“Pasta puttanesca,” he says, innocently holding up the bag.
Downstairs, they eat together in the dark kitchen. The only sound is a cable news show, faintly heard from the living room, where she usually keeps it on in the background for company.
“How is it?” he asks expectantly.
“Good,” she says. “It’s always good.”
“It’s for the charity thing tomorrow night. I got the good anchovies. Can you tell?” he asks.
“Martel’s?” she asks.
“Martel’s? You think these are Martel’s? It’s Delfino’s. Four times the price per tin, and you can’t tell the difference?” She knew it was Delfino’s, but she likes to rile him up a bit. She still finds it endearing the way he’s so passionate about his cooking. She smiles, and she can see him realize she’s kidding. She offers him wine, but he declines, so she puts the kettle on for tea instead.
“It’s really good,” she says again, squeezing his shoulder as she passes behind him, and plucks two mugs from the cabinet. After their meal, they sit out on the front porch in the rocking recliners. Christopher jumps up on Grant’s lap, and he strokes the old dog on the top of the head and sips his tea. It’s a breezeless night, and the neighborhood is silent. Paige pours a nip of gin into her tea and covers her legs with a blanket.
“Be careful,” Grant says out of nowhere.
“With what?” Paige snaps.
“Whatever sneaky snake stuff you’re getting yourself into now, that’s what,” he says.
“Sneaky snake?”she repeats with a look of condescension. He doesn’t react, so she waves his comment away with her hand and a scoff.
“I had this memory of Caleb last night,” Paige says. “Do you remember when he came home late from some party last year, and he was laughing because he saw Finn Holmon parked on the street and he said it looked like he was getting a blow job?” Paige asks.
“I can’t say that I remember that,” Grant says with a short laugh.
“Maybe you were at the restaurant, but he said he was pretty sure old married couples didn’t do stuff like that.”
“I told him it was a cliché for a young person to say old people don’t have sex, and also Cora is, like, thirty-nine.”
“He said his point was that it wasn’t Cora. When I asked how he knew that, he just said, ‘Trust me,’ and went up to bed. He thought it was hilarious.”
“Okay,” Grant says, not knowing where this is going.
“I assumed it was Cora, but now that I think about it, he’s right. Pretty sure it wasn’t her,” Paige says.
“And this is our business how?” Grant asks.
“’Cause she’s my friend. And the son of a bitch is a cheater.”
“Is this how you’re spending your time at home all day?” he asks and then sighs, and she can tell he wishes he hadn’t said anything about how she spends her time. “I just worry,” he continues. He doesn’t have to say all the reasons why—that he worries she is unstable, or too isolated, or has been mourning too long, or sleeping an unhealthy amount; the list could go on—so before he says anything else, they just drop it the way they have both learned to do, so it doesn’t explode into raging arguments the way it used to right after Caleb’s death. Maybe if they’d learned to control the conversations this way earlier, they would still be together and not have said things they can never unsay to one another.
“Why don’t you hang out with Finn anymore, anyway? You two used to watch the game together and play golf all the time,” Paige says. Grant just shrugs.
“Things change,” he says, and they don’t say much of anything else, just that Christopher is getting a little fat, the ice maker in the fridge keeps jamming, and Grant could use a haircut, which Paige offers to do for him when he comes over on Sunday.
The next morning, Paige wakes up late the way she often does these days. She trudges downstairs in her sweatpants and oversize Blondie tank top and starts a pot of coffee, when she sees Finn out her kitchen window, stuffing his golf clubs into the back of the Holmons’ Land Rover. She decides, without thinking, that this is an opportunity to follow him. She shoves her feet into slippers, grabs her handbag, and runs to her garage. She times opening the garage and pulling out to just after she hears his car pull away.
On the drive, she very much regrets not pouring a coffee into a to-go mug or putting on real clothes, and she begins seriously doubting that she will obtain any valuable information at a golf course. The last thing in the world she wants to do is sit in a country-club parking lot all day on a Saturday, but she’s on a mission, so she’ll at least give it an hour or so.
When she sees him take the Greenbriar exit, her pulse starts to speed up, and her hands feel suddenly clammy. The golf course is six miles farther down Lakeview. Maybe he’s stopping for gas. Good, she thinks. She can grab a coffee maybe, even though she looks slightly homeless. The fleeting judgment will be worth the caffeine. When he drives right past the Conoco station, and the Mattress Firm, Coffee Central, and a vacant Taco Bell building, she cannot believe her luck. He’s driving to the Royal Inn.
She slows down a bit because he must be looking over his shoulder. He must be going to a place like this rather than the Hilton Express or whatever because nobody besides hookers or cheap road trippers would ever stay here, so he’s likely to never run into someone he knows. Holy shit, she’s got him. She parks in the Antiques Mall parking lot across the street so he doesn’t spot her and peers through her binoculars at the motel. He’s still sitting in his car.
The Royal Motel is anything but royal, of course. It’s a single-story, ten-room building with a low roofline and a broken Pepsi machine out front that looks like it’s been there since the 1980s. Each room can be accessed directly from the parking lot, and there are no numbers on the rooms, only a different, boldly colored door for each to differentiate. A few young women are loitering around the yellow door, smoking cigarettes and looking at their phones.
She wonders why he’s still in his car. Is the woman he’s here to meet inside, or perhaps not here yet? Then, after ten or so minutes of watching him, she sees one of the smoking women flick the butt of her cigarette into the air, fluff her hair, and walk over to his car.
