Their house.
They lived in Dunwoody, a suburb just outside of Atlanta. The lot had a gentle slope; at its crest had been a small cottage with a tire swing in the backyard that the bulldozers had razed the first day of construction. Paul had designed their home from the ground up. He knew where every nail and screw was. He could tell you where every single wire led and what it was supposed to control.
Claire’s contribution to the infrastructure had been to give Paul a label maker because he loved labeling things. He’d been like Harold with his purple crayon. The modem said MODEM, the router said ROUTER. The cutoff for the water supply had a giant, labeled tag. Every appliance had a label telling the date it had been installed. There were laminated checklists for everything, from winterizing the outdoor spigots to troubleshooting the a/v system, which more closely resembled a NASA control board.
Managing the house was arguably a part-time job. Every January, Paul gave Claire a list of contractors so she could set up the annual appointments for maintenance on the generator, the geothermal units, the garage doors, the copper gutters, the composite roof, the irrigation system, the well for the irrigation system, the outdoor lighting, the elevator, the gym equipment, the pool equipment, and the security system.
And those were just the tasks she could recite off the top of her head. January was less than two months away. Who was she supposed to call? Claire always threw away the list after the last workman left. Did Paul have the file somewhere? Would she even know how to find it?
Her hands started shaking. Tears filled her eyes. She was overwhelmed by all the things she did not know she needed to do.
Her mother asked, “Claire?”
Claire wiped away her tears. She tried to logic down the panic. January was next year. The wake was right now. Claire didn’t have to be told how to throw a get-together. The caterers would’ve arrived an hour ago. The wine and liquor had been delivered this morning. As Claire had gotten dressed for the funeral, the gardeners were already out in the yard with their leaf blowers. The pool had been cleaned yesterday evening while the tables and chairs were being unloaded. There were two bartenders and six servers. Black-eyed pea cakes with shrimp. Zucchini and corn fritters. Coriander-spiced beef fritters. Burgundy beet risotto tarts. Lemon-spiced chicken with dilled cucumbers. Pigs in a blanket with mustard, which Claire always threw in as a joke but was invariably the first thing the caterers ran out of because everyone loved tiny hot dogs.
Her empty stomach soured at the thought of all that food. She stared blankly at the liquor decanters in the limo. Her mother’s hand rested lightly on the stoppers. Her yellow sapphire ring was a gift from her second husband, an affable man who had quietly died of a heart attack two days after retiring from his dental practice. Helen Reid was sixty-two years old, but she looked closer to Claire’s age than her own. Helen claimed her good skin came from being a librarian for forty years, which had kept her out of the sun. The fact that they were often mistaken for sisters had been the bane of Claire’s younger existence.
“Did you want a drink?” Helen asked.
Claire’s mouth formed a reflexive no, but she said, “Yes.”
Helen pulled out the Scotch. “Ginny?”
Claire’s grandmother smiled. “No thank you, dear.”
Helen poured a generous double. Claire’s hand shook as she took the glass. She’d taken a Valium this morning, and when that hadn’t seemed to work, she’d taken some Tramadol left over from a root canal. She probably shouldn’t put alcohol on top of the pills, but Claire probably shouldn’t have done a lot of things this week.
She threw back the drink. Her mind flashed up the image of Paul throwing back his Scotch in the restaurant four nights ago. She gagged as the liquid hit her stomach and burned back up her throat.
“Goodness.” Ginny patted Claire’s back. “Are you okay, dear?”
Claire winced as she swallowed. She felt a sharp pain in her cheek. There was a small rash of scraped skin where her face had grazed the brick wall in the alley. Everyone assumed the injury had happened during the robbery, not before.
Ginny said, “When you were a little girl, I used to give you Scotch and sugar for your cough. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I do.”
She smiled at Claire with genuine affection, which was something Claire could not quite get used to. Last year, the old woman had been diagnosed with something called pleasant dementia, which meant that she had forgotten all the perceived slights and neurotic obsessions that had made her such a nasty bitch for the first eight decades of her life. The transformation had made everyone wary. They were constantly waiting for the old Ginny to rise up phoenix-like and burn them all anew.
Helen told Claire, “That was nice that your tennis team showed up.”
“It was.” Claire had been shocked that they’d made an appearance. The last time she’d seen them, she was being shoved into the back of a police car.
“They were dressed so impeccably,” Ginny said. “You have such lovely friends.”
“Thank you,” Claire said, though she wasn’t sure whether they had attended Paul’s funeral because they were still her friends or because they couldn’t pass up a juicy social event. Their behavior at the cemetery had offered no clues as to which was the truth. They had kissed Claire’s cheek and hugged her and told her how sorry they were, and then they had all wandered off while Claire was greeting other mourners. She couldn’t hear them, but she knew what they were doing: picking apart what everyone was wearing, gossiping about who was sleeping with whom and who had found out and how much the divorce would cost.
Claire had found herself having an almost out-of-body experience where she floated like a ghost over their heads and heard them whispering, “I heard Paul was drinking. Why were they in that alley? What did they think would happen in that part of town?” Someone, invariably, would make the old joke, “What do you call a woman in a black tennis dress? A Dunwoody widow.”
Claire had been friends with these types of mean girls all of her life. She was pretty enough to be the leader, but she’d never been able to engender the type of fearless loyalty it took to marshal a pack of she-wolves. Instead, she was the quiet girl who laughed at all the jokes, straggled behind them at the mall, sat on the hump in the backseat of the car, and never, ever—ever—let them know that she was secretly fucking their boyfriends.
Ginny asked, “Which one were you charged with assaulting?”
Claire shook her head to clear it. “She wasn’t there. And it wasn’t assault, it was disorderly conduct. That’s an important legal distinction.”
Ginny smiled pleasantly. “Well, I’m sure she’ll send a card. Everyone loved Paul.”
Claire exchanged a look with her mother.
Ginny had hated Paul. And she had hated Claire with Paul even more. Ginny had been a young widow when she raised Claire’s father on a paltry income from a secretarial job. She wore her struggles like a badge of honor. Claire’s designer clothes and jewelry and the big houses and the pricey cars and the luxury vacations had com
e as a personal affront to a woman who had survived the Great Depression, a world war, the death of a husband, the loss of two children, and countless other hardships.
Claire could vividly recall the time she’d worn red Louboutins to visit her grandmother.
“Red shoes are for toddlers and whores,” Ginny had quipped.
Later, when Claire had told Paul about the exchange, he’d joked, “Is it creepy that I’m fine with either?”
Claire put her empty glass back in the console. She stared out the window. She felt so out of time and place that she momentarily didn’t recognize the scenery. And then she realized that they were almost home.
Home.
The word didn’t seem to fit anymore. What was home without Paul? That first night when she got in from the police station, the house seemed suddenly too big, too empty, for just one person.
Paul had wanted more. He had talked about children on their second date and third date and countless dates thereafter. He had told Claire about his parents, how wonderful they were, how he had been devastated when they’d died. Paul was sixteen when the Scotts were killed in a car accident during a freak ice storm. He was an only child. The only relative he’d had left was an uncle who passed away while Paul was at Auburn.
Her husband had made it clear that he wanted a big family. He wanted lots and lots of kids to inoculate himself against loss, and Claire had tried and tried with him until finally she had agreed to go see a fertility expert who had informed Claire that she couldn’t have children because she had an IUD and was taking birth control pills.
Of course, Claire hadn’t shared that information with Paul. She had told her husband that the doctor had diagnosed her with something called an “inhospitable womb,” which was true because what was more inhospitable than a pipe cleaner stuck up your uterus?
“Almost there,” Helen said. She reached over and touched Claire’s knee. “We’ll get through this, sweetheart.”
Claire grabbed her mother’s hand. They both had tears in their eyes. They both looked away without acknowledging them.