Deconstructed(10)

I shoved the wine into the fridge to chill and grabbed the cocktail shaker. Usually, Scott made the drinks, but even a novice like me could pour vodka and vermouth and add olives. I grabbed proper martini glasses because my mother would expect as much, and I wished for the umpteenth time in an hour that I had not tried to make a utility closet my office. Because then I wouldn’t know about my husband. Then I wouldn’t be wishing my mother would leave so I could poke through Scott’s office to see if I could figure out who he might be doing. Or maybe I should be looking elsewhere. He had a fireproof safe where he kept important documents. And a gun safe. Where else might he—

“Any day now, Catherine. I’m parched.”

I poured the martini in the glasses and made my way to the hearth room, tossing Pippa a biscuit and letting her outside en route.

“Here you go,” I said, wagging the drink in front of my mother.

She took it, sipped, lifted an eyebrow that could mean anything from Acceptable to Pour it in the toilet, and sighed. “We need to talk about the gala in a few weeks. Your father is supposed to be bringing his trollop to the event. He said Scott invited him to sit at your table, and I find that unacceptable.”

This was news to me. I had talked to Dad last week, and he hadn’t said anything about it. Scott liked my dad, but he’d never invited him to visit. We always went to Florida, mostly because the golfing was better, and it generated no talk about my father’s midlife crisis over drinks at the club. “I didn’t know.”

“How do you not know?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t really had the chance to speak to Scott much. He had a tennis tournament at the club this past weekend.”

I nearly choked over those words. For years, he’d asked me to take up tennis. To do something together as a couple. I had always hedged. Running an antique store took up a lot of my time, as did mothering my daughter. Sitting on PTA committees, helping to chair the silent auction for the St. Jude golf tournament, and teaching confirmation at church kept me running in circles. My intentions had been good. I figured that once Julia Kate started driving, I could do more with Scott. Maybe I had done this to us. Maybe my lack of knowing anything about the bank and his hobbies had sent him into the arms of another woman.

“Junie Minter told me that Scott has been drumming up business for Donner Walker. You know anything about that? Maybe that’s why he wants your father to come to the gala. Your father and his trashy wife have obviously made a lot of money with that storage business of theirs.”

That was an understatement. My father may not have been smart about where he dipped his stick and had lost quite a dime in the divorce settlement, but he wasn’t dumb. He’d invested in storage facilities and a string of car washes in Florida, making back what he’d been forced to give my mother by her sharky lawyer several times over. I knew Scott had been having drinks and dinner with Donner Walker, an investment guy who’d moved to Shreveport a few years back. The man was the older brother of Scott’s best friend from college who had died in a tragic car accident, but I didn’t know Scott had been helping him with clients. Scott was always careful about crossing boundaries as a banker, taking pride in being ethical, but then again, he had promised to cleave to me until death do us part. Did cleaving mean being faithful? I wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know, Mother. I can ask him when he gets home.”

My mother shook her head, and her hair didn’t move an inch. “No. Just do not allow Bernard to sit at the bank’s tables. Make sure he’s in the back. Behind a fern.”

To say there was no love lost between my mother and father was obvious. My mother loathed my dad, but she still missed him. I heard the longing in her voice. Once when she’d had too much bourbon on Christmas Eve, she’d cried over him. I had never seen her cry before, and it had been somewhat horrifying and frankly a relief. Because I had always wondered if she missed him . . . or if she’d even loved him. Always hard to know with my mother. “I’ll talk to Melissa Peete, who’s in charge of corporate sponsorships. And you know Daddy. He probably won’t come anyway. He hates coming to Shreveport.”

I could make no promises. If Scott insisted, I would relent. The bank had two tables. I would ask that my mother be seated far from my father and Crystalle if they did, indeed, show.

My mother flinched before taking another sip. “Better he stay away.”

An hour later, I waved as my mother drove away, hoping she’d be okay to drive. The martini hadn’t been strong, and she lived two streets over in a huge colonial house with a pool that had been featured in NWLA Columns last year. The title had been “Backyard Oasis,” and my mother had bought and mailed copies to all our cousins in Baton Rouge.

As soon as I closed the front door, I scrambled to the office.

It didn’t take me long to confirm what I already knew. I paid the house bills, but the bank paid for Scott’s cell phone. A quick call to May, Scott’s assistant at Caddo Bank and Loan, got me his account number. The next call to AT&T landed me a chatty rep who helped me into the iCloud. And since Scott frequently used the same password, SCOTTGOLF1, so I could log on to our household accounts, I easily accessed his texts for the past month. The dumb butt had been sexting one Stephanie Brooks. The same Stephanie Brooks I wrote a monthly check to at the country-club tennis center for Julia Kate’s lessons. No mistaking things like “I’ve been dreaming of your lips” and “What are you wearing?” as convo about Julia Kate’s tennis stroke.