“I don’t know.” Wasn’t it a sign that she’d let that view of marriage seep into her own thinking, that she could utter these words—“I don’t know”—so levelheadedly? That after seeing the texts, she had promptly left the room to take Buddy out and continue with her morning?
“Are there children?”
“Two. Caitlin is seventeen and Robbie is eight.”
“Put it in a box in your mind, lock the box, and put it on the highest shelf.” Maura looked directly at Alice, as if wondering if she had formed the right words to reflect the sentiment. “You understand what I am trying to say, don’t you?”
Alice nodded. It was the advice she knew her mother would give, but why then had she wanted to hear it so badly?
They sat in silence for a few minutes.
“I like that name, Robbie. Is it short for anything?”
She watched her mother carefully. “No. Just…Robbie.”
“How nice.”
* * *
Alice started the dishwasher, and her mind came back to the empty, now clean(ish) kitchen. The memory of Walker’s texts lingered though; the memory of reading them at the island joined the rest of the room’s chaos and to-do’s. She grabbed her house key and went to the garage to stare at Walker’s pristine (leased) Audi, sitting innocently in the garage with its buffed shine.
She knew what she was supposed to feel as she constantly replayed the conversation with her mother: hurt, enough to burst into tears, or even better, rage. Like the kind she had seen last summer at the neighborhood pool when a wife, whom she recognized from the women’s events she forced herself to go to for fundraising contacts, had marched over to her own husband, smoking cigars with a group of fathers and drinking a beer, slapped him in the face, and told him he deserved to be castrated. Alice wanted to summon that feeling, but instead, she felt nothing.
At first, she thought the feeling of rage would come once the news sank in. Yet, eight days had passed, and she still felt, if not nothing, then annoyance only for how utterly predictable Walker had turned out to be. As soon as she read that text from Brittani—“Still sore after last night! ;-)”—she knew what the rest would say, right down to the punctuation (or lack thereof). She knew where he would meet Brittani, how he’d conceal the affair. She could guess when and how the texts started, so accurately that she’d grown tired of reading after a few screens, not even feeling the need to scroll all the way to the top of the message thread.
She couldn’t blame him completely for that, though, for his predictability was exactly why she had married him. Knowing what to expect meant comfort, safety, had allowed her to dive into him and blend herself effortlessly into his life without him asking questions about who she really was, about her past, or why this life would be appealing.
She circled the car once, the key heavy in her hand. One scratch down the door, the kind another car could do if parked too close—maybe that would free the anger and hurt, allow it to fill her. Maybe that’s what would help her move to the next step, the action, the what next, not working long hours at the Center or spending extra time in her garden or walking Buddy, as she had since she’d read the texts.
She stood next to the car, miming opening a door, trying to map where the scratch would happen, how long it would be, how wide it would be, all the while imagining Walker’s face when he saw it, how he’d first squint at a distance, wonder if it was just his Lasik acting up again. He’d gallop to the car, lick his thumb and furiously rub the mark, the beating in his chest growing thicker in his ears as he felt the indentation from Alice’s key.
It was sad, really. Pathetic.
As she could play his reaction to the car, she could also play her remaining years with Walker in her mind like a movie. She knew that Walker would never divorce her, no matter what he told Brittani—“when her mother improves.” Another thing that would never happen. Eventually, when Brittani grew tired of Walker’s games and ended the affair, he would book an expensive Caribbean trip for Alice and him. He would make quick friends with another perfectly chiseled father of two. She would read research papers on the beach in her black bikini. They would settle back into their lives.
Caitlin would find a job. Robbie would go to college. Alice would continue to grow the Center, withdrawing further into the lake’s serenity. Walker would retire, making a full-time job of watching sports, badgering his stockbroker, and playing golf. They would retreat to separate corners of the large house they shared as roommates.
Alice saw only two options in front of her: say nothing and let the comfortable, predictable future play out or tell him she knew and dare to ask the questions about what came next. Divorce, but what after? Her view of that path was hazy, foggy, and a sense of panic seized her chest as she thought of the blank space ahead.
She reached the key toward the paint, resting it there, feeling a type of reassuring power through her body at the pain she knew it would cause him. Just as she pressed in, ready to drag the key along the slope she’d mapped out in her mind, the door to the garage flew open and she jumped.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
She straightened. Caitlin stood in the doorway with a bright-green face mask globbed onto her skin, holding Alice’s old hiking boots with the leather trim.
“Nothing, just… Nothing.”
“Okay… Can I wear these to school tomorrow?”
Where had she even found those? “Sure.”
Caitlin disappeared back inside, and Alice followed. It was 9:00 p.m. She should go up and make sure Robbie was asleep.
She shut the door to the garage.
She would use the alone time cleaning out her parents’ house to let the choices settle in her mind and percolate. She trusted that by the time the wrecking ball swung, she would know what to do.
Chapter Three
The next morning, Alice passed her mother’s hair salon—which she always thought of as the dividing line between their two Atlantas—just as the morning air swallowed its first gulp of humidity. She could feel the day around her growing heavy as the chill whipped by her rolled-down window. In the passenger seat, Buddy curled deeper into himself.
She drove toward the neighborhood streets of her youth, where she had walked to school as a child. She followed the unexpected dips of the Chattahoochee riverbanks, trying not to think about where she was headed. When she finally glimpsed the river between the trees, she barely recognized it anyway. The full river of her childhood was low from years of less rain and brown from years of erosion, something that always surprised her, despite the clear downward slope of her graphs at the Center.
She stopped at the last turn before her parents’ house, where the river’s water stood almost completely still in front of her windshield. It was the same light where, instead of turning left to their neighborhood, a teenager drove his car straight into the water after a party one night when Alice was in elementary school. She had thought about him at the bottom of that river, ready to grab her foot and pull her down, too, long after Rob told her they already took out the body. Now, she wondered how it felt, jamming his foot on the gas, wondered if it had felt like flying when his car leapt off the last foot of dirt and pavement and dove into the water.