The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [105]
“The software was,” Eddie tells her. “Your brilliant husband went entirely solo on the software.”
“And how long did it take you and Paisley to come up with the name?”
“Just that one afternoon.”
“You were home in the afternoon? When you were still running the store?”
Eddie shrugs, too casual. “Maybe it was an evening. Maybe it was a weekend.”
Ginger says to herself, Don’t. Paisley was your friend. Paisley is dead. “And that was all you did? Talk?”
Eddie stops, allowing the crowd to flow around them like water around a stone. “What do you mean?”
“Did you sleep with her, too?”
The couple beside them slows, curious. Eddie starts walking again. In the cold gray morning, his face is slick with sweat. “What do you take me for?” he whispers.
Ginger knows then that he did. “All you had to do,” she says quietly, “was say no.”
His face locks into an expression so guarded that it’s impossible to tell if he’s disgusted with her for the accusation, or admitting the lie.
Ginger feels numb as they approach the entryway, hardly cognizant of her own hands as she signs the guestbook. “Go on. I’m supposed to wait for Andrea and Julianne and Iona.” She’s relieved she won’t have to sit with Eddie. She couldn’t bear right now to be inside the familiar circle of him: the scent of his aftershave, her arm brushing against the dark fabric of his suit, his wedding ring tight on his finger. She couldn’t bear it.
There’s a great deal of hushed conversation echoing through the hall as Ginger takes her seat over to the side, near the sound system. Julianne’s son, Toby, is beside her, and then Julianne and Doug, who is either Julianne’s friend or fiancé, Ginger isn’t sure which. Then Iona and Andrea’s family. All according to plan. She wishes this would start. From her position, she can see Eddie and the children clearly, though they’d have to turn around to see her. Eddie’s face is blotchy, not as if he’s been weeping, but as if he’s been running and has gotten out of breath. She wishes this would start. Finally a large man in a black suit—not a preacher—walks up to the podium. The crowd quiets.
“This,” he says in a voice that sounds rehearsed and false, “is going to be the celebration of a life.”
Ginger doesn’t hear much of the service after that, only the occasional laughter and frequent muted sobs. She’s glad she’s on the aisle because if worse comes to worst and she has to throw up, at least she can get out.
She didn’t expect this kind of physical reaction to Eddie’s admission, or lack of it. She isn’t seething. She doesn’t even feel, outwardly, particularly upset. She just feels sick.
She knows when it happened and why. She knows her own part in it.
Eddie had been running the store for two years by then. He had not complained, but it was such an obvious struggle that Ginger had put aside her snotty disdain for hot tubs and started going in two days a week to help out. She didn’t expect to like it as much as she did—not just getting away from the children for a couple of hours, but having this other . . . well, purpose. She saw right away that they ought to stop selling swimming pools and devote themselves to hot tubs and the pool chemicals that provided repeat business. Pools were expensive and risky. When she told Eddie, he was embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of this himself. The fact of his ineptness made him even more somber and boring and careful than before. The only place he showed any enthusiasm at all was in bed.
Two months after her father-in-law died, Ginger found Eddie at his computer, working on the web-based program that became the Teacher Toolshed, a pack of lesson plans and activities elementary teachers could use to make social studies fun. The spark of excitement and enjoyment in Eddie’s eyes had shocked her, it had been so long since she’d seen it.
She’s been over the rest of it a million times. The way Paisley had asked, that same week, at exactly the right moment, “Don’t you ever get bored?”
The way she had answered, with a lightness that masked the weighty truth of her reply, “Bored? Oh, yes. If I didn