Kitty’s son, Marvin, showed up at her arraign ment and posted his mother’s bail. Then he asked if Dana would mind taking her home. “I must get back to work,” he said, pushing his round, black-framed glasses up onto the bridge of his sloping nose. Though not quite thirty, he was a top proctologist at Cedars-Sinai. It was a profession so fraught with innuendo that most people didn’t say a word, they just tried to hide their smiles.
Kitty kissed her son and thanked him for the bail. As dispassionate as Dana’s life had become, she was grateful that she was not Kitty.
“Shall we stop for lunch?” Dana asked, once they were seat-belted inside the Volvo.
Kitty sort of nodded. “If you’d like,” she said, her head tipping curiously to one side, her arms wrapping themselves around her too-thin middle, her gaze fixating on the dashboard.
They went to The Chocolate Flan because it was on the way to the apartment where Kitty had been staying since the movers had absolved the marital house of its furnishings. Like the apartment, the restaurant was in Tarrytown, so it would not matter that Kitty looked like a zombie, or that she wore Dana’s Polarfleece with linen pants.
They ordered salads. Kitty also ordered wine.
“You need a real attorney,” Dana said.
Kitty flinched as if she only just then realized that they were in the restaurant and not still in the car. “It won’t matter,” she replied. “I was the one who was holding the gun. No one’s going to believe I didn’t do it.”
Dana spread the mocha-colored napkin across her lap. “What happened, Kitty?”
Kitty zipped the fleece as if it were as cold in there as at the jail. Her eyes did not meet Dana’s but attached themselves to the small sunflower in the center of the table. “I went to the house to meet him.” The waiter brought her wine. She took a long, slow sip. “Vincent was already dead. Right there in the living room.” She took another drink. Dana wished she’d ordered wine, too. “I got scared,” Kitty added. “I took out my gun.”
“Your gun? I didn’t know you owned a gun.”
“Vincent bought it for me. He was so worried about all the cash he always carried. He was afraid someone would think I carried a lot of money, too.”
Dana didn’t ask why a futures trader—or his wife—would carry a lot of cash. Steven rarely had more than a hundred dollars, relegating the space in his wallet to American Express. Dana wasn’t much different.
“But…” Dana stumbled for the words. “The article said the gun was still smoking.” Since the boys had grown and gone and Steven was traveling so much, Dana spent too much time home alone, watching too many Law & Order reruns. She supposed it was a throwback to her early years as a cop’s daughter and her brief journalism dreams. But even before Lennie Briscoe and Jack McCoy, Dana would have known that when a gun was “still smoking,” it had just been fired.
Kitty lifted her glass again. “Ah,” she said, “a smoking gun. Right out of a Sue Grafton novel.”
It was the first spark of life Dana had witnessed since seeing Kitty that morning.
Then, lowering both her eyes and her voice, Kitty said, “I heard a noise. I thought the murderer was still in the house. I took out my gun and pulled the trigger by mistake. I shot the Oriental rug.”
“Excuse me?” Dana asked.
“The rug,” Kitty said, lifting her head again, this time her blue eyes wet with tears. “I shot the bloody rug that we bought when we went to Istanbul for our twentieth wedding anniversary.”
Dana frowned. “Isn’t the house empty?”
“Yes. Except for the rugs. A dealer from Newbury Street in Boston was coming to give us a price. Vincent promised to split the cash with me. Keep it away from the lawyers, you know. They already were charging the net worth of the house and the villa combined. Anyway, that’s why I went there. To meet Vincent and the rug dealer. We have nine carpets, in all. Scattered all over the house.” She waved her hand as if she were talking about dust mites and not valuable antique rugs.
“Did you tell the police?”
“Tell them what?”
“That you shot the rug?”
“Yes.”
“What did they say?”
“They told me I had the right to remain silent.”
The salads came, the waiter left.
“And did you?”
“I didn’t think I had a choice. What with the way it looked and all.”
The boys from Law & Order no doubt would have agreed.
Bridget had tried to be a good wife to Randall Haynes, a joyeux fille who would make his life a pleasant one. She did not care that some people thought she was a trophy: That was an American slang term; Americans could be so grossier, so visqueux.
Last year she had made certain her daughter was finally going to school in Provence—Ecole Ste. Anne—where Bridget would have gone if her parents could have afforded it. But Aimée was an only child, and Randall had finally agreed to send her, though he lamented that three times a year—Christmas break and spring and summer—would not be often enough to see his fourteen-year-old daughter.
Still, he’d allowed it because he knew his wife was from Provence. Luckily he did not know the rest.
But Bridget had tried to be a good wife. They’d had their ups and downs, like when he’d wanted more children and she’d said absolutely not, that she had not liked being pregnant, that she’d thrown up all the time. His good nature had vanished like a blip on a screen. He’d threatened to send her back to France without their daughter and without a dime. He said that in America the courts always sided with the parent with the money, especially if he could prove that prior to meeting him, she’d merely been a waitress and not a good one at that.
She hadn’t known if his caveats were true; she hadn’t known how to find out.
She hated Randall during that horrid time, hated him très terriblement. She thought of kidnapping Aimée and running away. But Bridget had nowhere to go, no longer anyone to go to.
She decided if she couldn’t have a good life, at least her daughter could. So she pretended to change her mind, to agree with Randall that another child would be worth a few months of illness. His humor, his love, returned. For several years she pretended to be trying to get pregnant, but instead she took the pill. Lucky for her, Randall was Catholic. As time went by he began to think that God had intervened (Bridget paid off a wayward priest to delicately plant the suggestion). When she turned forty, Randall woefully gave up, and now they only had sex on occasion, like Christmas and birthdays and when the Dow broke twelve thousand.
Through it all, Bridget had not once thought of shooting him.
She stood in the middle of her daughter’s enormous walk-in closet now, surveying the skirts and shirts and pants and cotton sweaters Aimée might want at school in the next couple of months. It had been a thin excuse for not accompanying Dana to Kitty’s arraignment. But the truth was, she couldn’t fit one more drama into her life.
“So sorry, darling,” Bridget had whined when Dana emerged from upstairs, dressed for the courtroom, keys to her Volvo in her hand. “But I’ll be leaving in days to get Aimée—I have so much to do!”
She could have lied and said she had a doctor’s appointment, but she’d had enough of those lately and didn’t want to jinx her diagnosis.
“Most women survive cervical cancer,” her doctor had told her.
No one else, of course, knew. Not Dana or Caroline or Lauren. Not Aimée. Not Randall.
When Bridget had her hysterectomy, they’d thought she’d gone into the city to have some work done on her thighs (liposuction wasn’t just for fat people anymore) and her tummy (tucking was so easy). It was amazing how the latest patient rights’ legislation helped you burrow like a little mole in a medical backyard, helped you keep your private things truly private, God bless America.
Radiation treatments were even easier to pull off: She’d claimed to be a volunteer for a French program at the United Nations. Every day for seven weeks, she took the train into the city. No one questioned, not even Randall, why she was exhausted. Nor did anyone question why she was having godawful hot flashes because no one knew her body had been hurled into menopause ahead of its natural time.
Still, the doctors wanted Bridget to have chemotherapy. But she wanted to put it off until she’d told Luc.
Luc, after all, had been her first husband, though her second didn’t know it; he’d fathered her son, whom Randall didn’t know about, either. Luc was the man Bridget had loved forever, the man who lived across the sea, not far from where Aimée now went to school, quelle coincidence. Bridget needed for Luc to know she still loved him, in case she was not like “most women” and did not survive.
Plucking a pretty pink sweater from a cubbyhole, Bridget smiled. She folded it, dropped it into the suitcase. She’d leave for Provence this coming weekend to spend a few days in the country before bringing her daughter home. While she was there, she’d tell Luc about the cancer. Maybe then he’d tell her that he still loved her, too.
With slow, deliberate motions, she packed the suitcase. If she finished early enough, she might go back to Dana’s and ask how Kitty had made out.
It was after five o’clock when Dana finally arrived home. She went into the living room, poured a glass of wine, and sat down on the love seat, propping her feet on the low coffee table, the way she’d often admonished her sons for doing.
She’d hated leaving Kitty. The apartment Kitty was renting (two bedrooms, two baths, no ambience) was partially filled with the landlord’s unimaginative furniture, poorly framed floral prints, and thin window blinds that at least blocked the view of Interstate 287. She said she’d be fine but Dana wasn’t convinced.
Nor was she convinced Kitty hadn’t shot Vincent.
It had been nearly a year since Kitty had been one of “them,” nearly a year since Vincent had left her and snatched her credentials the way the Queen of England had once revoked Princess Di’s “HRH” just because her husband couldn’t get his priorities straight. It was abominable, Dana thought, the way men could be the screwups, yet emerge the victors.
Her cell phone and the house phone rang simultaneously. Dana closed her eyes and considered answering neither. But she’d spent too many years as a mother to be comfortable with that (“Michael”—or Ben or Sam—“fell on the playground and split his forehead open”) and too long as a New Falls wife to expect such a luxury (“Honey, my driver can’t get to LaGuardia. Do you feel like taking a ride?”).
So she opened her eyes, checked caller ID (Caroline, not the school, and Bridget, not her husband), and answered them both anyway.
“We all need to do lunch tomorrow,” Caroline said, and Dana agreed and passed the query over to Bridget.
Lunch, of course, was not about food, which none of them ate much of anyway. It was, instead, their justification to talk, their venue for resolving the persistent issues that had a way of creeping into their lives.
The issue, right now, being Kitty, though Dana was surprised Caroline was feigning interest.
“She called me,” Caroline said.
“She called her,” Dana relayed to Bridget, who was on the cell.
“She wants the name of an attorney.”
“She asked Caroline for the name of an attorney.”
“She doesn’t understand that I can’t get involved.”
Dana wasn’t sure how to translate that to Bridget, so she merely tucked the receiver between her neck and her chin and took a drink from her glass.
“What time?” Bridget was asking. “And where?”
“Where?” Dana asked Caroline. “What time?” She’d have to reschedule her pedicure, but this was more important. Steven wouldn’t be home for another few days, and it wasn’t as if anyone else saw her toes.
“Twelve-thirty. At Calabrese.”
“That’s in Tarrytown,” Dana said.
“Yes. It’s near where Kitty lives. She’ll join us there.”
Dana passed the information on to Bridget, who asked, “Shall I call Lauren?”
Dana turned from her cell back to her landline. “What about Lauren?”
“No,” Caroline said. “I already called her. She said she can’t make it.”
Can’t. Won’t was more like it, Dana suspected. Lauren, after all, was afraid of her own silly shadow.
“Shall we meet at the restaurant?” Dana asked.
“Yes,” Caroline replied. “I have an early appointment at the museum.” She was on more boards of directors than seemed physically possible.
“We’ll meet her there,” Dana told Bridget.
“I’ll pick you up,” Bridget said to Dana, which would happily allow for pre-and post-lunch discussion.
They said good-bye all around, then Dana hung up both phones, stared at her wineglass, and wondered how it happened that life did these kinds of things, that as soon as you felt restless and bored, along came a distraction to keep you from losing your mind.
She thought she was going to go crazy.
Lauren sat on the window seat in the master suite, looking out at the rolling green lawn and the towering oak trees and the flower beds that had been tended by Jeffrey, the gardener, who once worked for Martha Stewart but now worked for her and for Caroline, too, doing twice the work for four times the price. He had, after all, married Lauren’s stepdaughter Dory, and the women took care of their own.
Lauren sat on the window seat, toying with her triple strand of pearls, her eyes stinging with tears, her throat closing with fright.
She was alone in the “big house on the hill,” as Bob called it because of the way it was perched, overlooking (overseeing) the town as Bob liked to do. Bob and Mr. Chang had gone into the city, after Mr. Chang said he’d very much enjoyed his visit to their home.
She’d smiled and bowed and said, “It was a pleasure to have you,” all the while holding her secret close to her chest, so close that Mr. Chang could not suspect anything might be askew, so close that Bob wouldn’t know, either.
Finally they’d left. She’d sat there and watched as Jeffrey packed up his rakes and his hoes and departed, too. And now she stared at the stillness of the earth and the quiet of the sky as the sun slid toward the horizon, its soft salmon color stretching its arms.
She sat there in the silence and wondered how soon it would be before everything erupted. How soon it would be before someone, somehow, would learn that, before Yolanda, Vincent DeLano had been sleeping with her.