Once Upon a Lie (6 page)

Jack looked at her mournfully. “I guess this means we can’t go for clams.”

Maeve managed to hold down the muffin she had eaten right before she had left the store, but yes, it still meant that they weren’t going for clams.

It was as if Sean were laughing at her from his grave. See? he taunted. You’ll never be rid of me.

CHAPTER 6

“Speed dating.”

Maeve looked up from the mixing bowl. “That’s funny. I thought you said ‘speed dating.’”

“You know you want to.” Jo hoisted herself over the counter and into Maeve’s work space, something that Maeve had asked her several times not to do, but that she persisted in doing. Jo was a former gymnast, and she still carried herself like one all these years later. She had competed until she had gotten too tall—topping out at a hair below five feet nine—and left her little spandex-suited teammates behind to throw themselves up and over and around the mats at the gymnastics academy where she still held a couple of scoring titles. Reed thin, long-legged, and graceful, she hid her lithe body behind baggy overalls and Doc Marten boots. She never did a backhand spring or anything else to give away her background, but the ease with which she could bend from the waist to pick up a dropped knife or stand on her toes to get something on a tall shelf was a dead giveaway that she was a former athlete and made Maeve, a hair over five feet, envious.

“You know?” Maeve said, watching Jo’s eyebrows go up in anticipation of her acceptance of the plan. “I really don’t.” She held up her spatula, letting the ganache she was making trail back into the bowl. “Does the consistency of this look right to you?”

Jo shrugged. “Looks okay. Put a dollop on top of the cake and see if it holds.” It was the first reasonable thing she had said about baking the entire day.

The store was quiet that morning, despite it being a typical workday. Maeve handed Jo a muffin tin, the idea being that she would actually bake.

“It will be fun,” Jo protested.

“The last time someone said that to me, I ended up throwing up, upside down, on a roller coaster in Seaside Park.” Maeve licked the knife that held a dollop of cream cheese frosting. “It won’t be fun. It will be a disaster. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Jo looked at her forlornly, reminding Maeve that she was much newer to the realm of divorce than Maeve was, although Maeve had never had a longing to pair up with anyone after her marriage had ended. In the space of eighteen months, Jo had lost her breasts and her husband to cancer, the former to the actual disease, the latter to the fallout from more than a year of treatment and all its attendant horrors: chemotherapy, hair loss, and, ultimately, a body that didn’t resemble the one that he thought he had taken possession of ten years earlier at their wedding.

To say that Maeve didn’t like Jo’s ex was a massive understatement.

Jo was still talking, but Maeve realized she wasn’t listening. She was fantasizing about killing him. And not in that abstract way in which you thought about making someone—a nuisance, really—disappear. It was all very clear to her, and she figured it would take about fifteen minutes; if she budgeted her time correctly, she could fit it in between Heather’s tutoring session and Rebecca’s haircut.

“Maeve?”

“What?” she asked, noting the empty muffin tin in Jo’s hands.

“It’s one night. And there’s free booze,” Jo said.

“You really want to do this?” Maeve asked.

Jo looked at her beseechingly. “It’s that or I put an ad on Craigslist. You don’t want that, do you?”

Maeve reached into the huge stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen and handed Jo a tub of muffin mix. “And what would that say?”

Jo thought for a moment, putting down the muffin tin. “Breastless woman with boundless sexual energy seeks to make the carnal acquaintance of man with penis. No experience necessary. On-the-job training available.” Jo had had a reconstruction after her surgery, but it hadn’t gone well, her body too battered, her skin too thin, another nail in the coffin of her marriage.

Maeve took off her apron, still clean, and hung it on the back of the door. “Very enticing. Alluring, even.” She pulled open the kitchen door, staring out into the empty space in the front of the store. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”

Jo clapped her hands together excitedly, a gesture that belied her almost forty years on the earth. “I’ll drive. I know how you get around free Chardonnay.”

Maeve was halfway out the door, another soccer game on her schedule, when she reminded Jo that she hadn’t actually said yes.

*   *   *

Cal and Gabriela were already at the game when she got there, and she did her best to hide the hitch in her step as she approached the bleachers, the one that indicated that, yes, she was surprised to see them, and no, she wasn’t happy to see Gabriela. Her flat-ironed hair was motionless on this breezy day, held in place by countless applications of some kind of product Maeve would never buy or use on her own curly blond tresses, preferring a stretched-out elastic band or a headband to deal with the strays that inevitably made their way onto her face. Next to Gabriela was a purse big enough to hold a case of wine, its soft, buttery leather containing the contents of one very glamorous woman’s life. Maeve knew for a fact that Gabriela had gotten the bag at a photo shoot a few years earlier because she had offered it to Maeve, her unkempt and not-stylish friend married to the man she had set her sights on, a gesture that Maeve now knew was a guilt offering. At the time, Gabriela had been sleeping with Cal on a regular basis, and it seemed that Maeve was the only person who hadn’t known.

Maeve wished she had taken the bag. It was worth twenty grand on eBay, its salmon color making it a rare and exotic breed of designer handbag. She had looked it up.

The baby was strapped to Cal, as usual, Gabriela’s crisp white dress shirt not the place to put a baby whose reason for being was to dribble and drool as much as possible. Cal’s second wife looked up as Maeve climbed into the bleachers, taking a seat behind them. She was happy to notice, looking down at Gabriela’s head, that a thin spot had begun to appear right at the crown of her former friend’s head, pink scalp starting to peek through black tresses. Karma really was a bitch. That, or Gabriela’s aggressive straightening treatments were wreaking havoc on her scalp.

Gabriela’s modus operandi was to behave as if nothing had changed between them. She looked behind her and gave Maeve a big smile. “I left work early so I could see the game,” she said, her Portuguese accent covering every word like a cashmere blanket, soothing and comforting. Maeve knew better, though; beneath the earth mother persona lay a spoiled, rotten witch who got what she wanted, when she wanted it, regardless of the cost. Like the bag. And Cal.

The baby was the icing on the cake. Sure, he was adorable and completely innocent in this whole situation, but watching Cal parade around like Father of the Year when he had been completely absent for the better part of his first two daughters’ fleeting childhoods, was hard to take. Cal decided right around the time that Gabriela announced her pregnancy, with some creative math that made Maeve realize in hindsight that perhaps Gabriela had been pregnant before Cal had really bolted the family nest for good, that he was burned out on corporate law. That plus the fact that he now had a wife, two children, and a pregnant mistress was enough to burn anyone out. It was depressing him, making him question if he really was living his best life, sentiments that were the hallmarks of a traditional midlife crisis. Maeve watched from the sidelines as he struck a deal with his new wife to stay home and take care of little Devon while she continued her career at a second-tier women’s magazine—
Frou Frou
was no
Vogue
and never would be—dispensing advice as to how to wear the newest nail polish colors and when to wear fishnets. Her magazine was for women with a lot of time on their hands and even more disposable income; it didn’t interest Maeve in the slightest.

So why had they been friends? Maeve asked herself that every day. They had met at church, when Maeve was still going, and served on the hospitality committee together. From what Maeve knew, Gabriela still went to church every Sunday and, like some of her Donovan cousins, was quite the donor. The church benefited from a beautiful statue of Our Lady of Fatima, which Maeve knew that Gabriela’s ex-husband had paid for but for which she took complete credit.

Maybe Maeve, like her former husband, had been a little bit in Gabriela’s thrall, her beauty making her overlook what turned out to be an indefatigable shallowness hidden beneath a thick layer of gloss and shine, two things that Maeve had lost so many years before. Maybe she hoped that Gabriela was only kidding when she called her first husband’s children the “little rotten bastards,” or that she really didn’t mean it when she’d called her former husband—while they were still married—“the troll.” When the dust had settled and Gabriela had ridden off into the sunset with Cal, Maeve came to the conclusion that what she had once written off as witty insouciance turned out to be a deep-seated maliciousness that Cal seemed to take to like a bee to honey. While Maeve had tried so hard to be the good girl, it seemed that her former husband was drawn to the bad girl.

To this day, she had never seen Gabriela hold the baby.

Maeve reiterated her request that Heather not be let out of the house the Saturday upcoming. Gabriela gave her a sly smile. “Getting a little too hot to handle?” she asked.

“I guess you could say that,” Maeve said.

“That will be up to this guy here,” Gabriela said, patting Cal on the shoulder. “I’ve got my hands full with the little one,” she said, pinching the baby’s cheek in a way that suggested she had just met the boy and found babies, in general, a level just above detestable.

Rebecca finished her workout with the team and scanned the crowd as she always did for her mother, who returned her daughter’s wave with an enthusiastic one of her own. When the game started and everyone became involved in the heated rivalry that was Farringville versus Lake Monroe, it was as if Maeve had become invisible to the couple in front of her.

As she washed the dishes in her kitchen sink that night, she realized that Gabriela hadn’t expressed sympathy at her family’s loss of Maeve’s cousin. She wondered if Cal had even told her, the subject of Maeve and her family something he probably didn’t bother himself with beyond his concern for Jack.

She hoped they were happy—really, she did—but then wondered if that was even possible, given the players.

CHAPTER 7

Maeve never said she would actually speed date, a fact that she reminded Jo of when they arrived at the hotel conference room the following evening. She pointed at the lobby bar as they strode past, telling Jo that she would wait for her until she was done.

Jo was not happy. “I thought we could do this together.”

“Aren’t we? I’m here, aren’t I?” Maeve might have given Jo the impression that she would actually participate in ten dates in fifty minutes, but when it became clear what speed dating actually entailed, Maeve said that she had never gotten on board to talk to strange men, in person, in a hotel ballroom. “And why did we have to come to the Bronx again?”

“Looking for tribe members,” Jo said. “I figured it would be easier to meet a single Jewish man in this part of the city than where we live.”

“There are Jews in Westchester,” Maeve reminded her. “And Eric was Catholic. Since when did you get so religious?”

“Since I married a cheating goy who never once told me I was beautiful,” she said, attempting a joke that fell flat because it was true and not remotely funny. “I’m off Catholics for the time being. No offense,” she said to Maeve.

“None taken.”

“So let’s try a Jew!” Jo said. “Now get your head in the game.”

“It is,” Maeve said.

“Not really.”

She was right. Maeve wasn’t into doing this with Jo, and she wasn’t really there mentally. She thought of one more potential “out” and raised it to Jo. “I didn’t sign up!” she said, trying to sound apologetic and failing miserably. “I think you need to register for these events. I didn’t register.”

Jo was one step ahead of her. “I signed you up yesterday,” she said. “Problem solved.” She pushed Maeve gently toward the door to the ballroom, where a group of singles, men and women, had gathered in anticipation of a night of possibly meeting their soul mate. Before they entered, she said, “You owe me thirty bucks.”

Speed dating didn’t come cheap, another reason Maeve stood fast; clearly, speed dating was not for her. “You do it,” she said. “I’ll wait at the bar.” Jo pouted while she waited for Maeve to change her mind. Maeve could see she wouldn’t win this one and threw up her hands. “Fine.”

Jo smoothed down the front of her dress. “How do I look?”

“You look great,” Maeve said. In a tight black dress that showed off her slim build and sky-high stilettos, Jo did look great. Maeve hadn’t put as much thought into what she would wear and ended up in her best pair of jeans and an untucked oxford shirt, sensible flats on her feet. Next to Jo, she looked like someone’s maiden aunt. Someone’s tiny maiden aunt.

“I’m wearing a Wonderbra,” Jo said. “Do you think that’s false advertising?”

“No.” She thought for a moment of what other advice she could give Jo, who was more invested in this process than Maeve would have thought or even liked. “I wouldn’t mention how much you hate cheating Catholics, though.”

“What about how Eric never satisfied me sexually?” she asked, only half-joking.

Maeve pretended to think it over. “Uh, no on that one as well.”

“I bet you’re going to have a good time.” She smiled hopefully, and it was that smile that came close to breaking Maeve’s heart. It was also what made her enter the ballroom with Jo, against her better judgment.

The minute she entered, she was sorry she had, but she put her feelings aside, paying attention to the rules, planning on breaking several if the spirit moved her. She took her place at a small table and waited until bachelor number one, a tall drink of water named Doug, took his place across from her. She wished she were thirstier, but Doug wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to slake her thirst. He was thirty-nine, Jewish, never married, and a C.P.A. Maeve listened to his litany of academic and athletic accomplishments and then beckoned him closer.