She was peering out the window, watching a black sedan with tinted windows pull into her driveway, then back out and leave, when the phone rang.
“Mom?” Static on the line. Erin must be using her cell phone. “Just wanted to let you know I’m going to the movies with a couple of girls from the store. Then we’ll probably go to Starbucks afterward. I’ll be home around midnight. Okay?”
Mary Bliss looked at the chili-roni casserole on top of the oven. “But I fixed dinner already. Your favorite. Anyway, didn’t you just go to a movie last night?”
“Mo-om. It’s summer. There’s nothing else to do. Anyway, just put dinner in the fridge. I’ll take it to work for lunch tomorrow. Is that cool?”
“I guess,” Mary Bliss said. “What are you going to see? Not another of those horrible slasher movies, I hope.”
Erin giggled. “I’m nearly eighteen, Mom. Too old for Disney. It’s the new Mel Gibson movie. Don’t worry, there’s hardly any slashing at all. And I won’t be late. Did Daddy call?”
Mary Bliss gulped and thought about what to say.
“Haven’t heard from him,” she said, her voice gay, even carefree.
“Well, did you figure out where he went? Did you ask Libby?”
Mary Bliss’s throat constricted. “No, uh, Libby was out of the office all day.” Which was true.
Erin sighed. “What a rat. Daddy was supposed to take me to buy tires for the Honda tomorrow. Guess it’ll have to wait for next weekend.”
“Probably,” Mary Bliss said. She added new tires to the growing list of expenditures in her head. She’d have to find the money for the tires somehow. Couldn’t have Erin running around Atlanta on bald Firestones.
“Drive careful,” she said, and Erin promised, and they hung up.
Mary Bliss went into Parker’s office and got the big atlas down off the bookshelf. She took it back to the kitchen table, got the bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator, and filled up an iced tea glass with it.
She was running a finger down the map index, paused at the Azores, when someone rapped smartly at the back door.
Mary Bliss whirled around in her chair and saw a tall man in a white baseball cap standing there. The door was unlocked, of course. She was so used to leaving everything unlocked. Maybe that was where she’d gone wrong. Maybe she should have locked up tight, kept Parker at home where he belonged, instead of taking off for some island somewhere. But the door was unlocked, her husband was gone, and suddenly she felt incredibly vulnerable.
“Mary Bliss?” The man’s voice was apologetic. “It’s me, Randy Bowden. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Randy,” she said, her voice giddy. “Of course you didn’t scare me. My mind was just a million miles away is all.” Literally.
Her cheeks flaming, she got up and opened the door for her neighbor.
“How in the world are you?” she asked, her voice high and squeaky, taut with nervous tension.
Randy was in a bad state and they both knew it. There were deep circles under his eyes. His graying blonde hair was shaggy under the cap, and his shorts and T-shirt hung baggily on his already lanky frame. He’d lost at least five pounds since Memorial Day weekend, when she’d last seen him at the country club.
“I’m all right,” Randy said. It was his stock phrase. People didn’t know what to say to somebody whose life had gone to hell. “How are you?” he asked, for lack of anything better to say.
Mary Bliss stood there, unable to answer. She was rooted to the kitchen floor. She didn’t want him in her kitchen, didn’t want his naked pain so close, so close it could be catching, like cooties, or cancer, or the plague. Go on back across the street, she wanted to tell Randy Bowden. We’ll both wave and pretend nothing bad has happened to either of us.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” she said finally, gesturing toward the bottle on the table. She took the atlas and shoved it under a stack of cookbooks on the shelf.
Randy looked around the room. “Is, uh, Parker at home?”
She stared down at the table. He knew. He had to know. And if Randy Bowden knew, it must be all over Fair Oaks that Parker McGowan had run off and abandoned his family. Everybody at the club, everybody on her block, even the big-haired lady at the dry cleaners and the girls on her tennis team, even that pimply, hormone-charged lifeguard at the pool knew that Mary Bliss’s husband had discarded her like an empty cigarette pack.
“No, um, Parker’s out of town on business. Can I take a message for him?” The lie came easily, and she took a long sip of wine.
Now it was Randy’s turn to blush. His pale blue eyes blinked rapidly behind the tortoiseshell-framed eyeglasses. He shifted from one foot to the other, ran a pale tongue over his lips.
“Maybe, if you don’t mind, I’d love a glass of wine. If it’s not any trouble.”
“No trouble,” she said smoothly, and was glad to occupy her hands getting down a proper wine glass, a paper napkin, pouring and handing it to him.
The two of them nearly emptied their glasses in one embarrassed gulp.
Randy leaned a bony hip against the kitchen counter.
“Actually, Mary Bliss, you’re the one I really need to talk to. It’s kind of embarrassing. In fact, it’s embarrassing as hell. Could I have a little more of that wine?”
She nodded and poured it out, hardly spilling any.
“You know Nancye and I are separated, right?”
She nodded and looked down at her wine glass, then up at Randy. “Somebody mentioned it yesterday,” she said. “I’m always the last to know about these things. I’m so sorry, Randy.”
For some reason, it was important that she let him know that she hadn’t been gossiping about him. Even though, of course, she had. But everybody in Fair Oaks was talking about the Bowdens. And that was understood. In a small town like theirs, juicy gossip was the coin of the realm.
Randy pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. He’d lost so much weight, even his glasses were too big.
“She walked out. Just up and walked out on all of us. My lawyer says I can’t get custody of the kids without a fight. He says it’s gonna get nasty.” He laughed, but he didn’t smile. “I didn’t think things could get any nastier than they already were. Guess I was being naive. Right now, we’ve got joint custody. But, uh, Nancye’s behavior has gotten kind of, uh, you know.”
“Really?” Mary Bliss coughed. “I had no idea.”
He picked at his thumbnail. Mary Bliss knew he worked in downtown Atlanta, doing something at the bank that used to be C&S but was now called something else. His hands were unusual for a banker, though, callused, red, crisscrossed with cuts and scrapes.
“God,” he blurted. “I can’t do this.” He sighed. “I was going to ask you to do something for me. It’s disgusting. So, never mind.” He shook his head, jerked abruptly away from the counter, and knocked over the wine glass. He grabbed for it, but it fell to the floor, shattering into bits.
“God,” he exclaimed. “I’m sorry. What a moron.”
“It’s nothing,” Mary Bliss said, running to the sink for paper towels and a whisk broom. She was babbling, trying to make him feel better. “Just an ugly old cheap wine glass you got free with a ten-dollar purchase. At the Winn-Dixie.”
She clapped her hands to her mouth as soon as the words had escaped. Winn-Dixie. He must think she was awful.
“I’m so sorry,” Randy said, stooping now, holding out the dustpan. “I’ll replace this. I think we’ve got a set of these glasses at the house. Nancye goes to Winn-Dixie all the time. I think she likes the meat.”
Mary Bliss gasped, then started to choke. Thank heavens Katharine wasn’t here. She would be rolling on the floor, hooting and screaming with laughter. Katharine had a very smutty mind.
The more she thought of Katharine, the more her unintentional faux pas worked on her. She started to giggle but clamped her lips shut, trying to suppress the laughter. Poor Randy would think she was a mental case. The giggle kept welling up, and now tears were streaming down her face, and oh, God, she thought she might wet her pants.
Randy sat back on his heels, astonished. He hadn’t expected anybody, especially one of Nancye’s friends, to sympathize with him. Nancye was telling everybody in town that he was abusive, drank too much, was a control freak. Everybody loved Nancye. She was the life of every party. People were choosing up sides, avoiding him. What other lies had his wife been telling on him?
Mary Bliss stood up, her knees pressed together. She fanned her face with her hand. “I’m sorry, Randy. I really am. I shouldn’t drink wine this early. What was it you were going to ask me? Please.” She touched his arm. “I’d like to help. I can tell you’re in pain.”
He took the dustpan full of glass bits and dumped it in her trash can. “Has Nancye called you? Mentioned anything to you about me?”
Her eyes widened. “She left a message on my answering machine today. I haven’t called her back yet. Why? What’s going on?”
“She’s called all our friends. Practically everybody in Fair Oaks. Even people we don’t know very well. I’m surprised she waited this long to call you.”
“We’re not really that close,” Mary Bliss explained.
“Close enough to hear her scream when I beat her?” Randy asked, gazing straight at her. “Close enough to see her run from the house in her nightgown to get away from her abusive husband?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“That’s what she told her lawyer. That’s why she’s calling up all the people who live around us. To get somebody to go on the record that I used her as a punching bag.”
“That’s absurd,” Mary Bliss said. “I never heard anything like that. In fact, I always thought you two were such a darling couple. I used to tell Parker, ‘Look how Randy Bowden holds hands with Nancye when they go for a walk.’ I saw the two of you, last year, at the Sinclairs’ Christmas party, slow-dancing to Johnny Mathis singing ‘Twelfth of Never.’ The way you held her, I felt so, oh, jealous, I guess. Parker’s not very demonstrative like that. Not in public.”
“The Sinclairs’ party,” Randy said. “How could I forget? She told our pastor I got mad at her for dancing with Charlie Weidman that night and slugged her in the stomach in the car on the way home,” Randy said.
“Nancye danced with Charlie at that party?” Mary Bliss said, surprised.
“Nancye likes to dance.”
In all the years she’d known him, Mary Bliss had never seen Charlie Weidman dance. Not ever. That Nancye Bowden must be quite a piece of goods. Quite a piece, Katharine would say.
Mary Bliss chewed her bottom lip.
“Never mind,” Randy said, moving toward the back door. “It’s not your problem. It just bugs me, you know? The idea that you and Parker might think I was that kind of guy. Nancye and I had our problems, but I swear to God, I never lifted a hand to her. It was never anything like that. Not even when we were separated last time.”
“You were separated before?” This man was full of surprises.
“Four years ago, right after Christmas,” Randy said. “Nancye told everybody I was up in Charlotte, at a bank training seminar. We didn’t even tell the kids, actually. It only lasted about five weeks.”
A training seminar, Mary Bliss thought. That’s what she could tell anybody who asked about Parker. He was out of town. At a seminar. But Nancye Bowden had already used that fib. She’d have to come up with something better. More original. That would be a challenge. To make up bigger lies than Nancye Bowden, the town slut.
“I think it’s horrible, that she would accuse you of physical violence,” Mary Bliss said. “If she calls me back, I’ll tell her straight out. I’ll call her a liar right to her face. And I’ll tell that to your lawyer too, if you want.”
“Thanks,” Randy said. “Thanks for believing me. I hope somebody else will too.” He opened the back door and walked outside.
“And I’m gonna have her kicked off the carpool too,” Mary Bliss called out, watching him plod up the driveway, back toward his own house.
Damn tootin’.