The Better Liar(23)

I waited as she led me through the white stucco hallway and up the stairs. When we were in the guest bedroom (unnaturally clean, framed photographs of the New Mexican landscape lined up on the bureau), I shut the door and pressed the lock on the knob.

    “So there’s a luggage rack in the closet,” Leslie said, pointing at my duffel bag, which Dave had leaned against the closet door.

“You didn’t tell your husband you got fired,” I said flatly.

She didn’t answer me right away. I could see her face in the mirror. Her ears, sticking through her lank hair, were mottled red. “Not your business,” she said. “There are fresh towels in the bathroom closet.” She turned to leave.

“How was I supposed to know that?” I hissed, reaching for her shoulder. “What if I fucked it up for you?”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Well, just keep not fucking it up, then,” she said. “Okay?”

“Does he know you’re going to lose the house?”

“If we get the money, we won’t lose the house,” she said, jaw tight. “So it’s not an issue.”

I stared at her. Finally I sat down on the bed, which gave slowly underneath me. Memory foam. “How come you didn’t tell me you had a baby?” I asked.

“I told you everything you need to know,” Leslie said. “All you need to do is stick to small talk, sign the papers, collect your money, and disappear. At no point do you need to discuss my personal life with my husband.”

“Not telling me was stupid,” I said, my voice pitched low. “I want to make sure there’s nothing else that’s going to get me in trouble. If you don’t want your husband to find out about your personal life, you should think about that.”

Leslie’s lips thinned. She didn’t look drunk anymore. “You’re doing a great job,” she said. “Focus on that.” She came over to the bed, and I felt her long, cold fingers tuck the tag on my jacket back into my collar.

I just looked at her. She exhaled through her nose and left the room. The door clicked shut behind her.





16


    Leslie


Alone in the master bedroom, I stepped out of my clothes and gathered up the pile for the hamper. Then I padded into the bathroom to wash my face. I was almost out of retinoid cream. I put a thin ring around each eye, rubbed a stripe into the paper-crease lines on my forehead. Dave had left his shaving things out on the counter. I examined his razor and dropped it into the trash can; he always forgot to switch. I dug out a new one from the package under the sink and left it next to his shaving cream in the cabinet.

When I went back into the bedroom, Dave was in his underwear with his reading glasses on, holding his tablet. I admired the way the long, hard line of his calf muscle shone a little in the reflected light from the lamp, and wondered why it was that the things I liked best about his body were natural, genetic, whereas the things I liked best about mine were artificial: my carefully maintained skin, my gel-protected fingernails.

It took him a moment to notice me. He dropped his tablet into the blankets and held his arms out to me. “Come here, you makeupless kid,” he said.

I got into bed and draped myself naked over him, pressing my face into his neck. He smelled like cumin and wine. “I missed you,” I said.

    I felt his laugh. “You were only gone for, like, two days.”

“Yeah, but the whole thing was…” I sat up. “I don’t know. It was weird.”

“Seeing your sister again?”

I nodded. Seeing her body had been awful, but also a relief: I’d never have to worry about her again. If she needed money. What kind of upsetting message she’d left on my machine.

“You never talk about her.” Dave was trying hard to sound casual, incurious.

“Because she’s not a part of my life.” I stopped, and tried a softer tone. “Because her life is not easy on the people around her. I don’t want you to be sucked into that part of my family.”

“I appreciate that.” He rubbed his hand over my back. I sank into the blankets. “Do you think you’d ever forgive her?” he asked after a minute. “I mean, she seems…she seems like she’s cleaned herself up a little, right?”

He likes her, I thought. “No,” I said flatly.

Dave studied my face. “Okay.”

I rolled off him. “What did you do? While I was gone.”

He made a creaky groan, stretching a little. “Shot the shit with our incredibly charismatic baby, mostly,” he said. “Saw my mom for a little while. Took Eli to Elaine’s for a playdate with Brody.”

“Another one?”

“Yeah, they seem to get along pretty well, although Brody is definitely the one in charge. Our son may be beautiful, but he is a follower by nature. Not a future president. Maybe a future personal assistant. He was all ready to hand Brody his sucker. Not even a peep of protest. Natural philanthropist.”

I made myself smile. “How’s Elaine?”

“Oh, you know. The Internet’s star mommy.” Elaine was Dave’s coworker, the first one he’d made friends with when he’d started four years ago. Back then her older son, Tanner, was a year old. Elaine had run a semi-popular blog chronicling Tanner’s firsts—first steps, first words. Two years ago, when she was seven months pregnant with Brody, her husband left her. A few similar blogs picked up on the story, and Elaine gathered more and more followers. She moved most of her blogging to Instagram, where she posted professional-quality photos of herself and her kids several times a day. She had a funny, dry tone to her writing, undercut by the dreamlike, idyllic photography. Dave said she had enough followers now to do ads.