The Queen of Hearts(90)
The gun belts of the cops rattled, they laughed so hard.
“That’s a barn, honey,” one said, not unkindly, but I saw Emma’s eyes gloss. After that she stayed quiet.
We were headed to my house, an hour farther south in the foothills of the Appalachians, but our trip took a detour when we stopped for lunch. “Let’s go to your house,” I said impulsively. “You’ve been to mine a bunch.”
“No,” she said flatly.
“Why?” I said. “I want to meet your mom. And then we’ll head over to Falls Cove”—that was my family’s land—“in time for dinner.”
Emma declined again, but I persisted. It was a gorgeous day. I wanted to go somewhere new and unknown and different; despite growing up in the country, I’d never been that far east into the wilderness of the state’s mountain ranges. And I wanted to see Emma’s house and meet her mother; it seemed weird that she knew my family so well but I’d never met hers.
Emma’s mother was in her forties, but her face was the weathered crevasse of a much older woman. A pink space yawned in her mouth where her front teeth should have been. I tried to make my eyes look somewhere else when she welcomed us into the peeling pile of boards behind her.
The floor, composed of some kind of rough-hewn knotholed gray wood, had nothing beneath it. No concrete, no insulation. Between gaps in the wood, I could see the ground a couple feet below, which was littered with stuff: tin cans, a shovel, something that looked like a rusty lawn mower engine. I was so fixated on the floor it was some moments before I noticed the interior surroundings. We stood in one of three rooms, all open to one another: a kitchen with a metal table; a tiny living area, dominated by an old boxy television; and a sleeping area with one double bed. I looked around again, but that was it. I could not imagine where Emma had slept growing up.
I couldn’t remember much from the rest of the visit. Emma’s mother seldom spoke, but she was hospitable; she made us some corn bread in a skillet and insisted we take the last sodas from the short, round-edged refrigerator when we left. If she was baffled by the changes in her only child’s fortune, she didn’t show it. She hugged Emma fiercely, warmly, when we left, reaching up with a veiny, knobby hand to clasp the top of her much taller daughter’s head.
I could not interpret Emma’s expression.
—
Now I flushed, seared by the memory. “I—I know how you grew up,” I said, uncertain how to reference the extreme poverty in which she’d been raised. “But look at you.”
Emma cast her eyes down and started to say something. I could see right through her: a blast of confusion, a wave of self-loathing.
“Don’t think that,” I blurted, momentarily forgetting the difficult circumstances between us. “I love you.”
Suddenly I was very aware of the restaurant noises: tinkling glassware, murmured conversations, the swish of a swinging door between the diners and the kitchen. Emma’s eyes shone. “You did love me,” she said. “I should have given you more credit.”
“Of course I did.”
“Anyway,” she said, too brightly, “here we go. I’m confessing. And it’s okay; I am going to revel in the indescribable lightness of honesty, even if you decide you’re done with our friendship. I’ll accept whatever you decide, Zadie. I deserve it. When I saw your reaction to the picture of me and Nick, which was . . . not understated . . . it reminded me of what a monumental shithead I am.”
“Well, I am a person who feels things keenly,” I said, relieved at her switch to a more conversational tone. “It’s possible I could even be described as a tad overdramatic.”
Emma allowed herself a tight-lipped smile. “I’m aware of your tendency toward keen feelings and drama, since I’ve been your friend more than half my life. But you were entitled to that reaction. What I did to you was loathsome.”
“Right, then.” I took the plunge. “Go ahead and lay it on me. What could possibly be worse than you having an affair with my boyfriend? My married boyfriend.”
Emma shook her head. “He wasn’t married.”
“I heard—”
“I know what you heard. But that was actually just a rumor Nick started himself, to get some nurses off his back. He wasn’t married.”
“When I went to his apartment the last time, his wife was there. I heard her.”
Emma waited for it to dawn on me.
“Wait. It was you? You were the one in his apartment when I went to confront him? He said it was his wife!”
She shook her head again, a small, regretful gesture. “He didn’t say that. But he let you believe it because he thought it would hurt you less to think he was married than to know the truth. He was desperate that you not know.”
She stopped and waited again, a patient kind of pain on her face. I mulled it over; then I gasped.
“He was married to you?”
Emma gasped back. “No!” she said. “Okay, so there was one calamity I managed to avoid. No.”
“What, then?” I thought about it some more. I’d barged into Nick’s apartment one night after an ER shift; that rotation had been in the early winter. All of a sudden, it struck me.
“Emma, that was way after Graham died. Why would y—”