Sherri’s counselor had done a lot of legwork to help them settle into their new lives, greasing the wheels in important and invisible ways. Apparently the surf camp at the beginning of the summer was nearly impossible to get into without a lot of prior planning! And Katie had secured a spot. Now Katie was enrolled in a series of one-week camps through the Youth Services program in town (this week’s was Knitting for Preteens; Sherri had never learned to knit herself and was in awe of the collections of stitches Katie had been bringing home each day) and Sherri, also with the counselor’s help, had a job interview. Here she was at Derma-You, a medical spa in Danvers, interviewing with the office manager, a woman named Jan. Sherri was carrying her fake resumé in a new bag she’d bought for $29.99 at Marshalls. She thought it looked like it cost quite a bit more than that, though.
It had been a long time since Sherri had held a job. She’d stopped working after she and Bobby got married. She hadn’t exactly been changing the world; she’d been working as a receptionist at a hair salon and frankly had been happy to give it up and concentrate on getting pregnant, which took longer than she thought it would. Now, the prospect of a job interview filled her with equal parts terror and feverish, trembling excitement. She, Sherri Griffin, was going to reenter the work force!
When Sherri walked into Derma-You’s waiting room she found it busy, full of women, most of them bent over clipboards and casting furtive glances around at the rest of the patients. She was shown by one of the smooth, ageless front desk employees to a small room in the back to meet Jan.
“We need someone to answer the phones, that sort of thing,” said Jan, launching right in. Apparently they weren’t going to sit around and engage in small talk. That was all right with Sherri. Small talk made her nervous, because she didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Jan could be in her fifties or in her thirties or her forties depending on how many of Derma-You’s services she had availed herself of. It was really hard to tell. Sherri tried to listen to her without staring too hard at her puffy lips.
“A lot of the job is answering phones,” said Jan. “Being the first face the patient sees, that sort of thing.”
“I’ve got a really good phone voice,” said Sherri, trying not to sound too eager.
“Eventually you’ll need to be trained in the billing system, which is sort of complicated.” Jan rustled the fake resumé, which had Sherri having had a number of clerical jobs in and around Columbus, Ohio. She furrowed her unfurrowable brow. “Have you ever worked in a medical office before?”
“Not specifically,” said Sherri. “But I’m a very fast learner.” That’s what the counselor had told her to say, and in fact it was true.
“Well, we’re extremely short-staffed right now,” said Jan. “We’re opening another branch in Woburn, and half of our front desk staff has had to go over there, so we’re scrambling. You can consider yourself hired.”
“Really?” It was that easy, to get a job?
“Really,” said Jan. She peered at Sherri’s face.
“What?” asked Sherri, putting a hand self-consciously to her cheek. The light was extremely bright in this office.
“You should stay out of the sun. You’ve got sunspots here”—Jan touched Sherri’s cheek along the top of her cheekbones—“and here.” The edge of her forehead. Sherri reared back; something had activated her “fight or flight” instinct.
“Sorry,” said Jan, lowering her hand. “I was just going to say, the lasers can do wonders with that. I didn’t mean to spook you.”
“You didn’t spook me,” said Sherri untruthfully.
“There’s no shame in wanting to improve yourself,” Jan said firmly. “That’s the most important thing you need to understand if you are going to work at Derma-You.”
“No! No, of course not,” said Sherri. “Of course there isn’t any shame in wanting to improve yourself.” If anybody in the place understood that, it was Sherri. If only there was a laser for the heart, thought Sherri. A filler for the soul.
They went over some specifics. Jan preferred to train new hires in the evening, when it was a bit quieter in the office. “Not that it’s ever really quiet,” she said, both proudly and ruefully. The office was open until nine three nights a week. Could Sherri come at six p.m. on the sixth of July, which was next Monday?
Yes, Sherri could come at six p.m. “How long will I stay that night?” she asked.
“A couple of hours,” said Jan. “Maybe longer.”
Sherri thought of Katie in the corner of the bedroom. Her heart started to beat faster. But she couldn’t not take the job. They had to eat; they had to pay the rent. “I’ll see you on the sixth,” she told Jan.
She made her way through the thrum of women seeking self-improvement: the women who felt no shame about their bodies and the women who obviously felt lots of shame. Once she was in her car she allowed herself a little whoop of joy. She had a job! She would get a paycheck and discounts on the lasering of sunspots! She, Sherri Griffin, would be a contributor to the economic wheels that powered the great state of Massachusetts.
Sherri decided she’d bring some sort of treat home for Katie to celebrate. Maybe some of those Angry Donuts from the shop on Winter Street. She hadn’t tried Angry Donuts yet—she didn’t know what the doughnuts were quite so angry about—but one of the moms had told her they were very good.
She found a parking spot near the shop, and when she got out of the car such a funny, unexpected thing happened. She wasn’t far from the river, and some of the scent had wafted her way. A pair of seagulls circled, letting out a mournful, delirious cry. From where she stood she could see the foot traffic and the bike traffic on the rail trail. It was all still so foreign to Sherri, the smells and the sounds and the very particular air of a New England summer. And at the same time, in some inexplicable way, she was starting to feel like she was home.
As it turned out, Angry Donuts sold out early most days and nothing was left for Sherri to buy. So after she picked Katie up at the knitting camp she took her to Mad Martha’s. They would celebrate Sherri’s new job!
Mad Martha’s was nothing more than a little cottage on Plum Island, really almost a shack, with just a few tables, the bigger of which patrons shared with other patrons whether they knew each other or not. Katie and Sherri were seated with a family of five on vacation from Durango, Colorado. The food was delectable, and the community table lent the whole experience a jolly, festive air. The Colorado family was chatty. Durango sounded lovely, with a famous railroad that wound through canyons and a national forest. Sherri put it immediately on her mental wish list of places to visit. The list was long and included India and Africa too. Realistically she probably wouldn’t get to any of those. Her pay at Derma-You was twenty dollars an hour, and she wasn’t even working full-time. The waiter was young and nice-looking, with beachy hair, a good tan, an easy smile. Sherri could tell that Katie was smitten, blushing faintly when she placed her order. Watch out for the good-looking ones, Sherri imagined telling her when she was a little older, in a few years’ time. I went for a good-looking one, and look what that got us.
The thing was, Bobby had often been tender and funny. He made a really good pesto sauce. Once they’d played mini golf and he’d crawled through a spiky hedge to retrieve her ball, when she very easily could have gotten a new one from the girl working at the counter. He used to make pancakes for Katie every Saturday morning, which was sort of a cliché of good fathering, but in fact the pancakes were sensational, and he never burned the bottoms. In bed they had an incredible connection—incredible. Sometimes, even now, she flushed when she thought about that. And, worse, she missed it.
The waiter at Mad Martha’s wasn’t even twenty, and it would have been unseemly for a woman of Sherri’s age—a mother! A Derma-You employee!—to let herself be attracted to him. But the glimpse of his bicep, the hollow below his cheekbone when he smiled, his firm, tan calves: all of these things made her wonder something that she hadn’t allowed herself to wonder since she and Katie had first set foot in that terrible motel that smelled like old cheese and despair. What she wondered was this: Would she ever have a man in her life again? Would she ever have sex again? It didn’t seem fair for her to have to give up sex altogether because Bobby had been involved in something so reprehensible. But how, exactly, would it come about, the sex? She lived in a town where everybody seemed already to be coupled off, marching two by two like animals onto the ark. Would she continue to wake day after day alone in the bed in this half-house with only Katie for company?
She took a bite of her breakfast burrito; it was the size of a small country and absolutely delicious. Maybe she and Katie should adopt a dog. Maybe Sherri should join Tinder. Was she too old for Tinder? Probably she was. Were people on Tinder looking for a slightly worn single mother with a secret past? Probably they weren’t. She sighed.
“I think we should do some updating,” Katie was saying as she worked her way through her pancakes. “To the house? Don’t you think it would be fun to do that, Mom? Maybe we could get a rug for the kitchen floor, like Morgan has. Something really bright. And some throw pillows for your bed! Wouldn’t you like to have some pretty throw pillows on your bed? They have them at Homegoods, do you think we should go to Homegoods?”
“Maybe,” said Sherri, turning her attention back to Katie. “Sure, we can go to Homegoods.”
“Today?”
“Why not?” Sherri was feeling flush, with the new job and all. “We’ll go today, after breakfast.” Bobby would never have wanted Sherri shopping in a Homegoods. He loathed discount shopping—he called it “shopping for other people’s castoffs.” She’d liked that he hadn’t wanted her to have other people’s castoffs.
“When’s your first day at work?” asked Katie.
“July sixth. In the evening.”
“The evening?” Katie looked stricken. “What will I do? Will I stay alone?”
“Will you be okay if you do?” Sherri asked.
“Yes,” said Katie’s voice—but her eyes told a different story.
“We’ll figure something out,” said Sherri. “I promise: we’ll figure something out.”
While they were waiting for the bill she pulled out her phone and texted Rebecca. I forgot to get Alexa’s number from you 😬 (she added the slightly chagrined emoji, to convey that it was probably her own fault). RE: Babysitting.
The first time Sherri found something was an accident. She was in Bobby’s office, looking for a stapler, and she dropped the papers she was holding. They slipped right out of her hands, almost like they wanted to lead her to something. When she bent to pick them up, she saw that the floor vent register under his desk chair was slightly askew. In her attempt to straighten it—Bobby was fastidious, she knew he wouldn’t want anything out of place in the house—she pulled at it, thinking she had to take it all the way off to put it back on straight. After she removed the register, she saw that four of the large floor tiles slid out of place too.
And underneath was not the place where forced hot air came out in the winter. Underneath was a hiding place, sort of a tunnel.
Of course she’d really known before that, hadn’t she? Maybe not the specifics, but she knew there was something going on. Something untoward. From the very beginning, there was so much money. None of the wives talked about where the money came from, they knew that a simple trucking business couldn’t make money like that unless it was trucking something very, very illegal. Drugs or jewels or people.
The wives didn’t let themselves think too much about it. They definitely didn’t talk about it. They spent it, and they enjoyed it—they practically bathed in it—but they didn’t talk about it.
There was so much of everything. Clothes, cars. A vacation at a five-star resort in Mexico where Katie played in the pool while Bobby and Sherri drank champagne that cost four hundred and fifty dollars a bottle. Sherri didn’t even blink when Bobby ordered it. When she drank it, it tasted like money. They had friends with yachts; they had friends with shares in private planes and vacation homes they’d never set foot in.
The first time Sherri found the hiding place there were two boxes full of hundred-dollar bills in there. Full. There must have been tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands. She didn’t count it. She just put it away, and she lined the floor tiles back up, and she put the register back too.
The next time, the money was gone, and there was a box inside a box inside a box—like an ominous set of Russian dolls—and inside the smallest box were twenty large diamonds.
Another time: cocaine, divided in tiny bags, like snacks for a preschool class. Once there were five fake passports, all for different people. Sherri saw all of it. She saw the laptop that looked exactly like the laptop on Bobby’s desk but wasn’t. (She tried to figure out the password for that laptop many times, but always stopped before it locked up. She tried her birthday and Katie’s birthday and their wedding anniversary and Bobby’s eight-hundred-meter time from high school. Nothing worked.)
It became her hobby, to keep an eye on the hiding place. It was like knitting or learning Spanish, but different. It was what Sherri did besides looking after Katie and keeping herself looking good for Bobby (nearly a full-time job in itself: the waxing, the nails, the peels, the hair). Even as she was tracking it, she told herself it was okay. Nobody was getting hurt. It was only money changing hands. She told herself that whoever’s money it was probably deserved to lose it—they’d probably done something bad in the first place. Brought it upon themselves.
She didn’t let herself consider the lives being ruined by the drugs, the kids who might be taking them, the desperate people who were selling them. She didn’t think about any of that.
And then came Madison Miller, and all she could do was think.