Jennifer could tell Megan a thing or two on the subject of surveillance. Furtive glances, open hostile stares. The time a woman came up to her in the grocery store, Milo a toddler kicking his heels in the basket, and said—loudly, like she wanted the whole store to hear her—“Someone ought to take that child away from you.” Milo’s face transformed into the look of betrayed astonishment he wore when he got a shot, and Jennifer wanted to round on that woman, wanted to grab the can of tomatoes from her cart and bash in her head. She walked away, whispering to Milo, “Don’t worry, sweetie, she’s a crazy lady,” while behind her the woman called, “It’s shameful that you still have that child. Shameful, shameful, shameful. Imagine what you’re doing to him!”
What about what this woman was doing to him? That didn’t seem to matter. Milo has recently learned the word hypocrite, and now he’s trying out the concept. He asks Jennifer: Is my teacher a hypocrite? Is the president a hypocrite? Is Batman a hypocrite? “I don’t think so, honey,” Jennifer answers again and again, but what she really wants to say, is Yes, yes, yes. They are all hypocrites. There is not a soul who isn’t.
“What about you?” Megan asks. “Do you go in the post office and run into a client? And suddenly they’re, I don’t know, asking you about the kink in their neck?”
“Um,” Jennifer says as the girl at the food counter calls first Megan’s name, then hers. Megan starts to rise but Jennifer waves her down. “I’ll get them both,” she says. Picking up the plates, she lets out a slow breath, banishing the memory of the grocery store woman, for which Megan is not to blame.
When Jennifer sets down the food, Megan looks at her like she’s decided something. “You and I should plan an outing,” she says.
“An outing?” Jennifer repeats.
“Just get away for a day. Or maybe even a weekend. Farther away than Nashville. Have you been to Atlanta?”
“Funny to think of getting away from the getaway.”
Megan sighs extravagantly. “Sometimes you just have to get the fuck off this mountain,” she says. “Breathe some less rarefied air. Let’s go somewhere no one will recognize us.”
Jennifer thinks: I already did.
“Where would you want to go?” Megan asks.
“I don’t think I could go anywhere,” Jennifer says. “I don’t have a sitter.”
“Oh, of course.” Megan produces another of her slow flushes, a blotchy red creeping up her neck. The places the flush doesn’t touch are weirdly fascinating—like someone’s pressed their fingers hard against her throat. Why is she so embarrassed? It’s not as if Jennifer forgets she’s a single parent unless Megan points it out.
Jennifer crunches a bite of salad. She’s surprised by even this hint of dissatisfaction from Megan—get the fuck off this mountain. Should she ask if something’s wrong? What if Megan says yes? Yes, something is terribly wrong. Sebastian screams at her and locks himself in the bedroom for hours, Megan sobbing outside the door; Sebastian beds the women of Chattanooga in his photography studio, posing them this way and that. Megan, though—she gets her own back, all her adoring students, those pretty pretty boys. From what she knows of Megan so far, this last notion seems so outlandish that it might as well be impossible, like alien life or time travel, like Megan growing a second head, or Megan’s friend being a murderer. “Did I tell you about Margaret?” she asks abruptly. “My client?”
Megan cocks her head. “I don’t think so.”
“She’s ninety, and she’s a World War Two vet.”
“Really! How interesting.”
“She was a nurse, near the front lines. I’m doing massage for her, but also she’s asked me to . . . help her with her memoir, I guess.”
“About the war?”
Jennifer nods. “We started this morning—she told me a story, I took notes. But I think it’s going to be difficult. She wants to talk about it, but then she doesn’t.”
“What do you think that’s about?”
“I don’t know, the stuff you see in a war.”
“The people she lost.”
“Right.”
Megan reaches over her salad for more pie. “Maybe there were patients she thinks she should have saved.”
“That could be.”
“Everyone who goes to war must have those kinds of regrets.”
Jennifer takes another bite of salad. I had an affair once, she thinks. She thinks it at Megan, but clearly neither is telepathic because Megan just takes another bite of pie. He was one of my clients. Megan! Can you hear me? Megan!
“Oh my God, this is so good,” Megan says. “I can’t believe you’re not eating this.”
“I will, after my salad.”
“If there’s any left.” Megan rolls her eyes at herself. “I have the willpower of a flea.”
The man, the other man, was a regular, someone she thought about mostly, preaffair, as her Tuesday at nine a.m. He spent his weekends and any other time he could get on a bicycle, and the massages were part of his whole cycling lifestyle, along with his shaved calves and the spandex she assumed he wore.
“That’s why I can’t have dessert in the house,” Megan says. “I eat it without even knowing it. I’m at home grading papers and then suddenly I’m in the kitchen with Oreos stuffed in my cheeks.”
“So what?” Jennifer says. “You look great. You’re so skinny.”
“Constant effort, my friend.” She sighs. “Back to the salad.” She playacts an unwilling, listless bite. “Mmm,” she says. “Delicious.”
One Monday afternoon her client called with a weird tension in his voice and said, “I have to cancel our appointment.”
“Do you want to reschedule?” Jennifer asked, already reaching for a pen.