Tell Me Lies (5 page)

And it had meant Brent, coming by to pick her up and drop her off on dates and school days, Brent who’d bought her a house on Linden because she loved the street and wanted to be close to Treva, Brent who could be so sweet and who was probably cheating on her now.

Do you hate him?
Treva had asked. It was possible to love someone and hate him at the same time; she’d felt that way about him once, after Beth. But now all she felt was rage and dread and lethal exasperation; there wasn’t any love left to counteract anything anymore. And that was her marriage. To her horror, she found she couldn’t stop the tears. Em would see. “Race you to the car,” she said, and pounded down the last block to collapse in the driver’s seat of her aged Civic, winded but not weeping.

Em got in and slammed the car door behind her a minute later. “No fair. You got a head start. Where are we going? Why can’t we take Dad’s car? It’s better.”

Because I’m never getting in that car again.
Maddie put the car in gear. “This one’s fine. Let’s go see your dad.”

Em grew still. “Okay.”

Maddie met her eyes and smiled, straining every muscle in her face to make it do what it didn’t want to do. “We’ll just ask him what he wants for dinner. That’ll be fun.”

“Okay,” Em said again, but the cautious look stayed in her eyes.

Maddie backed out of the drive while Em hunched down so no one would see her in a rustmobile. The Civic, at least, was one battle Maddie had won in her marriage. She gripped the steering wheel harder as she thought about it. Brent had pushed her to trade it in for the new car he wanted to buy her and had even sent a tow truck to drag it away, but she’d thrown herself across the hood of the car at the last minute, and the guy in the tow truck had gone off without it. “I love this car,” she’d told Brent. “I paid for it myself, it never stalls, and I understand it. It takes years to learn a car like I know this one. I wanted to be buried in this car.” Brent had stopped nagging her then, but he’d looked at her as if she were demented. Maybe that’s why he was cheating: the shame of her car, complicated by her dementia, drove him to it.

He was cheating. All her arguments to Treva aside, there wasn’t going to be another explanation. Treva had been right to roll her eyes. He was cheating.

Maddie turned on a country station and drove through the center of town toward her husband and the end of her marriage, listening to the Mavericks as she tried to ignore her mangled life. People smiled and waved at her, and she waved back and felt approved of. People in Frog Point liked her. She was nice. That’s who she was, Nice. That was a hell of a thing to be, Nice, but it was what she was, maybe all that she was. A terrible thought struck her that maybe the reason she was fighting the idea of divorce was that divorce wasn’t Nice. That would be stupid. Except that if she wasn’t Nice, she wasn’t sure she’d still exist.

She distracted herself with better thoughts. Old Frog Point was beautiful in late summer, its streets canopied by huge old elms and oaks in full leaf, their branches rubbing together over the street, and Maddie felt sheltered as she drove through their dappled shade. Their roots pushed up gray slabs of concrete sidewalk into cracked and rolling waves, crusted with moss in the shady parts. When she and Treva had been little on Linden, they’d pretended the slabs were mountains and made up stories about them and roller-skated up and down them and played hopscotch. Em and Mel did the same things now, safe away from all the ugly things that happened to little kids in bigger towns. Whatever its drawbacks, and they were legion, Frog Point was home. It had wrapped itself around her for thirty-eight years and kept her warm while it watched every move she made. If it hadn’t been for Brent, she could have lived with that. Even with Brent, she was going to have to live with that. She belonged to Frog Point.

The Mavericks finished, and Patsy Cline started in on “Walking After Midnight.” Patsy had had her man problems, which was some comfort; if a class act like Patsy could be a fool over men, too, maybe Maddie wasn’t a complete loss. An ancient brown Datsun came zooming up behind them and braked at the last minute before beginning to tailgate them. The Datsun was even older than her Civic, so old that it looked like something that C. L. Sturgis might have wrecked in his glory days. Maddie thought about C.L. back then, cocky and crackling with nervous energy, and just for a minute, she wished she were back there, back before she’d made all her mistakes, able to choose C.L. instead. But that would mean no Em, and Em was worth everything, even this, so she let go of C.L. and the memories and kept going toward her husband.

The squeal of brakes brought the Datsun back to mind. It had come up behind her too fast again and stopped at the last minute, almost skidding into her.

“What are you
doing?”
Maddie said to the Datsun in her rearview mirror, and the driver peeled off down a side street, evidently disgusted at how poky she was being. Well, nobody rushed to their own disasters, especially when they had their kids in the passenger seat. Maddie drew a deep breath. This was going to hurt Em so much; that was the worst part, the absolute worst. That was what she’d never forgive Brent for, that he’d hurt Em when she loved him so much.

But she couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done to her, either, and driving slowly through the cool green shade, she let her anger seep into her bones. He’d made a fool of her again. If she left him, she’d be crawling away into the sympathetic, scornful arms of the town with no way to fight back. Treva was right; somehow, she should be able to get even. C.L. came to mind again, this time a recent memory, standing in her doorway, broad and smiling and solid and possible and pretty damn attractive as an adult.

No. Absolutely not. She had enough problems without committing adultery. Aside from the fact that it was wrong, adultery in Frog Point got you your own miniseries on the grapevine.

Still, the thought of revenge was lovely. And, she was surprised to realize, the thought of confounding the town by not being a good girl was pretty attractive, too, as long as all she did was think about it, not do it.

Reba McEntire took over the radio from Patsy, and Maddie turned a corner only to brake a good ten feet short of the next stop sign for a little multicolor mutt. It was sitting in the middle of her lane, scratching an ear, unimpressed with her car. “No hurry,” she told it, and Em relaxed and laughed.

Then Em became very still and turned to her mother, her eyes wide with innocence behind her glasses. “I bet that dog doesn’t have a home. Maybe we should adopt it.”

Maddie peered at the dog over the steering wheel. It was wearing a red collar, and its tags jingled as it scratched. “It belongs to somebody, Em. It’s probably on its way home.”

“Well, then,” Em said. “Maybe we could go buy a dog and give it a home. As a good deed.”

Maddie leaned back.
Angel Daughter cashes in,
she thought.
Finally.
“Okay, spill it. What’s up?”

Em gave up and slumped back on the seat. “I want a dog. I want one really, really bad. And I’ve been good. And my birthday’s coming up.”

“Your birthday’s in January,” Maddie said.

Em groaned. “I
knew
you’d say that. Listen, we really need a dog, Mom. We do.”

“This is because of ‘Frasier,’ isn’t it?” Maddie said. “Em, it’s not as easy as it looks on TV. You have to take care of a dog—”

“I know,” Em said with such satisfaction that Maddie knew she’d been had. Em crawled around the seat and brought up a batch of library books. “I’ve been studying.”

Maddie looked at the books.
Caring for Your Puppy. The Complete Book of Dog Care. Dog Lore. No Bad Dogs.
There were others in Em’s lap.

“I read them all, even the hard ones,” Em said. “I can do it.
Please
.”

Maddie’s first impulse was to say no, that she had too much to deal with already, but Em was so earnest. And Brent would hate having a dog, which was a major selling point. And a dog might distract Em if there was a divorce coming up, something she could hold on to while the rest of her world fell apart.

Em looked at Maddie as if her entire life depended on what Maddie said next.

“All right,” Maddie said. “We’ll go to the pound when we get back from Daddy’s.”

“Yes!” Em bounced on the seat.

“But you’ll take care of it—”

“Yes, I will, I know how to, I will, I will, I love you, Mom!” Em bounced and bounced, her grin swallowing her face.

The mutt stopped scratching and yawned, and Em laughed again, and the world seemed a good place for a moment.
Maybe I won’t go up to the company to see Brent,
Maddie thought.
Maybe we’ll go get a dog instead. Or maybe I’ll just stay here parked in the middle of the street.
Maybe if she never got to the corner, things wouldn’t change.

Then she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the ancient Datsun hurtling around the corner toward them.

She turned in panic to warn Em, but her voice was lost in the scream of peeling tires and slammed-on brakes and the gut-wrenching scrunch of pleated metal. She felt the blow of the impact on her back, and her head jerked forward as the seat gave beneath her and slid and the radio cracked into silence, and then her head whipped back and smacked sickenly into the headrest behind her.

Em—short, relaxed, and wrapped in her seat belt—sat unhurt, her eyes wide behind her glasses. “I’m okay, Mom. Wow.”

“Are you sure? Does your neck hurt?” Maddie’s neck hurt.

“I’m okay. Boy, he really hit us.”

Maddie pushed her car door free of the buckled frame, and small metal things tinkled onto the ground. She got out, and the world looped around her.
Slow here.
Everything seemed at once brighter and less clear. With meticulous care, she picked her way back to the other car. Broken glass scrunched underfoot as she went. The radio blared out something obscene, and Maddie wished she could, too, but it wasn’t a possibility because it would hurt too much.

The driver sat there, holding his head and moaning, and she bent to see if he was all right. He was a kid from the high school, a pale, weedy blond she recognized without putting a name to him, not one of the kids she’d had in class.

“Are you all right?” she said. “Did you hit your head? Was your seat belt on?”

“My car. I hit you hard.
My car. ”

“Your radio works.”
You moron.
All the anger she’d been repressing came flooding back, and she almost screamed at him before she remembered that he’d been in an accident, too, and there was no point in making him even more miserable even if he was a reckless degenerate. At least C.L.‘s accidents had always involved guardrails and ditches, not other people. The kid moaned again and refused to meet her eyes. She straightened and went back to look at her car.

It was dead. The hatchback was mashed up into the backseat, both taillights crushed into powder. Knowing nothing about cars, she knew that no one would fix this one. It was too old.

She should have screamed at the kid after all. Three times he’d come at her.

Em got out. “Boy.”

My car.

“Does this mean we get a new car?” Em asked.

The kid joined them. “Do you think your insurance will cover this?”

Maddie turned to look at him.
I could kill you where you stand.
She began to walk back to her car, taking careful, measured steps.

The boy followed her, and then the police pulled up.

She sank back into her car and rested her head on the steering wheel. The officer, a boy who’d failed her senior art class five years ago, asked for her driver’s license, and Em fished it out of her bag for him. He was polite, but he asked too many questions, and she got confused, and he asked if she was all right.

“I was going to be buried in this car,” she said, and he radioed for an ambulance for a possible concussion.

“I’ll take care of everything.” Then he turned away from her to talk in deep, serious tones to the young doctor and the even younger nurse.
I hate you,
Maddie thought, but it didn’t seem like the time to mention it with Em right there. The room reeked of disinfectant and alcohol, and she tasted metal from the medication they’d given her. She was cold and the examining table was too high, and she wanted to go home, but Brent was still talking to the doctor.

She watched her husband. Would another woman want him? He was getting a little pudgy, but he was still good-looking in a big, boyish, beefy sort of way. That dark lock of hair that always fell in his eyes. That endearing cowlick at the crown of his head. Those dimples. That cocky smile. That bastard. He walked toward her with his shoulders back, and the nurse appreciated it. Maddie pulled away as he came near.

He was saying something to her, and she focused in on him from very far away.

“Don’t worry, it wasn’t your fault,” he was saying, his arm around Em, who leaned on him lovingly.

“I know.”

“The kid wasn’t insured, but our insurance will cover it.”

“I know.”

His hand tightened on Em. “And Emily’s all right, thank God.”

“I know.”

“You don’t even have a concussion. Just pulled muscles in your neck. Tylenol Three is all you need.”

“I know.”

Brent sighed, his solicitude morphing into exasperation before her eyes. “We can go now.”

“I know.”

The nurse gave him a glowing smile and Maddie’s painkillers, and he walked them out to the Cadillac, putting Em in the backseat before he turned to Maddie, who was looking at the car, trying to figure how it had gotten from the driveway where it had betrayed her all the way to the hospital.

“I was cleaning this car,” she told him. “It was in the driveway.”

“Howie dropped me off so I could pick it up. Your car’s in back of Leo’s. I called while the doctor was with you. Leo says it’s totaled. You’ll have to get a new car now.”

Her car was dead in the weeds in back of a service station. Normally that would have depressed her, but she was too dazed to care. “I know.”

She got in the car and tried to remember what normal life felt like. Yesterday.

He got in beside her and patted her knee, and she moved it away. “Just relax, Mad,” he told her. “You’re going to be fine.”

She nodded once, but a knife went into her neck, so she stopped. “I know.”

Brent exhaled through his teeth. “Could you please say something besides ‘I know’?”

How about, your expressions of sympathy touch my heart? How about, could we have a moment of silence for my car, which was just brutally murdered by a teenaged moron? How about, are you having an affair and if so with whom, you rotten lying son of a bitch?

“Maddie?”

Em was in the car. “Thank you for coming to get us.”

He sighed and put the car in gear, and a thousand years later, they pulled into the driveway. Maddie sat and stared out the window, knowing she had to say something. Soon.

“Maddie, we’re here.” Brent reached over and unbuckled her seat belt. “Mad?” He put his hand on her shoulder. It felt like a lead weight.

Right. They were here. She almost felt sorry for Brent. It couldn’t be easy talking to her like this; she realized that. She sympathized. She watched him walk around the front of the car and open her door. That was nice of him.

“Maddie, get out of the car. You’re not hurt that bad. The doctor said so.”

Right again. She got out of the car. Her shoes stuck to the melting tar in the driveway, and she concentrated with great effort to pull her feet free. They were so far away. Brent was too close.

“Mom?”

Em’s voice had an echoey quality to it. Maddie focused on her face and smiled. “I’m fine, baby. Let’s go inside.” The creosote smelled nice and clean, and she concentrated on that for a moment to keep from screaming at her husband.

“Emily, are you sure you’re okay?” Brent got down on his knees on the sidewalk beside her and looked into her eyes. He looked so sweet on his knees, holding on to their daughter, clean and earnest with that cowlick at the crown of his head. The bastard.

Em nodded, keeping an eye on Maddie. “I’m fine, Daddy. Really.”

“Okay.” He hugged her and kissed her on the cheek and then stood up and watched her as she headed for the porch before he looked at Maddie. “You, too, Mad. I’ll be late tonight. Order pizza and take it easy. Don’t wait for me.”

Maddie moved by him, and he tried to pat her shoulder, big clumsy thuds that slid over the top of her arm.
Don’t touch me,
she thought, and the spurt of anger was fresh and clean after all the murky dithering she’d been doing. She stopped and waited until Em was a couple of yards away, going up the porch steps, and then she met his eyes.

“Maddie, come on.” He put his hand on her arm to guide her toward the porch, and she shook it off with such ferocity that he stepped back.

“What’s going on, Brent?” she whispered at him, clenching her teeth to keep from screaming. Her hands curled into fists and came up in front of her. “What are you doing? What the
hell
are you doing?”

“What?” Brent stared at her, stricken. “What are you talking about?”

Maddie moved closer to him, toe to toe, and spoke under her breath. “I found some other woman’s underwear under your front seat, damn you. Who are you seeing? Is it Beth again?” She shook her head at him even though it made her skull scream, and pressed her fists against her chest to keep from hitting him, needing to make it clear to him, needing to make it clear to herself. “I’m not doing this again, Brent. I won’t do this again. I won’t. If you’re cheating, I’ll leave you, I
swear V\l
leave you this time.”

Brent glanced at Em, who had stopped on the porch and was watching them. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said, and his voice was too loud. “You’re confused. You just hit your head.” He dropped his voice. “You’re upsetting Emily. Knock it off.”

“I found underpants,” she said to him under her breath. “Black lace crotchless underpants. You tell me
now,
you explain that.”

Em said, “Mommy?”

“Just a minute, honey,” Brent called back to her. He lowered his voice again. “You know I wouldn’t cheat on you. I promised you. How long are you going to make me pay for Beth?”

Maddie took a step back, confused. He was so rational. “What about the pants?”

“I don’t know.” Brent’s exasperation made his voice rise. “Somebody’s idea of a joke.”

“It’s not funny,” Maddie said.

“It sure as hell isn’t.” He stepped away from her and went to the porch to Em. “Mommy’s feeling bad,” he told her, and when Maddie followed him to the porch and said,
“Wait a minute,”
he said, “Not now,” and turned back to take Em’s hand. “Mommy needs a nap. Come on, Em, I’ll take you to Aunt Treva’s so Mommy can rest.”

Em looked close to tears. “Mom?”

Maddie drew a deep breath. She’d never wanted to scream at anybody more, but not in front of Em. Never in front of Em. “Daddy’s right. You go stay with Mel tonight. Stay all night. I’ll be okay.”

Em swallowed. “Are you sure? I could take care of you.”

Maddie blinked back tears. “Thank you, honey, but I’m just going to take my pills and go to sleep. Honest. You go with Daddy.”

Em nodded, her head wobbly on her neck. “Okay, but I’m not staying all night. I’m coming home tonight so I can help you when you wake up.”

Maddie put her arms around her and pulled her close, feeling how stiff Em’s body was against her. “I’m all right, Em. You can stay with Mel.”

“
No
.” Em’s voice cracked and Maddie held her tighter.

“All right.” Maddie patted her back and rocked her a little, as if she were a baby again. “All right. Daddy can bring you home later, after bowling. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Maddie watched as Em went down the walk to the car, her face turned back to look at Maddie, her hand in Brent’s hand. Brent, the son of a bitch who was using their daughter as an excuse to escape. She wanted to scream at him,
You come back here and talk to me,
but instead she waved as he backed the car out of the drive. Then she took a deep breath and went inside.

She took a painkiller and put the pill bottle on the kitchen windowsill so that the light made it glow amber. Pretty. Then she sat down for a moment so her head could clear, trying not to think about Em or black lace or divorce or her car or anything else that was confusing her.

It was so nice that she didn’t have a concussion. What the hell did she have? She looked around her. Well, she had an ugly kitchen. They’d put gray linoleum in because Brent had gotten a deal on it, but she was the one who’d painted the walls yellow. Yessir, that was her choice. They certainly were yellow. She felt as if she were trapped in a pound cake.

At least the black lace had cut through the yellow.

She got up carefully and moved into the hall. The hall was white. Boring but not offensive. Sort of like Brent. Until today. Today he was offensive and unbearable. She pulled herself up the stairs using the banister, and the strain made her dizzy, so she leaned on the wall until she got to the bedroom. Peach. Why had she thought peach would be a good idea? The quilted headboard was especially ugly. When you got right down to it, she hated the whole room. The whole damn house. It was time to move. Maybe that’s what she’d do, she’d move and not tell Brent. But then somebody else would. This was Frog Point. You couldn’t get away with anything in Frog Point.

Maddie eased herself down onto the bed. It was heaven to close her eyes. It meant her eyeballs weren’t going to fall out. But the rest of the pain, the pain everywhere else, pressed down on her so that she sank into the mattress to get away from it.
The thing is,
she thought,
I hate him. So it shouldn’t matter whether he’s cheating or not. But I hurt all over, and I hate the thought of facing this damn town with all this mess to handle, and I can’t stand what this is going to do to Em. So I think I’ll think about this later.

I’ll have to think about it later.