The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(2)

“How do you know it’s her?”

She held up a fist and stuck out her thumb. “First, she’s the only really pretty employee in his office. Well, pretty and young, which is the way Richard likes them. Second, Richard is a liar but he’s not great at it, and I accused him of having an affair with Pam and he couldn’t even look me in the eye.”

“Have you accused him of having affairs in the past?”

“The thing is, I don’t think he has had an affair in the past, not a real one anyway. He does go to this bullshit conference every year for real estate brokers in Las Vegas, and I’m sure he’s hooked up with a stripper there or something, but that’s not really the same as an affair. And I’m kind of friends with Pam, that’s the thing. When she first got the job at Blackburn I invited her to my book club, which she came to a bunch of times, although none of us thought she really read the books.

“I was nice to her. I even introduced her to the guy who does my husband’s investments, and they went out for a while. I took her out for drinks at least three times.”

“When do you think the affair started?”

“I think it started around the time Pam stopped texting me, which was about three months ago. They’ve made it so obvious it’s like they want to get caught. You must see this stuff all the time?”

It was the second time she’d mentioned that, and I decided not to tell her that it wasn’t something I saw all the time because my only regular clients were a temp agency that employed me to do background checks, and an octogenarian just down the street from my office who was always losing her cats.

“My guess is,” I said, “that they are trying to be secretive and failing at it. Which probably means that your husband, and Pam, as well, haven’t had affairs before. The people who are good at hiding secrets are the people who have practice at it.”

She frowned, thinking about what I’d just said. “You’re probably right, but I guess I don’t particularly care one way or another if my husband is cheating on me for the first time. I don’t know why I feel this way but, honestly, it’s Pam that is pissing me off a little more than he is. I don’t know what game she thinks she’s playing. Hey, did you keep teaching after the seniors graduated early that year? I know you didn’t come back the next year.”

It was an abrupt change of topic and for that reason it made me answer honestly. “Oh, God, no,” I said. “I don’t think I could’ve ever walked back into that school. I felt bad about it, but there was only about two weeks left anyway.”

“You never taught again?”

“No, not high school. I do occasionally teach an adult ed class in poetry, but it’s not the same thing.”

“The basketball player,” she said, and her face brightened as though she’d just won a trivia contest.

I must have looked confused because she added, “It’s all coming back to me, now. For the last month of classes you had us read poetry because you knew we wouldn’t be able to focus on full books.”

“Right,” I said.

“And we read this poem about a kid who used to be—”

“Oh, right. John Updike. The poem was called ‘Ex-Basketball Player.’ I haven’t thought of that for—”

“And you got in a fight with Ally Eisenkopf because she said you were making up all the symbolism in it.”

“I wouldn’t call it a fight. More like a spirited intellectual debate.” And now I was remembering that day in class, when the lesson plan was to dissect that poem line by line, and I’d drawn a map on the chalkboard that located the gas station described in the poem, and the street it was on. I was trying to show how a relatively simple poem such as “Ex-Basketball Player” by John Updike could be as carefully constructed as a clock, that every word was a deliberate choice for both the text and the subtext of the poem. The students that were paying attention had rebelled, convinced I was reading things into the poem that didn’t exist. I’d told them I found it interesting they could believe that someone could go to the moon, or invent computer coding, yet they couldn’t quite believe that the described location of the gas station in a poem was a metaphor for the stalled life of a high school basketball champion.

Ally Eisenkopf, one of my more vocal students, had gotten visibly upset, claiming I was just making stuff up, as though I’d told her that the sky wasn’t blue. I was very surprised that Joan remembered that particular class. I told her that.

“I have a good memory, and you were a good teacher. You really made an impression on me that year.”

“Well,” I said. “You and no one else.”

“You know that Richard, my cheating husband, went to DM too.”

It took me a moment to remember that DM was what the kids called Dartford-Middleham High School. “No, I didn’t know that. Did I have him in a class?”

“No, you didn’t have him in one of your classes. No way did he do honors English.”

I was surprised that Joan had married a high school boyfriend. The towns of Dartford and Middleham might not be as ritzy as some of the other towns around them, like Concord, or Lincoln, but most of the kids from the public high school went on to four-year colleges, and I doubt many of them married their high school sweethearts.