The Secrets She Keeps
Read The Secrets She Keeps Online
Authors: Deb Caletti
PRAISE FOR
HE’S GONE
“Mesmerizing…”
—Sarah Addison Allen,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Peach Keeper
“Thought-provoking and moving.”
—Erica Bauermeister,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Lost Art of Mixing
“Masterful…one of the best books I’ve read all year.”
—Barbara O’Neal, author of
The All You Can Dream Buffet
“Perfectly executed…strongly characterized and emotionally complex fiction.”
—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
“An all-in-one-sitting affair…Caletti solves the mystery in the end, but more riveting and of greater depth is her second conclusion, that you bring your same self wherever you go.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Readers will find themselves swept up…by Caletti’s believable characters and their raw emotions. As much a gripping emotional thriller as it is a book about love and relationships, Caletti’s newest work will please old fans and garner new ones.”
—Booklist
“Readers who appreciate a slow reveal and family drama tied up in their mysteries will appreciate this one.”
—Library Journal
The Secrets She Keeps
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Bantam Books eBook Edition
Copyright © 2015 by Deb Caletti
Reading group guide copyright © 2015 by Penguin Random House LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
B
ANTAM
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OOKS
and the H
OUSE
colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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ANDOM
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OUSE
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EADER’S
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IRCLE
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Caletti, Deb.
The secrets she keeps: a novel / Deb Caletti.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-345-54810-8 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-345-54811-5 (ebook) 1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Ranches—Nevada—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.A4386S43 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014029889
eBook ISBN 9780345548115
www.randomhousereaderscircle.com
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Virginia Norey
Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos
Cover images: Lauri Rotko/Getty Images (legs and background), SchrubPhoto/Shutterstock (boots)
v4.1
ep
Contents
A Conversation with Deb Caletti
Questions and Topics for Discussion
Benedictio: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
—E
DWARD
A
BBEY
,
Desert Solitaire
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
—M
ARGARET
A
TWOOD
,
Six Word Story
She isn’t one bit sorry. Not right now. Not when she closes the door of that car and the window is down and there are crickets and millions of stars and miles and miles of open road. For once, she is not the one making the careful, thought-out decisions that make her the practical sister, because there is no question: This is a mistake. This is a doomed mission of the heart, and Veronica May Fontaine says no life worth living is absent a few of those. Of course, Veronica May Fontaine had tipped back more than one Moscow mule before she said it, and Nash’s mother had only rolled her eyes. By that time, Alice had heard it all.
But this night, no theory of love matters. No consequences do. There is a thin yellow curve of moon in that big, big desert sky. The night air smells like dry grass and horse manure and summer. Nash is flying down that dirt road with her true love beside her, and she is filled with all the complicated themes of two people bound together by circumstances of fate—rescue and renewal, joy and fear, connection and inevitable loss.
She has made a promise. A vow. She may be only eighteen years old—Jack Waters called her
Peanut
before he stopped seeing her as a child—but you don’t grow up on a divorce ranch and not learn to take a vow seriously.
Honestly, though? It may seem terrible to say—horrible, a betrayal—but even the vow, the terrible night of it, the metallic smell of blood and the sound of thunder that wasn’t thunder but horse hooves, hundreds of them, has retreated in the face of this. This soaring. This rise in her whole body now, as they pick up speed and the ranch falls away behind them and there is only the sweet catastrophe of what’s to come.
Thomas washed his wallet by accident, and that’s what changed my life. He’d left it in his pants. My mother always told Shaye and me never to do a man’s laundry, but as I watched him spread out soggy receipts and dollar bills on the foot of our bed, I wished I’d never listened. He looked defeated. He was bent over that small, wrecked pile, and it seemed as if all the annoyances of living had suddenly caught up to him—the cracks in the cement and missed planes and calls to the cable company. Two minutes later, our marriage as we knew it would be hanging in some awful balance, but right then I felt bad for him. I thought maybe he’d lived a life of quiet desperation, only I hadn’t known it. My mother—she ended up alone, anyway. She’d say that’s how she wanted it, but we were two different people.
It was Saturday morning, and I was still in my robe. I sat cross-legged on the bed. Thomas wore that T-shirt with the sailboat on the back and his favorite old cargo shorts. I always thought he looked cute in those. Thomas was still a very good-looking man, no doubt about that. He was fit and strong, and that dark hair, well, even now it got to me, these many years later, the way it had that slightly mussed mind of its own.
“Did it make it?” I asked him. The wallet looked battered and soaked but also like it just had the ride of its life. Thomas set it up at an angle on the dresser. It was not any usual old day for that wallet. No flat, dull outing in a back pocket for that adventurous leather accessory.
“I hope so,” Thomas said. “It better have.”
He seemed to mean it. I was surprised he cared so much about it. It might have been a Christmas gift years ago, and God knew he could do with a new one. He never bought himself the things he needed. He still had coats from his college days, and he could go miles with the sole of a shoe flapping. He was smug about all the things he could do without. It could drive you insane.
“I think it’s okay.” He exhaled his relief, unfurled a photo from the small stack of wet paper in his hand. There you had it—we’d been talking about two different things, and to that I can only say,
No comment
.
He set the small square of paper on the comforter to dry. It was an awful picture of the four of us from the time of shoulder pads and high-waisted jeans—I’d forgotten how high. My hair was permed for the first and last time, and if you saw it, you’d know why. I did it at home from a box, and the curls were as tight as an Airedale’s. Thomas’s own hair was long in front, and he was wearing an Alpine sweater that worked so hard at being cheery, your heart went out to it. Amy and Melissa wore the dresses Thomas’s mother had bought them just before cancer-scare number one. I made them wear the scratchy lace because we thought she was dying, but naturally she wasn’t. Those kinds of people go on forever. I think we had the picture taken for free in the back corner of a J. C. Penney or somewhere like that; at least, we were in front of a cloudy blue background. It was the sort of photo they show on crime programs after someone’s been murdered.
“Look at us,” I said. Who knew if J. C. Penney even had photo studios anymore.
“I thought it was done for,” he said, before moving on, peeling away a sodden ticket stub and a voter-registration card. He held up the damp, noble face of Andrew Jackson, torn in half by the spin cycle. “Great. Terrific.”
“A little tape will fix that right up,” I said.
“What time is it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He leaned over to look at the clock on the bedside table. “Shit. I’m already late.”
He exhaled the frustration of the morning. I felt a curl of guilt for my wifely shortcomings. Thomas was the sort of husband who brought you a cup of coffee and made sure the snow tires had been put on, though maybe, too, you could always feel a sigh in there somewhere. Folding his socks wouldn’t have been such a big deal, though he probably would have lost a lot more wallets had I been in charge of the washing.
“How about if I go get her?” Our daughter Amy was at the last Global Citizens meeting before her post-graduation trip to Costa Rica. The group was leaving in the morning. I should also mention what a good father Thomas was. He was even one of the parents who helped at the fundraising car wash. He’d done it for Melissa, too, a few years before. I wanted to be with Amy every chance I could get right then, but I can’t truthfully say I minded missing out on the jumping and screaming and sign-waving of the girls on the street corner. T-shirts with glitter could get the better of me. Thomas woke up early, though. He said,
Rise and shine, Sunshines!
and made the rounds of the house, rousing us with the sock of a pillow. He put a baseball cap on over his tousled morning hair and even got donuts for the kids on the way.