She threw back the drink. Her mind flashed up the image of Paul throwing back his Scotch in the restaurant four nights ago. She gagged as the liquid hit her stomach and burned back up her throat.
“Goodness.” Ginny patted Claire’s back. “Are you okay, dear?”
Claire winced as she swallowed. She felt a sharp pain in her cheek. There was a small rash of scraped skin where her face had grazed the brick wall in the alley. Everyone assumed the injury had happened during the robbery, not before.
Ginny said, “When you were a little girl, I used to give you Scotch and sugar for your cough. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I do.”
She smiled at Claire with genuine affection, which was something Claire could not quite get used to. Last year, the old woman had been diagnosed with something called pleasant dementia, which meant that she had forgotten all the perceived slights and neurotic obsessions that had made her such a nasty bitch for the first eight decades of her life. The transformation had made everyone wary. They were constantly waiting for the old Ginny to rise up phoenix-like and burn them all anew.
Helen told Claire, “That was nice that your tennis team showed up.”
“It was.” Claire had been shocked that they’d made an appearance. The last time she’d seen them, she was being shoved into the back of a police car.
“They were dressed so impeccably,” Ginny said. “You have such lovely friends.”
“Thank you,” Claire said, though she wasn’t sure whether they had attended Paul’s funeral because they were still her friends or because they couldn’t pass up a juicy social event. Their behavior at the cemetery had offered no clues as to which was the truth. They had kissed Claire’s cheek and hugged her and told her how sorry they were, and then they had all wandered off while Claire was greeting other mourners. She couldn’t hear them, but she knew what they were doing: picking apart what everyone was wearing, gossiping about who was sleeping with whom and who had found out and how much the divorce would cost.
Claire had found herself having an almost out-of-body experience where she floated like a ghost over their heads and heard them whispering, “I heard Paul was drinking. Why were they in that alley? What did they think would happen in that part of town?” Someone, invariably, would make the old joke, “What do you call a woman in a black tennis dress? A Dunwoody widow.”
Claire had been friends with these types of mean girls all of her life. She was pretty enough to be the leader, but she’d never been able to engender the type of fearless loyalty it took to marshal a pack of she-wolves. Instead, she was the quiet girl who laughed at all the jokes, straggled behind them at the mall, sat on the hump in the backseat of the car, and never, ever—ever—let them know that she was secretly fucking their boyfriends.
Ginny asked, “Which one were you charged with assaulting?”
Claire shook her head to clear it. “She wasn’t there. And it wasn’t assault, it was disorderly conduct. That’s an important legal distinction.”
Ginny smiled pleasantly. “Well, I’m sure she’ll send a card. Everyone loved Paul.”
Claire exchanged a look with her mother.
Ginny had hated Paul. And she had hated Claire with Paul even more. Ginny had been a young widow when she raised Claire’s father on a paltry income from a secretarial job. She wore her struggles like a badge of honor. Claire’s designer clothes and jewelry and the big houses and the pricey cars and the luxury vacations had come as a personal affront to a woman who had survived the Great Depression, a world war, the death of a husband, the loss of two children, and countless other hardships.
Claire could vividly recall the time she’d worn red Louboutins to visit her grandmother.
“Red shoes are for toddlers and whores,” Ginny had quipped.
Later, when Claire had told Paul about the exchange, he’d joked, “Is it creepy that I’m fine with either?”
Claire put her empty glass back in the console. She stared out the window. She felt so out of time and place that she momentarily didn’t recognize the scenery. And then she realized that they were almost home.
Home.
The word didn’t seem to fit anymore. What was home without Paul? That first night when she got in from the police station, the house seemed suddenly too big, too empty, for just one person.
Paul had wanted more. He had talked about children on their second date and third date and countless dates thereafter. He had told Claire about his parents, how wonderful they were, how he had been devastated when they’d died. Paul was sixteen when the Scotts were killed in a car accident during a freak ice storm. He was an only child. The only relative he’d had left was an uncle who passed away while Paul was in high school.
Her husband had made it clear that he wanted a big family. He wanted lots and lots of kids to inoculate himself against loss and Claire had tried and tried with him until finally she had agreed to go see a fertility expert who had informed Claire that she couldn’t have children because she had an IUD and was taking birth control pills.
Of course, Claire hadn’t shared that information with Paul. She had told her husband that the doctor had diagnosed her with something called an “inhospitable womb,” which was true because what was more inhospitable than a pipe cleaner stuck up your uterus?
“Almost there,” Helen said. She reached over and touched Claire’s knee. “We’ll get through this, sweetheart.”
Claire grabbed her mother’s hand. They both had tears in their eyes. They both looked away without acknowledging them.
“It’s good you have a grave to visit.” Ginny stared out the window with a pleasant smile on her face. There was no telling where her mind was. “When your father died, I remember standing at his grave and thinking, This is the place where I can leave my grief. It wasn’t immediate, of course, but I had somewhere to go, and every time I visited the cemetery, I felt like when I got back into my car, a tiny little bit of grief was gone.”
Helen brushed invisible lint from her skirt.
Claire tried to summon good memories of her father. She was in college when Helen called to say that he was dead. At the end of his life, her father had been a very sad, very broken man. No one had been surprised when he’d committed suicide.
Ginny asked, “What’s that missing girl’s name again?”
“Anna Kilpatrick.”
The limo slowed as it made the wide turn into the driveway. Helen shifted in her seat to look out the front window. “Is the gate supposed to be open?”
“I guess the caterers—” Claire didn’t finish the sentence. There were three police cars parked behind the caterers’ van. “Oh, God. What now?”
A policewoman motioned for the limo to park on the pad down from the main house.
Helen turned to Claire. “Have you done something?”
“What?” Claire couldn’t believe the question, but then she thought about the Valium and the Tramadol and the Scotch and her heartless parole officer who’d said Claire’s smart mouth was going to get her in trouble one day, to which Claire had told him that day had come and gone or she wouldn’t have a parole officer.
Would he really drug-test her on the day of her husband’s funeral?