The Good Widow(7)

But that’s the problem with letting your curiosity overrule your conscience—you can’t change your mind afterward. Nick told me he’d found emails they’d sent each other—did I want to see them? He said he needed to know if they had been serious. If they had loved each other. If they were going to leave us. That last one? It hadn’t crossed my mind. Then it was all I could think about.

I turn onto Church Street and come to an abrupt stop in front of Beth’s tan two-story home. I press my hands against my throbbing quads, trying to steady my breathing, hating that my ability to drive seems to be another casualty since James went over that cliff. Because getting behind the wheel would have been such an easier way to get here.

The front door opens. “My God, look at you!” Beth rushes down the steps and bends over me, her mud-brown hair that matches mine hanging around her creamy complexion dotted with light freckles.

“I know.” I hold out my hand so she can pull me up. “Could use some water, please.”

She gives me a once-over, her perfectly tweezed eyebrows arching over her light-brown eyes. “You ran here?”

I nod. “Because I couldn’t . . .” I don’t finish, but we both know what the rest of the sentence would be.

Get in a car.

I did attempt to drive, just a couple of days after I found out. I was going to buy wine. Many bottles of it, preparing to drink myself into a dreamless sleep—anything to stop the nightmares. I slid into the seat of my Mini Cooper and started it just like I would have any other day. But as the engine roared to life, I saw a flash of James’s face, grimacing as he tried to steer the Jeep away from the cliff. My heart pounding out of my chest, I started gasping for air, my hands tingling so much I almost couldn’t get the driver’s door open. Then I laid my cheek against the cold, oil-stained garage floor and sobbed into the concrete until I managed to move myself into an upright position and call Beth, who came racing over, again. When she found me, resting against a bag of fertilizer, I looked at her and shook my head.



As I follow her inside now, I watch her nylon shorts start to slide down her slim hips, and she tugs them upward; I’m amazed that after birthing three children, she’s been able to maintain her high school figure. She’d cheered—literally chanting a Go! Fight! Win!—after she’d found her red-white-and-black cheer uniform in a bin and zipped it up as if she were still sixteen. But then again, she works at it. Without asking, I know she’s already dropped her kids at summer camp, been to a 9:00 a.m. SoulCycle class, and blended a Paleo-approved shake. As a lover of processed foods—anything with that orange stuff they’re trying to ban—I find eating like a caveman feels as unachievable as making the Olympic track team.

“Shoes,” Beth calls over her shoulder. “I mean, if you don’t mind,” she adds quickly, turning her head and giving me a quick, toothless smile. It’s funny how people hold their tongues when you go through something awful. I caught my neighbor, who spent years knotting her gray eyebrows together when my garbage cans were still sitting by the curb long after trash day, dragging them up our driveway last night, pulling forcefully as one wheel got stuck in a deep crack that appeared after the last earthquake. And Beth. She’s been on her best behavior since James died—replacing her typical blunt opinions with kind and gentle responses that seem foreign coming from her. What she doesn’t understand is that I wish she would go back to her normal personality, because I need her to be her. I need her unfiltered commentary about my life, her know-it-all attitude, her need to be right.

It’s not just Beth who’s been on first-date behavior. Before James died, my mom, who lives in Solana Beach, a sleepy beach town about an hour south of my neighborhood, would rarely made the trek “all the way up” to Aliso Viejo because northbound traffic is “just the worst on the weekends.” And now she has miraculously gotten over her commuter issues and has been religiously making the “journey” once a week to check on me. She’s never been a big believer in comfortable silences, so as she scrubs my spotless countertops and heats up some casserole we both know I’ll never eat and fluffs pillows and opens windows, she relentlessly throws words my way, telling me stories about her book club or my dad’s refusal to stop eating red meat, tiptoeing around me like I’m a land mine she might trigger.

What my mom doesn’t get is that I don’t need her to come to my house and rearrange my coffee table books. Just because James is gone, she doesn’t need to change; she doesn’t need to prove anything to me. It never bothered me that she didn’t drive up to see us. James and I liked going down to visit her and my dad, the coastal setting making us feel like we were going on a staycation the minute we arrived. But Mom’s unwillingness to come up north to see Beth and me, and our father’s silent alignment with her, drove Beth insane. “Can’t she do it for her three grandchildren? Doesn’t she realize we have soccer and gymnastics and we are bu-sy? I swear it’s Poochie Poo. She can’t leave that dog for five minutes.” I’d tell her that was crazy talk, that of course it wasn’t about the dog, but she’d spit back that I was too agreeable, that I accepted things too easily. And she’s right; I usually do. Part of me wonders if that’s why I’m standing here now, with questions outnumbering answers.

I force my sneakers off without untying them.