The New Husband(35)
I was at the grocery store, and I dropped a jar of pasta sauce on the floor. It shattered on the ground with a massive crash. I swear it looked like a murder scene, blood spilled everywhere. I was so embarrassed, but then your father—well, before he was your dad—stepped in front of me and acted like he was the one who dropped the pasta sauce. He even called for the manager and helped him clean up the mess, apologizing over and over for being such a klutz. Then we went out for coffee and—
But no, that wasn’t Nina’s story. It wasn’t her story at all.
It was a friend from social work school in Boston, where Nina had moved after venturing away from Nebraska, who had made her see things differently.
“Face it, your grocery store scenario isn’t going to happen,” she had said one evening years back, when wine was all about the buzz and calorie counting didn’t matter.
Not only did this friend know about Nina’s fantasy, but more embarrassing, she knew about the time Nina had held a jar of pasta sauce in her hand and contemplated dropping it because a cute guy was standing in the same aisle. Nina’s best chance of meeting somebody was through a setup, which was, her friend opined, the same thing as online dating.
“Just cast a wider net. What can it hurt?”
Nina created her online dating profile that very night. When she was done, she made a single click to see her first set of matches. There he was, the fourth profile on the page, handsome as a movie cowboy. She read his profile carefully. Thank goodness he didn’t list “long walks on the beach” and “cuddling by the fire” as personal interests. He sounded confident and sincere and was genuinely funny. He wrote something about being an aspiring surfer and having a good relationship with his mother, which in hindsight turned out to be not entirely accurate. He loved life, he wrote. Enjoyed the outdoors. Travel! Restaurants! He kept it vague, saying he’d rather chat in person than write it all out. Nina noticed he had rendered some of the letters in his “Interests” section in bold type, and realized after careful study that it spelled out the words “NICE GUY.”
Nina sent him a message through the website. She got the internet through AOL, and transmissions back then were slow and spotty, but he messaged her back quickly. That was all it took. Her first and only attempt at online dating had resulted in an eighteen-year marriage, two kids, a house in Seabury, and her in Carson, standing in front of the Muddy Moose searching for a woman who had apparently captured her husband’s heart.
“The Muddy Moose was a rustic bar,” Nina explained to Dr. Wilcox.
To set the scene, she described what she’d seen back then—the heads of various animals mounted on the wall, including that of a large moose (presumably their namesake) hanging over the bar. There was a group of people, all men, she recalled, chatting pleasantly at the long wooden bar, hunched over their beverages. The place still smelled of last night’s fun mixed with powerful cleansers. The jukebox was on, playing something by the Rolling Stones.
“I didn’t see Teresa there,” Nina said. “But I was hoping maybe she was in the kitchen, or she might be coming in for a later shift.”
“How did being there make you feel?”
“Empty,” Nina said. “I felt absolutely nothing. But somehow I knew, even if I didn’t get a chance to confront Teresa, that the thought of her was far, far worse in my mind than it would be in real life. In real life, she was just … just a waitress at the Muddy Moose. I’m not sure that makes sense, but I remember feeling utterly depleted, like all the anger left me in one great rush.”
“Did you leave?”
“Not right away, no. I went up to the bartender with my phone in hand,” Nina said. “He was thin as a marsh reed, I remember that clearly. I also remember trying to keep my emotions in check, but my heart was beating crazy fast.”
Dr. Wilcox leaned forward in her chair.
“I showed him the picture—not the make-out session, the other one—and asked if he knew the woman, and if she worked there, and he said, yeah, that’s Teresa Mitchell. I asked if I could talk to her, but he told me she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Like gone, gone. Like she’d up and left. Four weeks ago, he said.”
“Four weeks before Glen disappeared?”
“That’s right. He told me she’d done that sort of thing before, usually with some guy she’d met, but she always came back. But this time she didn’t tell anybody where she was going, didn’t say when or if she planned to return. She was just gone.”
“Did the police look for her?”
“They looked, sure. I don’t know how hard, but they couldn’t find her. They eventually released her picture to the local press, which is how everyone found out about Glen’s affair.
“I asked the bartender if he knew anything about Teresa and Glen, as a couple. He said they hung out together, were friendly for sure, but he didn’t know anything more. Anyway, I wasn’t about to go grilling the staff for information about my husband’s extramarital exploits. What did it matter anyway? The details weren’t going to do me any good.”
“Probably not,” Dr. Wilcox agreed.
“So I went outside. Really I wanted to bum a cigarette even though I hadn’t had one in ages, but instead I just looked at the picture again. I took it all in—her clothes, how she carried herself in that photo, everything—she was just the opposite of me, so different from anybody I would have thought Glen would have been attracted to. It made the affair somehow seem worse, like Glen had sought her out because she was nothing like me. And the strange thing was, I wasn’t sure I cared anymore.”