The woman looks to me like she stems from one of those countries that produce tall, light-haired, light-eyed people by the yard. Her hair is so blond it tends toward white; her eyes are blue like beach glass. She says to Gus, “Go play,” and he mopes, yanking the earbuds from his ears and abandoning them along with the army men on the park bench, rising lethargically and meandering to a swing. Maisie, on the other hand, takes off full tilt, headed toward a sandbox where she wiggles out of her hot-pink Crocs and gets down to work.
The woman says that her name is Kat; I say that my name is Clara. She has the most perfect posture, and though it isn’t intentional, her hair, her clothing, her eyes make me feel subordinate. I sit beside her and cross my feet at the ankles, feeling huge in the woman’s presence, my midsection still round and flabby. I try to ignore the charm of her adorable espadrilles and to avoid looking at my own bloated feet, the polish chipping quickly off the nails. The baby weight weighs heavily on me, my breasts engorged with milk. Just because I’ve begun feeding Felix formula doesn’t mean my body has adapted to the change. Not yet anyway, and so I fill to capacity with surplus milk, my breasts flattened beneath an old sports bra that only adds to my revulsion. I haul Felix from the stroller and feed him a baby bottle to satisfy his needs while my own stomach growls, a reminder that I’ve eaten nothing today, nearly nothing this week. I should eat, I tell myself, knowing I won’t eat.
Harriet lays herself in the shade beneath a tree.
“Who are you?” I ask the woman as we watch her boy, Gus, descend upon Maisie in the sandbox, asking indifferently if he, too, can play. I half expect Maisie to say no and throw a fuss that some newbie has infringed upon her sandbox, in an attempt to maraud the best, wet, packable sand, and I ready myself with the need to intervene, to explain to Maisie about sharing and playing nice, and how this sandbox isn’t all hers as she’s convinced herself it is.
And yet she doesn’t make a fuss but instead nods her head okay, and together she and Gus begin to build. Good girl, Maisie, I silently say.
“Nick and I were friends way back when,” Kat says to me as she picks at the flat-felled seam on a pair of vintage wash jeans. She doesn’t look at me, her eyes instead placed on the jeans. Her fingernails are freshly painted, a dark grape, freshly manicured.
But this is too ambiguous to me, too abstruse. Way back when. “When?” I ask, needing specifics, and Kat reluctantly tells me how she and Nick went to high school together.
“Where?” I ask.
“Seattle,” she tells me. “Bainbridge Island. We were close,” she says. “Good friends,” though I wager a guess from the tears that fill her eyes that they were more than good friends. I’m afflicted with a sudden pang of jealousy; were Kat and Nick better friends than Nick and me? But, no, I reassure myself, thinking of Nick and me lying together in bed, my head on his chest as he stroked my hair with those gentle, loving hands of his, the same hands that held our wrinkly baby boy all covered in vernix days later when he finally emerged from my womb after eighteen hours of painful labor.
He married me. We had a child together. Two children. He loved me, not her.
“You’ve kept in touch all these years?” I ask, wondering why Nick never mentioned Kat before. I think hard, trying to decide whether he did tell me about Kat and I wasn’t listening. It’s not like me not to listen, and yet I’d been so consumed in recent months with the pregnancy, with my own expanding body, with my mother’s ever-failing mind. Maybe he mentioned a Kat, and somehow or other I didn’t hear.
But she tells me no. “My husband and I, Steve,” she says, “Steve and Gus and I just moved here, to town. He’s in accounting, my husband. Steve,” and her words come out unmethodically, a series of ramblings that I must put together, like puzzle pieces. Her voice shakes. She is nervous, sad and scared. Why is she scared? Does she have a reason to be scared? Or maybe it is only the nerves masked in fear.
“He was transferred?” I infer, and she says yes. “When?” I ask.
“We’ve been here nearly eight weeks,” she says. “Two months,” and in my bitterness I want to tell her that I know that, that eight weeks is two months, that I can add, that I’m not an idiot. The words nearly snap out of me as the anger in me begins to rise, all but reaching a boiling point. Kat has done nothing to harm me, nothing that I know of for certain, and yet my dislike for her builds and builds. I’m tired and hungry, I rationalize in my head, and my husband is dead. I have every right in the world to be grouchy, angry, to snap at people I hardly know.
“And you and Nick…” my voice trails off as I search for the word I need. “You reconnected?” I ask, reading between the lines. The question comes out more pointedly than I’d intended—an inquisition—sharp like a scalpel. I envision some chance encounter at the tire and auto repair shop, which I only imagine because I remember Nick running over a mislaid nail on the interstate one day, eight weeks or two months ago, and coming home with a flattened tire. Or maybe it was at the post office, the Saturday afternoon he mailed a package to his father, an autographed glossy photograph of Dave Krieg he found at a sports memorabilia store on the highway toward Joliet. Maybe she was there browsing through boxes of NFL trading cards, finding one to give to Gus, Nick staring through tempered glass at expensive items on display. A chance meeting. Kismet.
“Yes,” she says, nodding her head. “In a way. We ran into each other at his dental practice, of all places,” she says, smiling cannily without realizing it, as she says to me, “He hadn’t changed a bit. Nick was still Nick.”
“You’ve seen him many times since you’ve moved to town?” I ask, trying hard to curtain my jealousy and distrust. Why didn’t Nick tell me about Kat, Nick who told me everything? No secrets, he always said. None. But now I’m beginning to believe there were secrets indeed. Many secrets. Had he been lying to me for the last eight weeks, the last two months, or for many years? All these women in Nick’s life about whom I knew nothing, Melinda and Kat.
Were there more? What else don’t I know?
“Yes,” she says, and then, “no,” settling finally on, “a few.” She and Nick had seen each other a few times since she moved to town. She, Steve and Gus, Kat goes on to tell me, are living in a suburb that lies adjacent to ours, one with home prices that soar upward of a million dollars and property taxes that are heinous, ones that fund the superlative public school system in town, the best one around. She doesn’t say this to me, but I know. Nor does she describe her home to me, but still, I picture it, some palatial home in one of those newer, gated subdivisions, the ones making a grand show of their upscale homes and onsite amenities, the tennis courts and heated pools and the elitist clubhouses flanked in glass and stone.
When I ask Kat about her last phone call with Nick the day of the crash, she describes it for me, the sounds she heard that day over the phone: the shrill screaming and the wreckage of the car as it slammed against the tree, “like refuse in a garbage truck,” she tells me, “being compacted beneath the force of the metal pusher plate, times infinity. That but worse,” she says decisively, her eyes set on Gus and Maisie in the sandbox and not me.