A Curve in the Road(36)

I return to the living room and shake my head at her, because I came here for answers and I’m not leaving without them.

“Thanks, but I think I’ll stay awhile.”

She offers no reply, so I set my purse on the hall table, remove my jacket, and text my sister to let her know where I am.

Eventually, Paula staggers to the kitchen to fill a glass with water. She takes a few sips, then shuffles back to the sofa and sits down.

“I guess the cat’s finally out of the bag,” she says, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s glad about that.

I sit on a tattered upholstered chair, facing her. “If you’re talking about your affair with my husband, then yes, the cat’s running all over the damn place.”

I consider all the questions I want to ask her. She’d better be sober enough to answer them. At least there’s a coffee maker on the counter. I’ll do whatever it takes.

“You’re not doing yourself any favors,” I say, “by going on a bender like this. It won’t bring Alan back, and it won’t take away your pain. It’ll just add a whopping headache on top of it.”

“I know.”

We sit in silence for a moment until she finally meets my gaze. “You must really hate me right now.”

“I can’t say that I like you. I just want to know what was going on between you and Alan, and for how long.” I glance around the room. “Obviously, if you had this place together, it must have been serious.”

When she speaks, there’s a sudden hint of rancor in her voice. “It wasn’t serious enough to get him to leave you, even though I tried my best to convince him to.”

The jealous, aggrieved wife in me wants to scratch her eyes out for trying to take my husband away from me.

And she’s blaming me for her unhappiness? Seriously?

I have to fight to stay cool, only because I want more information. “Just tell me how you met him.”

She won’t look at me when she talks. “He came into the hardware store to buy a furnace filter. We didn’t have the kind he needed, so I had to special order it. I asked for his number so that I could call him when it came in.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Three years ago. It was summertime.”

I shift uneasily in my seat. “How soon after that did you start the affair?”

“Pretty soon after.” She meets my eyes with a look of pure misery. “When he came in to pick up the filter, it was my birthday, and he was so nice.”

There’s a hot pounding in my ears, and my body begins to tremble with rage. “Just tell me how it happened.”

She keeps her eyes fixed on mine, and I can’t decide if she’s full of grief and remorse or if she wants to rub this in my face like sandpaper. “We flirted and started texting each other, and then we met for a drink.”

As I imagine all of this happening, my stomach turns because I can’t imagine Alan—my darling Alan—falling under the spell of another woman. A woman who was married herself and obviously had no qualms about flirting with a married man with a teenage son. I want to scream and hit something, but there’s no way in hell I’ll let this morph into an episode of Jerry Springer in which we start screaming and throwing chairs at each other. I want to keep my cool.

“Were you married back then?” I ask.

“Yes. Just for a year or so.”

“That seems a bit soon to start cheating.”

She shakes her head with something that might be regret, but I can’t be sure. “Michael isn’t the easiest man to live with. He can be controlling sometimes. I probably shouldn’t have married him. But then Alan came along, and he was the opposite. He was so kind and caring.”

I wonder which of them was the instigator in all of this. The part of me that still loves my husband wants to believe it wasn’t his fault—that he was seduced and manipulated by a beautiful woman who was desperate to escape her own imperfect marriage. But I don’t know anything anymore. For all I know, Alan could have recognized that she was vulnerable and in need of a hero, and maybe that was what he couldn’t resist.

“Who started it?” I ask plainly. “You or Alan?”

“I don’t know,” she replies. “We both did, I guess. The attraction was intense.”

I look away, because hearing about their attraction makes me want to scream.

It also makes me feel inadequate—like a failure as a wife for not recognizing that our marriage was in trouble or for not working harder to keep the romance alive in the first place. But I was so busy with work, doing a lot of night shifts. I didn’t always have time for him. I certainly didn’t need him to be my hero. I prided myself on being a strong, independent woman, and I always made it clear that he wasn’t responsible for my happiness. I didn’t want to put that on him.

Was that the problem? Did he not feel needed? Was that why he’d had an affair?

Or was that when he stopped wanting me sexually? When he already had Paula on the side?

And how often did they come here? Was she better than me?

No. Abbie, don’t go there . . .

I turn and look at Paula again. She starts to cry, but I have no desire to comfort her. After a moment, she collects herself and slides her drunken gaze to meet mine. “I should have known he was never going to leave you. You should feel happy about that.”