The Better Liar(71)

“I—” I shifted on the bed. “It’s fine. I just wanted to check.”

Mary turned back to the mirror and took up the last lock of hair, twisting it around the curling iron. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

I hadn’t sat in a bedroom watching another woman get ready in a long time. It smelled like hot hair and perfume, like the dressing room at prom. A memory floated past. My mother in the bathroom with Robin, me at the door. She’d told Robin to smile as wide as she could, and Robin had. You put it on the apples of your cheeks, my mother had said, patting her with the powder puff. She used loose powder and too much of it, like a lot of the women I remembered from my childhood. Pink circles, fever spots. Robin grinning. It wasn’t a happy memory. Why wasn’t it happy?

I’d been watching my mother in the mirror. It was her face that was wrong. A half smile, like a grimace. My father used to tell us it was her nerves. We wore on her nerves. We weren’t supposed to be in our parents’ bathroom. It was her private space. Us being there was wearing on her nerves. That was why she looked that way.

Had I called Robin away, told her to stop bothering our mother?

I couldn’t remember. The rest of it had faded.

“How did you meet Dave?” Mary said, jarring me. “I don’t think you ever told me.”

I shook my head. “It’s not an exciting story.”

She smiled into the mirror. “Sure it is.”

“No.” I couldn’t see myself behind her anymore. “Just in school. Business school for me. He was getting his MS.”

    I had been about to leave the party when we saw each other. I just went over to him. I never did things like that, bold things. But I’d had three beers and I went over to him and I said, I’m Leslie. I love your face, which I almost hated to remember. I did love his face, though; I’d loved it immediately, his wide, funny, flat-lipped mouth and faded pockmarks on his cheeks. The outside corners of his eyes tilted up a little, making him look permanently good-humored. His dark brown eyes, nearly the same color as his pupils.

He’d laughed, but not at me; he’d laughed and turned away from the woman he’d been talking to and said, I’m Dave. I love your face too.

I believed him when he said it. I didn’t even have a moment of doubt, the way I did when other men complimented me, their expressions expectant rather than admiring, waiting for the compliment to kick in, the way you waited for a faulty engine to turn over.

“How long ago was that?” Mary asked.

“Six years.”

She nodded. I watched her put in earrings, one after another. “Do you love him?” she said.

“Do I love my husband?” I repeated. “Of course I do.”

She padded back into the bedroom and kicked the sheets on the floor aside until she found a high heel. She put it on, then went around looking for the other one. “I just wondered if it, like, fades as you get older. I feel like everything kind of dries up, you know, eventually.”

“Not for me,” I said.

She found the other heel and straightened, several inches taller. “Okay. I’m ready. How about you?”

I couldn’t answer.

Mary came over and sat on the pile of socks next to me. The memory foam pressed us together. “If you need me to,” she said finally, “I’d help you, you know.”

I tried not to move next to her. “You are helping me,” I said.

She turned to me, her face half-lit by the bathroom. “With whatever it is you can’t tell me,” she said. “If it’s important, I’d help you. Like you helped me with Sam.”

    I stared straight ahead. After a second, she got up. I heard her heels clicking down the stairs.

I stood stiffly and turned around, looking for my purse. The dress she’d discarded was still lying on the mattress, and I picked it up to turn it right side out again.

Downstairs, the porch door opened and I heard Dave and Mary speaking in murmurs. She laughed, then stifled herself, as if she was afraid of waking Eli up. I stepped back to fold the dress and my foot landed on something sharp inside the rumpled sheet on the floor. I stumbled and dropped the dress. Then I lifted the sheet and shook it.

A key fell out, black plastic at the top, with a Hertz sticker. A rental car.

She had a car somewhere.

Mary’s footsteps grew louder again. “Leslie? Are you coming?” she called up the stairs.

I dropped the sheet back over the key.

How had she gotten the money to rent it? Had she done it under her own name?

I’d almost told her when we were sitting on the bed together—almost trusted her. But she was a stranger. I had forgotten for a second that she was a stranger.

“I’m coming,” I called back, voice stronger now.

She was nobody.

Mary was at the foot of the stairs, holding out my purse. “Can I drive this time?” she said, as if she really were my sister, as if she asked for the keys every week. As if she didn’t have her own car hidden somewhere, so she could leave me whenever she felt like it.

“Not this time,” I said, as if I believed her. When had she started talking to me like that?

Her eyes were clear and guileless as she handed me my purse. “Well, come on, lady,” she said, pushing open the door. “Let’s go get your money.”