on the chain. She didn’t turn around when Amelia came in.
“Sit,” she said. “Eat. Don’t talk yet.”
Amelia sat. Roxanne put a plate in front of her. Two eggs, toast, a sliced tomato from the yard. Then she poured two cups of coffee and sat down across the little table with her own and looked at Amelia over the top of the cup.
Amelia ate. She was surprised to find she was hungry. She ate all of it.
When the plate was clean, Roxanne put her cup down.
“Okay,” she said. “Now talk.”
So Amelia told her. The half-sentence in the kitchen.
The car. The party, and Zane’s joke, and Heather at the door.
The study. The frame. The cleaner on 28.
She told it flat, in order, like a report, because that was the only way she could get through it.
Roxanne didn’t interrupt once. She sat with her hands around her coffee cup, and as the story went on, her face got still and her knuckles went white.
When Amelia got to the part about the proposal, was the bet still on, and the long pause, and yes, Roxanne put her cup down so hard the coffee jumped.
“That son of a bitch,” she said quietly.
“Rox.”
“No. I’m going to say it once and then I’m done. That son of a bitch.” She took a breath through her nose. “Okay. Done.”
They sat there.
Amelia waited for the rest of it. She had been waiting for it since the porch last night.
Roxanne had not liked Lucas from the first day.
Roxanne had come to the wedding in a navy pantsuit and shaken his hand like she was checking it for weapons.
For five years, whenever his name came up, Roxanne’s mouth had done a small flat thing.
She had been waiting five years to be right.
“Go ahead,” Amelia said.
“Go ahead what?”
“Say it. You told me so.”
Roxanne looked at her. Then she reached across the table and took Amelia’s hand, the left one, the one with the scar and the ring, and held it in both of hers. Her hands were small and rough and warm.
“I’m not going to say that,” she said. “Not today. Not ever. You hear me? I don’t get to be right about this. Nobody wins this one. Not me. Not anybody.”
Amelia’s eyes filled.
“You’re going to stay here as long as you want,” Roxanne said. “You’re going to sleep on my terrible couch. You’re going to eat my eggs. And you don’t have to decide one single thing today except whether you want more coffee.”
“I want more coffee.”
“Good. That’s a decision. Look at you.” Roxanne let go of her hand and got up and poured. With her back turned, she said, “And for the record, honey, you didn’t do anything wrong. You fell for a man. That’s all. That’s the only thing you did.”
* * *
The first call came Saturday. It was Libby Carter.
Libby was on the Foundation’s gala committee. She had three children and a house in Ansley Park and a laugh like a wind chime. For five years she and Amelia had been what Amelia would have called friends. They had lunch. They sat together at the benefit. Libby had sent soup when Amelia had the flu.
“Amelia, sweetheart,” Libby said. “I just heard. I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Of course you are. You’re so strong. You’ve always been so strong.” A small pause. “Is it true you’re at some friend’s house? In—where was it—Grant Park?”
Amelia hadn’t told anyone where she was.
“Who told you that?”
“Oh, you know how it is. People talk.” The wind-chime laugh. “Listen, you have to let us take you to lunch. Me and Sloane and Katie. Tuesday? We’ll go somewhere quiet. You can tell us everything.”
You can tell us everything. There was something in Libby’s voice. Amelia had heard it before, at a hundred lunches, when someone else’s marriage was coming apart. It was sympathy, mostly. But there was something bright underneath it. A little hum of pleasure, the way a crowd hums before a show.
“Maybe,” Amelia said.
“Tuesday. I’ll text you.” Then, softer, as if she were saying something kind: “And honey, I just want you to know, I always thought it was so romantic. How it started. I always said so. Whatever anybody else—”
She stopped.
The silence on the line went on a second too long.
“Whatever anybody else what?” Amelia said.
“Oh, nothing. You know. People are jealous. Let’s do Tuesday.”
Libby hung up. Amelia sat on the edge of Roxanne’s couch with the phone in her lap and looked at the wall.
How it started.
* * *
By Tuesday, everyone knew.
Not about the bet. They didn’t need to be told about the bet. They knew she had left, and the knowing had a texture to it, a feel, like the change in the air before a storm.
Her phone would not stop. Women she hadn’t heard from in a year called to ask how she was.
Their voices were warm. Too warm. They asked careful questions and waited for the answers, not listening, just waiting to go.
Two of them used the same word, devastated, like they had agreed on it.
Sloane Whitfield sent a text with three heart emojis and the words Lunch ASAP, we’re all here for you.
The Tuesday lunch turned into a Wednesday lunch and then a Thursday dinner at Sloane’s, just the girls, and it wasn’t lunch at all.
It was an audience. They wanted her at a table so they could watch her face.
She didn’t go.
She sat on Roxanne’s back steps in the heat instead, with the phone face down beside her, and she let it buzz.
And slowly, the way a picture comes up in a darkroom, she understood the rest of it.
They had known. Not just Zane and Heather. All of them. Libby with her how it started. Sloane with her hearts. The women at the bar at Zane’s party who looked and looked away. The men behind Zane who laughed a beat before the joke landed, because they already knew the punch line.
Five years of dinners. Five years of benefits and lake weekends and baby showers.
Five years of learning which fork and which wine and whose husband was on which board.
She had worked so hard. She had studied them like a language, so she would never embarrass him.
So she would never be the girl from the night crew who didn’t know which glass was for water.
And the whole time, they had known what she was. They had been watching to see if she’d pass.
She put her face in her hands on Roxanne’s back steps and did not cry. She was past that. What she felt was worse. It was the heat again, rising up, filling her until she thought her skin would split with it.
She had never been so angry in her life.
* * *
Lucas came on Wednesday evening.
She heard the car first. Not the black car.
His own car, the dark gray one, the one he had been driving Heather in.
It pulled up at the chain-link fence and the engine cut off, and then there was nothing for a long time.
He was sitting out there. She could picture it.
Him in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel, working out what to say.
Roxanne was at the stove. She looked out the kitchen window, then looked at Amelia.
“You want me to get rid of him?”
“No.” Amelia stood up. “I’ll do it.”
She went down the narrow hall. She heard his steps on the porch, heard him stop at the door. He knocked twice, politely. She opened the door on the chain.
He looked terrible. Worse than terrible. He looked like he hadn’t slept since Thursday. He was wearing a suit, of course, because he didn’t know how to be seen in anything else, but the tie was gone and his collar was open and his jaw was dark with stubble. He had something in his hand.
“Amelia,” he said.
“What do you want?”
He looked at the chain. He swallowed whatever he had been about to say.
“I want to say I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I said it the other night. I’m saying it again.
I’m sorry. What I did was indefensible, and I’m not going to try to defend it.
I take full responsibility. I know I’ve hurt you in a way I can’t take back, and I understand if you need time and space, and I want you to know that whatever you need, I’ll make sure you have it. ”
She listened to it. It was a good apology. It had all the right words. It had indefensible and full responsibility and time and space. It sounded like something he had said out loud in the car, maybe more than once, getting the order right.
It sounded like a press release.
“Are you done?” she said.
He held out his hand. There was a ring of keys in it. The front door key and the back door key and the little brass one for the gate, on the silver ring she had bought him their first year, with the small enamel peach on it.
“The house is yours,” he said. “I’ve already moved out.
I’m at the Four Seasons. You can go home tonight.
Denise is there. Everything’s where you left it.
” He took a breath. “And anything else. If you’d rather have somewhere new, anywhere, I’ll buy it.
An apartment, a house, whatever you want.
I’ve told the bank to open an account in your name.
You don’t have to ask me for anything. You don’t have to talk to me. You just have to let me take care of—”
“No.”
He stopped.
She looked at the keys in his hand. The little enamel peach. She had bought it at a gas station in Macon the first time she took him home to meet her mother, and he had laughed at it and put it on his key ring that same day, and it had been there five years.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.