He wasn’t assisted by a staff of perfect-ten Spanish nurses (where did I come up with that, a Robert Palmer video?), one of whom had accidentally glitter-bombed the surgery!
The medical board doesn’t have a black sedan!
The Mariners have no chance of making the playoffs!
This witch was on tilt.
The yacht, I realized when I arrived at the dock, was no yacht at all but a banged-up squid boat. How did I know? A van from Renee Erickson’s restaurant empire was parked at the pier. A tattooed chef (is there any other kind?) haggled with a fisherman over a sea creature the size of a toilet.
A fluorescent cloud of cyclists whizzed past and practically knocked me off my feet. I was standing in the middle of the bike path, clueless and let down, unmoored from space and time. Yo-Yo sighed.
“You and me both,” I said to him.
Could Joe have been looking at something behind the boat? No, across a small channel there was only a row of corrugated metal buildings: a nautical-supply house, a marine-fuel station, and, beyond them, a Costco.
I sat on a guardrail. Yo-Yo placed his front legs on my lap and waited for a head scratch.
What I knew: Joe had told the girls in the office he was out of town for a week. Spencer’s call today had placed Joe at the end of that stretch.
But as of this morning he was facedown on the breakfast table. He must be going somewhere each day without telling anyone. And at some point, he’d aimed a telescope at this exact spot…
This was ridiculous. I called Joe’s cell.
He picked up after one ring. “Hey, babe.”
“Joe.” My calm voice belied my heart, which had broken loose in my chest. “Where are you?”
“At the office. Why?”
Yow. I realized I wasn’t dreading a scene, I was itching for one. I was ready to jack this party up to eleven and start breaking some plates. The last thing I could have fathomed was that I’d be lied to with such calm, clarity, and conviction. (C-words! They’re everywhere today!) I’d like to say such a thing had never happened to me, but I knew sickeningly well it had, eight years before, at the hands of my sister, Ivy. It’s the last impression I have of her, the cool betrayal. But now Joe? If there was one thing in this world I thought I could count on, it was that Joe was no liar. But here he was, lying.
Yo-Yo pawed at my lap. I’d stopped scratching his head.
“Just thought I’d check in.” I matched Joe’s nonchalance and raised him a bored sigh.
“All’s well?” he asked.
“‘I myself am hell, nobody’s here, only skunks,’” I said. “You know how it is.”
“Do I ever,” he said.
“I had to pick up Timby at school. It’s a long story involving cheaply made clothing, Bangladeshi slaves, and an antagonist with the last name Veal.”
This was better than a scene! It was so exotic, so uncharted; it was forging a new pathway, the two of us, liars. I actually felt closer to Joe in a kinky, thrilling way. Lying! The middle-aged sex?
“I’ll fill you in tonight,” I said.
“I’m stuck at a thing,” he said. “I might be late.”
For years I’d been cataloging traits of Joe’s that annoyed me, things I’d be relieved to have out of my life should he ever decide to leave me. The Gratitude List, I called it.
1. When I get out of the shower and ask Joe to hand me a towel, he invariably hands me a damp one.
2. He has never once offered to walk Yo-Yo. He’ll walk Yo-Yo, but only after making me play the harridan.
3. When we go out to restaurants, he puts leftover dinner rolls in his socks and brings them home so they won’t go to waste.
4. Said dinner rolls get placed on his bedside table until he notices them a week later, at which point he hands me the wheat stones and asks me to “use them in something.” (Thus the frequency of bread pudding. No wonder poor Timby is a chunkster.)
5. Every time we go to a movie and it starts twenty minutes late because of the previews, Joe goes nuts, showing me his watch and informing me and everyone else in the theater what time the movie was scheduled to begin.
6. When we run a fan to cool down a room, he insists it point into the room, not out, which just seems wrong.
7. He puts sriracha on everything I make. Even waffles.