“Tragic,” he said. “She’s so beautiful.”
Claire looked at her phone again. Paul was now thirteen minutes late. Today of all days. He was an architect, not a brain surgeon. There was no emergency so dire that he couldn’t take two seconds to text or give her a call.
She started spinning her wedding ring around her finger, which was a nervous habit she didn’t know she had until Paul had pointed it out to her. They had been arguing about something that had seemed desperately important to Claire at the time but now she couldn’t remember the topic or even when the argument had occurred. Last week? Last month? She had known Paul for eighteen years, been married to him for almost as long. There wasn’t much left that they could argue about with any conviction.
“Sure I can’t interest you in something harder?” The bartender was holding up a bottle of Stoli, but his meaning was clear.
Claire forced another laugh. She had known this type of man her entire life. Tall, dark, and handsome with twinkling eyes and a mouth that moved like honey. At twelve, she would’ve scribbled his name all over her math notebook. At sixteen, she would’ve let him put his hand up her sweater. At twenty, she would’ve let him put his hand up anything he wanted. And now, at thirty-eight, she just wanted him to go away.
She said, “No thank you. My parole officer has advised me not to drink unless I’m going to be home all evening.”
He gave her a smile that said he didn’t quite get the joke. “Bad girl. I like it.”
“You should’ve seen me in my ankle monitor.” She winked at him. “Black is the new orange.”
The front door opened. Paul. Claire felt a wave of relief as he walked toward her.
She said, “You’re late.”
Paul kissed her cheek. “Sorry. No excuse. I should’ve called. Or texted.”
“Yes, you should’ve.”
He told the bartender, “Glenfiddich; single, neat.”
Claire watched the young man pour Paul’s Scotch with a previously unseen professionalism. Her wedding ring, her gentle brush-offs, and her outright rejection had been minor obstacles compared to the big no of another man kissing her cheek.
“Sir.” He placed the drink in front of Paul, then headed toward the other end of the bar.
Claire lowered her voice. “He offered me a ride home.”
Paul looked at the man for the first time since he’d walked through the door. “Should I go punch him in the nose?”
“Yes.”
“Will you take me to the hospital when he punches me back?”
“Yes.”
Paul smiled, but only because she was smiling, too. “So, how does it feel to be untethered?”
Claire looked down at her naked ankle, half expecting to see a bruise or mark where the chunky black ankle bracelet had been. Six months had passed since she’d worn a skirt in public, the same amount of time she’d been wearing the court-ordered monitoring device. “It feels like freedom.”
He straightened the straw by her drink, making it parallel to the napkin. “You’re constantly tracked with your phone and the GPS in your car.”
“I can’t be sent to jail every time I put down my phone or leave my car.”
Paul shrugged off the point, which she thought was a very good one. “What about curfew?”
“It’s lifted. As long as I stay out of trouble for the next year, my record will be expunged and it’ll be like it never even happened.”
“Magic.”
“More like a very expensive lawyer.”
He grinned. “It’s cheaper than that bracelet you wanted from Cartier.”
“Not if you add in the earrings.” They shouldn’t joke about this, but the alternative was to take it very seriously. She said, “It’s weird. I know the monitor’s not there anymore, but I can still feel it.”
“Signal detection theory.” He straightened the straw again. “Your perceptual systems are biased toward the monitor touching your skin. More often, people experience the sensation with their phones. They feel it vibrating even when it’s not.”
That’s what she got for marrying a geek.
Paul stared at the television. “You think they’ll find her?”
Claire didn’t respond. She looked down at the drink in Paul’s hand. She’d never liked the taste of Scotch, but being told she shouldn’t drink had made her want to go on a week-long bender.
This afternoon, out of desperation for something to say, Claire had told her court-appointed psychiatrist that she absolutely despised being told what to do. “Who the hell doesn’t?” the blowsy woman had demanded, slightly incredulous. Claire had felt her cheeks turn red, but she knew better than to say that she was particularly bad about it, that she had landed herself in court-appointed therapy for that very reason. She wasn’t going to give the woman the satisfaction of a breakthrough.
Besides, Claire had come to that realization on her own the minute the handcuffs were clamped around her wrists.
“Idiot,” she had mumbled to herself as the cop had guided her into the back of the squad car.
“That’s going in my report,” the woman had briskly informed her.
They were all women that day, female police officers of varying sizes and shapes with thick leather belts around their chunky waists carrying all manner of lethal devices. Claire felt that things would’ve gone a lot better if at least one of them had been a man, but sadly, that was not the case. This is where feminism had gotten her: locked in the back of a sticky squad car with the skirt on her tennis dress riding up her thighs.
At the jail, Claire’s wedding ring, watch, and tennis shoelaces had been taken by a large woman with a mole between her hairy eyebrows whose general appearance reminded Claire of a stink bug. There was no hair growing out of the mole, and Claire wanted to ask why she bothered to pluck the mole but not her eyebrows but it was too late because another woman, this one tall and reedy like a praying mantis, was already taking Claire into the next room.
The fingerprinting was nothing like on TV. Instead of ink, Claire had to press her fingers onto a filthy glass plate so the swirls could be digitized into a computer. Her swirls, apparently, were very faint. It took several tries.
“Good thing I didn’t rob a bank,” Claire said, then added, “ha ha,” to convey the humor.
“Press evenly,” the praying mantis said, chewing off the wings of a fly.
Claire’s mugshot was taken against a white background with a ruler that was clearly off by an inch. She wondered aloud why she wasn’t asked to hold a sign with her name and inmate number.
“Photoshop template,” the praying mantis said in a bored tone that indicated the question was not a new one.
It was the only picture Claire had ever taken where no one had told her to smile.
Then a third policewoman who, bucking the trend, had a nose like a mallard, had taken Claire to the holding cell where, surprisingly, Claire was not the only woman in a tennis outfit.
“What’re you in for?” the other tennis-outfitted inmate had asked. She looked hard and strung out and had obviously been arrested while playing with a different set of balls.
“Murder,” Claire had said, because she had already decided that she wasn’t going to take this seriously.