She sat on the floor of Parker’s closet, held the note in her hand, and dialed Parker’s cell phone number. No answer. She dialed again, squinting at the readout window on her own phone to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake. But the number was correct, and nobody was answering.
Mary Bliss put the phone down again and looked at the note.
The bastard hadn’t even bothered to use a whole sheet of paper. It was written on the back of a junk mail envelope.
“MB,” it said.
“I’m gone. Mama’s all paid up at the nursing home. Tell Erin I’ll call when I’m settled. You are a good woman, and I’m sorry things didn’t work out. Sincerely, A. Parker McGowan.”
“Mama?”
Mary Bliss crawled to the door of the closet. Erin was wrapped in the big comforter, huddled in the middle of the king-sized bed. Her dark hair stood on end. One side of the oversized T-shirt had slipped off her slender shoulder, and the hazel eyes were clouded with sleep and confusion. Again, as always, her daughter reminded her of a just-hatched duckling. Mary Bliss thought she felt a jagged pain ripping through her right ventricle. It was only love.
“Did you forget again? That Daddy was going out of town?”
Of course. Out of town. Way out of town.
“Stupid old me,” Mary Bliss said, grimacing, giving herself a comic knock on the head. “Katharine made me drink gin and tonic at the pool tonight. You know how your mama gets when she drinks likker. Of course Daddy’s out of town. Dallas, I think. What time did you get home, sweet girl?”
Her lies came out smoothly, easily. Mary Bliss swallowed and felt the bile rising in her throat. They were just little lies.
“The movie got out at ten,” Erin said. “But Lizbeth had to have her quarter-pounder and fries, so we went to McDonald’s afterwards. I swear, that girl must have a tapeworm. And she never gets a zit or gains a pound. I hate her guts. And she told me tonight that she has a crush on Andrew Gilbert. Oh my God! Can you believe that? Last year he asked her out every day, and she wouldn’t even look at him. When we got home tonight, I came in here to watch Letterman. The cable’s messed up in my room. Guess I fell asleep. Are you sure Daddy’s in Dallas?”
A fine bead of sweat raised itself on Mary Bliss’s upper lip. She looked down. Her cotton gown was soaked, clinging to her chest and arms. She had to catch her breath, had to think.
She stood up and walked unsteadily to the bed, catching the bedpost with her right hand, grateful for the support.
“Honey, to tell the truth, I can’t keep it all straight. You know Daddy. He’s always on the move. With the holiday and all, Libby must have forgotten to fax me his itinerary. I’ll check in the morning.”
Erin nodded and yawned widely. “Okay if I sleep in here with you? It’s so hot in my room. I think you need to get the air conditioning people over here. I won’t wake you when I go to work in the morning.”
Erin had a summer job at the Gap. It paid better than lifeguarding at the club, which she had done last summer, and she also got a discount on clothes.
“You better wake me up,” Mary Bliss said, easing down into the bed. “I can’t sleep all day long, you know. Just because it’s summer. Teachers have stuff to do too.”
It was an unspoken rule in the McGowan house. Whenever one of them was away, Erin usually slept in the big bed upstairs. None of them felt this was odd or inappropriate, even though Erin was seventeen, going to be a senior this year at Fair Oaks Academy. Anyway, it was mostly Mary Bliss who ended up sharing the bed with Erin. Parker’s software consulting business seemed to take him out of town two or three weeks of every month.
She waited until Erin’s breath grew soft and sweet and regular, then peered over the mound of pillows her daughter had stacked up, like a moat surrounding a castle.
Erin had been a fretful baby, never sleeping through the night until she was nearly four. Now, though, she seemed to be catching up on all those lost hours. She slept as late as she dared on school mornings, liked a nap in the afternoons, and slept ’til noon most Saturdays.
Mary Bliss kissed her fingertip and planted it tenderly on the top of her daughter’s head.
She took the note, crumpled and damp with her own sweat, and read it again. She swept her hands through the row of clothes hanging on Parker’s side of the closet. His dress shirts, slacks, suits, sport coats, and ties were undisturbed. The shoe trees poked out of the line of wingtips and loafers. She opened the top drawer of the dresser. Neat balls of dark dress socks. But no white socks. She opened the next drawer down. His underwear had been cleaned out. Same with his shorts and T-shirts. She looked again at the row of shoes. No tennis shoes. He’d packed, all right, but not for business.
She flipped off the closet light and tiptoed downstairs to the den.
Parker had laughed at her when she told him this was her dream house. It was just a little cottage, really, a Craftsman bungalow on the nicest street in Fair Oaks. The house had been a shabby mess when they’d bought it, just before Erin was born. Parker always meant for them to move out of Fair Oaks and into Druid Hills, which he considered a nicer Atlanta neighborhood. He wanted them to join the Druid Hills Country Club, one of the more exclusive golf clubs in town, like the Piedmont Driving Club, or Ansley or the Peachtree Golf Club.
Parker had talked about taking up golf, once his business was doing really well. Fair Oaks Country Club was nice enough, but in the past it didn’t really have the glamour of the better-known clubs. The price of in-town housing in Atlanta had skyrocketed in the past five years, and now Fair Oaks was considered an enclave of exclusivity. Suddenly their cozy little four-bedroom, two-bath on the big half-acre lot was worth maybe ten times what they’d originally paid for it. It made Mary Bliss dizzy to think about it.
This den was supposed to be their little boy’s room. She’d waited, kept Erin’s crib there, along with the toy chest and the changing table. Then she hit thirty, and then Parker hit forty, and she knew there would be no second child. She’d fretted about it but knew better than to bring up the subject of infertility with Parker, who liked things just the way they were, thank you.
When Erin was twelve, Mary Bliss had found a leather sofa on sale at Rich’s, and she’d had some bookshelves made and refinished Parker’s granddaddy’s desk from the textile mill, hand-polished the old walnut until it shone like satin.
She sat at the desk now and looked around. No papers in the fax machine. No light blipped on the message machine. The desktop had been swept clean. Hospital-clean. So it was true. Parker was gone.
She felt that jagged pain in her chest again. What if she had a heart attack? Right now—with Parker gone Lord knows where, and Erin upstairs, sound asleep in their bed?
No, it wasn’t a heart attack, she decided. It was panic. Dread. Again she felt the same wave of nausea that had swept over her upstairs, where she’d crouched on the floor, reading the note by the closet light.
Gone. Gone where? And why?
Their life together was seamless as far as she knew. No major fights, no money worries. Mary Bliss taught at the public school, kept house, cooked, did volunteer work at the church and Erin’s private school. She visited Parker’s mother, Eula, once a week at the Fair Oaks Assisted Living Facility. They had dinner parties, went on vacation. Damn it, this was not a broken home. She had a normal, happy marriage. Didn’t she?
The problem was, one half of the marriage equation was gone and unavailable for polling.
She found herself praying, whispering aloud. “Please don’t let it be true. Please don’t let it be true.” Mary Bliss clamped her Harker lips together to make the praying stop.
The bank statements were neatly bundled together with rubber bands in the bottom drawer of the desk. When they’d first married, Mary Bliss had kept the household bills. She was good at it; liked toting up numbers, making a budget, keeping their little family ship afloat. But a year ago, Parker had insisted that his computer software could do a much better job of all that, so she’d reluctantly handed over the bill-paying to him.
It had hurt her feelings, his taking away her job, but she’d gone ahead and handed over the checkbook, and after a few months of not worrying over how many ATM withdrawal charges they were paying, Mary Bliss found she did not miss bookkeeping quite as much as she’d expected.
Everything was on the computer, she was sure. The problem was, Mary Bliss didn’t know where. She knew how to play solitaire and blackjack on the computer, knew how to pick up e-mail messages from Parker and her friends and former Agnes Scott classmates, but she had no idea where everything else could be.
She looked at the bank statements. For the first two months of the year, the balances in their checking, savings, and money market accounts looked fine. The checking account balance was a little low, but Parker did that intentionally because the bank didn’t pay interest on checking.
In March, the balance on all the accounts seemed to start dropping dramatically.
She skipped ahead to the most recent statement. May. It had been mailed only two days earlier. She looked at the number on the last sheet of paper and blinked. This had to be wrong. But the right account number was listed at the top of the sheet.
One time, a year ago, Parker had called from the airport in San Diego and asked her to call the computerized phone number to move some money around in their accounts. “It’s strictly for idiots,” he’d said when she’d protested that she didn’t know how. “Just listen to the instructions and punch in the codes when you’re given the prompt.”
She looked at the May statement again, found the telebanking number at the top of the first sheet. She dialed the number, followed the prompts, and listened, her pencil poised.
Zero. Zero in checking. Zero in savings. Zero in their money market account.
She heard a snapping noise and looked down. She’d broken the pencil in half.