My Lovely Wife(24)

We all eat it differently. Jenna licks the brown sugar off her peaches, then eats the cookie and finishes the rest of the peaches. Rory eats the cookie first, then the peaches, although it’s all sort of a blur, because he inhales everything so fast. Millicent alternates between the fruit and the cookie, a bite of one and then a bite of the other. I mash the peaches and cookie together and eat it all with a spoon.

Tomorrow is our movie night, and we discuss what we will watch. Last week, it was a talking animal movie. Rory always groans at first, but he loves those as much as anyone. Both of the kids like sports movies, so we pick one about a baseball youth league trying to make it to the world championships. We vote on this like it’s a serious election, and Batter Up wins by a landslide.

“I’ll be home by five thirty,” I say.

“Dinner at six,” says Millicent.

“Are we done here?” Rory asks.

“Who’s Owen Oliver Riley?” Jenna says.

Everything stops.

Millicent and I look at Jenna.

“Where did you hear that?” Millicent says.

“TV.”

“Owen is a horrible man who hurt people,” I say. “But he can never hurt you.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry about Owen.”

“But why are they talking about him?” Jenna asks.

“Because of that dead girl,” Rory says.

“Woman,” I say. “Dead woman.”

“Oh. Her.” Jenna shrugs and looks over at her phone. “So are we done?”

Millicent nods, and they pick up their phones, clearing the table while texting. I rinse off the dishes, Jenna helps put them in the dishwasher, and Millicent gets rid of whatever is left of the tacos.



* * *



? ? ?

While we get ready for bed, Millicent turns on the local news. She watches the press conference highlights and then turns to me. Saying nothing, she asks if I had something to do with it.

I shrug.

She raises an eyebrow.

I wink at her.

She smiles.

Sometimes, we do not have to say anything.

We weren’t always like this. In the beginning, we spent entire nights talking, just like all young couples do when they fall in love. I told her all my stories. Couldn’t get them out fast enough, because I had finally found someone who thought they were fascinating. Who thought I was fascinating.

Eventually, she knew all my old stories, so we traded only new ones. I texted her in the middle of the day to tell her the smallest things. She would send me a funny picture depicting how her day was going. I had never known someone so well, nor shared my life so completely with another. This continued until we got married, even afterward when Millicent was pregnant with Rory.

I still remember the first thing I didn’t tell her. The first thing of any importance, I mean. It was the car. We had two; hers was the newer one, and mine was a beat-up old truck that held all my tennis equipment. When Millicent was eight months pregnant, my truck broke down. It needed a thousand dollars in repairs, and we didn’t have the money. Any money we did have had been squirreled away, bit by bit, to afford a crib and a stroller and the mountains of diapers we were going to need.

I didn’t want to upset her, didn’t want to make her worry, so I made a choice. I told her the truck broke down but not how much it would cost. To pay for the repairs, I opened a new credit card only in my name.

It took more than a year to pay it off, and I never told Millicent. I never told her about the rest of the charges, either.

That was the first big thing, but we both stopped talking about the small things. We had a baby, then another, and her days became more exhausting than funny. She no longer recounted every little thing, nor did I tell her all the details about my clients.

We both stopped asking, stopping sharing the minutiae, and instead we stuck to the highlights. We still do.

Sometimes a smile and a wink is all we need.





Sixteen




Within twenty-four hours, Owen Oliver Riley is everywhere. His face is all over our local news and websites. My clients want to talk about him. Those who aren’t from here want more details. Those who are from here have not decided it he’s really back. Kekona, the local gossip, is in the middle on both counts.

Though she was born in Hawaii, she has been living here long enough to know all our legends, myths, and infamous residents. She doesn’t believe Owen Oliver is back. Not for one second.

We are on the court, and Kekona is working on her serve. Again. She thinks if she can just serve one ace after another, she doesn’t need to play the rest of the game. In theory, she is right. In reality, no one can do that. Not unless her opponent is a five-year-old.

“Owen could go anywhere to kill women, but they think he’s back here?” she says.

“If by ‘they’ you mean the police, then no, they haven’t said anything about Owen Oliver. It was just some reporter’s question.”

“Pfft.”

“I’m not sure what that means.”

“It means that’s ridiculous. Owen got away once. He has no reason to come back.”

I shrug. “Because it’s home?”

Kekona rolls her dark eyes. “Life is not a horror movie.”

She is not the only one who feels this way. Anyone who didn’t live through it the first time thinks it would be ridiculous for him to come back. They see this as Kekona does, like a choice that makes no rational sense.