Sunburn: A Novel(11)

She certainly got him to do her a lot of favors. Marry her. Become a dad. Buy a brick house near a park. This whole setup was all for her, and now she’s left him holding the bag.

The letter’s not even addressed to him. It’s to Jani. A greeting card with a bear on the front, the imprinted message: “I can’t bear being away.” Then, in her tight, up-and-down script: “I love you, I miss you.” Lies, lies, lies.

Well, today’s the day. It’s been four weeks, and she’s clearly not coming back. Maybe she’s certifiably insane. Wouldn’t that be just his luck? At any rate, he needs to find her and get her back to Baltimore to take care of Jani. He’s made an appointment with a private detective. A woman. He wouldn’t trust any man around Pauline. No, it’s not the men he doesn’t trust. It’s Pauline. She’s just too good at getting what she wants. Why did he ever fall for her? She’s not that pretty. Her shape is good, but not crazy-insane great.

The sex was good, though.

The private detective’s office is up in Towson and he’s arranged to come in late at the office, although things are crazy busy. After spiking up last year, interest rates are back down. Not 1993 levels, but under 8 percent for a thirty-year fixed and lower still for the adjustable-rate mortgages that are so popular now. Everyone’s trying to sell and buy before school starts up. Summer’s barely started, and people are already thinking about fall.

He drops Jani at his mom’s. He thought grandmothers were supposed to love their grandchildren to the point where they could never get enough of them, but his mom’s getting a little cheesed off about all the babysitting over the past month. He hasn’t told her the exact truth about Pauline. He dropped a hint that she had to go somewhere to take care of a family member, but he didn’t provide many details. He’s not sure why he’s lying to his mother. It’s not like he and Pauline are going to get back together. He guesses he just doesn’t want his mother to say, “I told you so.” She hated Pauline from the start. Said she didn’t seem like wife material. But Gregg hadn’t been looking for wife material. He tried to make the best of it when she got pregnant, but it was foolish to think that you could marry a party girl and she would figure out how to be a party girl by night, a mom and wife by day. Now he knows it doesn’t work that way.

The detective’s office is in a beige building off Joppa Road, a place with a credit union on the first floor, and a lot of “professional” places above—dentists, podiatrists, urologists. But only one private detective. Not how he imagined it. Then he realizes he was imagining an old movie: venetian blinds behind a glass panel with the agency’s name stenciled in gold letters. This gun for hire.

Here, there is a plastic nameplate, security associates. Inside, Sue Snead—wait, did he pick her for the name, without making the association, Sue Snead/Sam Spade?—is small and nondescript, an asset in her work if not her life. Probably a lesbian, he thinks, taking in her short hair, button-down shirt, khakis.

“Office buildings are air-conditioned for men,” she says.

“What?” Her voice is gorgeous, unexpected. It’s like listening to beautiful music pour out of some kid’s rinky-dink toy piano.

“That’s why I wear pants and long-sleeved shirts, even on a day with temperatures in the nineties. Because the business world, its thermostats are set to temperatures that are comfortable for people who wear suits. The women come in bare legged, in sleeveless tops, then complain that they’re freezing.”

“Interesting,” he says. It’s not, but what does it cost him?

“I think the first thing we need to do is a background check on your wife, which means I’ll order a search of all legal databases through Chicago Title.”

“She’s got no legal troubles.”

“How do you know?” Her tone is kind, her eyes round and serious. She’s not challenging him.

And for the first time he thinks: How do I know? You meet a woman in a bar. She’s fun. You tell her your best stories. She laughs and tells hers—only Pauline Smith never did, come to think of it. Tell stories. She laughed and asked for more of his. In Baltimore, people always start with Where did you go to school? They mean high school, not college. But she always said she wasn’t from Baltimore, that she grew up in West Virginia. And the weird thing about West Virginia is that, although you can drive there in two hours, it feels like it’s a million miles away. There’s a reason they have those bunkers at the Greenbrier Hotel in case D.C. is ever nuked. Gregg plays the license plate game on road trips, a hangover from childhood, and you seldom see a West Virginia tag east of Hagerstown. Less often than Vermont, even. About as often as Utah, he reckons.

“Let’s start with what you do know,” Sue Snead says, her pen at the ready.

“Well, her name. Her birth date. Her social. And the social has to be right, because we file a joint return.”

“Where does she work?”

“She doesn’t.” Oh, he remembers—you’re supposed to say it differently. “She didn’t have a job outside the home, I mean. She was a full-time mom. A good one, too. She loves our little girl. Or I thought she did.”

They talk for almost an hour and, while part of him is clocking the cost, there’s another part of him that enjoys the conversation, all those questions in that honeyed voice. Usually, talking to a woman this long is a prelude to sex. Maybe this is what going to a therapist is like. She seems so interested in him, kind and supportive. No detail is too small, she keeps telling him. He finds himself talking about what it was like, at first, the sex with Pauline, how great it was, and then she got pregnant and everything changed. Like, she would be up for sex in odd places—outdoors, the spare bedroom at a party, but she scoped it out first, made sure it was unlikely they would be seen. Did that mean the wildness was a calculation? Or something she had learned to control?