Dear Wife(51)

I laugh and shake his hand. “Beth Murphy, and this is—”

“Martina and I have met, many times. Haven’t we, Martina?” He gives her a good-natured smile she doesn’t return. She doesn’t answer, either. He turns to me with a shrug. “Have you s—”

“Your dad’s not here,” Martina says.

He looks at her, goading. “What if I was about to say Oscar?”

“Oscar’s in Florida,” I offer, at the same time Martina asks, “Were you?”

Erwin aims his smile at me, then Martina. No, he was not. It’s a lighthearted teasing, but Martina isn’t having it.

She gives him her back, attacking the console on the far wall. “I don’t know where the Reverend is. Last I saw him, he was onstage in the church, but that was a half hour ago. He could be anywhere by now.” On the other side of her body, the television flickers a Cialis commercial, an older couple holding hands before a setting sun.

Erwin drops his hands in his jeans pockets, and a platinum watchband gleams on his wrist. “If you see him, tell him I fixed his email issue. The last update messed up the syncing between his computer and his phone, but it’s working now. I run the IT in this place.” That last sentence he delivers to me, though I can’t decide whether it’s meant to inform or impress.

His gaze bounces between us, waiting for one of us to respond. He doesn’t seem eager to leave.

I don’t know what to say to this guy, the son of a holy man. The clothes, the watch, the impish half grin on his face. The result is anything but holy. The silence stretches, long and uncomfortable. Martina ignores us both.

“Okay, well...” Erwin takes the hint, backing out of the room. “Nice to meet you, Beth. Martina, you have a nice day. See y’all around.” And with that, he saunters back into the hall.

“What is wrong with you?” I say as soon as we’re alone. “Why were you being so rude to him?”

“Because Erwin Four is a creep, that’s why.” She sprays down the television screen with Windex, and I don’t tell her she shouldn’t. Something about how the chemicals eat away at the delicate film and distort the pixels. You told me so, right before you backhanded me in the temple for doing it to yours.

“He’s your boss’s son. It wouldn’t hurt you to be nice.”

She exchanges the Windex for a fresh rag, begins wiping down the screen. “I tried that once. It didn’t work out that great. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay far, far away from him. I mean it, Beth. He’s bad news.”

Whatever she says next fades into a pounding in my head, blood rushing in my ears because a national news alert is flashing across the television on the other side of her body. A face fills the screen, and dread, like warm bile, bubbles up my throat. I step to the side, bobbing my head to see around Martina’s feverish scrubbing. A banner crawls across the bottom, white text shining on a bright red background.

MISSING: SABINE STANFIELD HARDISON.

A chill skitters up my spine, hollowing out my stomach and my lungs. I stare at the screen as the photograph grows smaller, shifting to a lopsided square in the upper right-hand corner. A journalist’s face takes her place, and I focus on her brows like twin commas squeezed together in concern. Her shiny pink lips are moving, exaggerated, like a silent movie star. I want to search for the remote, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the screen.

All this time I’ve been hunkered down, hiding and watching the news for reports of a missing Pine Bluff woman, and now here it is, and I can’t breathe. The room spins, the words dancing in spots across my vision.

Martina steps away from the screen, pausing at the look on my face. She frowns at the TV over her shoulder. “What’s wrong? Who is that?”

“Her name’s Sabine Hardison.” My voice is high and wild. It echoes in my ears like a scream.

Martina turns to face the television, shifting so we’re side by side. She tilts her head and studies the screen. “She’s so pretty. Do you know her?”

Do I know her. I try to cough up an answer, but my lungs are hardened concrete. It’s all I can do to shake my head.

“Then why are you looking at her picture like that?”

My thoughts careen and slide around, searching for purchase, for an acceptable excuse for the silence that I’ve already let stretch far too long. “Like how?”

“Like you want to throw up or something.”

New words flash across the bottom banner: Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Martina doesn’t read them out loud, but she sees them and turns to study me. Her gaze crawls across my profile, over my wide eyes and cheeks that are burning like I’ve been in the sun too long. Martina is neither blind nor stupid, and I don’t like the way she’s looking at me, like she’s trying to solve a puzzle.

And now my breath is coming too hard, too fast. I need Martina to forget she ever saw Sabine’s face, ever saw her name and those awful words that crawled across the bottom of the screen, and the only way to do that is to keep moving and stuff my feelings down. I peel myself away from the screen, pick up my bucket and carry it into the next room, casting one last glance back at the TV. The reporter has moved on to the next subject, and Sabine’s picture has been replaced with that of a politician, some old guy with beady eyes and a smarmy smile.