Pretty Little Wife(4)
She chalked up the request to his idealized view of family. One different from what he’d known. It was as if he believed if he had all the outside trappings, from the big house to the perfect wife, the rest would fall in line. No one could question or destroy it. She understood because she’d maneuvered her way through a dysfunctional upbringing and knew the things you grabbed on to to survive weren’t always rational.
At the beginning of their marriage the Aaron-imposed public dress code, while sometimes annoying, wasn’t a problem. It blended in with what she needed to wear to the office. That changed when they moved and she left her job, but his requirements for that dream of perfection never dimmed.
Now he couldn’t play that game. Thanks to her.
Today she complied on her terms. She picked the perfect outfit to stand outside on the long driveway that twisted its way up to her sprawling ranch house at the top of the hill. Hair styled and a light touch of makeup. Ready to fake mourn.
The gardeners deserved the credit for the pristine lawn and intricately shaped bushes. Her contribution amounted to writing a check for their services every month. Growing up, her father viewed mowing as a man’s job, convinced she’d hurt herself. The lectures about what was and wasn’t her place blurred into a humming sound in her head. His stern and disapproving voice. The way he screamed Jesus at her mother so often that Lila didn’t realize it wasn’t part of her mother’s actual name until she got older. Right around the time the whispering about her parents started.
A buzzing vibrated in her brain now. The memories itched and scratched, desperate to break through the invisible barrier she slammed into place to shut them out. She did what she always did to survive. Blocked and refocused, this time on the warm sun. It beamed down, breaking through the lingering chill.
She touched the top button of the silk cardigan draped over her shoulders and looked at the straight edge where the grass met the pavement. The line, too perfect, called out for flowers. A splash of color amid the sea of brown. Brown house siding on top of brown stone. Brown shutters with a darker brown front door.
Aaron had bought the property without her input about four years ago. She’d stayed behind in North Carolina to clean up before their move north. He’d gone up for a quick meeting about his new teaching job and called her, shouting about a bargain. One with old plumbing and wiring so unpredictable that it prevented them from plugging in more than two lights in the living room at the same time during the first few months they lived there.
He’d already signed the offer by the time he called. Of course he had. Still in those earlier days, flush with a sense of hopefulness and a na?ve optimism about how they could do better than their parents and forge a path, she didn’t recognize his move for what it was—a complete dismissal of her opinion. Treating her as an afterthought.
She was wiser now. More jaded but open to the truth about the minimal role she played in his thinking and in his life.
She refocused again, this time on that razor edge of green, and thought about pink. Aaron would hate the change. He viewed pink as a direct blow to his masculinity. So pink flowers in spring it would be.
After a quick scan of the quiet suburban cul-de-sac, she took the cell phone out of her pocket and checked for messages. Nothing waited for her.
Unexpected, but it was still early.
She wandered down to the mailbox. After Aaron ran over the last one during a bad ice storm in March, he’d picked out one shaped like a duck as the replacement. He joked about how great it would be if it made a noise. Spent the afternoon he bought it walking around the house and scaring the crap out of her by yelling, “Quack!” She had no idea why he found that funny or what the duck meant to him, but then many things Aaron did and said were a mystery to her.
A sign hung off the duck’s belly, taunting her. THE PAYNE’S. Block letters of a name she never informally or formally agreed to take. Ridgefield was the last piece of who she’d been before. She clung to it even as she said yes to a marriage to someone as broken as she was.
Her refusal to capitulate on this one thing dropped a wedge in the center of her marriage. Her last stand led to the spousal fight that refused to die over the years.
Then there was the apostrophe. She’d dared to question if one should be there and he’d kicked the sign, shattering the bolt. The force of the blow knocked the left side from its hook and sent it swinging with a screeching sound of metal scraping against metal.
She’d left the unwanted sign hanging there ever since. Crooked. Half-broken and off center. It struck her as the perfect metaphor for their marriage.
“Lila?”
The singsongy voice made Lila cringe. She managed to plaster on a smile by the time she turned to face her seemingly ever-present neighbor. “Hello.”
Cassie Zimmer. Every sentence she uttered ended on a tonal upswing as if she were asking an unending series of questions instead of just talking. She smiled without ceasing. That alone made Lila want to slap her. She didn’t, of course, but the temptation hovered right there.
From the day they moved in, Cassie had been that neighbor. She brought cookies on her welcome to the neighborhood visit then overstayed by walking around the living room, asking an endless line of personal questions disguised as get-to-know-you talk while she peeked at every unpacked possession. Lila had mentally put Cassie on the intolerable list she kept in her head, and Cassie had never worked her way off it again.