Grace couldn’t get a job in Garland as easily as she had planned. Every post at the college was filled by work-study students, and in January, none of the local boutiques were hiring. Grace wouldn’t have been hired anyway. Local businesses only hired relatives. She applied at the three nearby art galleries, listing her lone art history course, Western Art I, which she had not even completed, as a qualification, along with four months of experience at a fake appraisal office whose e-mail address she made up and would have to monitor herself. She didn’t want them calling Donald. She did not ask for help from Riley or the Grahams, who she knew were confused at her return anyway. She would find her own job, without writing Riley Graham’s secret wife on the résumé she left with Anne Findlay’s assistant, a girl who looked a little like Grace, but happier.
The second week of January, she was hired part-time at the T.J.Maxx in Pitchfield. She had to drive Riley’s car to get there. He didn’t like that she worked at T.J.Maxx. Grace as a discount cashier didn’t fit into his vision.
“It’s a job,” she said. “My mom used to work at a T.J.Maxx.” She didn’t know where that had come from. It was true, but the comparison was unlike her.
“You’re not your mom,” he said, and there was nowhere to go after that.
Riley had made almost nine thousand dollars in his December show at Anne Findlay’s gallery. Grace didn’t believe him until he showed her his bank statement. He was dying to spend the money. When she came home at night, she found him obsessively looking at cars online. He bought a pair of white nubuck wing tips. He wouldn’t save the money. He talked as if he would, as in of course he would save the money, most of it, but his math was magical.
“Do you want to go on a trip?” he asked her. “Like a real vacation. Like adults.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Anywhere you want. Paris. L.A. Shanghai!”
“Do you?” she asked wearily.
“All by ourselves,” he said. “We could check into hotels.” This was the idea that really thrilled him—making reservations, signing his name.
She knew he was disappointed in her. Who was this tired, defeated knitwear cashier who dreamed of nothing? She couldn’t explain. She was stunned by how much of herself had become secret from him. It didn’t help that when she and Alls slipped past each other in the hallway, her neck tensed up for an hour. Once, she had gone to shower right after him and found herself holding his damp towel, breathing in the steam. Greg had knocked on the door to ask her how much longer she would be. She was naked and the shower was running, but she hadn’t yet stepped into the tub. She didn’t even know how long she’d been standing there.
More than a year had passed since she’d first stood in this bathroom, drugged by the steam, and how guilty she’d felt then.
? ? ?
When Riley told her one night that he had a surprise, Grace thought for a moment that he was about to pull out an engagement ring. Instead, she unwrapped lingerie, a red satin bustier with black lace trim.
She lifted the bustier from the tissue by its delicate straps. She didn’t know anything about lingerie, but she could tell by the soft sheen of the fabric and the intricacy of the lace that this had been very expensive. She hated the red, but she knew that gift lingerie seldom expressed the aesthetic of the recipient. As she stared, Riley watching her from the other side of the corset, she felt criticized by him, soberingly so, but she didn’t know why at first. The matching thong sat coiled in the box, a limp rubber band.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, because what else could she say? Lingerie! Grace was eighteen and her husband was barely twenty. She thought of lingerie as something for old people, bored with each other’s bodies and habits, trying to fake themselves into seeing something new.
He needed her to be new. She’d been so afraid of losing him because of what she had done that she had neglected the rest. She had disappointed him, coming home to wrangle the carts at a Pitchfield strip mall. In trying to seem pure in order to be pure, she’d bored him.
She smiled—shyly, he probably thought—and took the box into the bathroom. The lid had long since broken off the toilet, and she balanced the box across the seat. This was who he wanted her to be. She pulled the corset over her head, struggling to get the waist over her shoulder blades. She lifted and dropped her breasts into the seamed cups. She looked over her shoulder at the mirror and adjusted the thong so that it arced perfectly over her ass, now a dark clefted peach. Her face looked too pale and too tired. She rubbed her lips together and raked her fingers up her scalp to fluff her hair, and then she went back into the bedroom.
17
Between shifts at T.J.Maxx, Grace read as if she were still in school, though it was too late to impress anyone. She’d failed three of her classes through sheer neglect. She hadn’t responded to either of the e-mails from her adviser, a harried adjunct she’d only met once anyway. She hadn’t even responded to the texts from Kendall. She imagined Lana, wide-eyed, describing Grace’s “nervous breakdown”—or was that a Southern phrase?
She tried to read her giant art history textbook, which had cost ninety dollars, but the words just settled around her, dead as dust. Instead she buried her mind in Shakespeare, feeling that she finally understood the histrionics of betrayal, and fat old novels that all seemed to be about doomed women, both the wicked and the duped. She missed working for Donald, magnifying the photos to find chips and scratches and signatures, pinpointing a silver hairbrush in time and by place. Donald and Bethany had both e-mailed her, and Donald had called a few times, but Grace hadn’t answered. What could she say? That it had all been too much for her? She had no way to explain her decision without subjecting herself to their pitying concern.
She wondered if she might find a similar job in Garland, but she knew she was kidding herself. There was nothing like that here.
? ? ?
The main thing was to stay out of the house when Alls was home alone.
She knew what his footsteps sounded like, their particular creak. She knew his cough. She knew better than to be alone with him. They could never speak of what had happened. She had to act as though it hadn’t happened; she had to believe it herself.
There were signs, if someone had known to look for them. Grace and Alls seldom joked around with each other anymore, and when Grace tried to tease him in front of Riley, he no longer teased her back. He was too aloof, too serious around her—too much like someone hiding something, she thought. Riley remarked on it one night, and Grace said that Alls was probably a little unhappy about her moving in.
“I probably ruined the manly vibe,” she said.
“It’s not like you bought coasters or something.”
True enough. Grace was a slob, and she left her dishes and empties around the house just as the boys did. “Maybe I’ll surprise you,” she said, anxious to stay with the joke. “Start a chore calendar.”
“With geese in wheelbarrows on it,” Riley said. “No, I think he’s always had, you know, kind of a thing for you.”
“What?” she said, heart thumping. “Really?”
“He’s so weird about girls, and you’re always around.”
“I’m quite the femme fatale,” she said. “Always being around and whatnot.”
“Ah, shut it. You know. You’re hot, you’re not an idiot or a screecher, you hold your booze fine. You’re probably the only girl he’s not scared of.”
“Thank you, husband. I’m tremendously flattered,” she said. “He’s had girlfriends.”