The Marriage Lie(28)

“Maybe we should donate some of these. What do you think?”

I glance over. “Fine by me. There’s a church around the corner and a dozen shelters within five miles.”

“Cool. I’ll get James to give me a hand.”

“A hand with what?” James says, coming into the room with a bottle and three glasses. He holds the glasses by the stems in one hand and pours with the other with a surgeon’s steadiness, not spilling a drop. Dave tells him about the flowers, and they agree to distribute the first load in the morning.

“Thanks,” I say, taking one of the glasses from James. With my other hand, I gesture to my laptop screen, to the sea of shocked condolence posts jamming up Will’s wall. “When did people start treating Facebook as a tool to communicate with the dead? Like this one. Will, man, so sorry to hear of your passing. RIP, buddy. Do they really think he’s going to see it? He never checked his page when he was alive, much less...” Unable to finish, I bury my nose in my wine.

Dave drapes a palm over my wrist. “Stop torturing yourself, sweetie, and turn off the laptop.”

“I can’t. I’m looking for clues.” I open a screen for Will’s list of friends. There are seventy-eight of them, and more than sixty of them are mutual. I scroll to the bottom, to the friends we don’t have in common, find a handful of colleagues, one of my girlfriend’s exes, a neighbor from down the road, the barista from our neighborhood coffee shop.

Dave leans in, reading over my shoulder. “What kind of clues are you looking for, Inspector Gadget?”

“Clues of the Corban Hayes kind.” Dave frowns, and I add, “You know. The banker-slash-bodybuilder I met at the memorial today. The one who told me all those things about Will.”

“Because of curiosity, or suspicion?” James says.

I pause to consider my answer, but it doesn’t take me long. Yes, curiosity is driving me, but after meeting Corban, I can’t shake the feeling there’s more I don’t know. If there are more people like Corban Hayes out there, I want to speak to them.

“Both.”

But I’m not going to find anything here. Will hated Facebook, and there’s nobody here I don’t recognize or can’t place. I slam the laptop closed in frustration.

James leans back into the couch, resting his wineglass on his flat stomach. “Have you checked the cards?”

“What cards?”

He sweeps a palm toward the arrangement on the table and beyond, to vases standing like soldiers at attention on the kitchen bar. “You must’ve gotten flowers from everyone you know. Maybe there are a couple here from people you don’t know.”

Of course, the cards. The ones Mom arranged in the basket on Will’s place mat, the ones I couldn’t bear to read. I pop off the couch and fetch the basket from the table.

James refills the wineglasses, and we sip and sift through the condolences, pausing only to point out a painfully bad illustration or an extra corny text, and there are a lot of both. There must be close to a hundred cards here, saccharine messages and religious missives from my and Will’s colleagues, old friends and neighbors, aunts and cousins and college classmates, people I haven’t seen or heard from in years.

Dave holds up a note card covered in green glitter. “Who are Terry and Melinda Phillips?”

“Aka Melinda Leigh,” I say. “Our cousin.”

His eyes go wide, and his face spreads into a grin. “The one who came to your wedding in a prom dress?”

I smile at the memory of my brother’s face when Melinda walked up the church steps in her frilly blue concoction. “Terry is her third husband. Or is it fourth? I’ve lost count. And it wasn’t a prom dress.”

“It was definitely a prom dress, and it was hideous, not to mention two sizes too small.” He starts describing the dress for James, the lace and the ruffles and the seams stretched to screaming, while I return to the pile.

A few cards later, I come across something—a name I’ve never heard of before, printed underneath the generic florist’s card message. I twist to face James. “Did you go to Hancock?”

He gives me a funny look.

“This card says Deepest sympathies for your loss, Hancock High School, Class of ’99. Is that where you went?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve never heard of the place. Maybe it’s Will’s alma mater?”

“No, Will went to Central. I know, because I pulled it out of him for that surprise trip I planned to Memphis, on our first anniversary. Remember?”

“The trip that never was.” Dave knows Will and I never actually made it to Memphis, and he knows why. And now, I can tell by my brother’s expression that he and I are thinking the same thing. Who went to Hancock?

And then his eyes go wide, and he pops off the couch. “Be right back.” He takes off down the hallway and up the stairs, his footsteps thumping overhead. Next to me on the couch, James settles his glass on the side table, slides his phone from his pocket and begins typing with his thumbs.

When Dave returns a few moments later, a T-shirt clutched in a fist, I recognize it from Will’s closet. It’s his ratty work shirt, the one he wears around the house for gardening and painting, an ancient thing that’s ripped and stained and threadbare around the edges. Its letters are faded, but I know what they say before he holds it up for me to see. Hancock Wildcats. I always thought it was just a vintage shirt, a generic one like the kind they sell at Old Navy, but now I make the connection.