No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [126]
Patricia smiles, says if he wants to come back in thirty minutes, she gets an hour off.
For that half hour, as he wanders the shops of Milford’s downtown, he asks himself what the hell he’s doing. He’s married. He has a wife and a son and a house and a job.
But none of it adds up to a life. That’s what he wants. A life.
Patricia tells him over a tuna sandwich in a nearby coffee shop that she doesn’t go to lunch with men she’s just met, but there’s something about him that intrigues her.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“I think I know your secret,” she says. “I get a feeling about people, and I got a feeling about you.”
Good God. Is it that obvious? Can she divine that he’s married? Is she a mind reader? Even though when he first met her, he’d been wearing gloves, and now has his wedding ring tucked into his pocket?
“What sort of feeling?” he asks.
“You seem troubled to me. Is that why you’re driving back and forth across the country? Are you looking for something?”
“It’s just my job,” he says.
And Patricia smiles. “I wonder. If it’s led you here, to Milford, maybe it’s for a reason. Maybe you’re driving all over the country because you’re supposed to find something. I’m not saying it’s me. But something.”
But it is her. He’s sure of it.
He tells her his name is Clayton Bigge. It’s like he has the idea before he actually knows he has the idea. Maybe, at first, he was just thinking about having an affair, and having a fake name, that wasn’t a bad plan, even for an affair.
For the next few months, if his sales trips only take him as far south as Torrington, he drives the extra distance south to Milford to see Patricia.
She adores him. She makes him feel important. She makes him feel as though he has some worth.
Driving back on the New York Thruway, he considers the logistics.
The company was rejigging some of the sales routes. He could get the one that ran between Hartford and Buffalo. Drop going to Chicago. That way, at each end of the run…
And there’s the money question.
But Clayton’s doing well. He’s already been taking extraordinary measures to conceal from Enid how much money he has tucked away. It would never matter how much he made, it would never be enough for her. She’d always belittle him. And she’d always spend it. So he might as well tuck some aside.
It might be enough, he thinks. Just enough, for a second household.
How wonderful it will be, for at least half the time, to be happy.
Patricia says yes when he asks her to marry him. Her father had already died, but her mother seems happy enough. Her sister Tess, though, she never warms to him. It’s as though she knows there’s something off about him, but she can’t put her finger on just what it is. He knows she doesn’t trust him, that she never will, and he is especially careful around her. And he knows that Tess has told Patricia how she feels, but Patricia loves him, genuinely loves him, and always defends him.
When he and Patricia go to buy rings, he maneuvers her into picking a wedding band for him identical to the one he has in his pocket. Later, he returns it to the store, gets his money back, and is able to wear the one ring he already has, all the time. He fraudulently fills out applications for a variety of municipal and state licenses, everything from a driver’s license to a library card—it’s a lot less tricky then than in a post-9/11 world—so he can bamboozle the marriage license office when the time comes.
He must deceive Patricia, but he tries to be good to her. At least when he is home.
She gives him two children. A boy first. They name him Todd. And then, a couple of years later, a baby girl they christen Cynthia.
It is an astonishing juggling act.
A family in Connecticut. A family in upstate New York. Back and forth between the two.
When he’s Clayton Bigge, he can’t stop thinking about when he