“Ming Garden?”
“The Luau Hut. I had one mai tai too many, I’m afraid.”
“Girls’ night out,” Jim said.
I could smell the lamb, acrid, almost like urine.
“Thanks for making dinner,” I said. “It’s been so long.”
“We’ll have it tomorrow night. If it’s salvageable.”
I thought about Fred. Somehow he seemed more familiar, more intimate, than my own husband. Did grief alienate people like this? Could we ever go back to how we’d been?
“Tomorrow night . . .” I began, but I couldn’t think of a good excuse for being out again.
“If the lamb’s ruined, I’ll make pork chops . . . All right?”
“Yes. Either way,” I said, forcing a smile.
*
Of course I didn’t meet Fred the following night. How could I? But as I sat across from my husband, eating Shake ’n Bake pork chops and Rice-a-Roni and applesauce, I thought of him waiting under the Shepard clock for me. How long did he stand there, looking expectant at first, watching the stream of people moving toward him, thinking one of them would be me? Like Jim, Fred is a tall man, tall enough to see over the heads of the crowd; he would have spotted me right away. How often did he glance at his watch, wondering what was keeping me? How long did he stand there, waiting?
I sipped the cold Chablis Jim had bought, and ate my dinner, and thought about Fred under the clock, maybe worried by now, maybe angry.
Jim’s voice broke into my reverie: “I think what unnerved me the most is that I did think about it.”
He was talking about the caller yesterday. He was talking about killing himself.
“But I didn’t want to leave you,” he said, and reached across the table and took my hand in his. “I couldn’t . . .” His voice broke and he didn’t continue.
Was this the beginning? I wondered. Were we starting to emerge from our fog of grief? Starting to make our way back to each other? I looked around the dining room, acutely aware of how quiet the house was. It had been that way ever since Michelle died, like it was holding its breath.
“Could you do it?” Jim asked me.
“Kill myself?” I said, surprised. “I don’t think so.”
“Could you kill someone else?”
I laughed nervously. “I admit it,” I said, “I have had murderous thoughts.”
We chewed our dinner in silence for a bit, and then Jim said, “I think we should leave. This house. Providence. We should go away and start over.”
I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the images of Michelle here. Here at this table smearing mashed sweet potatoes on her face. Crawling in the odd, army-style crawl she had, like Vic Morrow at the beginning of Combat. Taking her first bold steps across this threshold, nothing tentative about our daughter. She pulled herself to standing, walked into the room, then fell down hard on her diapered bottom.
“Leave,” I repeated, opening my eyes. “How?”
*
The next night I made excuses, an overdue library book, a sale at Cherry & Webb. Jim frowned at me but said nothing. Outside, the wind had picked up and dark clouds swept across the evening sky. April had certainly come in like a lion, I thought as I walked quickly across the Westminster Mall to the clock. Foolishly, I had forgotten an umbrella. The first fat drops of rain began to fall. The mall emptied fast. Was I also foolish for expecting Fred to show up?
But no sooner did I have the thought than I saw him, with his purposeful stride, moving toward me. He had on his London Fog, belted loosely.
“I thought you’d changed your mind,” he said when he reached me, pulling me into a long hard hug.
“I can’t stay,” I said, moving out of his arms. “Jim . . . he’s suspicious, I think.”
Fred nodded. Then he took my arm and tugged me along.
“Really,” I said. “He’s making meatloaf. I told him I was going to the library.”
Fred didn’t answer. He just led me back to Luke’s, and upstairs to the Luau Hut. Despite my protestations, he ordered us two mai tais and a pupu platter. Once they were delivered, he lifted his glass and slid the napkin from beneath it.
“You guys have life insurance?” he asked, taking a Cross pen from his inside jacket pocket.
A shiver ran up my arms.
“Of course,” I said. “Doesn’t everybody?”
Fred was writing something, but he laughed. “Not everybody. I had some hard luck, nothing serious, down in Buenos Aires. That’s why I came back here.”
“So you don’t have a job?”
“Not exactly,” Fred said. “But I do have a plan.”
He turned the napkin around and moved it closer to me. The mai tai tasted overly sweet tonight, and I bit into an egg roll dipped in hot mustard to get the taste out of my mouth. Immediately, my eyes began to tear.
“What is it?” I asked, coughing.
“A,” he said, pointing to the napkin, “you do something to upset him—”
“Who? Jim?”
“—then you leave the house. See, you’ll be out of it.”