This Place of Wonder (59)

“They are? Why?”

“They just want to question everyone in his life, I guess, and they haven’t been able to find you. Honestly, I thought you’d be back in Boston by now.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not yet,” she says. “Look, I have to go. I’m driving.”

“Of course.”

As I whistle for Elvis, my fingers setting free the green, pungent smell of rosemary, I wonder if I should pack an overnight bag. Broke her arm!



The second call comes in as I’m driving down into Santa Barbara. The robot voice on the console tells me it’s the police and I answer the Bluetooth. “Hello, this is Meadow.”

“This is Detective Love. Do you have a minute? We have the results of the autopsy back finally. Most of it, anyway.”

My stomach, which had returned to normal, pitches again. “Yes. Please tell me.”

“There are some results that are inconclusive, so we need to send some tissue out to a different lab, but we have some insight. Did you know he had cancer?”

All the veins in my body ache, all of them, all at once. I lie. “No.”

“It was substantial,” she says.

He hadn’t been feeling well for a while. Complaining of a lack of energy, weakness, even fainting. “Is that what killed him?”

“We don’t think so,” she says. “It’s still not clear.”

To hide my exasperation, I take a breath, hold it, let it go. “Can you release the body?”

“I’m afraid not. We need these last few tests to make sure it was a natural death.”

I frown. “I don’t understand what you’re looking for.”

“Some kind of poisoning, most likely. Which doesn’t mean someone murdered him; it just means something poisoned him. Especially because he worked with the public, we’d like to figure out what that was.”

“Of course.” In reaction, my heart threads unsteadily, as if I’m preparing for a heart attack of my own. “I understand.”

“We’ll keep you posted,” she says, and hangs up.

Furious tears sting my eyes. He was only sixty-seven! If he’d just stayed with me, safely married, he would have stayed healthy.

If only he had stayed, he would not be dead.



Over the years, Augustus sometimes dallied with this girl or that, always someone in her early twenties (or sometimes not quite that) with long beautiful hair and lush breasts. I’m not sure, but I think it started during the years I was so desperate to get pregnant.

I looked the other way. I know how that sounds, but in the ways that mattered, our family was solid, our marital rituals still in place—Monday picnics and monthly dinner parties and tangled in sleep every night. Through those dire years when I wanted a baby so badly, I rarely wanted to have sex unless I was deliberately trying to get pregnant, so in some ways I was relieved not to have to meet all his needs. I was secure in being his wife, and the women never lasted more than a month or two.

When I gave up the dream of our child, we settled back into our previous love affair, and although I did sense his dalliances, none of them mattered. He was a big, lusty man and he liked new dishes now and then. I just didn’t pay attention to them.

When he met Christy, I didn’t even register her presence. She started at P&P as a bartender but worked herself up to assistant manager pretty quickly. She wasn’t his type. Although she was still young, in her twenties, she was tautly athletic, with short blonde hair she wore shorn on the sides. Her tattoos, weaving around her arms and even across her chest, spelled out a life lived hard and deep. Kara had a crush on her, though she pretended she didn’t.

I liked her, honestly. She was smart and tough, but also wounded. I recognized that haunted look in her eye, that aura you just can’t shake. I do my best to hide mine, but it’s there if you look. Shanti had it, too.

The brokenness should have tipped me off. Wounded women were catnip to Augustus. He loved the song “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” about a man rescuing a woman who’d fallen and needed help; he patched up her wings and sent her on her way.

He rescued us. All of us. He’d rescued me, teaching me how to love sex, how to build a family, but also how to take pride in myself and my accomplishments, how to stand up for myself and ask the world for what I wanted. Without Augustus, I could never have found the courage to buy the farm, to write the book, to do the 1,001 things I could do after he loved me.

Shanti, too, had been a rescue, the daughter of a woman who abused her until she ran away from home somewhere in Mississippi to the golden shores of California, then found a boyfriend to abuse her some more. Augustus had not been as successful healing her as he’d been with me. She couldn’t kick her addictions, and someone once commented it was because she’d never examined her ghosts and traumas, but I call bullshit. Only people without the kind of wounds she and I carried think you need to live it all over again. Not everything can be forgiven. Not everything can be healed.

By the time Christy arrived, Augustus had attained a certain amount of fame with the big foodie movement; with his good looks and good humor, he was a delightful guest judge on various shows, including more than one stint on Top Chef. I found myself in demand as a speaker at conferences devoted to food writing, cooking, and sustainable farming, and I traveled a lot. For the first time, my star was rising higher and faster than his, but we both reveled in the attention and the way all of it fed into our fortunes.