Just Between Us

He looked skeptical, but he didn’t say anything until we were back upstairs in our bedroom. He took a seat next to me on the bed as I was setting my alarm. “Jules, I want to know what’s going on.”

I looked up at him, but couldn’t quite meet his gaze. “What? Nothing’s going on.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

I flushed and looked away, but he put a gentle hand on my chin and pulled me back, searching my face, staring deeply into my eyes. In that moment I felt desperate to explain it all, to beg him to fix it and make everything go back to the way it had been.

But I thought of the gun, the gun Brian didn’t even know I’d possessed, and I knew I couldn’t tell him. “It’s nothing,” I said, my gaze darting away from his. “It’s just the stress—the closing I’ve got in Edgeworth this week.”

He looked unconvinced as he held on to my face. “You’ve never been this stressed about a closing before.”

“Yes I have—remember the D’Amicos?”

“That was years ago, when you were first starting out.”

I pulled at his hand and he let me go. “This is a lot more money.”

He was silent for a moment and then he said in a low voice, “Are you in trouble?”

“What? No. Of course not.” As if I were surprised and hadn’t known exactly what he meant the minute he asked. I forced myself to look straight at him, struggling to keep the crawling sensation in my gut from appearing on my face.

“Because if you are, I want to know now, Jules. I don’t want to find out like last time.”

Memories of that day flooded me, snatches of color and sound, the feel of metal tightening around my wrists, the pattern in the cheap carpet that I’d kept my eyes fixed on as I was led out of the office past all those staring faces. I struggled to push the memories down, the sting of humiliation fresh for a moment before I locked it all away again.

“It’s not that,” I lied. “I promise.”

Getting under the covers, I curled up next to him. He’s a proud man, so it took me a minute to realize that he hadn’t just asked because of the past, he was wondering about the future. Specifically, had I met someone else? I leaned in to kiss him, giving him the reassurance he couldn’t ask for, running a hand over his chest and then letting it drop lower.

*

My worries from the night before seemed to have carried real trouble into the next day. Owen and Aubrey dawdled over breakfast and I burned my hand when coffee splashed over the mug I yanked too fast from under the maker. “Poor Mommy,” Aubrey said, offering to kiss it for me.

“Thank you, but I need you to hurry now and get dressed while I find your rain boots, okay?”

Of course it was pouring outside, just something else to make the day harder. I dug in the closet for the kids’ rain gear as I heard them squabbling upstairs. “Mommy, Owen stole my car!”

“It’s not her car, it’s my car—she knows that!”

“C’mon, you two, we don’t have time. Leave the cars and get down here.” If you think that was effective, then you’ve never had children.

Only after I’d marched upstairs, physically pulled them apart, and promised that later, after school, I’d use the wisdom of Solomon to determine who the Hot Wheels car belonged to was I able to hustle them downstairs and into rain gear and load both of them and their backpacks into the car.

I’d just fastened my own seat belt when Owen cried out, “Lunch, Mommy! You forgot my lunch box!”

“Mine, too, Mommy!” Aubrey would never be excluded from any drama.

Back into the house to grab the lunch boxes off the kitchen counter, back out to the car, race to the bus stop, keeping an eye out for cops and overzealous neighbors who might report my speeding. I saw Alison’s car ahead of me in the queue, but it was raining too hard for anyone to stand outside. Five minutes, eight minutes. The bus was late this morning. “C’mon, c’mon,” I muttered while the kids speculated about what the driver could be doing. Finally, mercifully, the bus came up the street, and I opened my big golf umbrella and escorted the kids out of the car and onto it.

Back in the car and a ping from my cell phone—a text from Alison to Sarah and me: Good luck; see you later. Home to shower and change, dressing as if it were any other workday. As I applied makeup I tried to stay positive. The worst would be over in a few hours. We’d pay and this troll would go away, slink back under his or her bridge.

Sarah showed up on time, which was a relief. I wanted to drive, but she’d insisted, arguing that since my car was partially visible in the blackmailer’s photo it was a bad idea to take it to the cemetery. “Ready to go?” she said, tossing her purse in the back and brushing crumbs off my seat as I got in the minivan. I surreptitiously sniffed, hunting for a whiff of alcohol. Nothing but the unappetizing mixed scents of stale Goldfish crackers and damp gym socks. And breath mints. A wave of mint assaulted me as Sarah turned her head to back down my driveway. What was she trying to cover? I clutched the door handle, nervous as Sarah pulled onto the street, but her driving seemed steady.

We turned in to the gates of the Sewickley Cemetery just before nine A.M., slowing to a crawl up the narrow, sharply winding road that climbed a steep hillside, eventually reaching the top, where gravestones perched like candles on top of a birthday cake. It looked like a crowded but beautiful final resting spot, although not as much in winter, with the dead yellow grass poking through patches of dingy snow and the black spires of bare trees looking like charred skeletons. Not that I thought much about the landscape in that moment. I was too stressed, checking right and left, while Sarah kept glancing in the rearview mirror. But there was no one out visiting graves this early on a day so rainy and cold.

I’d last been to a cemetery on Memorial Day, making the annual pilgrimage with my mother to put flowers on the graves of her parents, my gram and pap. “She was never the same without him,” she’d said four years earlier when we’d buried my grandmother next to my grandfather, who’d died over a decade before. “She missed him every day.” She always had pride in her voice, pleased to believe that her parents had been devoted to each other. I wasn’t so sure.

By the time I really knew my grandparents, they’d settled into the resignation I’ve seen in lots of older, long-married couples—general acceptance of the other with occasional bouts of irritation at foibles that had probably once seemed endearing. My grandmother was quick to laugh, but could be impatient with my grandfather’s sloppy eating habits. My grandfather once spent an entire afternoon patiently helping me learn to ride my bike, only to snap at my grandmother for being ten minutes late with his dinner. I’d never seen either abuse the other, though. If my grandfather had truly mistreated my grandmother, would she have considered leaving him? Most people didn’t in her generation, they just sucked it up and muddled along, convinced by religion or a difficult legal system that they couldn’t break their relationships.

Heather wasn’t part of that generation, but she hadn’t left either, or at least not at first. As Sarah drove past the road that led to the mausoleum, I wished that Viktor hadn’t come home early that day, or that Heather had just had the courage to leave him months ago. If she’d only gotten out of there sooner, none of us would be in this situation.

I gave myself a mental shake to focus on the here and now. Only a few more hours and we’d be done with this. We just had to pay the money and it would be all over.

Sarah parked in the spot that Alison had identified, down a road that ran perpendicular to the one with the mausoleum. The view was partially obstructed by pine trees; those hadn’t been reflected on the map. “This is going to strain my neck,” I said, craning to see past the feathery boughs.

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