The Other Wife

She nodded. Slowly.

“And I want to know why. I was married to him for fifteen years.”

Susan raised a palm, wiggled her fingers. “Five here.”

I swallowed that fact, allowing it to hit my stomach and churn in the empty pit with the rum. Five years. That meant he’d married her the year I was in the hospital having my appendix removed. I tried to think of when Dave had been gone then, but my brain had become a fuzzy mess of dates and lies.

For a second, I thought of telling Susan the whole thing was a huge mistake. Thanks for the rum, but I gotta go.

Then I realized leaving wasn’t going to do anything but put me back to square one, and instead I stayed where I was, taking another gulp of my drink from a glass decorated with flowers around the edge, and tried to regain some kind of normalcy.

Ha. There wasn’t any of that here. What I had was a whole lot of questions and a piano-playing dog who kept looking at me with expectant eyes, as if I was supposed to do some amazing trick, too.

“Well,” I began again, trying to drum up the courage to press forward, to force myself out of the comfort zone where everything was a known quantity. “I don’t know about you, but I want some answers.”

Susan shook her head. “I—”

“Don’t say you don’t want to know.” I waved the glass at her, the ice clinking in the emptiness. “Because you will. An hour from now, a day from now, you’ll wonder why. You’ll look in the closet and see his shoes—”

Oh, God, his shoes were under her bed, too. In her closet. Was this where his favorite blue shirt had gone? The one I’d torn the closet apart looking for last May? Or the yellow striped tie I told him I hated that he’d never worn again in my presence?

I clutched the glass tighter, to keep myself from running to her bedroom to peek and see how much of my husband was here.

“And you’ll want to know,” I went on, pushing the words past my lips, “because you’re some kind of masochist who hates to have a mystery unsolved.”

“I kind of like mysteries,” Susan said, a bright smile on her face, as if I’d just handed her a new Nancy Drew.

“Work with me, Susan.” I bit off the aggravation in my voice. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to know. About Annie. About where he went when he wasn’t with you.” I swallowed. “Or me.”

She toyed with her still-full glass. Silence descended over the kitchen, seeming to darken the bright, pretty room. “I left him that day, you know.”

“Yeah, the EMTs told me.”

“We had a fight,” she said.

I tried not to let on how much it weirdly pleased me to hear that he and Susan had had a fight.

“We had the fight after we…well, you know.” A faint sheen of red filled her cheeks, a surprise in this woman who seemed so Manhattan. “Anyway, I left and took the train back to Rhode Island, figuring he’d catch up with me at home. If I had known—” Her voice caught on a sob and held the last syllable. “I’m sorry, Penny.”

She was apologizing to me for leaving my husband. For not being there when he’d had a heart attack. She made it impossible to hate her. “I’m sorry for you, too.”

She nodded, then picked up the tumbler, knocked back half the drink and slammed the small glass back onto the wooden surface. Brown liquid sloshed over the rim. “You’re right. I want to know, damn it. I loved that man and I want some answers, too.”

To hear her say she loved him hit me in the gut, hard. I rose, poured myself another drink—skipping the cola this time—and the feeling went away. A little.

Harvey the Wonder Dog trotted into the kitchen, his nose to the floor, looking for scraps, or maybe another rug to circle.

“I say we take him,” I said, gesturing to the Jack Russell terrier, “to this doggie show and ask everyone there about Dave. They knew him, they know Harvey.”

“And if they won’t tell us anything?”

I grinned at my strange new ally and raised my glass. “We’ll break out the rum.”

As she toasted my glass with her own, I had a flashing nightmare of the two of us ending up on Jerry Springer, telling our tale of woe while Harvey did tricks in the background.

Surely, it wouldn’t come to that.

I’d go on Oprah before I’d ever sink to Springer.

Maybe.

CHAPTER 6

The next time I took a road trip to discover the truth about my late husband, I would go it alone.

Susan wasn’t a bad person, but the combination of Harvey and her in the car nearly drove me over the edge. Susan chattering, Harvey pacing and whining. I was used to being alone in my car, listening to the music I liked, the talk-radio programs that interested me, but as we moved farther from Boston, the reception got worse and Susan’s voice box revved up. She’d talked all through the night, making me regret letting her get a fifty-five-ounce Diet Coke at our last gas fill.

We’d stopped for fast food at one of the exits off of Route I-81 in Virginia. The place had been littered by ten million roadies before us, but Susan had assured me, one hand securely on my arm, that there couldn’t possibly be any airborne viruses in a place like that.

Probably because they’d all run for the hills, overcome by the grease fumes.

I’d gotten a cheeseburger, but opted to have us eat in the car—breaking one of my cardinal rules—after I saw a fly groom himself on a table in the apple-themed food court.

“Here’s a napkin,” I said once we were back in the car. “You might want to spread it out, like a tablecloth. There are wet wipes in the glove box, so you don’t get any grease on the door handles. Oh, and watch those little salt packets. They have a tendency to spray.”

“Here, Harvey,” Susan said, ignoring my housekeeping instructions and opening a six-piece box of chicken nuggets on the backseat of my Mercedes. Harvey dug in, as if he hadn’t already had his shot of Purina for the day. His little jaws made quick work of the nuggets, spraying brown confetti crumbs over the leather.

“Can you get him to stop that?” I asked. “He’s making a mess.”

“He’s a dog. He’s allowed.” Susan let out a sigh, her hundredth of the trip, then made a face at her window.

“This is a Mercedes,” I said, realizing as I said it how pretentious it sounded. Like it was okay to get processed chicken tidbits all over a Chevy, but not a Benz. I relaxed my white-knuckled hold on the steering wheel, drew in a breath, let it out, then decided it was going to be a hell of a long drive to Tennessee if I didn’t get a grip. “Never mind, I’m sure he’ll eat all the crumbs.”

He did just that, leaving a gooey white trail of doggy saliva on my seats in the process. Eww. I made a mental note to get the car reconditioned. Or better yet, call one of those crime-scene cleaners to erase all trace of dog.

The miles passed, with neither one of us talking. Harvey thrust his muzzle out the three inches of open window, sniffing the air with an enthusiasm that bordered on cocaine snorting. Every once in a while, he’d let out a yip, as if he’d seen someone he knew, his tail beating a greeting against the backseat. Then he’d hop down, dance around the backseat, nudge at his backpack, hop back onto the armrest and start the process all over again. If I hadn’t known better, I’d swear he was doing doggy aerobics.

I switched on the radio, but couldn’t get anything besides static. I watched the mile markers on I-81, which come every tenth of a mile, as if taunting me with how far I had yet to go, dread building in my stomach with each round number—261, 263, 268.

“Did you ever meet Vinny?” Bracing for the answer, I stiffened my spine and concentrated on the road—and not what lay at the end of it.

Because it sure as hell wasn’t a leprechaun and a nice little pot of gold.

“Vinny?” Susan thought a minute. “No, though I heard Dave talking to someone with that name a couple times, if that helps.”

A pang slammed into my chest, as sharp as a steak knife. Picturing Dave in her kitchen, or worse, her bedroom, sitting on the Sealy, lying against the pillows, talking on his cell. He’d have one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, and he’d be slumped a little, relaxed. If there was one thing Dave hadn’t been, it was high-strung.

“Apparently, he’s Harvey’s trainer,” I said.