Dear Wife(5)

This Nick guy better not be late. He is a crucial part of my plan, and I don’t have time to wait around. You’ll be getting home from work in an hour. You’ll walk through the door and expect to find me in the kitchen, waiting for you with dinner, with the endless fetching of newspapers and remote controls and beer, with sex—though whether your desire will be fueled by passion or fury is always a toss-up. The thought makes me hot and twitchy, my muscles itching with an immediate, intense need to race to my car and flee. An hour from now, a couple hundred miles from here, you’ll be looking for me.

“How will I know you?” I asked Nick two days ago during our one and only phone call, made from the customer service phone at Walmart, after I lied and said my car battery was dead. Nick and I have never actually met. We’ve not exchanged photographs or even the most basic of physical descriptions. I didn’t know he existed until a week ago.

Nick laughed. “What do you suggest I do, carry a rose between my teeth? Don’t worry. You’ll know me.”

I cast a sneaky glance at the teenager, laughing at something on his screen. Surely not. When we spoke on the phone, Nick didn’t seem nearly so oblivious. My gaze shifts to the elderly man, offering the rest of his milkshake to his wife. Not him, either.

When Nick rolls up at thirty seconds to five, I blow out a relieved breath because he was right. I do know it’s him, because any other day, at any other McDonald’s, he’s the type of guy I wouldn’t have noticed at all.

It begins with his car, a nondescript four-door he squeezes between a souped-up Ford F-250 and an extended-bed Dodge Ram. His clothes are just as unexceptional—generic khakis and a plain white shirt over mud-brown shoes. He looks like a math professor on his day off, or maybe an engineer. He walks to the door, and his eyes, shaded under a navy baseball cap, don’t even glance my way.

He orders a cup of coffee at the counter, then carries it over to my table and sinks onto the chair across from me.

“Nick, I assume?”

From the look he gives me, there’s no way Nick is his real name. “And you must be Beth.”

Touché. Not my real name, either.

Up close he’s better looking than I thought he’d be. Wide-set eyes, angled chin, thick hair poking out the rim of his cap. In a normal world, in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt, Nick might not be half-bad.

He dumps three packets of artificial sweetener into his coffee and swirls it around with a red plastic straw. “It’s the only way I can stomach this stuff, by masking it with something that tastes like it was imported straight from Chernobyl. If I grow an extra ear, I’m blaming you.”

It’s a little dig because Nick here wanted to meet at the Dunkin’ across the street. He wasn’t the least bit subtle about it, either. “If you don’t mind, I’d really rather meet at the Dunkin’,” he said, not once, but enough times that the old me almost caved, even though I did mind. Because what I called Nick here to discuss has to be done in a McDonald’s. The universe demands it. Symmetry demands it.

“This place has special memories for me,” I tell him now, not so much an apology as an explanation, an olive branch for the Chernobyl coffee. “Not good memories, but memories nonetheless. Let’s just say it’s karma that we do this here.”

Nick shrugs, letting it go. “Karma’s a bitch. Best not to piss her off, I always say.” He takes a sip of his coffee, then puts it down with a grimace. Clasps his hands on the Formica table. Waits.

“I understand you travel extensively for business.”

Nick came highly recommended to me exactly because of this qualification—must travel extensively for business. The other qualifications, must be dependable and discreet, were something I mentally checked off as soon as I clocked him walking through the door, on time and in clothing that might as well make him invisible.

“I’m on the road more often than not, yes.”

“Long trips?”

“It varies. Sometimes I need to stay put for a day or two, but even then, I’m never sleeping in the same bed two nights in a row. I like to move around just in case.”

He leaves it at that, just in case, and I don’t ask. Whatever he means by it, I honestly don’t care to know. For the job I called him here to do, it makes zero difference.

“But sure,” he continues, shrugging again, “in a typical month, I’ll log three to four thousand miles so I guess that qualifies as long trips.”

“Do you have a home base?”

“Multiple home bases. But like I said, I’m hardly ever there.”

“Perfect.”

He grins. “Tell that to the missus.”

I’m pretty sure he’s joking, or maybe he’s saying it to try to throw me off his tail. Men like Nick aren’t the marrying type—or if they do marry it’s more for convenience or cover than for love. Never for love.

“That’s funny,” I say, twisting the cap on my water. “I always liked it when my husband traveled for work.”

As soon as I say the words, I want to swallow them back down. The skin around Nick’s eyes tightens, just for an instant, but long enough I catch it. Unlike his joke, harmless words about a wife that doesn’t exist, mine revealed too much—that the husband is real, that life was better when he was gone. Nick is not my friend. He’s not someone I should be joking with over a cup of crappy coffee. This is a business meeting, and the less he knows about me, the better.