On Second Thought(40)

What if my mother-in-law (was Eloise still my mother-in-law, since I was technically no longer married?)...anyway, what if Eloise brought her little dogs over, and they ran into the bathroom and grabbed one out of the trash and ran out and dropped it at her feet, the same way my childhood dog had barfed up a tampon in front of my first boyfriend?

I’d run out of pregnancy tests two days ago, so I had to go to the CVS three towns north (in case I ran into someone who knew Nathan, and their name was legion). The CVS was conveniently located next to a gas station.

And really, the two lines were much more likely to show up here. Right? Wouldn’t this make a great scene in a movie? It was all so...grimy. If I was a teenager, I’d definitely be pregnant.

I had to be pregnant. I had never once missed my period, which had been such a faithful pain in the ass since it had first debuted when I was twelve during my great-aunt Marguerite’s one hundredth birthday party. “I see your Cousin Tilly from St. Louis has come to visit,” Marguerite whispered in my ear.

I thought she was having a stroke. Turned out I had a big splotch of blood on the ass of my white (of course) sundress. Ainsley thought I was dying and had been inconsolable.

And since then, every friggin’ twenty-eight days.

So where was my period, huh? Making a placenta, that was where.

“Placenta,” I said out loud, just to make sure I wasn’t in some weird dream. The difference was very hard to tell. I was drunk with exhaustion.

Since Nathan’s death, I’d slept only in twenty-minute spurts, jerking awake in a panic. Was it true? Was he really gone? Or had I dreamed his whole death thing? Or maybe our whole life was the dream, those nine bizarrely idyllic months just an incredibly vivid product of my imagination.

Already, our marriage felt like it was dissolving. I could picture Nathan only in shimmery waves, as if I was looking at him across a hot parking lot in August. I could picture a photo of him, but not him in real life.

“Please come back,” I whispered. “Please, Nathan.”

There was no answer.

I glanced at my watch. In twenty minutes, I was meeting Eloise at the Cambry-on-Hudson Lawn Club for lunch. We were now shackled together in grief, she and I. This would be my first public outing aside from that trip to the supermarket, three late-night drives and today’s fun-fun-fun outing to CVS.

Twenty minutes. Plenty of time for my hormones to create the appropriate lines on the pregnancy test. I wouldn’t tell Eloise that I’m pregnant until I was well out of the first trimester, when the pregnancy was more assured. And then, oh, what happy news it would be!

I picked up the test.

One line.

“Well, f*ck you, shit-bird,” I said and threw it in the trash as hard as I could.

*

“Kate, my deah,” Eloise said as I came into the club. “Thank you for joining me.”

“Thank you for inviting me.” I went to kiss her just as she hugged me instead, so the end result was that I kissed my mother-in-law on the neck, like a teenage boy going in for a hickey. She kindly ignored it but did step back a little. I couldn’t blame her. Looking down, I saw that my shoes didn’t match. Classy. I tried to hide this fact by standing with one foot behind the other, like a tightrope walker.

Looking Eloise in the eye was just too hard. Though I wasn’t a mother (thanks for nothing, pregnancy test), it seemed to me that suicide might feel like a very reasonable option if your child died. Then again, Eloise had Brooke and Brooke’s sons. And Nathan Senior.

“Right this way, Mrs. Coburn, Mrs. Coburn,” the ma?tre d’ said.

Technically, I wasn’t Mrs. Coburn. Four months ago, changing my name had felt awkward and pretentious, as if I’d be flaunting my married status. Now I wished I had.

I followed Les or Stu or Cal—I knew his name had three letters in it—to a table by the window.

“Please let me say how very sorry I was to hear about young Mr. Coburn,” he said.

“Thank you, Bob,” Eloise said. Bob. That was it. “You’re very kind.”

“Yes. Thank you,” I added.

“I remember his sixteenth birthday party here, when he—” Bob’s voice broke off.

I swallowed. Everyone knew him. Better than I did, in many cases. Everyone had more memories. And rather than comfort me, these stories made me jealous and confused. What do you mean, you played poker with him? He never played poker! Not in the whole nine months I knew him! I wanted to bark. Or, Who gives a rat’s ass that he got you through algebra? He was my husband, and he’s dead!

“That was a happy day,” Eloise said, graciously covering for poor Bob, who was struggling to maintain control. He gruffly assured us that our waiter would be right over and left the table.

Unable to avoid it any longer, Eloise and I looked at each other.

“So how are you?” I asked, my words squeaking, crushed by the vise in my throat.

“I’m doing as well as can be expected.”

She looked good, that was for sure. Tall and slender, her thick blond-gray hair cut in a bob, Eloise was the type of woman who didn’t own jeans or Keds. She wore a beige dress with a matching jacket and low heels. Very stylish, very flattering.

What was I wearing? I didn’t remember, so I glanced down. Linen pants (points for that), a white shirt with a faint stain of spaghetti sauce. That’s right. The meatball stain from a night at Porto’s. A stain that predated Nathan.