Mary Bliss barely made it to the downstairs powder room. After the first spasm of nausea subsided, she managed to kick the door shut with her foot so that her retching wouldn’t echo through the house. She had no idea how long she stayed like that, sprawled on the cold tile floor, hugging the commode, bleating and sobbing and cursing and praying.
Finally, she got to her feet, scrubbed her face with cold water, and rinsed out her mouth with a tiny sample bottle of mouthwash she found in the cupboard under the sink.
The woman in the mirror stared back at her with red-rimmed eyes and skin gone pale under the summer tan.
“Christ,” she moaned.
After a while, she forced herself to go back to the den. Parker had made no attempt to hide what he’d done. She found the stack of bills tossed in the top drawer of the desk, the dunning notices paper-clipped to the front of each envelope. Atlanta Gas Light. Georgia Power. Southern Bell. Cablevision. Fulton County Tax Assessor’s Office. Piedmont Savings and Loan. Visa, American Express, Talbot’s, Land’s End.
When she’d opened all the envelopes, faced all the facts, the desktop was littered with the pieces of paper that traced their lives for the last four months. The special dinners at Babette’s Café and Bones. Erin’s prom dress, $240 from Nordstrom’s. Four steel-belted radial tires for the minivan. Two black canvas Voyager suitcases from Land’s End, and six cotton pique sports shirts, for a total of $377.86.
But there were no other clues. No plane tickets or hotel reservations or rental cars. Nothing to explain Parker’s treachery, his decision to steer their little family ship smack into the shoals of humiliation and despair.
Mary Bliss reached across the mound of paper and picked up the framed photo by the telephone. It was an old black-and-white snapshot. Parker, his mama and daddy (bless his heart, Grampa Mac had his hands full with Eula), and Mary Bliss, holding baby Erin, standing in front of the cottage at the Cloister. The photo was taken right before Grampa Mac got sick. He’d taken them all to the Cloister for Easter that year. There was a palm tree in the background, and they were all tanned, smiling, looking, Mary Bliss always thought, a little like a southern version of the Kennedys. In the photo, Mary Bliss had Erin tilted toward the camera; Parker’s hand rested lightly on the nape of Mary Bliss’s bare neck, while Mary Bliss looked up at Parker in something like adoration, and one strap of her sundress had fallen off her shoulder. Grampa Mac was smiling down at the baby, and Eula, she stared straight ahead at the photographer, lips bared in the closest thing she could get to a grin.
It was the last picture they had of Grampa Mac. The leukemia had been deadly but quick. Bless his heart. Al McGowan didn’t have a mean bone in his body. What would he say about his only son leaving her in a mess like this?
She took the photo and whapped it hard against the edge of the desktop. The glass splintered into a bazillion pieces. With the edge of her hand she swept them over the edge of the desk and into the trash can.
Parker’s slot in the garage was empty, nothing but a small grease stain where the Lexus should have been. She leaned against the garage doorway and closed her eyes, smelling the garage smells—gasoline and weed killer and fertilizer. Where had he gone? Had he simply driven off, leaving them behind like a pile of old newspapers?
“You’re a good woman,” Parker had written. Good for what? Leaving?
The cicadas droned on and on. Out on the front porch, Mary Bliss tucked her legs under her and used the weight of her body to rock the old wicker chair in time to the rhythm of the whirring insects.
It was only slightly summer, technically, but the heat on the porch was already a damp blanketing presence. Her gown stuck to her back and legs, and her hair was soaked with sweat. Soon the county would start the water restrictions. Her lawn, her perennials and ferns, were already wilting in anticipation. And her tomatoes, the Early Girls, could not stand a drought right now. She got up, walked around to the side of the house, and turned on the sprinklers.
Then she rocked and listened to the soft swish of the water hitting the parched grass. A mosquito flitted around her head, and a moth danced around the porch light. Gradually, the navy velvet sky lightened, then washed into purple, then peach. The streetlights switched off, and slowly she saw porch lights flicker on at the house across the street. Fifteen minutes later, the house next door was lit up too. Discreet little FOR SALE signs had sprouted on the lawns at the Gasparinis and the Weidmans, like the first toadstools of summer.
Fair Oaks taxes were sky-high, and everybody sent their kids to private schools. A divorce usually meant a reshuffling of finances. Mary Bliss still couldn’t believe Katharine intended to sell her house. It was the biggest and oldest in the neighborhood, but Katharine said it was a mausoleum, and she intended to buy one of the new condos being built at the back of the old Connelly estate.
Directly across the street, even the pearly morning light was not kind to the Bowdens’ house. It looked more than a little tatty. The lawn needed mowing, weeds were as high as the azaleas in the pine island, and four or five days’ worth of newspapers were piled in a heap by the front door. Randy Bowden’s little green Saab backed slowly down the driveway and out onto the street. Mary Bliss scrunched down in the rocker so that Randy wouldn’t catch sight of her. She felt sorry for him, that was for sure. Did he know what his wife was up to in that Winn-Dixie parking lot last night?
It wasn’t until the Saab was out of sight that she remembered to feel sorry for herself. Parker was gone, and from the look of things, so was all their money.
The morning quiet was split by the throb of a bad muffler on a rusted white Cadillac that came rattling slowly down the street. She knew without even looking that this was not a vehicle owned by a Fair Oaks resident. Sure enough, when the car rolled past, she saw a dark, sinewy arm extended from the driver’s window, and she saw the rolled-up newspaper go sailing onto the Bowdens’ front yard, plonking onto the sidewalk near the pine island, not far from the other, yellowing newspapers.
The arm extended again, and the newspaper sailed over the top of the Cadillac, landing neatly at her own curb.
At least Parker had cut their grass before leaving. He’d been meticulous about their lawn, lavishing it with iron supplements and fertilizer, aerating twice a year, spring and fall, trimming and weeding until it was the deepest green on the block.
The McGowans had won “Yard of the Month” so many times from the Fair Oaks Garden Club, it had gotten embarrassing.
Now, with Parker gone, how long would it be before the neighbors were tsk-tsking under their breath about her weeds, her scraggly azaleas, and her yellowing stack of newspapers? When a yard in Fair Oaks went to hell, it was the first sign, she thought, that a marriage was on the rocks.
“Welcome to Split City,” she told herself.