Watch Her

MAXINE

Maxine pulled her gold Trans Am onto the darkened street and parked with one tire creeping onto the curb. She paused, reflecting on the evening, and how strange it must have seemed for Angela and Hester, on the outside looking in. Every now and then, she examined her choices, the life she’d carved out with the Matsons at the center, with Jennifer at the center, and wondered how things could have been different. But, as her brother Stan often said, it wasn’t worth dwelling on hypotheticals.

The car door groaned as she shoved it open, and her knees cracked as she hauled herself out from under the steering wheel. Everything seemed to be getting old these days.

From the trunk, she lifted a file folder of reports she’d have to review before tomorrow. So much for sleep.

She paused when she reached the house to catch her breath. Eighty-seven steps, from the pavement to the front door of her third-floor walk-up. They hadn’t seemed so bad when she’d bought this place as a twenty-seven-year-old. Now, she considered installing an elevator whenever she came home. Not that an elevator was even a possibility. Since she’d bought this condo, the neighborhood had come and gone a minimum of three times, and Maxine had yet to get her act together in time to sell at the top of the market. Besides, where would she go? And the idea of paying a mortgage again gave her the hives.

She hiked up the first set of stairs to the front porch, where Derek (was that his name?) maneuvered a baby carriage, a double-wide, out the door. He wore a wool coat over his pajamas and hadn’t bothered to change shoes for slippers. Derek and his wife had bought the second-floor unit less than a year earlier, but now that the twins had arrived, the family would be gone within months. Maxine couldn’t even remember most of the people who’d moved in and out over the years, single men and women, couples. Even one throuple whom she did remember, because they’d made so much noise that she’d kept a baseball bat by her bed to bang on the floor once they got going. She’d long ago given up on the idea of making friends.

Forty-two steps to go.

The stairway was still covered in the same worn shag carpet that had been there the day Maxine moved in. At the summit, the door to her apartment was ajar. The lights in the kitchen blazed, and ice clinked in a glass. She tapped the door open with her toe and dropped her bag and files to the floor.

“In the kitchen,” Tucker called.

He’d already mixed drinks, a Manhattan for Maxine.

“I didn’t think I’d see you,” she said.

“I slipped away. She won’t wake up, not after the night she had.”

Maxine drank the cocktail and let Tucker pull her in for a kiss. At least one thing could go right tonight.

* * *

“Tuck me,” Tucker groaned. “Tuck me hard.”

Maxine wanted to shush him—she’d wanted to shush him since the first time he’d come up with that doozy—and besides, Derek and his wife had probably gotten the twins to sleep again. They didn’t need to hear this. But Tucker was vocal, and it was one of the things she’d learned to accept about him. Like his eyebrows.

But technically, wasn’t Maxine the one getting tucked? From behind. Standing on the cold linoleum floor. Staring out those windows that encircled the entire apartment and praying—praying—that the neighbors were fast asleep, that they wouldn’t raise their blinds and see her pressed against the Formica countertop she’d promised herself to replace every day since she’d moved into this apartment. She pawed at the switch, relaxing as the track lighting faded to a warm glow.

Tucker turned her. At sixty, he still had grace.

Maxine closed her eyes. He kissed her neck. She thought about the first time she’d seen him, at St. Catherine’s College in Stoughton, a dying Catholic school where Maxine had earned a B.A. with a double major in business administration and English, and then worked her way up to dean of the college by age twenty-five, all while living with her mother. Then, one day, Tucker swept into her office—six-four and so present in boxy jeans and a blousy white button-down that showed off his tanned face—that she’d gasped.

“I’m buying this dump,” he announced, and Maxine hadn’t thought twice about signing on for the ride. Tucker hired her to manage the new campus, and Maxine transformed St. Catherine’s into one of the most successful and profitable satellite campuses in the Prescott University system. Tucker visited the campus as often as he could, and two years later, Stan, who’d met Tucker and seen the way she looked at him, cautioned her against moving to Boston. “Is this all you want?” he asked, always the older brother.

“It’s what I want now,” Maxine said.

Besides, her offer on this condo had already been accepted.

Back then, Jennifer and Tucker were still restoring Pinebank. They lived in a small portion of the mansion, with the Newfoundland Shadow.

Tucker kissed Maxine gently. “You’re off somewhere,” he said.

It was afterward, her favorite time. They lay in her bed—her enormous, soft, comfortable, all-white bed with feather pillows and a down throw, in a room with blinds. She ran her fingers through Tucker’s white but still-thick hair. She was glad of the choices she’d made. Tucker was good and oddly faithful for a married man (God knows he hadn’t tucked Jennifer in years, or at least he claimed that was true). And he’d taken to his new role as chairman of the board, out of the spotlight and on the sidelines. Tucker lived in a world where good things happened, where puppies had homes, where babies swam, where companies grew. When the slow boil began, when the school began to fail, he hadn’t been able to make the changes needed to survive. He wouldn’t have eliminated programs or fired adjuncts, and he certainly wouldn’t have sold off the St. Catherine’s campus when enrollments no longer supported it. He’d had to go, and Maxine, in her heart, believed he knew it.

“You’re worried about something,” he said. “I can tell.”

“Shush,” she said.

Having Tucker here helped her forget about the burst pipe and the angry instructors. Tucker even helped her forget about Jennifer and that stupid book. Maxine wondered if he even knew how much she relied on him.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

“You’re a sly fox.”

“I haven’t had any other choice.”

Of course, Maxine had had plenty of choices. She could have stayed in Stoughton and married that boy, the one who’d taught at Boston Latin, the one who’d moved to Vermont after she dumped him. She could have said no to Tucker that night he’d shown up. Instead, she’d stood in the hallway while he banged on the door, her fingers on the latch, her cheek pressed to the cool, smooth molding. She waited till his voice softened before she turned the dead bolt. Who was the woman who’d lived on the second floor then? Belinda or Baily or Brandy? All Maxine could remember was her voice, disembodied and annoyed, echoing up the stairwell. “Are you serious?” she shouted. “It’s after midnight.”

“All set,” Maxine said as she held the door open, and Tucker came in.

One option Maxine hadn’t considered was regret. Jennifer was like a jigsaw puzzle with a few missing pieces, and sex, Maxine assumed, was one of those pieces.

“You need to go,” she said now. “It’s late. Jennifer will wonder where you are.”

“Jennifer drank a quart of vodka. She’ll sleep till noon.”

Tucker fumbled on the bedside table with a bottle of blue pills. Maxine relented, nestling into the crook of his arm, her one safe place. “You’re a pervert,” she said.

“That I am.”

* * *

Later, after Tucker did finally leave, Maxine opened the box of files from work and sat in bed along with another Manhattan and some cold pad Thai. She wondered if Jennifer even remembered that Maxine had set up all her online accounts, that she paid her credit card bills and tracked her spending. It took less than a minute to see that Jennifer had ordered the copy of Adam Bede herself. At St. Catherine’s, Maxine had written her senior thesis on George Eliot, on the influences of agrarian society on nineteenth-century literature or some bullshit like that. She’d read that book, she knew the story it told, and Jennifer knew it, but maybe asking Angela to come by tonight would keep Jennifer from doing this type of thing again.

Maxine packed away that worry for another time and turned to the data Gavin had supplied. And later, as the sky outside began to turn gray, she knew she had another problem to deal with.