No One Will Miss Her(20)

Ethan Richards was a criminal. The soft kind, one of those fancy, white-collar bad guys who floats away on a golden parachute and lands gently in a pile of cash while the company he looted burns to the ground. The scandal was old news by then, but stories like this always ring the same bells. Shady dealings, hidden losses, men with corner offices tiptoeing along the finest of lines between unethical and illegal in order to line their already-overstuffed pockets, and stepping all over the little guy on their way to wealth. When the shit finally hit the fan, hundreds of people lost their jobs, and even more lost their life savings. The scope of the whole thing was hard to grasp, but the impact was plain enough. Somewhere, someone’s grandma is going to spend her retirement eating Fancy Feast in an unheated apartment because of what Ethan Richards and his friends did—and of all the men involved, Ethan got away without a slap on the wrist.

That night, I stayed up for hours reading all the stories about his arrest and subsequent release, and all the outraged op-eds that came later, about why the laws needed changing so that people like Ethan Richards would pay for their crimes down the road. He was never charged, but it almost didn’t matter. As far as the press and the public were concerned, he was guilty on all counts, with Adrienne as his codefendant. It was funny how that worked out. People were angry at him, but, lord, they really hated her. You could see why: she made the perfect villain, a gorgeous picture of shallow privilege with her little vanity projects, her Instagram sponsorships, her totally unearned life in the lap of luxury. And then there was the callousness; she seemed either ignorant or indifferent when it came to the havoc her husband had wrought, and some of the articles even slyly suggested that she might have had a hand in it herself, a flawlessly highlighted, fashion-forward Lady Macbeth urging on her man from behind the scenes. Later, after I got to know her better, I would decide that they were probably wrong about that. Adrienne just wasn’t ambitious or imaginative enough to mastermind a billion-dollar accounting scandal. But the more I read that night, the more I couldn’t help admiring Adrienne Richards. The corporate drama, the news stories, the possibility that her husband might be indicted for fraud and go to prison, leaving her with nothing—a lot of women would have lost their minds, but not Adrienne. More than anything, it all seemed to bore her.

I couldn’t tell her any of that, of course. I wouldn’t have. I’d already decided to treat them like any other guests, save for an offer to stop by once a week to do a little light cleaning and change out the linens, and that’s only because they were staying so long. The day they arrived, I handed over the spare set of keys, gave them the five-minute spiel on our local attractions and the ins and outs of the house, and left them to themselves.

It was pure coincidence that I happened to be in the market a few hours later when Adrienne came in. She was something to see in that moment, swanning through the aisles in her espadrilles, leaving a perfumed trail and half a dozen annoyed locals in her wake. At first she just flitted from section to section, making disappointed noises over the selection of cheeses, grimacing at the vegetables (“Where’s the kale,” she murmured), putting nothing in her basket while people looked on and rolled their eyes. I had half a mind to sneak out before she could spot me. A couple old-timers were starting to shoot dirty looks in my direction, too, because there was only one person in town who would rent to a visitor so obviously not-from-around-here. One of them muttered something to the other under his breath; I caught the words “that Ouellette girl” and decided I’d rather not hear the rest.

But then Adrienne walked up to the register and started asking Eliza Higgins where the organic Icelandic yogurt was, and Eliza just kept saying, “What?” in this obnoxious fake-clueless tone, like she’d never heard of either yogurt or Iceland and maybe didn’t speak English at all, and then Adrienne would repeat herself sounding more annoyed each time, and I found myself getting angry. Angry at both of them. I wanted to slap Adrienne, not just because she seemed not to realize she was being mocked, but because she should’ve known better than to give Eliza the opportunity, to think she could ask for any fancy thing she wanted in a place like Copper Falls. In fact, this turned out to be one of her great talents: to make it seem like you were the weirdo, the world’s most adorable idiot, for not knowing about free-range alpaca milk, or freeze-dried yogurt-dipped bumblebee eggs, or bespoke vagina steaming, or whatever other expensive shit Gwyneth Paltrow had recommended in her stupid newsletter that week. But that was Adrienne, and then she’d somehow act surprised, all wide Who, me? eyes and bafflement, when everyone in town fucking hated her.

But then again, they fucking hated me, too—which put us on the same team. Would I have done what I did, if not for that? Would things have been different?

Because what I did was march up to the register myself and say, “Jesus fucking Christ, Eliza. She wants yogurt from Iceland. It’s not that fucking complicated. Just tell her you don’t have it, because you don’t, because everyone in town only just stopped freaking out about that time three years ago when you started stocking Oikos and they had to learn to pronounce a new fucking word. And then point her to where the Oikos is, since it’s the next best thing, so she can finish her shopping and get back to the lake. Also, she and her husband are gonna be here all month”—I turned to address the small crowd that had gathered behind me to gawk—“That’s right, guys, the entire fucking month, and part of August, too, so you can go ahead and get your underpants in a big fucking twist right now”—and then turned back to Eliza to finish, “so maybe you’ll find it in your heart to order a case of the Iceland stuff. If there’s any left after they leave, I’ll buy the rest from you myself. It’s good, right?”