Million Dollar Road (4 page)

And why was that? Liz's stomach fluttered in sudden apprehension so she gulped half her third glass of champagne. What if... Con had been in an accident? Maybe he'd crashed in one of those deep drainage ditches out there on Million Dollar Road. Maybe he was in the ER at St. Tammany General in a coma, his handsome face the color of cottage cheese, I.V. tubes sprouting from his arms like sinister plastic vines. If something had happened to Con, Lizzie didn't know what she'd do. I mean, she thought, it's not as if I don't
love
him.

Of course she did.

Okay, the fear slyly suggested, he's probably not dead. What if he's with someone else instead? Some girl? Maybe he's keeping the wife at home on ice—just like he did with Emma? Those questions were unavoidable and somehow more deeply disturbing than the idea of him being dead in a ditch. After all, she knew what Con was capable of better than anyone else.

Liz's mouth turned down, stoutly denying her fears any traction. Unlike her, Con's first wife had been beyond clueless. Two years ago, when Con had asked Emma for a divorce, she'd been so shocked and undone she had to be hospitalized. So what? Lizzie thought. According to Con, Emma was a really good person, but Lizzie knew that sometimes bad things happened to good people. Life was like that; bad things had happened to her all the time. Con had said he felt just terrible about having to divorce Emma, especially after the breakdown, but Lizzie hadn't felt terrible. It wasn't her fault, was it? The Birkenstock-wearing, prematurely gray, all-natural idiot had missed every last one of the signs and that wasn't anybody's fault but her own, right?

But there were times when Liz couldn't help but be uncomfortably aware that despite her one-time rule about married men, she'd been
that
girl. She'd been the ruthless, infatuated twentysomething who'd taken Con away from Emma without a moment's indecision. Still, all that was over now, everything had worked out like it should. Now he belonged to her.

No, there was no way Con would dare run around behind
her
back. Liz was positive about that.

Impossible, she thought. There couldn't be another girl. Unlike clueless Emma, being nobody's fool, Lizzie would
know
.

 

She'd just polished off the bottle of Cristal when Con finally walked into the living room at 10:15. Slumped on the ivory linen sofa, Liz had taken her shoes off and her hair was starting to fall around her face in loose, taffy tendrils.

“Sorry I'm late, babe,” Con began. He sat down beside her with a penitent smile, looking beat on his feet. “I was just getting ready to leave when Roger called from Provence, wanting to know how the Japanese deal went down yesterday. That took an hour, but then we had some kids sneak onto the farm, looking for a place to park and smoke dope. I had to call the sheriff's office so they'd come out and take care of it, and then I couldn't get out of there until the damned deputies showed up and ran 'em off.”

It was a smooth stream of reassurance, but Con's face was questioning as with a quick glance he took in the upended bottle in the ice bucket. “And you've been waiting for hours.” He kissed her cheek. “Still hungry, babe?”

“Hell, yes. You think I dressed up so I could stay home?” Liz was aware she might sound snotty, but by now she didn't give a damn. “You're gonna take me to the Lemon Tree.
Now
.”

“Okay. If you really want to, honey.” Not looking as enthusiastic as he should have, Con stood and flipped open his cell phone. “I'll call and see if they can still take us.” He dialed. “Hey, Jen, it's Con Costello. Can you handle one last table tonight?”

Con listened for a long moment, his cheeks gradually flushing. “Yeah. Uh, yeah, for sure. Me too.” He paused again, looking even more uncomfortable. “Soon, yeah. Well, uh, thanks for taking us. We'll be right there.”

From deep in the sofa cushions, Liz glared at him in sullen dishevelment, now wishing she'd given up on Con an hour ago. She wanted to be curled up on the couch in the den watching HBO, but with a labored sigh, she slipped into her heels and let him pull her to her feet.

“You look great, hon,” Con said. “Just great.”

Oh, right. She'd looked great
three hours ago.

 

It was a mostly silent ride to the restaurant and, once inside, the blond hostess at the reception desk seemed overly happy to see Con, in Lizzie's fuzzy estimation. Then, too, she had the impression she was being given a discreet once-over as the girl ushered them to a booth in the bar in a polite hurry.

“They're still serving in here. I hope you don't mind,” the blond hostess said with a sideways glance at Liz.

Definitely
a once-over, Lizzie thought.

“No, no,” Con said a little too heartily. “This'll be fine.”

It was most certainly not fine with Liz, but it was clear that the Lemon Tree was in the process of shutting down for the night: all the tables were empty except for a lone party of three paying their check. The bartender came out from behind the wide mahogany bar, wiping his palms on his apron before he reached to shake hands with Con.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Costello,” he said. “I'll get you a couple of menus. Would y'all like to order a cocktail to get started? Glenmorangie on the rocks, right?”

Con slid into the booth across from Liz. “No thanks, Chuck,” he said. “We're good.”

“Oh yes, we would
so
like a cocktail,” Liz announced, stifling a belch. “I want champagne.” Better not to change horses in midstream, she thought.

Con's face was unreadable. “Bring us a bottle of Cristal, then, please.” He shook out his napkin and put it in his lap. After Chuck the bartender had hurried off, Con's tone was dubious when he said, “More to drink, Liz? You sure?”

“Absolutely.” Liz tried to sound dignified and almost succeeded. Okay, maybe she'd had a little too much champagne, but Con had been so late that the drinks had sort of gotten away from her. She changed the subject. “Already you're some kind of celebrity in here, aren't you.” That sounded like an accusation, not the way she'd intended. A headache was forming inside the clouds in her brain and Liz would have killed for a couple of aspirin. “Everybody knows your name, what you drink even,” she said, rubbing her forehead.

“Lunches with clients, hon. It's a nice change of pace from chain restaurants and fried seafood.” Con's sea-blue, almost-green eyes studied her. “Not still upset, are you? I know I was late, but that's how it goes out there—especially while Rog is out of town.”

He reached across the table to take her hand, but Liz pulled it away. Con might be doing that charm thing he did whenever she was upset with him, but she meant to get down to this evening's real purpose before she was distracted by him.

“Look.” Lizzie toyed with the place setting's silver-plated knife. “I thought,” she said, choosing her words with tipsy care, “we were going to have more time together when you took this job. That's what you
said,
anyway.” Her silverware arranged, Liz looked up to meet Con's grave, attentive gaze. “I mean, I saw more of you when we were working together at the law office, before we got married even. It's just, well, I . . . miss you, okay?”

That last was a painful admission, one she'd only just had to admit to herself. Lizzie despised feeling this way, as though she were somehow diminished by acknowledging a perfectly rightful need.

“For God's sake, Con,” she said, determined to have her say anyway, “ever since I quit and turned into Suzy Homemaker, and you took the job with Hannigan, it seems like you're never home.” She knew she was whining now, and hearing that in her voice was almost unendurable. Lizzie MacBride-Costello didn't
whine
. She wanted to kick Con's shin under the table for reducing her to this.

Hating her anger, too, she snapped, “You're either at the farm or in some goddamned strip club. You should be making time for
me
. I only agreed to this bullshit arrangement we have because it seemed so damned important to you that I be
home
all the time.”

Liz was sure she'd just crossed the line between whiny and bitchy, but in that moment the bartender arrived with their bottle of champagne and a footed silver ice bucket.

“Here we go, folks. Have y'all had a chance to get a look at the menu yet?” Chuck seemed anxious for them to order.

“Not really. Why don't you surprise us?” Con sounded affable, but Lizzie couldn't miss the undertone of exasperation in his voice. The young man in the black shirt and pants looked somewhat confused. Her husband gave him a quick smile then, the same confident smile that had so charmed a twenty-nine-year-old junior associate from Baton Rouge that she'd shrugged off her Methodist upbringing and rule about sleeping with married men along with her second-best dress ($69.99 on sale at Banana Republic), before falling into bed with him at the Ritz-Carlton. On their first date.

“Everything I've had here is excellent,” Con said, “so just have the kitchen do what they still can and I know we'll love it.”

Her jaw tightening, Lizzie thought of the tenderloin in the fridge, marinating in red wine, crushed pink peppercorns, and garlic. “No, I know exactly what I want,” she said with an adamant shake of her head. “A filet, medium rare, with a real béarnaise sauce—not that crap from Sysco—and I want it on the side.”

Con closed his eyes for a moment. “I'll have the same, then,” he said.

After Chuck the bartender had poured the champagne and hurried off to place their order, Con gave her a long, beginning-to-be-irritated look. Lizzie decided she didn't care. She downed the better part of her glass right away, her head throbbing.

“What the hell's this about, Liz?” Con said in a low voice. “I already apologized. I brought you out. You've got another nice bottle of French booze. You've gotten your way. You always get your way, so can't we just have a quiet meal and go home?”

“
My
way?” Lizzie yanked the bottle out of the ice bucket. “My ass! My way was not on your goddamned agenda tonight. So maybe this marriage isn't turning out how it was supposed to, Con. Maybe we need to get, get . . .
counseled,
or whatever. Maybe I should go back to work and you can keep the house. God knows the firm wouldn't have stuck me in some backwater. I could have been on the partner track, too, if I wasn't being your stupid, unpaid housekeeper.”

Recklessly, Liz poured herself another glass of champagne. Foam spilled over the edge of the flute onto the white tablecloth. “Oh, yeah. And maybe instead of carrying on around town, getting cozy with random
hostesses,
you should make it home at a normal hour. Tell the clients to scrounge up pole dancers on their own time instead of using you for a damned pimp!”

She raised her glass to her lips, hot amber eyes glaring at him over the rim. The champagne tasted sour, but she took a gulp anyway. Liz hadn't meant for her evening with Con to turn out like this. Her plans for a civilized discussion had been ruined by too much champagne and her own bitchiness. Con was bound to be fed up with this conversation. She was sickened by it herself, and yet she couldn't seem to stop.

Con didn't look remotely contrite, though, and wasn't that the whole problem? Lizzie suspected meek Emma, that
good person,
had never called him out on his crap. Liz was sure to suffer by the comparison—although she was in the right on this. But the thought of long-suffering Emma tasted as sour to her as the champagne, and even as a part of Liz was frantically telling her to shut up, shut up
now,
she couldn't let it go, not yet.

“And don't you dare tell me I sound like your pathetic ex-wife!” Liz hissed. Being compared to Emma, even in her own head, was beyond galling.

“I wouldn't dream of it,” Con said. His voice was contemptuous. “Emma would never have gone off on me like you've done tonight.” His mouth was a flat line. “She had too much class.”

That old Baton Rouge nerve—being nobody worth noticing, special to no one—had never been successfully buried, and now it flared into life. How
dare
he? She had as much class as anybody, by God, she most certainly did! Far past being reasonable now, Liz's simmering resentment exploded. Her hand suddenly seeming to move by itself, she snatched her glass and tossed champagne into Con's astonished face.

“Fuck
you
!” she snarled.

The long hours of waiting for her husband to come home to her, his lessening desire for her body, the halfhearted attention, this insulting disrespect. A thunderbolt of devastating certainty split the champagne clouds in Lizzie's brain, bringing months of growing, half-sensed suspicions into a long-denied clarity.

Cheating. Con had to be
cheating
on her.

A
n empty bushel basket resting in the dirt at her feet, Emma took off her wide-brimmed straw hat and wiped the perspiration from her forehead with a dusty forearm.

Late August in the garden was pretty much a lost cause. There'd been nothing worth taking to town this Saturday morning for the Covington farmers' market. The neat rows of summer vegetables—bell peppers, snap beans, summer squash, tomatoes, sweet corn, and field peas—everything was picked over and almost done.

Except for the okra, of course. In all its hairy, practically carnal exuberance, okra thrived long after everything else gave up in the staggering heat. Emma sighed, resigning herself to bushels of exuberance well on into Christmas.

Born in New Orleans, a child of the Deep South, forty-year-old Emma had always only submitted to the seemingly endless Louisiana summers. Like everyone else, she waited them out, longing for the first days of fall, when being outside felt less like a forced march through the Congo. The flock of gold-brown, fluffy bantams was equally oppressed by the heat. The hens pecked at squash bugs with halfhearted stabs, scratching listlessly in the powdery soil of the garden.

Organic farming, Emma reminded herself, was not for sissies. It was damned labor-intensive and time-consuming, so as an exercise in mindfulness—
be here now
—months ago she'd quit wearing her watch when working in the garden. The sun was her clock now. As the mornings drew on into early afternoon, shadows crept close under the plants' wilted leaves, huddling like refugees from a natural disaster. Then Emma would shoo the chickens into their pen, whistle for Sheba, the mongrel bitch who'd adopted her six months ago, and go home. In for the afternoon, she'd stay out of the garden until well after the sun's burning angle fell oblique to the horizon before venturing out again to do her few evening chores.

The shadows were announcing it was time to quit. Emma put her hat on, picked up the empty basket, and began walking through the garden, back to the house.

The farm was a recent endeavor, one strongly urged by her therapist, Margot.

At first, the challenges were immediately apparent, the fulfillment not nearly so much. The backbreaking days of clearing, tilling, and planting had stretched Emma's fragile equilibrium taut as a thrumming power line, until the jeering voices in her head fell silent from sheer exhaustion. Through the long nights, alone in the too-big bed, she'd slept like a dead woman, and, already more thin than was flattering to her tall, graceful frame, she'd misplaced another seven pounds somewhere along the way. Eighteen months later Emma's high cheekbones now planed sharply, her pale gray eyes grown huge, luminous as moonlit snow under her bangs of shoulder-length silver hair.

In the near-barren garden, an errant breeze lifted the dust in a spiritless spiral. As she took off her gloves, Emma rolled her aching shoulders, brown and smoothly muscled.

“C'mon, guys,” she called over her shoulder to the flock of bantams. Like tired commuters, the chickens ambled down the rows, heading for the coop's fenced yard under the live oak's deep blue shade. Emma whistled for Sheba and the rangy black-and-tan dog came trotting from the woods that bordered the field, panting, her tongue lolling.

“Catch anything?”

The dog seemed to shrug at her question, as if saying, “What's to catch in this heat?” Sheba, some mixed breed of hound, often brought home big dead field rats, a wide variety of snakes, and the occasional fat raccoon, apparently sharing the carcasses with Emma. Hunting was sure to be a survival skill learned from living off the land, but when Sheba had wandered up to the porch one frigid evening last February, Emma had felt as though she'd discovered a kindred soul—lost or abandoned, hoping for one last chance before she wound up as roadkill. It never occurred to her to turn Sheba away, and so digging holes to bury the dog's victims seemed a small price to pay for her loyal company.

Sheba at her heels, Emma trudged up the steps of her front porch. The rambling old farmhouse promised the cool relief of central air-conditioning, a guilty pleasure, one she'd found she couldn't bring herself to sacrifice on the altar of sustainable farming. The low, wide eaves and long windows, her flower garden's morning glories, shrub roses, and sunflowers, the crows perched on the gabled roof—all of it was as it always was: a place she'd had to teach herself to call home.

Once inside the blue-painted front door, Emma was greeted by the ethereal echo of Mozart's
Requiem
playing on the radio's NPR station. Music made the house seem less empty, and she'd conceived a deep and abiding fear of silence. Emma raised the volume, and after making sure Sheba's water bowl was filled, she went down the long center hall to her spare, cream-painted bedroom, as neat, simple, and solitary as a nun's cell.

Gathering fresh clothes from her closet, Emma tossed her sweaty shirt and shorts into the hamper in the old-fashioned bathroom while she ran a bath. With a groan of pleasure she slid under the lukewarm water in the claw-footed tub. Emma scrubbed her knees and under her fingernails with a brush, lathered her hair with organic, cucumber-scented shampoo, and soaked for long minutes. Her thoughts drifted in a rare peace as the soprano's pure, soaring voice sang of loss from another century, until, after half an hour, when her hands and feet began to wrinkle, Emma got out of the tub. She dressed in what had become her summer habit of khaki shorts and a plain white T-shirt, running a comb through her wet hair before she twisted it up in a clip.

And now it was time for the exercise in hard discipline that followed the afternoon's ritual bath.

Taking a deep breath, Emma forced herself to look at her reflection in the medicine cabinet's wavy mirror, at the long straight nose, the dark eyebrows feathered like moth wings. Startlingly pale in her tanned face, her gold-flecked gray eyes looked back, grave and wary.

Emma summoned an unconvincing smile for the woman in the mirror. Her reflection was still there. For today at least, she was seeing what was real.

“You cooled off yet?” she said, turning to the dog.

Sheba, stretched out on the planks of the bathroom floor beside the tub, thumped her tail in response. With a grimace, Emma dry-swallowed her Prozac tablet and two fish-oil capsules before she slipped on her watch. She glanced at it. Only 12:45.

She'd hoped it was later than that.

This was the treacherous part of the day, the long hours between morning's end and evening's chores. Reading left Emma's mind untethered, the intrusive thoughts and unsought memories slyly inserting themselves into what had once been safe, measured passages of Austen and Proust. They popped up around corners in the histories she'd once loved. The old house was isolated at the end of a gravel road, and all its rooms were so fearfully quiet. Emma feared hearing the low voices, insidious whispering voices, both familiar by now and yet still dread-invoking. There weren't
really
any voices, she knew that, but Emma heard them all the same. Over the past year she'd come to leave the NPR station on all day, whether she was in the house or not, hoping the constant classical music and the calm, competent voices of the news cycle would make the whispers leave her alone.

But even Nina Totenberg was no defense against memory. Emma lived side by side with stubborn memory reminding her of the way life had once been. Memory led to melancholy, futile dreams of the paths her life might have taken if only things had turned out differently. Perhaps if the baby had lived, instead of being alone in this house Emma and her daughter could have passed the summer afternoons making gingerbread, going shopping, or just, just . . . being together. Her child would have been eighteen years old this summer, and if she'd been born there might have been three of them here, a family. Three instead of only her, alone.

Cultivate gratitude
. It was another of her therapist's affirmations.

Catching hold of the thought, with a flash of her formerly characteristic, philosophical good humor, Emma reminded herself that, yes, she could choose to be grateful. She'd come a long way in the two years since her breakdown. For one thing, she could look in the mirror now, even though it was still difficult to work up the nerve to do it.

“There's this, too—I've got you, old girl, for company,” Emma said, looking fondly at the dozing dog beside the bathtub. Sheba lifted her head for a second and went back to sleep.

Padding barefoot into the big, sunny kitchen, Emma poured a tall glass of lemonade from the frosted pitcher in the fridge. She sipped at it while looking out the window at her twenty-acre farm, paid for with the divorce settlement. The herb parterre bounded by flower beds, the grassy alleys stretching under the sun-spotted shade of the pecan tree grove, the iris-ringed pond where a great blue heron waded—it was an ordered, beautiful place, but at moments like these, Emma felt the emptiness of every solitary acre. Beauty could be lonely, too. She sighed.

So what to do now with the rest of her afternoon? Emma wondered. She'd cleaned the house yesterday, her laundry was done, and she wasn't hungry. Emma glanced hopefully at the cell phone charging on the kitchen counter beside her hand, although hardly anyone called her anymore except for Sarah Fortune.

When the old woman had come by over a year ago to welcome Emma to the neighborhood, Sarah arrived with housewarming gifts: a loaf of homemade bread and a bottle of discount vodka. Oblivious to Emma's nearly mute shyness, she'd made herself at home in the kitchen and stayed for two hours. Now possessed of an unlooked-for friend, over the months Emma had come to appreciate Sarah's blunt company. The acquaintances she'd made in Covington before the divorce had done a slow fade since she'd been single, as though divorce were catching and she, having contracted the disease, was a carrier. Consequently, more often than not, checking the phone was a waste of time.

But then time was something Emma had more than enough of, miles of it.

Still, she picked up the phone anyway and for once this Saturday morning there'd been an unusual two missed calls and a voice mail, besides. Emma noted Sarah's regular morning call, reminding herself to ring her neighbor back, but then she recognized the rare second number and it set her heart to banging like an unlatched screen door in a high wind.

Con
.

Her knees going abruptly slack, Emma had to sit at the scrubbed cypress table. She was breathless at the approach of her old enemy—a panic attack. Instinctively, she began Margot's breathing exercise, frantic to head off the sudden, unreasoning terror stalking her before panic brought her down once again and tore her to pieces.

But Con had called. God help her,
Con
had called and panic was winning.

“Breathe!” Emma grabbed at the air in gasps, struggling to find a rhythm. Gradually, her racing heart slowed. After long minutes, her breaths deepened. As if sensing something amiss, Sheba trotted down the hall into the kitchen, toenails clicking on the pine floor, and heaped herself like a load of laundry at Emma's feet under the table.

“I can . . . do this.” Although calmer, Emma still panted. Her hand went down to Sheba's dark head and found the long, silky ears. She stroked them. “I'm okay . . . I'll be okay, Sheba. It's just . . . a voice mail.”

A voice mail from
Con
.

Still, Emma knew she'd retrieve it. She always did. She was going to listen to his voice again. She had to, it was a compulsion, as inexplicable as phantom pain from a lost limb, but now Emma was fighting to turn back the unbidden memory of her ex-husband's once-beloved face, his mouth, so dear to her, saying those terrible, terrible words.

I want a divorce
.

 

They'd been together since the start of her sophomore year at Tulane, meeting outside the library when Emma had discovered a flat tire on her bicycle and Con had stopped to help.

He'd fixed the leak, asked her out for a coffee, and from that afternoon they were inseparable. A handsome, popular twenty-one years old to her solemn, quiet nineteen, he'd pursued her with a bewildering ardor and she was helpless to resist him, even if she'd wanted to. When Emma contracted mono that fall, Con came to her dorm room every day with newspapers, magazines he knew she'd enjoy, class assignments, and silly haikus he'd written for her. Until she recovered, he weekly brought her fragrant armfuls of lilies he'd picked up at a discount market down in the Warehouse District. Both on impossibly tight budgets compared to the majority of the other, more privileged students, most nights they studied together in Emma's dorm room before falling asleep in each other's arms, twined together in her narrow bed.

Sometimes Emma wondered why Con had chosen her, an agonizingly shy, orphaned girl raised by an elderly aunt and uncle in their decaying Garden District mansion. They'd died during her freshman year. Utterly alone then, she'd had no one—until Con found her. And so the weeks turned into months before Emma could at last believe it: she had fallen in love, she began to trust that she was loved in return, and over the course of that year she began secretly framing what had been a solitary life in unfamiliar, exciting terms of
we, us,
and
ours
.

One cold December night washed with a gentle rain, Con asked her to marry him. They'd been walking in the French Quarter, and he'd just given his last five dollars, unasked, to an almost invisible woman who'd been huddled in a doorway.

“Marry me, Em?” His face was grave, but his tone was light.