The Widow Waltz (19 page)

“Aha,” I say.

“And Estelle is adorable,” she adds.

If there is a God, Estelle is a cat, a goat, a canary. I hold my breath.

“His little girl.”

Please don’t ask me for advice,
I think,
because you will hate what I say.

“
G
eorgia, I’m driving into the city,” Luey said. “Where are the car keys?”

She’d fed and exercised this week’s boarders. Herb the dachshund had become a weekday regular and owned the place. Al, a skittish collie, swallowed his pills that she’d buried in baby applesauce. Gloria, the deaf cockapoo, had bedded down for the night with her stuffed binkies and Piaf, the Coton de Tulear whose owner swore she could sing, and followed Luey into the kitchen along with Sadie, who now barely gave Georgia a nod.

“Excuse me?” her mother said, peering over her glasses and giving her the Look. Georgia was editing—and by editing, she meant rewriting, although her mother wouldn’t admit it—an SAT essay for a jumpy high school junior. Word-of-mouth racing through the concierge moms’ grapevine had caused a spike in requests for her services since she’d helped the younger brother of Luey’s ex-friend, Whitney, polish an essay that their mother was sure would make him irrefutable MIT material. At Luey’s insistence, Georgia was charging a thousand dollars an essay. Her mother said she found this shameful, but Luey figured that the richer her fee, the higher the regard and demand for services among the entitled, who assumed that if something cost more, it had greater value. Luey had been right: Georgia was completing one or two essays each week.

“Where are the car keys,
please
?”
Luey added.

“We’re supposed to get six to ten inches of snow starting before dinner. Have you checked the weather?”

All Luey had checked was her phone at roughly ten-minute intervals to reread the text from Buffalo Bob’s manager relaying the information on where Miz Kitty could pick up concert tickets. She wondered why there were two. Did Peter expect her to bring a date? She’d considered inviting Cola, then blew off the idea. Tonight should be a solo sortie.

“You can’t trust those reports,” Luey said.

Her mother frowned. “It’s you I can’t trust,” she said, and began apologizing as soon as the sentence polluted the air. She hopped up from the kitchen table, reaching out to hug Luey. “I’m so sorry. Oh, honey, what did I say?”

“Plenty.”

“I didn’t mean it. I worry, that’s all.” She stepped back to a normal distance, looking Luey up and down, clucking. “I’m really sorry. Worry is in my job description.”

Was this supposed to be news? Luey was worrying as well. Prenatal blogs and pregnancy websites could convince any mother that the slightest slipup would cause sideshow babies. Luey did not want to begin to imagine the grisly outcome of, say, absentmindedly eating a cracker spread with Brie. Sushi was the Antichrist, along with cold cuts, caffeine, and alcohol, all of which she’d been dutifully avoiding. Yet even with careful—if belated—precautions observed, Luey felt as if she were a petri dish of emotional bacteria, most of it fear. What if something were wrong with the baby? What if at the end of the pregnancy she couldn’t figure out how to raise a child? Or find adoptive parents, if that’s what she decided. A relentless game of panic tennis played in her brain.
Whatifwhatifwhat.

But tonight her plan was to tell Peter. In person. He deserved to know. If after nuking him with the news he chose to have nothing to do with her and their child, Luey hoped this knowledge would help her to put fantasies aside—Peter and Luey, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g—and propel her to get on with her life.

In the meantime, the question loomed of what to wear. With her height and long, slim waist, if you scrutinized Luey, you might think she’d made one too many visits to the all-you-can-eat buffet, not that she was at the beginning of her sixteenth week. For tonight, she’d swaddled herself in a lacy black tunic over black leggings and tall leather boots, black jacket over tunic, a loopy white scarf to alleviate the effect of gloom, finished by a dangly silver pendant to point Peter toward her ample cleavage. She’d been pleased with the result.

“Okay, go ahead and worry if that’s your thing,” she told her mother.

“Why don’t you take the train or the jitney?”

Because it’s uncool enough to be pregnant,
Luey thought. She didn’t need a smelly commuter conveyance to underscore the point. “I’m not going far.” Just all the way to the city.

“What are you doing?” Her mother didn’t give her a chance to answer before she added, “Who are you seeing?”

“Harrison,” Luey said, the lies coming fast and furious, not unlike the snow she was now noticing through the kitchen window. “He’s in town for his grandmother’s eightieth birthday. She lives in Huntington and he’s meeting me. . . . in Plainview”—a suburb where she’d once stopped to buy bagels. Where was all this coming from? Luey was shocked at how natural it felt for her story to build. Maybe she should write a made-for-television movie.

“Well, bundle up. Wear a hat. Call!”

Luey kissed her mother good-bye and grabbed a knit cap, though she didn’t plan to plunk it on top of her freshly washed hair. She started the six-year-old Honda Civic her mother had bought to replace the Audi SUV when its lease ran out. As she backed the car out of the driveway, she imagined that she felt no less brave or scared than Christiane Amanpour might be when heading to war.

Luey drove into town to fill up the tank and handed the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. She no longer had her father’s credit card—that account had been canceled months ago—and she knew better than to ask to use the single credit card her mother reserved for emergencies. This was an emergency, but not one she cared to discuss.

“Hope you’re headed home,” the cashier said, handing back change, which amounted to less than a dollar. Gas was only one of many commodities Luey had discovered were ridiculously expensive. Maple syrup and olive oil? More costly than wine. “I’m closing up early,” the cashier said. “It’s a cocoa and Netflix kind of night.”

“Sounds cozy,” Luey said.

Was she nuts? If Miz Kitty didn’t turn up, Peter might read her absence as disinterest and surely, if unredeemed, the statute of limitations on his curiosity about her—because that’s all she thought she should expect—would expire. She had no idea when he’d be touring again in the area.

This whiteout of an evening was her only shot. She took off, headed for the roads that fed into the Long Island Expressway, and tuned to a news station. “The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory for the entire region, effective eight p.m. this evening through noon tomorrow,” a robotic voice warned. “The stage is set for an icy mix, with cold, dry air steadily bleeding into the area. Temperatures are expected in the teens and twenties. In Eastern Long Island, many spots are already below freezing . . . .”

Luey crept along another few miles. It was starting to look like the proverbial white Christmas, a few weeks late and minus the merriment. Her windshield wipers, which were going full blast, began to slow. She’d traveled past only five exits down the expressway when traffic stopped. After a few minutes, Luey got out to get a better look. Cars and trucks were stalled as far as she could see, in front as well as behind her. A driver nearby was standing by his Lexus. “What’s going on?” she shouted to him.

“One of those tractor-trailers got into an accident up ahead,” he yelled back. “Isn’t looking good.”

She returned to her car and checked for weather updates.
Apocolyptic storm a’comin,
@Islandgal had tweeted, and @notanacmarc was chiming in, too,
Hope u r tucked in tite in jammies—big ole storm comin in yr neck o the wood.

Five minutes later the ambulance sirens whizzed by along with state highway patrol cars, lights swirling. The troopers directed cars to move to the right. Luey checked her watch. She’d allowed more than sufficient time to get to the city and park, but now a whole hour had evaporated and she was only a few miles from home. The concert was starting in three hours. She fiddled unsuccessfully to find a local radio station that would give her an update on the traffic situation, but reception was garbled.

Minutes later the cavalry arrived in the form of a patrolman who tapped the window of her car, snow thick on his wide-brimmed hat. Military-ish uniforms always stressed her out; sometimes she had even been spooked by her own former doormen. Luey hoped the trooper wouldn’t demand to see her registration, because she didn’t know if it was in the glove compartment or if her driver’s license was even up to date. But what he asked was, “You okay, miss?”

“Fine,” Luey said, trying to act that way. She told herself there was no reason to have a meltdown. Under the brim, the patrolman’s face looked floury and boyish, round as a pie. “Thanks,” she added. “Just waiting for the road to be cleared up ahead.”

“That’s not going to happen tonight, miss.”

“Really?”

“First of all, look around. It hasn’t snowed this hard all winter and there’s a first-class mess up there, We’ve got a jackknife, and the driver was rushed to the hospital. Didn’t you see the ambulance? We’re closing down this section of road and directing drivers to back up and get off at the next ramp. If I were you, from there I’d get on home.” He cocked his chin toward the sky and brushed snow off his glasses. “This is only the beginning.”

As soon as the patrolman moved on to the next car, Luey texted both Peter and his manager with deep regrets, then reversed her car and began to drive. The trip took an hour and a half. When she arrived, Georgia, Sadie, Herb, Al, and Piaf greeted her as if she’d been gone for a week.

N
aomi McCann rings my bell at exactly ten in the morning. Herb, channeling a pit bull, races to the door. Sadie, twice his size, cowers in his foreshortened, master-of-the-universe shadow. Men.

I open the seldom-used front door where every other winter I’d hung a balsam wreath studded with tiny pine cones, sprigs of juniper berries and silvery moss. Wind blows into the entryway crowded with yet another box, this one filled with clothes that Nicola, to augment her humble salary, is reluctantly hoping to resell at local consignment stores. If I were acquiring rather than divesting, I’d shop at any one of them myself.

“May I take your coat?” I ask.

“Thanks,” she says, and glances at her boots, sensible laced leather uppers and stout vinyl lowers. The boots drip on the stone floor.

When I woke this morning, a bumpy rash covered my neck and arms; on my lip, a cold sore is blossoming; I am out of Valtrex and the drugstore that has my prescription is in Manhattan. Bags under my eyes betray my lack of sleep. At least I have clean hair, although I rushed to dry it, and wisps frame my head like a feathered tiara.

Despite blustery weather, Naomi is wearing a skimpy navy jacket. She stuffs her beret and Black Watch scarf into the sleeve and hands me the jacket to hang on a hook. Her hair looks even worse than mine. If she were a friend I would find a moment to gently suggest a different brand of hair color, about which I am now an expert. But she is not a friend.

“Want to sit down and take off your boots?” I make room on a low bench piled high. She carefully sets them next to the front door. To see her wearing only thick red stockings feels far too intimate. Naomi McCann’s button-down shirt is tucked into jeans. Her body’s a shorter duplicate of Clem’s, and the loose shirt fails to disguise an equally substantial chest, breasts cantilevered high.

“The coffee’s hot,” I say, forcing a smile. I start walking to the kitchen and she follows me down the hall.

Today I am happy that Chip insisted I remove our family photographs: for this woman to scrutinize my visual history would be an even deeper violation than having her simply under my roof. Then it occurs to me that she may have gotten a play-by-play from Clem. Neither of us speaks as we make our way to the back of the house. I have no small talk for Naomi McCann.

“Please, sit,” I say. “How do you take your coffee?” Nicola left early this morning and aside from her rinsed dishes in the sink, the room is neat. I have set out mugs, sugar, and a small pitcher of milk. Fighting my hostess instincts, there are no scones or muffins, not even a Dunkin’ Donuts munchkin.

“Black, please,” she says. There is a quiver in her raspy voice, which calls to mind Marge Simpson’s chain-smoking sisters, whom Nicola and Luey mimic brilliantly and often. I fill each of our mugs. The woman’s blue eyes seem to focus on a rabbit in the yard. I can’t guess what she’s thinking, except that she must dislike both me and this situation. I would want to tackle anyone whom I’d felt had been upsetting Cola or Luey. This meeting is probably no easier for Naomi McCann than it is for me.
Let’s get going,
I tell myself, and launch the speech I have rehearsed seven times.

“Naomi,” I start.

“It’s not
Nigh
-omi,” she says. “It’s
Nay
-omi.”

“Sorry,” I say, realizing I’ve been mispronouncing that name for my entire life. I clear my throat for a do-over. “
Nay-
omi
,
I can understand if you think I’ve been harsh with Clementine.” The swelling cold sore on my lip is beginning to hurt. I clench my fingers to force myself not to touch it. “I apologize.”

The woman’s face is motionless, her hands in her lap, one folded over the other. I begrudgingly allow that she has an admirable restraint. Others might take it for elegance, but I am not that generous.

“My husband isn’t here to defend himself, and I’m certainly not going to defend him either, just as I won’t apologize for him.” I feel a tear forming. I wanted to be as cool as, say, Camille. She’d have found a way to have already julienned this guest; Naomi would be trembling. “I have no way to prove anything, but my gut tells me Ben, my husband”—it feels crucial to add that title—“may have taken advantage of your daughter.”

Still, no reaction.

“She’s young—these things happen,” I continue. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s Ben, not Clem.” I don’t believe this, but feel the need to say it. “But, well, these last few months haven’t been easy—I’m sure you can understand . . . .” I have no evidence for this assumption, but I say that, too. “Maybe I’ve let my imagination run away with itself, but simply to put my mind at rest . . . woman to woman . . . indulge me, please.” I’ve started babbling. Once again, I clear my throat. “For the sake of closure”—did I really say
closure
?—“I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on what you know—might know— about Ben and Clementine.”

This speech drains me. Why didn’t I issue myself a gag order?

“Mrs. Silver,” Naomi says in that gravely alto that I imagine many men find sultry.

“Call me Georgia,” My mother would never say something like this.

“Georgia.” I don’t care for the way my name sounds in this brittle stranger’s mouth. “My daughter has only met your late husband a handful of times. They have never been involved in the way you are insinuating.”

Insinuating—
was there ever a word more snaky and slimy,
sin
built right
into it? Her cease and desist order is loud and clear.

“Keep Clem out of this,” she continues. “I can well understand that you have suspicions about your late husband, but don’t look at my daughter.”

Her words are a volley of gunshots. It now seems preposterous to ask about the child that I am certain I saw in her SUV and heard cry on Hedge Lane. I will myself to believe that what Naomi says is true, and weigh whether I heard a subliminal suggestion in
well understand
. What does she know about Ben and other women? Concerning my late husband, I’ve become willing to imagine almost anything.

Naomi has defended her daughter’s honor. We have nothing to say to each other and I’d like this woman, with her haughty air, to leave.

She nods toward a tall flowering plant in a terra-cotta pot on the table. “Perfect specimen,” she says.

The plant’s deep red flowers are close to iridescent, resembling peonies that will bloom here in the late spring. “A double amaryllis,” I offer, although I’m sure I’m not teaching the owner of Adam and Eve anything new.

“A Cherry Nymph,” she says.

At the name, I stifle a nervous laugh.

A blush crawls up Naomi’s face, blotching her freckled skin. “Where did you get it?” she asks quickly.

“I grew it,” I say. “They and paperwhites get me through the winter”—along with jasmine, lavender, holiday cactus, an azalea topiary that I’ve kept alive for a year, and orchids that I’ve had longer than most of my bras.

“Unusual.” She touches one of the rows of the petals. “I’m impressed.”

Is Naomi McCann surprised that a pampered hothouse plant like me can make anything bloom, that my amaryllis wasn’t a gift from Madison Avenue?

“Refill?” I ask. Good manners are a knee-jerk reaction.

“No thanks,” she answers. “But may I use your powder room?”

I direct her to the bathroom off the kitchen. No, I definitely can’t ask about the child, I think as I wash and dry the mugs. When she emerges, she thanks me for coffee and shakes my hand.

I look down. On Naomi’s hand is a ring she wasn’t wearing before, a whopper emerald—large, square, and as green as chlorophyll—surrounded by diamonds of equal size. She sees me see it.

Message received.