“A couple of hours,” said Jan. “Maybe longer.”
Sherri thought of Katie in the corner of the bedroom. Her heart started to beat faster. But she couldn’tnottake the job. They had to eat; they had to pay the rent. “I’ll see you on the sixth,” she told Jan.
She made her way through the thrum of women seeking self-improvement: the women who felt no shame about their bodies and the women who obviously felt lots of shame. Once she was in her car she allowed herself a little whoop of joy. She had a job! She would get a paycheck and discounts on the lasering of sunspots! She, Sherri Griffin, would be a contributor to the economic wheels that powered the great state of Massachusetts.
Sherri decided she’d bring some sort of treat home for Katie to celebrate. Maybe some of those Angry Donuts from the shop on Winter Street. She hadn’t tried Angry Donuts yet—she didn’t know what the doughnuts were quite so angry about—but one of the moms had told her they were very good.
She found a parking spot near the shop, and when she got out of the car such a funny, unexpected thing happened. She wasn’t far from the river, and some of the scent had wafted her way. A pair of seagulls circled, letting out a mournful, delirious cry. From where she stood she could see the foot traffic and the bike traffic on the rail trail. It was all still so foreign to Sherri, the smells and the sounds and the very particular air of a New England summer. And at the same time, in some inexplicable way, she was starting to feel like she was home.
As it turned out, Angry Donuts sold out early most days and nothing was left for Sherri to buy. So after she picked Katie up at the knitting camp she took her to Mad Martha’s. They would celebrate Sherri’s new job!
Mad Martha’s was nothing more than a little cottage on Plum Island, really almost a shack, with just a few tables, the bigger of which patrons shared with other patrons whether they knew each other or not. Katie and Sherri were seated with a family of five on vacation from Durango, Colorado. The food was delectable, and the community table lent the whole experience a jolly, festive air. The Colorado family was chatty. Durango sounded lovely, with a famous railroad that wound through canyons and a national forest. Sherri put it immediately on her mental wish list of places to visit. The list was long and included India and Africa too.Realistically she probably wouldn’t get to any of those. Her pay at Derma-You was twenty dollars an hour, and she wasn’t even working full-time. The waiter was young and nice-looking, with beachy hair, a good tan, an easy smile. Sherri could tell that Katie was smitten, blushing faintly when she placed her order.Watch out for the good-looking ones,Sherri imagined telling her when she was a little older, in a few years’ time.I went for a good-looking one, and look what that got us.
The thing was, Bobby had often been tender and funny. He made a really good pesto sauce. Once they’d played mini golf and he’d crawled through a spiky hedge to retrieve her ball, when she very easily could have gotten a new one from the girl working at the counter. He used to make pancakes for Katie every Saturday morning, which was sort of a cliché of good fathering, but in fact the pancakes were sensational, and he never burned the bottoms. In bed they had an incredible connection—incredible. Sometimes, even now, she flushed when she thought about that. And, worse, she missed it.
The waiter at Mad Martha’s wasn’t even twenty, and it would have been unseemly for a woman of Sherri’s age—a mother! A Derma-You employee!—to let herself be attracted to him. But the glimpse of his bicep, the hollow below his cheekbone when he smiled, his firm, tan calves: all of these things made her wonder something that she hadn’t allowed herself to wonder since she and Katie had first set foot in that terrible motel that smelled like old cheese and despair. What she wondered was this: Would she ever have a man in her life again? Would she ever have sex again? It didn’t seem fair for her to have to give up sex altogether because Bobby had been involved in something so reprehensible. But how, exactly, would it come about, the sex? She lived in a town where everybody seemed already to be coupled off, marching two by two like animals onto the ark. Would she continue to wake dayafter day alone in the bed in this half-house with only Katie for company?
She took a bite of her breakfast burrito; it was the size of a small country and absolutely delicious. Maybe she and Katie should adopt a dog. Maybe Sherri should join Tinder. Was she too old for Tinder? Probably she was. Were people on Tinder looking for a slightly worn single mother with a secret past? Probably they weren’t. She sighed.
“I think we should do some updating,” Katie was saying as she worked her way through her pancakes. “To the house? Don’t you think it would be fun to do that, Mom? Maybe we could get a rug for the kitchen floor, like Morgan has. Something really bright. And some throw pillows for your bed! Wouldn’t you like to have some pretty throw pillows on your bed? They have them at Homegoods, do you think we should go to Homegoods?”
“Maybe,” said Sherri, turning her attention back to Katie. “Sure, we can go to Homegoods.”
“Today?”
“Why not?” Sherri was feeling flush, with the new job and all. “We’ll go today, after breakfast.” Bobby would never have wanted Sherri shopping in a Homegoods. He loathed discount shopping—he called it “shopping for other people’s castoffs.” She’dlikedthat he hadn’t wanted her to have other people’s castoffs.
“When’s your first day at work?” asked Katie.
“July sixth. In the evening.”
“Theevening?” Katie looked stricken. “What will I do? Will I stay alone?”
“Will you be okay if you do?” Sherri asked.
“Yes,” said Katie’s voice—but her eyes told a different story.
“We’ll figure something out,” said Sherri. “I promise: we’ll figure something out.”
While they were waiting for the bill she pulled out her phoneand texted Rebecca.I forgot to get Alexa’s number from you??(she added the slightly chagrined emoji, to convey that it was probably her own fault).RE: Babysitting.
The first time Sherri found something was an accident. She was in Bobby’s office, looking for a stapler, and she dropped the papers she was holding. They slipped right out of her hands, almost like theywantedto lead her to something. When she bent to pick them up, she saw that the floor vent register under his desk chair was slightly askew. In her attempt to straighten it—Bobby was fastidious, she knew he wouldn’t want anything out of place in the house—she pulled at it, thinking she had to take it all the way off to put it back on straight. After she removed the register, she saw that four of the large floor tiles slid out of place too.
And underneath was not the place where forced hot air came out in the winter. Underneath was a hiding place, sort of a tunnel.
Of course she’d really known before that, hadn’t she? Maybe not the specifics, but she knew there was something going on. Something untoward. From the very beginning, there wasso much money.None of the wives talked about where the money came from, they knew that a simple trucking business couldn’t make money like that unless it was trucking something very, very illegal. Drugs or jewels or people.
The wives didn’t let themselves think too much about it. They definitely didn’t talk about it. They spent it, and they enjoyed it—they practically bathed in it—but they didn’t talk about it.
There wasso much of everything.Clothes, cars. A vacation at a five-star resort in Mexico where Katie played in the pool while Bobby and Sherri drank champagne that cost four hundred and fifty dollars a bottle. Sherri didn’t even blink when Bobby ordered it. When she drank it, it tasted like money. They had friends withyachts; they had friends with shares in private planes and vacation homes they’d never set foot in.
The first time Sherri found the hiding place there were two boxes full of hundred-dollar bills in there.Full. There must have been tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands. She didn’t count it. She just put it away, and she lined the floor tiles back up, and she put the register back too.
The next time, the money was gone, and there was a box inside a box inside a box—like an ominous set of Russian dolls—and inside the smallest box were twenty large diamonds.
Another time: cocaine, divided in tiny bags, like snacks for a preschool class. Once there were five fake passports, all for different people. Sherri saw all of it. She saw the laptop that looked exactly like the laptop on Bobby’s desk but wasn’t. (She tried to figure out the password for that laptop many times, but always stopped before it locked up. She tried her birthday and Katie’s birthday and their wedding anniversary and Bobby’s eight-hundred-meter time from high school. Nothing worked.)
It became her hobby, to keep an eye on the hiding place. It was like knitting or learning Spanish, but different. It was what Sherri did besides looking after Katie and keeping herself looking good for Bobby (nearly a full-time job in itself: the waxing, the nails, the peels, the hair). Even as she was tracking it, she told herself it was okay. Nobody was getting hurt. It was only money changing hands. She told herself that whoever’s money it was probably deserved to lose it—they’d probably done something bad in the first place. Brought it upon themselves.
