Annabelle was already at the diner, Spencer with her; his teachers had an in-service day. We’d both hoped that coming here, where Spencer normally got his bus, would help with the change in routine, but he was clearly shut down, filling in, with colored pencils, the squares on a sheet of graph paper. Red, yellow, blue, green, orange, brown. The same order, over and over. He didn’t even glance up when I slid into the booth next to him, just shimmied farther away. He looked beat, purplish grooves etched beneath his eyes.
Deanna, the owner, filled our mugs, talking over her shoulder to someone else as she kept moving: “You said over easy. You never cook the yolks all the way.” The room was loud with voices and clattering dishes.
I leaned toward Spencer’s paper. “Those are some good colors, buddy.”
He repeated, “Those are some good colors,” then continued filling in the squares.
I glanced at Annabelle. She was wearing a faded green T-shirt that said “Reece Painting,” Scott’s company, and her hair was scraped into a ponytail. She looked washed-out, an oily sheen to her skin.
We were sitting by a window. Eva swung into the gravel parking lot in the red Jeep Gabe had bought for her fortieth birthday a month ago. “She looks like Malibu Barbie in that thing,” Annabelle said.
I watched as Eva slammed the door, smiling into her phone, holding up one finger to indicate she’d be right in.
Two minutes later, she slid into our booth, green eyes flashing.
“What are you so animated about?” Annabelle asked.
“Kelly Jarrell is from Rehoboth Beach?” Eva held out her mug as Deanna swept by. “You are so busted, Claire.”
“What?” Annabelle snapped her head in my direction. “Kelly Jarrell is from your hometown?” She lowered her voice. “Do you know her?”
I looked at Eva. “How did you find out?”
“Oh my God.” Eva was beaming. “You do know her!”
“Did,” I said. “Did. Eons ago. Another lifetime.”
“Were you friends?” Annabelle asked.
Eva leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Isn’t Rehoboth pretty small?”
“It is.” I forced a smile, but my heart was racing. “And yes, I was friends with Kelly Jarrell for a while.” It felt odd to say her full name. She was just Kelly to me. Kel. And Jarrell. Nick’s name. Lucy’s. It had once been mine. I’d taken my maiden name back after the divorce. It had felt unbearable—to stay a Jarrell without any of them in my life.
“I can’t believe you never even hinted!” Eva said. And then, “Wait. Wait wait wait. You had something to do with getting her here, didn’t you?” She turned on Annabelle. “Did you know?”
“No! Of course not.” Annabelle set down her mug. “Does KJ not want anyone to know there’s a connection? Is that why you haven’t—”
“No.” I was shaking my head. “I swear, I had nothing to do with her coming here.” This was the conclusion they were jumping to? This? That I’d pulled strings to get Kelly at Ten Chimneys?
Eva took a sip of coffee, leaving a pink crescent on the rim of the mug. “You must have seen her in her high school performances, right? Was she amazing even then?”
“She was. She was our local celebrity.” I heard the pride in my voice, but the grief too, which surprised me: how close to the surface it was. All those afternoons in the auditorium, watching Kelly rehearse; taking the bus to New York each January—her parents always gave her tickets to a Broadway play for Christmas. Of course, she took me.
“So, how good of friends were you?” Annabelle was still smiling, but the playfulness was gone from her voice. “Did you do stuff? Go to each other’s houses?”
“Please don’t be mad,” I said. “I wanted to tell you.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“Yes, we went to each other’s houses.” I pictured the pyramid of empty Mountain Dew cans atop Nick’s bureau or the scratched coatrack in Kelly’s room draped with fringed scarves and hats, a red feather boa from some play.
There was a brittle quality to the way Annabelle was holding her elbows and staring outside.
I don’t owe you this information, I thought. I don’t owe anyone, not even Erik, every detail of my life. But that wasn’t what this was about. She was hurt, and with good reason. “I’m sorry,” I said, willing her to look at me. “It’s complicated, but I should have mentioned it. I know that.”
Nothing.
“We met in kindergarten.” I was holding my own elbows. “We were pretty close.” Next to me, I felt Spencer watching his mom.
“Is she—you’re not in touch anymore?” Eva asked. “Is that why you never—”
“Oh please,” Annabelle said. “Like Claire’s going to share anything about her past.”
“Come on.” Eva nudged Annabelle. “Why are you being weird?”
“Me?” Annabelle finally turned from the window and looked at me. “Two years of watching Widows and not once do you mention you were friends—no, excuse me, close friends—with Kelly Jarrell?” She shook her head. “You want to talk about weird, let’s talk about that.”
“Well, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” Eva teased, but Annabelle just shot her a vicious look, then leaned across the table to Spencer. “We’re going to go soon, okay, Spence? How many more squares do you want to do?”
He didn’t lift his head, just kept coloring his boxes, applying such force to the pencils, he was pushing through the paper. I leaned over and whispered, “It’s okay, buddy; you don’t have to press that hard.”
“Don’t tell my son something’s okay when it’s not,” Annabelle hissed.
My son. I looked at her incredulously. I felt like she’d slapped me.
“Whoa!” Eva held up her hands to Annabelle. “What is wrong with you? Maybe you want to jump down Claire’s throat after you find out what happened?”
“Claire tell us something important?” Annabelle snorted. “Good luck with that.” She heaved her scratched leather purse onto the table and started digging for her keys.
My pulse was racing. “What do you want to know, Annabelle?”
“Anything! Jesus. We’ve known you for six years, and you’ve never mentioned what happened in your marriage or why you don’t visit your parents, or what brought you to Wisconsin—”
I opened my mouth to protest but she held up her hand. “Yeah, we all know the story about how you saw a map and liked the shape of the state, which is bullshit.”
“Annabelle, stop,” Eva said.
“No, you stop, Eva. You’ve said it too, that it’s weird how little we know Claire.”
“That’s not what I said.”
I knew Annabelle was probably taking Eva’s words out of context, but could they really think they didn’t know me? Everything I was—Erik’s wife; Spencer, Phoebe, and Hazel’s stepmother; an artist; a runner; their friend—how could this not count?
I stared at my hands, cradled around my coffee mug, which had grown cold. “I don’t mean to be secretive,” I said quietly. “Kelly’s connected to me leaving Rehoboth.” I glanced at Annabelle, arms crossed over her chest, eyes full of judgment. “Talking about her isn’t…it’s not fun for me. I wish I didn’t know her, and I hate that she’s coming here.” My voice faltered. “I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what you want.”
“You realize you’ve told us nothing, right?”
“Annabelle,” Eva said.
“What? This is the same old crap, and it’s all just too painful to talk about.” She spoke in a syrupy singsong. “Do I have that right?”
She did.
“Yup. What I thought.”
“Why do you need details, Annabelle? Isn’t it enough to know I went through a bad time?”
“No one wants every gritty little detail, Claire. But believe it or not, friends confide in one another. I tell you everything!”
“Really?” I sat back. “You have no secrets? Because if you really want to talk about—”
“Stop it.” The color had drained from Eva’s face. She turned to Annabelle. “If Claire doesn’t want to talk about her past, she doesn’t have to.” She was playing with a sugar packet, tapping it one corner at a time on the table. Bright patches of red inflamed her cheeks. She does know about the affair, I thought. Maybe not consciously, but Erik was right: She wouldn’t let us get anywhere close to that truth. Immediately, my anger dissipated, replaced by shame. What had I just done?
Annabelle swiped her eyes over me, then leaned across the table again toward Spencer. “Five more squares,” she said. Under her breath she added, “This is so fucked up.”
“Five more squares,” Spencer repeated. “This is so fucked up. Five more squares. This is so fucked up.”
Except for us, the diner was mostly empty now. Across the room, Deanna’s son, a huge bearded man in stained cook’s whites, was sharing a booth with his wife. Deanna stood at the table, jiggling their infant. My mom had once held Lucy like that in my dad’s restaurant. Midafternoon, chairs upside down on tables.
“All you had to do was mention that you’d known Kelly,” Annabelle was saying. “And sure, we might have tried to wheedle a few details from you, but we would have respected your not wanting to talk about her, the way we’ve respected your not wanting to talk about…well, pretty much your whole life until you moved here. Obviously, though, you don’t trust us.”
“It wasn’t personal, Annabelle.”
“Lying’s always personal, Claire.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You pretended you didn’t know her. Same difference.”
For a moment, none of us said a word. A jagged panicked feeling rose up in me. How could I explain that it wasn’t about not trusting them? It was about shame, so much shame it would light me on fire if I ever gave it air. I’d hurt my child; I’d lost the right to be her mother. Why would I want anyone to know this?
And yet.
Weren’t there times when it was just the two of us and I’d think, Maybe? Annabelle had suffered a terrible depression after Spencer’s birth—she would understand.
But then I’d hear Erik insisting Annabelle could never comprehend what I’d done, and my mom all but pleading with me not to say anything. Because what if it changed how Annabelle felt about me? Why would I risk that? Why would I fight so hard for this second chance just to throw it away? It was the only time my mom got angry. And I understood. She’d picked up the pieces over and over when I fell apart, and all she wanted now was that I hold on to this life I had.
Annabelle was staring outside again. Eva was tearing the sugar packet into confetti.
“I don’t talk about the past because I’m happy now,” I said. “And a lot of that is because of you guys.” It was the truest thing I could say.
Annabelle didn’t blink. “I’m going to go,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”
“No,” Eva said. “I’m not letting you out of the booth until we settle this.”
Annabelle closed her eyes and said, “Move, Eva, or I’ll crawl under the table.”
Wordlessly, Eva got up. I stood to let Spencer out. My legs were shaking.
“Mom said five more squares and it’s five more squares.” His shoe was untied, and he handed me his pencils as he crouched down to tie it. They were damp from his sweaty hands. I dropped them into the baggie Annabelle was holding open. And then without looking at us, she turned, one hand on Spencer’s back, guiding him toward the door. Eva and I slid back into the booth and watched as they walked across the parking lot, the air thick with sunlight.
“Give her a couple hours,” Eva said.
I nodded. The diner was quiet but for the tinny sound of a radio in the kitchen. “I had no idea it bothered you guys that I didn’t talk about my past,” I said. “You never pushed.” I was staring at the blur of cars passing by on the street out front.
“We’re curious. That’s all. And Annabelle adores you, Claire. She’s just scared.”
“Of what?”
“Losing you. I’m not sure either of us can really understand how alone she feels. We’ve got our families. Even if something awful happened to Gabe, I’ve got my older brother and my mom, and you’ve got your parents, but Annabelle is on her own, and she has been her whole life. Which means she works incredibly hard to make sure we need her, though the truth is that she needs us. Especially you, Claire. And not just because of the kids, though that’s huge. You just get her. If I didn’t like you so much, I’d be jealous.” She laughed softly. “Trust me, she’s not upset about Kelly. She’s upset because she thinks she’s not important to you. And not that this excuses her crappy behavior, but she was up all night with Spencer.” Eva settled her purse strap over her shoulder as she slid from the booth. “Annabelle has the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known, but she’s also got the biggest temper.” She smiled. “Three hours, tops; she’ll be at your door.”