- “Mommy, look. That’s the lady who comes to our house when you’re at work.”
- My five-year-old said it loud. Loud enough for the cashier to glance up. Loud enough for the man behind us with the case of soda to stop pretending he wasn’t listening.
- Leo was pointing past me, toward the bakery display at the end of the checkout lanes. His little finger was steady. His face was completely sure.
- “She plays in the room upstairs.”
- I was holding a carton of milk. My hand squeezed it so hard that the cardboard started to buckle. I set it down on the conveyor belt before I crushed it.
- The woman by the bakery hadn’t turned around. She looked about thirty. She wore a short green dress, and her dark hair was pinned up loosely, with a canvas tote bag hanging off one shoulder. I couldn’t see her face.
- I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
- I need to back up. Because when Leo said those words, they landed on top of a week’s worth of little things I had been trying very hard not to notice.
- My mother died in the spring. Pancreatic cancer. Four months from the diagnosis to the funeral. Three months later, I was still walking around inside my own life like a stranger who’d wandered into the wrong house.
- That Wednesday morning, I was standing at the foot of our bed folding a pile of Leo’s tiny T-shirts. My mother’s silk scarf lay on the dresser in a loose coil. It was cream with little blue birds, and it still smelled faintly of her jasmine perfume.
- Before I could stop myself, I picked it up and held it to my face and breathed in.
- “Mommy, are you crying again?”
- Leo was standing in the doorway. He had on one blue sock and one striped sock, and he was holding a juice box like a trophy.
- “No, baby. I’m just smelling Grandma.”
- “Grandma smells like flowers.”
- “She does.”
- He padded across the room and climbed up onto the bed. That’s when I saw it again. A smear of silver paint along the side of his thumb, dried and starting to peel. Another streak was crusted near his elbow. I was positive it hadn’t been there when I gave him his bath the night before.
- “Leo, what’s this?”
- “Paint.”
- “I can see it’s paint. From where?”
- “Art class,” my husband called from the hallway.
- Mark appeared behind Leo with a cup of coffee in one hand and his phone in the other.
- “The teacher’s been doing a whole outer space unit this week. Stars, planets, the works.”
- Then he gave me a smile I’d been seeing a lot lately.
- It was small and private. The corners of his mouth tucked inward, like he was holding something in so it wouldn’t slip out.
- “It looks stubborn,” I said. “Doesn’t it wash off?”
- “You know how he is in the tub. Water goes everywhere except on him.”
- “I did wash!” Leo shouted. He bounced off the bed and thundered down the stairs.
- Mark leaned over and kissed my forehead. Quick and warm.
- “You look tired, Kate.”
- “I’m fine.”
- “Our anniversary is Saturday. Ten years. Are we doing something, or are you going to keep pretending you forgot?”
- “I didn’t forget.”
- “Good.”
- He looked at his phone again. That same soft smile. Then he slid it into his back pocket before I could see the screen.
- “I have to run out for an hour,” he said. “Errand.”
- “On a Wednesday morning? Don’t you have work?”
- “I took the morning. It’s a boring errand. Promise.”
- I watched him go down the stairs. I heard the front door close and his car back out of the driveway. I told myself I was being ridiculous.
- Grief does strange things to people. My mother used to say that suspicion was just love with nowhere to land. Lately, my love didn’t seem to have anywhere to land at all.
- I had a lot on my mind that week. My mother had named me executor of her will. I’d spent the whole summer learning words I never wanted to know. Probate. Letters testamentary. Estate inventory. Her attorney, a gentle old man named Gerald Pruitt with an office above a pharmacy downtown, walked me through every step. He was patient. He never made me feel stupid when I cried in his office, which I did more than once.
- Mom left everything to me. She was a widow, and I was her only child. It wasn’t a fortune. Her little two-bedroom house on Alder Street. A checking account with $11,300 in it. And a life insurance policy through her old job at the county library that paid $50,000. The check had come in the mail two weeks earlier. I hadn’t been able to deposit it yet. It was sitting in an envelope in my desk drawer, and every time I opened the drawer, I closed it again.
- The house was the hardest part. We’d listed it in July. A young couple with a baby on the way had made an offer of $236,000. The closing was set for Friday at a title company across town. I’d have to sit at a table and sign my name on a stack of papers that said my mother’s house wasn’t hers anymore.
- Gerald told me I didn’t have to be there in person. I could sign ahead of time. But I wanted to be there. I couldn’t explain why. It felt like the last thing I could do for her.
- So that was my week. A closing on Friday. An anniversary on Saturday. And my husband smiling at his phone like a teenager.
- That evening, I carried a stack of clean towels down the upstairs hall to the guest room.
- The door wouldn’t open.
- I turned the knob again. Locked.
- “Mark?” I called. “Why is the guest room locked?”
- “Is it?” he called back from downstairs. “Must be stuck. I’ll take a look in a minute.”
- “Do you have the key?”
- “Somewhere around here,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
- I stood with my hand on that doorknob for a long time.
- Then I walked away. Because that’s what a sensible wife does. That’s what a woman who trusts her husband is supposed to do.
- But I didn’t sleep well that night.
- I lay awake listening to Mark breathe beside me and made a list in my head. The silver paint. The smile at his phone. The errand on a Wednesday. The locked door.
- I’m a loan officer at a credit union. I spend my days reading bank statements and looking for the things that don’t add up. Whose deposits are steady. Whose spending changes all of a sudden. It’s not a glamorous job. But it teaches you to notice things.
- So the next morning, before work, I did something I had never done in ten years of marriage.
- I logged into our joint savings account and looked at the statement.
- Mark and I keep a savings account at our credit union for emergencies and for the house. It had about $19,000 in it, mostly from his year-end bonus. We don’t really touch it. We both have access to it, and we never check up on each other. That’s always been our deal.
- I scrolled down the transactions for the last four months.
- There it was. A transfer in May. $1,600. Another one in June. $1,600. Another in August. $1,600.
- All three of them went to the same place.
- NE Studio LLC.
- Four thousand, eight hundred dollars.
- I didn’t know anybody named NE. I didn’t know of any studio. I sat at the kitchen table in my work clothes with my coffee going cold and stared at those three lines until the numbers blurred.
- Leo came downstairs in his pajamas and climbed into my lap. He smelled like sleep and maple syrup from yesterday’s waffles.
- “What are you looking at, Mommy?”
- “Nothing, baby. Just work stuff.”
- I closed the laptop.
- At work, I was useless. I processed a car loan for a retired schoolteacher and got her interest rate wrong twice. My manager, Denise, stopped by my desk around lunch.
- “You okay, Kate? You look like you’re a thousand miles away.”
- “Just the closing tomorrow,” I said. “My mom’s house.”
- That was true. It just wasn’t the whole truth.
- She squeezed my shoulder. “Leave early. Go pick up your boy. I’ll cover the rest of your afternoon.”
- I left at two. I picked Leo up from his preschool, the one with the bright blue door and the hand-painted sunflowers along the fence. I asked his teacher, Miss Patty, about the outer space unit.
- She looked at me blankly. “Outer space? Oh no, honey. We’re doing farm animals this month. Cows and pigs. Why?”
- “No reason,” I said. “I must have mixed it up.”
- I buckled Leo into the car, and I sat behind the wheel for a full minute without starting the engine.
- Mark had lied.
- Not a big lie. A tiny one. Art class. Stars and planets. But he’d said it so easily, without even thinking. Like he’d practiced it.
>>PART 2
My Five-Year-Old Son Pointed at a Woman in the Supermarket and Said She “Plays in Mommy’s Bedroom” While I’m at Work
