Never Have I Ever(63)

The sun was up, and the roads were getting crowded. The return trip took longer. Davis was texting me, asking if he should take Oliver in with him to school. The university had drop-in day care, but it cost the earth. We only used it in emergencies. I voice-texted him back through the car, telling him there was no need. I was ten minutes away. He didn’t answer, probably ticked off, but I hoped he would wait. When I went to meet Char for our walk, I wanted everything to be normal.

It was already ten past nine as I turned in to my neighborhood. I met my eyes in the rearview mirror and practiced an apologetic shrug. Just sorry enough, a little flustered, putting the lie into my whole body, where it felt quite at home. “Sorry. The traffic back from the beach . . .”

I turned onto our street. Tess Roberts was out in her yard gardening, her toddler helping. I made my regular smile for her, gave her a completely regular wave, like I was normal Amy Whey heading home from an early dive, a woman whose biggest problems were finding a math tutor for Maddy or a more exciting recipe for chicken breasts. Not a woman practicing to slide yet another lie past her husband.

I parked my car in the drive and trotted quickly up the walk. The front door was unlocked.

I let myself in, calling, “Davis? I’m home! I’m sorry!”

I’d hoped to find him pacing in the foyer, ready to thrust Oliver at me and dash away. Had he taken Oliver into school with him after all?

“Davis?” I called, heading for the kitchen.

“Guess again,” a woman called back.

It wasn’t Char, though. I knew the voice. I knew it. It was her. I froze, inadvertently. My feet stuttered to a stop. Everything in me seemed to pause, my breath, even my heartbeat. The kitchen door swung open, and there was Roux, looking daisy fresh in a short yellow swing dress and some low-top sneakers.

She was holding Oliver, and instantly the hair on the back of my neck rose. I didn’t like seeing my child perched on her hip. She really was a baby whisperer, because he wasn’t having any kind of stranger anxiety. He bounced his legs, happy, a hunk of her long hair fisted in his hand. When he saw me, he held his arms out, babbling, “Amamama,” and that unstuck my feet. I hurried forward, reaching back.

She passed him over as if he were a sack of groceries, then leaned in the doorway, smiling a practiced smile that did not reach her eyes.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I wasn’t ready yet. I had one move, and it was a bluff. I’d planned to come home, practice it in the full-length mirror. “Where is Davis?”

“He had to go to work,” Roux said. “Better question. Where the fuckin’ fuck have you been?”

Her tone was pleasant, well modulated, but she was angry, all right. Seething with it, just under her skin. Her smile was close kin to a sneer.

“I had to lead a dive.”

“Sure,” she said. She came toward me, one hand reaching out. I flinched, I couldn’t help it. But she only grabbed the shoulder of my cotton dress and jerked it sideways, exposing the strap of my tankini top.

Her eyebrows went up. “That’s a bathing suit.”

“I know,” I said, as if I had the moral high ground. “It’s what you wear when you go into the water.”

She ran her thumb along the strap. “It’s dry.”

“Of course, it is,” I said, super cool. “It was a long drive back.”

“Bah,” Oliver said, as if he did not believe me either.

She was shaking her head, her temper receding, pushed out by a grudging admiration.

“Your husband wouldn’t have checked for a swimsuit. He wouldn’t have thought to. It doesn’t even show under your dress,” she said. “I’d have on a swimsuit, too, you know that? It’s rule one. Only lie if you can back it up. I never—” Then she stopped, and her lips compressed. She leveled a serious gaze on me, and I knew we were both remembering the time she hadn’t. “Almost never,” she amended.

Well, she’d been in a hurry. What a godsend Tig’s story must have been to her. She needed a big fish, and he’d dropped one right into her lap. I thought of all the women he must have told that story to over the years. But only in her hand had it become a weapon.

Oliver wanted down. He bounced on my hip, bending at the waist and reaching for the floor. I reshuffled his weight and told him, “No, baby,” and then said to Roux, “What are you doing here?”

She smiled with what looked like genuine pleasure, genuine amusement. “Funny thing. I was busy yesterday. Very. We’ll get to that later. But I woke up this morning, early for me, feeling like I’d missed something. I was sure that you were doing something naughty. I could smell it on the wind. So I came down here, and guess what—Amy’s on a dive. I told your husband that you and Char had invited me to join your little walking club, and I was supposed to meet you here. He must have eaten up whatever bullshit you slathered on his toast like it was jam, because all he was worried about was getting to work on time. I offered to watch the kid so he could go. He took a little convincing, but you were texting by then, saying you were ten minutes away, so he left. Where were you, Amy, really?”

I was instantly furious with Davis for leaving Oliver with, essentially, a crocodile. Even for ten minutes. But how would he know? All the book-club moms traded babysitting, and Roux had presented herself as an invited member of my sacred morning walk, which would have made her seem like inner circle. God, I had to find a way to warn him off her.