The Last Secret (13 page)

“No! No reason.” He laughs. “I was in the area. Thought I'd stop in, say hello.” He is unfolding a newspaper. “Pretty impressive. Family paper.” He turns the page, reads the masthead: OLIVER P. HAMMOND, PUBLISHER. KENNETH L. HAMMOND, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER.

“What do you want?” She already knows. Money.

“You've turned into a very skeptical person, Nora.”

“I'd like you to leave, please.”

“Please! So, it's a request, it's up to me.”

“It's not a request. I'm telling you, I want you to leave! Now!”

“Nora,” he chides, holding up his hands. “I thought you'd be happy to see me. I'm all right. See! Aren't you relieved? It was all so crazy that night, so confusing.” He grins and his dimples deepen with an intimate sweetness that turns her stomach. “I was so worried about you. All this time I been wondering, did some psycho pick her up? Does she even know what happened? Does she care?”

“So you refuse to leave, is that what's going on here?” She comes around the counter nearer the phone.

“No, I just … actually, I'm a little hurt. I just wanted to set your mind at ease, that's all.” He picks up a stack of photographs from the counter and riffles through them. They were taken on Chloe's junior class trip to New York City. “Good-looking kids. Think the world's their oyster, that nothing bad's ever going to happen to them.” He chuckles. “Good thing they don't know,” he sighs, grinning at the picture of Chloe pulling herself up the ladder from the hotel pool. She is wearing a skimpy bikini that Nora said not to bring. Suggestive enough on a beach, but definitely inappropriate on a class trip, especially in such close quarters as an indoor pool. “Now you've even got bikini rules?” Chloe laughed. “That's right!” Nora snapped back, troubled by the echo of her own mother's stridency.

“Like us,” he continues. “We didn't know, did we?”

There was no us, no we
, she almost says,
but that's what he wants.
She snatches the picture from him. “I'm really very busy.”

“Go ahead, don't let me hold you up.” He pulls out a stool. “I'll just sit here while you do whatever it is you do.”

“My husband'll be home any minute.”

“Great! Unless … he doesn't know about us.” He laughs softly.

She takes the head of lettuce Chloe laid out and begins to tear the leaves into the salad spinner in the bar sink.

“So what happened? Where'd you go? I always wondered.”

She turns the water on high. Fill in the blanks and maybe he'll leave. “I got a ride.” She speaks so quietly he has to lean forward.

“What about me? Did you ever think, ‘Oh, poor Eddie. I should've stayed and helped him out a little’?” He wrings his hands, that same way, slender fingers writhing through one another.

“I was upset.” She stares at him.

“Yeah!” Like himself, he means.

“I was very young.”

“That's your excuse?” he asks in disbelief.

“Excuse?” Floating romaine leaves brim over the spinner into the sink.

“For letting me take the fall. Twenty years I been in.”

Her knees sag. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Never gave you up, though. Gentleman to the end, I'm proud of that. ‘So who is she? What's her name?’ they kept asking. ‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I don't know’” He shrugs. “Just kept playing dumb. ‘Some chick,’ I said. ‘Some chick by the side of the road, thumbing a ride, next thing I know some guy's passed out in his car.’ ‘No,’ they go. ‘Try dead.’”

Water, the only sound, it keeps running.

“He didn't die.” She can barely breathe.

“Really?” Again, his amusement. “That what you wanna hear?” He jams the faucet down, shutting off the water. The sudden silence stunning, like the jolt of an electrical shock. “That what you been telling yourself all these years?” He slips a business card from his breast pocket, scribbles on the back. “My cell.” He slides off the stool.

She doesn't pick it up until he is gone.

HARMONY LTD
.

P.O
BOX
0367

NEW YORK CITY

NEW YORK

A week
has passed. Eddie hasn't been back, so he's probably gone for good. He couldn't rattle her the way he wanted. Random, that's all, a blip on the screen. She doesn't believe the man died or that Eddie went to jail. There's no denying the violence of that night, the pipe, blood pouring from the man's face. Ugly, but not murder. Couldn't have been. No. Impossible. He would have told the police she'd been there, too. He never would have protected her all these years, serving a prison sentence in noble silence. Not the type. No. Just a down-on-his-luck loser working a newfound connection.

The shock of seeing him, though, has been an antidote. Injecting one poison into her system to fight another, rousing her from malaise. As in a fever, at its hallucinatory pitch the phantom has slipped from one nightmare into another. The past is dead. Only family matters, her marriage. Now, with perspective, she will be well again. She calls up the back stairs to Chloe. What's taking so long? School starts in twenty minutes. Nora sits at the table with her toast. Stirring his coffee, Ken says he heard the shower go off an hour ago.

“Probably still trying to get the stripes out,” he says, and she can almost smile. Chloe sprayed green stripes into her hair for last Friday's varsity basketball game.

“I know. Poor kid,” Nora says. Days later, and the stripes still show, even after countless shampooings.

“I'll ask Oliver, maybe Nana's wig's still up in the attic.” His grandmother Geraldine Hammond's singed blonde wig is part of family lore. A candle set it on fire one night at a dinner party. After snipping away the burned strands she continued wearing it. Hammondian frugality, Oliver calls it in justification of his own dated wardrobe.

“Don't. Don't even mention a wig. That'll be the next thing, driving around to wig shops.” Laughing with him again feels good. A relief. The way things used to be here.

“Outfit us all. The whole family, bewigged, bothered, and bewildered,” Ken croons, making her laugh even more. His hand slides over hers. “You look good,” he says, and she tries to hold her eyes level with his, but can't. “Are you okay?”

“All right. I guess.” Again, ice in her voice; can't help it. Stay on safe ground. So much easier talking about the children.

“Here, Mom.” Chloe runs into the kitchen, listing under the weight of her bulging backpack slung over one shoulder. “Can you sign this? I am so wicked late.” She holds out a pen and folded paper. “My ride's waiting. That line,” she adds in a faltering voice as Nora reads. “The bottom one.”

“It's your progress report.”

“I know and it sucks and I'm sorry, and I'm really gonna try, but right now you have to sign it so I can bring it back. Please? Please, Mom? Please?” she begs, rocking back and forth on wedged heels.

“One D and three C minuses.” Nora pushes it across the table to Ken.

“What's this all about?” he says. “What're you thinking? What do you want, to end up in some two-bit junior college somewhere?”

“If she's lucky,” Nora says.

“I know,” Chloe groans, pleading for release.

Nora asks how long she's had the progress report. A week, Chloe admits, but she forgot about it. She did. And that's the truth. Nora refuses to sign it until Chloe discusses the poor grades with them and explains how she plans to raise them.

“I can't now, Mom! So just sign it, please! I'm gonna be late and I've already got three tardies.”

“Apparently you're going to have to get another one,” Nora says, scraping butter onto her cold toast.

“But then I'll get detention!” Chloe cries.

“That's not my problem now, is it?”

“Dad! Please! Will you sign it? Please? It's just the progress report, and I'm trying so much harder now. I swear. I am! I've got the whole rest of the term.”

Ken looks at Nora. “What's the harm? Gotta sign it, sooner or later.” He clicks open his pen with a stern look at Chloe. “But just so you'll know, your mother's right. This has got to be discussed. Whatever's going on here has got to change.”

“I know. I know. Please, Dad.” Chloe glances at her watch. “Now Max is gonna be late too.”

Scribbling his name, Ken winces. “Max?” he and Nora say in unison. “What the hell?” Ken says.

“He's just giving me a ride, that's all.” Chloe snatches up the paper. “Jeez!” she cries with the closing door.

“Was that a slam?” Nora asks, seething.

“One one thousandth of a decibel shy.” Ken finishes his coffee. “But I'll tell you something, in my house that progress report would've called for a celebration.”

“Ken!”

“I know. Just trying to keep things in perspective, that's all.” He stands up to leave. “Goddamn Max Lafferty that's what really pisses me off.”

Nora isn't
the first woman to wake up one morning to find her life tipped upside down, which seems to be Kay's theme with this second tale of adultery. Now it's Kay's older sister in Dallas. Married thirty-five years. One day she's hanging up her husband's pants and she finds it. In his pocket. Nora squirms with annoyance. Kay means well, but trivializing what Nora's going through makes her feel worse.
Adultery, no big deal, it happens:
the message here.

Kay continues cutting her asparagus. She and Nora are having lunch at Leanna's, which is halfway between the real estate office and the
Chronicle.
“So Ruthie looks at it, you know, trying to figure, toss it, or is it something Don needs? But damn, if it isn't some kind of condo receipt. Long story short: dear old Donnie's got himself a girlfriend half his age, and he's keeping her in fine style. Big, beautiful condo, parking fees you wouldn't believe, while my sister, well, you know Ruthie, she's so damn frugal she'll only buy a car every ten years. And then they have to be used.”

“Poor Ruth.” Nora last saw her a few years ago. Pretty, lively like Kay. Beyond Don's brogue she barely recalls the man. “What'd she do?”

“Had herself a messy little nervous breakdown. Two weeks on suicide watch in a mental hospital, and now with the Lexapro and counseling, she's better. Well, the knives are back in the block, anyway,” Kay says bitterly. “My nieces are having a tough time. Thirty and thirty-two, but they still won't speak to their father. In some ways, I think it's worse for the kids when they're older.”

Nora agrees, says she's heard that. Now Kay expects to hear how Chloe and Drew are bearing up. But that's where she draws the line. Her children won't be fodder for gossip. No matter how loyal a friend Kay is, it's human nature to tell more than one intends, to be a story's pivot person, the only one who can fill in all the blanks.

“Oh. Before I forget, the Sanders Gallery is showing Annette Rose-man next week,” she says to change the subject.

Kay holds up her hands. “Yes! I've been meaning to tell you! I saw her last week. At the symphony, with a very nice-looking man who, by the way, was not Oliver Hammond.”

Nora shrugs. “That's the arrangement. She has her life. He has his, and it works.”

Kay is staring at her. “Tell me something. You and Ken, you never suspected anything? Not even once?”

“Honestly? No. He enjoyed women, their company. He always did. I knew that.” She shrugs. “Just the way he was. Why? Why're you looking at me like that?” Kay obviously wants the salacious details.

“I'm worried about you. You can't just let it out. Even a little, can you?” Kay says.

“And do what? Have my own messy little breakdown?”

“I don't know, maybe. If you need to.”

“Well, guess what, Kay. I am. Only it's all in here,” she says, tapping her chest as Kay looks up.

“Hey, Nora, how're you doing?” the slender man says, then turns quickly to Kay. “Sorry. I'm Ed. Ed Hawkins. Nice to meet you,” he says, shaking Kay's hand. “Thought I'd grab a quick lunch, but all the tables are full.”

Nora glances out the window. There's still a waiting line. Please, sit with them then, Kay insists; they're almost done, but he might as well.
Thanking her, Eddie pulls out the chair between them. The women at the next table smile watching him, and he grins at their attention. He's wearing an elegant dark suit and white shirt with trefoil onyx cuff links, his silk tie pale as his eyes. This is his second try here for lunch, he says. He came with a client Monday but same thing, an hour wait, and who has that kind of time to waste in the middle of the workday? Kay agrees. They don't take reservations so the trick is to come early, eleven fifteen, like they did, she tells him. Next time, he'll know, he says with a glance at Nora. Thoughts racing, she still hasn't spoken. What does he want? Coincidence, or did he follow her here?

The sole meunière is very good, Kay is saying, or if he wants something quick, any one of the salad grills.

“Quick is good.” He leans close to Kay, touches her arm. “Then I could still eat with you ladies and not get the heave-ho.”

Kay gestures for the waitress, who takes his order. Caesar salad with grilled chicken and a glass of soda water, one slice lemon, one lime. He asks if they'd like another glass of wine.

“No, thank you.” Her first words.