Deirdre!
Rob’s palms, beginning to sweat, started to slide on the steering wheel. He checked the rearview mirror: no cars coming down Main. He pulled over to the side of the road. He didn’t even know Deirdre was Catholic. And even if he’d known that he wouldn’t have thought her devout enough to attend church on, of all things, a Thursday morning. Then Rob looked at the sign in front of the church. Beneath the list of Mass times was this: DAILY CONFESSION, 6:30 WEEKDAY MORNINGS.
Deirdre had been confessing!
Confessing her sins.
Confessing Rob.
Rob was a sin.
Now he felt worse than ever. Sure, Deirdre had been the one to kiss him. He’d been weakened by his fight with Eliza. You don’t work with your hands. And, admittedly, by the worry he felt over Eliza spending time in her hometown, with her high school boyfriend. And by the strains of building Cabot Lodge. And, of course, by the many, many beers. But he had been the one who’d brought up the Colemans’ holiday party, he’d been the one to stir the pot. And so, in a sense, what had happened had been his fault. And now Deirdre was sneaking out of St. Matthew’s at six forty-five in the morning after telling a priest about it. Not only had he driven Deirdre to that, but he’d hurt Eliza.
Did it help, confessing? Was regret like the stomach bug, when you ached and ached until finally you disgorged your last two meals and then you felt better almost instantly?
He got out of the car and loped across the street until he was close enough to Deirdre to call her name. She turned, and when she saw him she frowned. She was dressed conservatively, in tan pants and a blouse with a little ruffled sweater on top. She said, “What are you doing here?”
“Bagels,” he said. She nodded, as though that explained everything. “Hey,” he continued. “I thought we should talk.”
“I tried to call you yesterday. You didn’t pick up.”
“I got—busy,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” She squinted at him. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, the way she had been at The Wharf Rat, and she looked somehow both older and younger than she had that night. “What…what do you want to talk about?”
“Well. What happened, I guess.”
Deirdre cleared her throat and flicked her eyes at him. “What happened is that you kissed me.”
“Um,” said Rob. “Come again?”
“You kissed me, Rob,” said Deirdre.
“What? No, I didn’t. You kissed me.”
“Did not.”
“Then why are you at confession, if you don’t think you did anything wrong?”
“How do you know I was at confession?”
He jerked his head toward the sign at the front of the church.
“Then how do you know what I was confessing? Maybe I have other sins, Rob. Maybe I have lots of sins.” She pulled her sweater closer around her. “Anyway. It’s not like we—” She lowered her voice and glanced around. “It’s not like we had sex.”
“God, no!” said Rob. “It was a silly kiss, nothing.”
Deirdre chewed on a thumbnail. “Well, you don’t have to look like the idea of having sex with me is abhorrent to you.” She gestured downward, to her tanned, toned body.
“It’s not. I mean, it is, because I’m married.”
“You looked like I suggested eating slugs.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. Are you going to tell Eliza?”
In a nearby tree, a bird chirped in a manner that was probably flutelike and summer-morning beautiful but in Rob’s addled mind sounded aggressive. “Nooooo. Are you going to tell Eliza?”
“No.” She crossed her arms carefully in front of her.
Another bird joined in, then another. (Show-offs.) There was no equivocation in Deirdre’s answer.
He thought about Charlie’s tumor. Recurrence rate of nearly one hundred percent, even if treated. Pressing down on the part of his brain responsible for vision. The fact that Charlie wouldn’t consider any treatment was killing Eliza: as a former med student, as a daughter, as a person who truly believed that you should give up on something only when you’d exhausted all of your options. “No,” he repeated. “I feel bad enough to think that I hurt her. I don’t see any reason to burden her with the hurt. For nothing.”
Deirdre nodded slowly and then said, “You’d better hurry up, they always sell out of cinnamon raisin early.”
“Huh?”
Deirdre sighed—it was the exasperated sigh women had been directing at men since time began. “Cinnamon raisin,” she repeated. “Zoe’s favorite.”
“Right,” said Rob. “I know. Of course I know what her favorite is.” (In fact, he had thought it was sesame.) “And Evie’s is plain.”
“Used to be plain,” she corrected. “Now it’s everything.”
Was there no solace for the dad who was trying his best?
“Before I go,” said Rob.
Deirdre said, “Yes?” a little too eagerly, in a way that caused a twinge in his heart.
“I was just wondering if you found my lucky coin. If it fell out when we—” He decided not to pursue the verb after all. “If it fell out in your car.”
“You have a lucky coin?”
“Yes,” he said defensively. How little Deirdre knew about him, after all! “It’s a ten-baht. From Thailand. From my dad, from when I was a kid.”
“Oh,” she said, and her face softened. “No, sorry. I didn’t see it.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, bye, Deirdre.”
“Bye, Rob.”
She started back toward her car and he toward his, then Deirdre called after him, so he turned back. “Don’t worry, Rob,” she said. “I meant what I said. I’m not going to go all Fatal Attraction on you. I’m not going to boil your bunny!”
“I didn’t think you were,” he said. Then, after a beat: “We don’t even have a bunny.”
Deirdre turned toward the parking lot and pointed her key at the Tahoe, pressing the unlock button until the car beeped.
“One more thing,” said Rob, and she turned toward him with a hopeful expression that made him cringe. He hurried his words out, lest she get the wrong idea. “Did it help?” he asked.
“What?”
“Confessing. Did it help? Do you feel better?”
She looked at him for a long time, and finally she said, “No. I don’t feel better. I feel like the worst friend in the world, and like a terrible wife. I feel like shit.”
———
Two and a half hours later, at Cabot Lodge, Rob held, in his sullied hands, a square of the reclaimed tile from the English castle that Mrs. Cabot had discovered in Vermont.
The tile was gorgeous; he agreed with Mrs. Cabot.
“It comes from an eighteenth-century English castle up in the north of the country,” Mrs. Cabot said. “Let me see, I wrote down the name of the castle somewhere, I’m just looking—” She plunged her hand into her giant Louis Vuitton bag and rummaged around. “I can’t find it anywhere! It was right here, I’m sure, on a little sticky note, before I left the house.”