The Morning After
February 15, 2019
Anne Wilkes tried hard to mask her hangover, but she was unsuccessful.
“Mom, please.” Anne looked over to where her mother had begun to reorganize her cupboards at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. “That banging is driving me insane.”
“It’s unbecoming for a lady to drink so much.” Anne’s mother, Beatrice Harper, sniffed. “It lacks class. And it’s not safe. For you or the kids.”
“Mom. Please.”
“I just wish you’d get help, Anne.”
“I don’t have a problem. I can stop drinking if I want, okay? I’m not going to fucking leave the kids.”
“Again.”
“Excuse me?”
“Leave them again,” Beatrice said evenly. “You’re very lucky the doctors wrote you a note the last time so you didn’t get in bigger trouble.”
“I had postpartum depression. It’s an actual illness—not an excuse.”
“Sure,” Beatrice said. “Even so, a civilized book club doesn’t last until three in the morning. And by the way, where was your husband last night?”
“Mark?” Anne swallowed. “He didn’t come home?”
“You didn’t know?” Beatrice said. “How could you not know?”
Because, Anne wanted to say, Mark has a lot of secrets.
“I didn’t hear Mark come home,” Beatrice said. “And I can’t believe you didn’t notice.”
The reason Anne hadn’t noticed was because she’d fallen asleep the second her head had hit the pillow. Anne’s bedtime was 10:00 p.m. on a good night. An evening of drinking at a bar with her friends was enough to knock her out cold for a week. Anne had come home, seen the basement light on, and assumed Mark was working late out of his home office.
Not feeling particularly inclined to start a conversation with him that would likely last all night, she’d gone upstairs and fallen asleep. When he wasn’t in bed when she woke up the next morning, she figured he’d gotten an early start in the office. He’d been doing that a lot lately.
Anne leaned against the doorway to her own kitchen and felt like an outsider. As always, her mother had transformed Anne’s average house into something fit for a magazine spread. The dishes were put away, the counters wiped spotlessly clean. The twins were chattering away happily in their Pack ’n Play in the living room while her older children had miraculously found ways to occupy themselves. With startling clarity, Anne realized that her mother was even capable of organizing the children.
“I’ll be back by noon,” Anne said. “Can I bring you something from the café?”
Her mother didn’t bother to look up. “I’m making breakfast for your children. Homemade, as it should be.”
Anne stopped in the living room, smacked four kisses across the heads of each of her babies. They didn’t bother to look up. She was running late, but she paused in the doorway and glanced back, scanning one last look over a living room with happily playing children.
With a very unladylike arsenal of curse words coupled with a lead foot, Anne managed to make it to Santa Monica only fifteen minutes after she’d agreed to meet her friends. She pulled into a parking spot half a block away and strode toward the outdoor café that would put a major dent in her very slender wallet.
She stopped at the picket fence before the restaurant. The place maintained an aura of rustic ambiance, though Anne knew for a fact that it was brand new. The materials had been roughed up to look worn, the wicker chairs supposed to look like something out of Country Living when really, they’d likely been purchased from an overpriced boutique catalogue.
But it wasn’t the decor or the sunny day or the sight of her friends that stopped Anne in her tracks. It was the sight of a uniformed cop standing by the table. The look of horror on Penny’s face. The deadened stare in Eliza’s eyes as she looked at the officer and murmured four awful words.
“I’d like my lawyer.”
God, no, Anne thought. This can’t be happening.
Penny raised her gaze then and caught sight of Anne. Their eyes locked in nervous trepidation. Anne couldn’t bring herself to unfreeze from her position. She merely stared back at Penny, wondering if their lives had spiraled wildly out of control.
Was it possible that their dirty little secrets were about to become very big twisted truths?