Mrs. Saint and the Defectives
Julie Lawson Timmer
Chapter One
It was only when Markie saw her husband’s hands clasped around another woman’s breasts that she finally acknowledged their problems weren’t ones she could hide any longer. Except that wasn’t completely true. Though it shamed her to confess it, the truth was that if she had seen them—his hands, the breasts that weren’t her own—in the privacy of their bedroom or in some tawdry motel room she had burst in on, she might not have admitted it still. There had been other women before, and since the only people who had known were Markie, Kyle, and his mistress-du-jour, it had always been an easy secret to keep. An easy reality for Markie to pretend away.
Lipstick stains on collars, the smell of perfume she didn’t wear—why dwell on these things when they could be shoved aside instead, leaving her free to continue her charade as a happily married woman? An enviably married woman, in fact. Kyle couldn’t keep a vow or a job, and he spent more than he earned and borrowed more than he admitted to, but he was handsome and fit and sexy, and Markie could tell from the looks on the faces at the dinner parties and black-tie casino nights so popular with the private-school crowd they ran with that there wasn’t a mother at Saint Mark’s Prep who didn’t wish she could go home with him.
But secrecy was no longer an option now. Markie had seen them—the hands, the breasts—on the screen of a phone held by one of the members of the Saint Mark’s Mothers’ Club, a phone being huddled over, ogled at, by five other members as they sat, spandex-encased and Botox-injected, at a booth in a swanky restaurant near the school, whispering and shushing and pointing and not-entirely-smiling-with-glee-but-sort-of. And she knew that by the time she had raced home, screamed up the driveway, stormed into the house, and finally confronted her husband, it would be all over Saint Mark’s and her workplace (which were one and the same). All through the ranks of the Mothers’ Club and the staff and the students, one of whom was Markie and Kyle’s eighth-grade son, Jesse.
After that, it would be only a matter of time before the rest of the truths she had ignored—Kyle’s many other infidelities, his maxing out of credit cards Markie hadn’t even known they had, his emptying of their checking account, their savings account, Jesse’s private-school tuition fund, his college fund—surfaced. And even if that particular level of detail wasn’t shared around the Saint Mark’s campus, around their neighborhood, their town—Markie wasn’t about to reveal such facts, and surely Kyle wouldn’t air his complete list of sins—it would become clear, when Jesse didn’t show up on campus the next fall, that something had happened to them financially. And that whatever it was, it was as mortifying as the fact that the photo of Kyle’s hands, the other woman’s breasts, and their joining together had made its way through the phones of every person Markie would never be able to face again.
Kyle left that night. It was right after Easter. Jesse had a quarter term to go before the end of the school year. Thanks to his father, they had no money to pay for it, so Markie had swallowed pride and bile and accepted a Loan of Many Attached Strings from her parents. The minute the Saint Mark’s school year ended, she listed their house, now deep underwater. To keep it in shape for showings and to fulfill one of the many conditions of her parents’ charity, she moved back into her childhood bedroom in her parents’ home, Jesse into the guest room, for the summer.
She didn’t last a week. Her parents, Clayton and Lydia, had never approved of Kyle, who did nothing for their status at the club—no impressive letters after his name, no fancy alma mater for them to casually drop into conversation, no promotions to mention offhandedly over cocktails or golf or bridge. But they approved even less of divorce. There was a child involved now—their grandson. Not to mention all the years they had spent convincing their friends that Kyle was, in fact, worthy of their daughter. Now what were they supposed to tell everyone?
“And it’s not as though we can say you’re doing so much better without him,” Lydia told Markie, eyeing her daughter’s recently added weight, her not-recently highlighted hair (“We don’t show our roots, dear, no matter how badly off we might be”), and the old yoga pants and baggy T-shirts she wore constantly, having no other items in her closet that fit anymore and no money to replace them. “We could do a little shopping trip, maybe,” Lydia offered. “Though I don’t know how much black we’ll find in the summer, and really, at this point, I think dark colors are your best friend, don’t you?”
They approved only slightly more of their grandson, whose teenage ways they interpreted as just this side of criminal. “All this lying about,” Clayton sputtered. On their second day, he rapped on Jesse’s door at six thirty in the morning. “The sun’s up—why aren’t you? Ha ha ha.” Another rap. “I’m joking, son, but I’m also not. Up and at ’em. Your grandmother’s got breakfast on the table, and I’ve got a big lawn you can mow. Let’s give those muscles a shot at making an appearance, shall we?”
“And the video games,” Lydia fretted. “Aren’t you worried he’ll turn into one of those, you know, Columbine-type kids? He already looks the part.” Jesse was as thin as their daughter was heavy. Clayton and Lydia took equal offense to both conditions.
After dinner on their second day, Markie retreated to her bedroom, claiming exhaustion, and sat in the middle of the floor, a bottle of wine and a decade’s worth of diaries open beside her. She read, in loopy, purple handwriting, about the “amazing” career she saw herself in, the “perfect marriage” she planned to have with the “very successful, very hunky” man she was sure she would meet “after college, when I’ve already seen the world and figured myself out and decided what I really want in a husband.” The “gorgeous” house she would live in, which would be “even bigger and more beautiful than my parents’ place.”