“I’m sorry, the number you have reached, 518-555-8797, is not in service at this time. Please check to be sure—”
Eve slammed the phone down before it finished. She must have dialed wrong; he was her husband, had always been responsible, he wouldn’t just vanish. Maybe he hadn’t paid his bill, but then they say “temporarily disconnected,” which translates You have reached the number of a deadbeat.
If he’d moved, his mother would know where. But Eve had the jitters as she did even’ time she called him and had probably just dialed wrong.
She reached for the phone to try again and it rang. She grabbed it, hoping it was Sam, knowing it was not.
“Eve, it’s Meg.”
“I recognized your voice,” Eve said drily. They’d talked to each other on the phone almost every day for over twenty years.
“I need help,” Meg said.
Meg used to call just to talk or make a shopping date. Then Eve’s mother died eight months ago and Meg had changed along with everything else. Now they were user and usee, with Meg as user.
“What kind of help?” Eve asked warily.
“You know.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Won’t, you mean,” Meg cried.
“Listen to me, Meg.” The French doors from the terrace opened and Eve’s Aunt Frances glided in.
Eve said, “It’s over, gone and done. Go to a storefront reader and adviser, find a gypsy caravan.” Frances stood in front of the doors, listening.
Meg cried, “Oh, God, I need you! I’d do it for you if I could.”
Which was probably true.
“This’ll be the last time. I swear it,” Meg said.
“That’s what you said last time.”
Meg knew enough to keep quiet.
“Okay, Margaret, I’ll meet you at Burt’s in forty minutes. But it’s not going to do any good. It really is over.”
She hung up, faced her aunt, and said, “It is over. I’ll try and fail.”
“How do you know?”
“Same way you know you’ve lost a tooth. You feel it missing.”
“You haven’t lost a tooth since you were eight,” Frances Tilden reminded her gently.
“Shit... okay. But it is over.”
“I hope so, dear,” her aunt said, and glided across the room as if she were wearing a chiffon gown. In fact, she had on flannel slacks and red cotton socks; she’d probably left her walking shoes on the terrace so she wouldn’t trek mud through the house.
Eve waited until she left the room, then went upstairs to change.
The house was silent; no one was expected for dinner. Mrs. Knapp, the cook, had gone to see her daughter in Hartford, and Larry must be out back doing something with one of the cars.
Eve stripped and washed at the shell-shaped granite sink in what had been her mother’s bathroom. She’d moved into this room after Sam left to prove something to herself or her aunt. She wasn’t sure what.
She raised her head and looked in the mirror with water running down her face. There were circles under her eyes, her cheekbones stuck out, and she’d lost weight, not gained it, but she’d read that weight loss was common in the early weeks of pregnancy.
Meg waved at her from the dim back section of the old roadhouse. Eve crossed the barroom behind the few afternoon regulars, who stared into their drinks or at the monster TV hung on the wall next to the shelves of glasses, and slid into the booth across from Meg.
“Thank you,” Meg said humbly.
“Let’s get this over with.”
“Don’t be like that. It means a lot to me,” Meg said, and Eve realized her old friend had come to rely on the thing.
Eve should find a better word for it; gift didn’t fit. Gifts were good, and this had probably cost her her husband and turned her best friend into a dependent fool.
Her aunt called it a talent—a polite word, but Frances could find a polite word for rape. Talent didn’t fit; power didn’t either because it implied control.
“I brought this.” Meg drew a long, knitted scarf out of her leather bag and laid it on the table. Mary Owen, who’d gone to grammar school with Meg and Eve, but not to Rosemary Hall or Wellesley, came to take their orders.
She had on slacks with a good crease in them and a clean starched shirt, and Eve thought she looked better turned out than they did.
“Nice scarf,” Mary said, touching it. “Feels like cashmere.”
“Mixed with cashmere,” Meg said. “I knitted it for Tim—he wore it all winter.”
Tears filled her eyes and Mary blushed and asked quickly, “What can I get you?”
“Gin and tonic,” Meg sniffled. Eve ordered 7-Up, which her aunt swore by to settle gastric distress.
“Now what?” Eve asked gently when Mary left.
Meg wiped her eyes and Eve saw pain in them. The questions were always about pain... the answers caused more pain.
“Tim’s found another woman,” Meg said.
“That’s absurd!”
“No, it’s not. He used to be home by six every night, all weather. Now two, three nights a week, it’ll be after eight. His clothes are wrinkled, his shirt looks like he’s taken it off and put it back on; ditto his tie.”
Mary brought their drinks. Eve sipped the 7-Up, the liquid hit her stomach like falling ice cubes, the nausea locked her in for a moment. She grabbed the table edge, shut her eyes, and thought, Leave me alone... why can’t you all just leave me alone... it’s over... I can’t help you. I never could help you because knowing doesn’t help... knowing makes it worse... just leave me ah me.
“Eve?”
The nausea ebbed. Eve opened her eyes.
“Touch the scarf,” Meg said softly in a voice that was almost seductive.
“I don’t have to touch anything to tell you that Tim loves you, and if he doesn’t—if there’s someone else—what good will knowing do?”
“He could clean out the accounts and take off with her.”
“Horseshit. He can’t touch your trusts, and you know it. How much do you have in trust, Meg?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I know you, you know to the penny. How much?”
Meg clasped her hands on the table, twisted them, and said, “Seventy million, seven hundred twenty-two thousand.”
“And in those famous accounts you’re so worried about? Twenty, maybe thirty thousand?”
Meg nodded miserably.
“So it’s not the money.”
“Of course it’s not the money,” Meg snapped, “it’s that I keep imagining him with her, can’t stand to touch him or have him touch me. I want to gag when he kisses me. It’s mining us, Eve—I’ve got to know. You remember you told me Tim Junior didn’t have Lyme disease, and that Grandmamma’s emeralds were in that old safe deposit box in Millbridge we’d forgotten about. And that Old Man Whitney was going to make Tim a partner and not to serve the old man poached salmon when he came to dinner because he hates fish.”
It was such a short list of small favors, little things that had made her friend’s life easier. Not grand, dark, or painful, not the work of a mortal woman usurping God’s power. Then why did it feel so black and demonic, why did she hate it so much?
Because it had probably cost her Sam, had driven her father away from her mother and killed her grandmother.
But it was over.
“I can’t do it, Meg.”
“You could try, couldn’t you? Maybe there’s a little left.”
Eve looked at the scarf, and her heart started pounding because she was suddenly afraid there might be a little left. She’d tested herself last week when their cook, Mrs. Knapp, said she hadn’t heard from her husband in twenty-five years. Didn’t even know if he was alive or dead. “Twenty-five years,” she had said. “Billy was seven, Margie only four. How do you find a man after twenty-live years to tell him he’s a grandpa without hiring a private dick?”