The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [11]
“What are you talking about?” she says, but he's right, isn't he? His agitation these last few weeks, his remoteness. She knows. Of course she knows. Now that she knows she is sure she has known. Known what? That for the last few weeks everything's been a lie? It makes no sense. Nothing does.
“Robin. Robin and me.” His hoarseness grates in her ears, sets her teeth dryly on edge. Robin and Bob, their dear old friends, his childhood playmates, and Robin, his teenage steady. His lover.
“You fucked her?” She is as startled as he is by her smooth utterance of a word she hasn't used in over twenty years. He nods, mouth trembling. “How many times?” she asks, and he winces.
“I don't know.” He won't look at her.
“Why don't you know?”
“I just don't. Please, Nora, that's not—”
“Not what? Not important? Well, to me it is! What was it, at lunch? Or … or after that? Last week, when you missed the staff meeting, was that it? Is that where you were?”
He stares with stricken, unblinking eyes. “Nora, I'm not talking about a few … a few times,” he says, gasping out times. “I'm talking about a relationship we … I had.”
“A relationship?”
“For four years.”
A relationship. All she thinks about, even now, a week later, this pressure building in her head. For four years her husband has been spending every spare moment with Robin Gendron. Where? He doesn't want to, but she insists he tell her. After years of lies, she is entitled to the truth. He owes her that much, at least. But can't she understand that all talking about it does is to keep hurting her, and he doesn't want to do that anymore?
“I have to know so I can get things straight. So I can put things in perspective.”
“What? What do you have to know?”
“Everything!” she insists. Everything.
Chloe and Drew leave for school. The minute the door closes she races into the kitchen. She doesn't trust herself near him when the children are home. Under her bathrobe are yesterday's clothes. She fell asleep on the couch and when she woke up at three in the morning, thoughts racing, she didn't dare go up to bed because all she wants to do is hit him. And hurt him, and hit him. Ken hunches over his granola and thinly sliced bananas. For days all she's been able to keep down are saltines and weak tea. He stops eating and puts his hand over hers. “I've told you the truth, Nora. I have.”
“You haven't told me where.”
He closes his eyes. “Mostly there, at her house.”
Shocked, she pulls away. “But what about Drew?” He and Clay were best friends. Drew would be over there all the time. Her mouth falls open, remembering a day last summer. Drew came home with his cheek bruised. Basketball in the face, he said, but after that he stopped hanging out with Clay, stopped going to the Gendrons'. “He knew, didn't he?”
“Of course not,” Ken insists. “My God, Nora, give me some credit at least.”
Credit! the madwoman raves inside her head. Credit for what? For being duplicitous enough? Sneaky enough? Or for knowing how an affair—excuse me! a relationship—should be conducted? And what two people would better know than sweet, generous Robin and dear, fun-loving Ken.
“So where, then? Where did you usually fuck her?” She likes the way the word rolls off her tongue, the power of its vileness and poison. His misery hearing it.
“Nora, please.” I'm trying to eat, is what he wants to say as he picks up his spoon. If only he would so she can dump the bowl over his head or throw it through the bay window, an explosion of plants and glass onto the stone patio. Life's wreckage made visible, rubble underfoot, shards for all to see. Instead of this bloodless dying.
“In her bed? In the basement? The car?” Yes, she sees. All those places. Everywhere and all the time. The thrill of it. Teenagers again. “What did you say when the children