Clattering up the steps at the Concord River Inn, it was impossible to not think of my mother and me sitting in the wallpapered dining room with our seafood Newburg lunches, my mother sipping a Pink Lady and me with a Pepsi with a slice of lemon. Lily and I had agreed to meet at the bar, and not the dining room. What I had forgotten was that there were two bars in the rabbit’s warren of the inn, a snug L-shaped one immediately opposite the dining room, and a larger one toward the back. I chose the smaller bar, since it was empty, and from my barstool I could watch the hallway that led toward the bar at the back. I ordered a Guinness, told myself to sip it slowly. I had no intention of getting drunk this afternoon.
I had spent a lot of time with my wife in the previous week since returning from my business trip to London. Miranda was filled with ideas for furnishing the house in Maine. We had a vintage card table in our library and she had covered it with clippings from catalogs and printouts from the Internet. I tried not to think of her and Brad Daggett as she showed me item after item of things the house absolutely needed to have. I agreed to everything: the heated tile floors in all the bathrooms; the twenty-thousand-dollar Viking range; the indoor lap pool. And while I was agreeing, what kept me going was the knowledge that she was going to die, and I was going to be the one who made that happen. I thought about it constantly, turning the idea around in my mind like looking at a diamond from every possible perspective, looking for flaws or cracks, looking for guilt or second thoughts, and I found none. All I found was the renewed conviction that Miranda was a monster that I needed to slay.
She returned to Maine on Thursday, making me promise that I would come join her on the weekend. Before leaving she brought me to the library to show me a few more items she wanted to order from her pile of catalogs. Then she brought up an image on her cell phone, a painting she thought would be perfect for the dining room.
“It’s six feet by nine feet,” she said. “It will be perfect for the south wall.”
I looked at the tiny image. It appeared to be a man’s head, his ears on fire.
“It’s a Matt Christie self-portrait,” she said. “It’s guaranteed to be a good investment. Look him up if you don’t believe me.” Then she named a ridiculous figure in a sentence that also included the word bargain.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
She did a little jump without quite leaving her feet, then kissed me. “Thank you, thank you.” She pressed a hand against my crotch, running a finger along the zipper of my jeans. Despite my feelings for her, I felt myself getting hard. “When you come to Maine I’ll give you a proper thank-you, okay?” she said in a lowered voice.
I had a sudden urge to spin her around and bend her over the card table, the way I’d seen Brad Daggett fuck her, but I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t smash her face into the catalogs, or call her a cheating bitch. Instead, I told her that I probably wouldn’t get to Maine till Saturday night at the earliest. She didn’t seem too disappointed.
After she’d packed for the long weekend, I walked her to the garage where we kept our cars. After loading up the Mini Cooper, I said to her, “I hope Brad doesn’t give you any trouble up there. All that time you spend together.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s never hit on you, has he?”
She turned, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Brad? No, he’s a total professional. Why, you jealous?”
She delivered the line perfectly, a mixture of surprise, contemplation, and casualness. If I hadn’t seen them together through the binoculars, I would never believe that there was anything going on between my wife and my contractor. The first few years I knew Miranda, I thought of her as someone whose every emotion was on the surface, someone incapable of deception. How had I been so wrong?
She folded herself into the driver’s seat, and blew me a kiss through the window before whipping her car away through the tight channels of the garage. A sense of certitude washed over me. With those few simple words—denying her relationship with Brad—any doubt I had was erased.