No One Will Miss Her(21)

Eliza just gaped at me, but Adrienne jumped in like we’d been doing this routine together for years. “Oh, it’s delicious,” she said. “It’ll change your life.”



Twenty minutes later, Adrienne Richards paid for her groceries and we walked together into the parking lot, leaving Eliza Higgins scowling at her register. The sun glinted off Adrienne’s hair—it was a silky blond back then, before she dyed it that trendy rose-gold color that the sunshine and lake water would eventually turn orange—and she glanced cautiously over her shoulder before letting out a husky, conspiratorial cackle.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “That was an adventure. I’m not sure I can ever go back there.”

Her laughter was contagious, and I couldn’t help myself; I giggled. “It might be a little bit awkward,” I admitted. “If it’s a problem, you can let me know what you’re low on at the end of the week, and I’ll bring it by when I come to do the housekeeping.”

Adrienne raised an eyebrow, looking sidelong at me. “I’m not sure you can ever go back there, either,” she said.

“Oh, they’re used to me. I’ve known Eliza all my life,” I said.

“She won’t be angry?”

I laughed. “I didn’t say that. But if you never had someone’s good opinion to begin with, there’s no need to worry about losing it.”

I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel as cavalier as I sounded. We’d been out of the store for less than a minute, but the news of what I’d done would have spread town-wide by now, just another entry into the annals of Lizzie Ouellette, Trash Bag Bitch. I would probably hear about it from both Dwayne and my father before the day was done, and neither one of them would find it entertaining the way that Adrienne seemed to.

But in that moment, I found I didn’t care. I wanted her to like me, to be the kind of person she would like. She was so golden. The way she wasn’t even rattled by Eliza’s rudeness, the way she walked through the parking lot with her chin lifted and her hips swaying, like she was floating down a runway. Walking beside her, matching my gait to hers, I allowed myself to hope that whatever magic she had inside her might rub off on me, just a little. And maybe I was imagining it, but something about the tone of her voice and the tilt of her head as she spoke made me think that a line had been crossed—that she did like me, that maybe we’d even be friends.

I think that was when I first realized: Adrienne Richards was lonely. I had read, in some gossip rag, that their friends all shunned them after what happened. Those magazines can be full of bullshit, but in this case, it was obviously the truth. They had no kids, no family, nobody to stick by them on the basis of shared blood alone. I imagined what that would be like, for someone like her. For the phone to stop ringing, the invitations to stop coming. To have people start whispering when you walked into a room. I studied her social media accounts: they used to look like a nonstop party, but now the photos never had other people in them. Mostly, they were only Adrienne, her face or her nails or her hair; occasionally, there would be a picture of a book or a coffee cup sitting on the same glass-topped table in her apartment. She and Ethan must have spent a lot of nights in there, just the two of them, staring at each other. I think their vacation was more about interrupting the boredom of their mutual exile than anything else. Not that they did anything differently during their month at the lake, but at least there was more space and different scenery to do it in. Sometimes, it seemed like they’d escaped to the lake just to escape from each other. When I visited the house, something I was doing every other day by the end of July, they were almost never together. She’d be on the deck, usually with a self-help book in her lap, always with a glass of wine that she’d refresh to a more photogenic level before asking me to take her picture. He’d be inside, napping, or out on the water in one of the Costco kayaks I’d left for guests to tool around in. Not paddling, just drifting. He’d take the boat a few hundred yards out and just sit there, staring into space, the paddle resting on his lap. I’d wave. He either didn’t see me, or just didn’t wave back. And then sometimes he wouldn’t be there at all. The first time it happened, I saw the big black Mercedes missing and asked where he’d gone.

“He went back to the city,” Adrienne said.

I frowned, not understanding. “Bummer. He couldn’t stay?”

“No, he could. He just didn’t.” She yawned. The sun was getting low and golden, and out on the lake, a loon shrieked. Adrienne didn’t react. She might have been drunk, or more than drunk. Had she already started using by then? I like to think I would’ve known, but she was good at hiding things.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Another yawn. “Whatever. Hey, Lizzie, take my picture?”

She leaned against the railing, the lake behind her, the wine in her hand, while I used her phone to snap a photo—and then another, and another, since Adrienne was fussy about her angles. I didn’t mind. She was beautiful, and later, in the privacy of my bathroom, I would practice tilting my head and pursing my lips the way she did, and imagine being that beautiful, too. That poised, that “blessed,” the word she always used to describe herself and the life she lived. And when I thought about Ethan, it was only to wonder why a man who was married to a woman like that wouldn’t take every chance, every available opportunity, to be with her.