The truth existed somewhere in between, though. Denny wasn’t sure he knew what Anna wanted anymore, and he was even less sure that Di really knew. A confidante. A best friend. A stranger. A foe. A new and darker realization began to swirl around. The afternoon light filtered in through the bedroom. Anna had always wanted blinds to block the lights from the neighboring house. He hadn’t even been able to dignify that simple request, and he could see now that he had failed her, Anna. Dust swirled in the air.
“It’s very hard to know what she would have wanted,” he said, but that was a lie, too. What Anna would have wanted was the entire universe, he sometimes thought, but it was simpler than that. She wanted decency, fairness, and other things he could never deliver to her. Or not in life.
“If you want, I can go,” Di said. She was sitting up now, shielding herself with the top sheet. Her features were sharper. She had a crease along the top of her brow that he hadn’t noticed before. “I’m sorry.” She reached for his hand. Instinctively, he retracted. “I’ll go.”
She turned her back to him and rooted around on the floor for clothing. He looked over at her one more time, studied the foreign shape in his bed, watched as she collected herself, and saw her pick up his wife’s notebook that included those last words. He was surprised to learn, upon touching his own face, that it was wet, that the sadness had leaked out. It had been all wrong, allowing Di here, into his house, into his bed, into the space that had belonged only to Anna. But what could he say now? It was done. It was all done.
Chapter 22
MARY HAD ASKEDto meet up for dinner, just the two of them. Usually, it was a trio—Mary, Anna, and Di—but Mary had texted early in the week to see about a one-on-one dinner. Anna didn’t mind. In fact, she did better one-on-one, she always thought. It was an opportunity to really sink into whatever the other person was saying.
We should go to Newburyport. You always say you’re going to show me around and you never do.
That was true. Mary had asked again and again for an insider’s tour, and they had simply never made the time.
There’s a place I love called Vera, Anna wrote back. The restaurant was loud, so she and Denny almost never took the kids, because they had to yell across the table to hear anything. And they hardly ever had date nights anymore. But Vera served good pastas and chewy-crusted pizzas and it was a warm little place right off Market Square that people knew about but that always miraculously seemed to have enough space for a party of two.
Sounds perfect. Pick me up at 6, Mary said. Now Anna just had to clear it with Denny.
Which turned out to be no issue at all, because there was some miniseries on that he had been dying to watch, so he didn’t even blink when she told him she was heading out for dinner with friends, and would he please remember to give the kids vegetables and fruit with their macaroni and cheese this time? (Yes, yes, fine, he promised, though she knew better than to expect it.)
Mary wore a pair of pale blue slacks that cut right to the ankle, along with heeled black boots and a camel-colored wool coat, all clothing that Anna had never seen before.
“Look at you,” she said, as her friend got into the car.
“Well, you know, any opportunity not to wear sweatpants in public.”
In Newburyport, the giant Christmas tree still hadn’t been removed from Market Square. This year, the city had used LED lights instead of traditional bulbs, and the glow cast from them tinged everything blue. When Anna moved to the area in the late 1980s, the city had just started to recover from a period of economic regression. In the 1970s, a city-wide restoration, focused on the area’s brick-paved downtown, had been initiated to help drive business owners and tourists. But most of the people she knew were middle-class kids, with parents who worked in the public sector or who deep-sea fished on the weekends. The town had been a bit down on its luck until a commuter rail nosed in somewhere in the late ’90s, connecting the area with Boston and bringing better jobs with it.
Now you wouldn’t even recognize the place. If Newbury-port had once been a place for cheap beers and wayward fishermen, it was now a tony bedroom community, a mirror to Hamilton: UPPAbaby strollers, upscale boutiques, small restaurants that operated with a reservations-only model. Anna still knew plentyof people around town, but she found that the faces looked less and less familiar now, a place stretching beyond its own measure of comfort.
Vera still reminded her of the way Newburyport had been when she was a kid, even though it had been the home of an old ice cream parlor, Bergson’s. Inside, she and Mary were shown to a table in a corner.
When a server came over—one she recognized—Anna held up two fingers. Sangiovese, two glasses. The server nodded and disappeared toward the bar.
“Everything is good here, but I can also list my favorites, if that’s helpful,” Anna said. She didn’t need a menu. Even though she never came with Denny, she had been to Vera plenty with Di, and even a few times alone, enough to know the menu, enough to know the wine.
“Order for me,” Mary said. “I honestly don’t care. I’m so happy to be out of Hamilton, I’ll eat anything.”
“Even pizza?”
“I’m from South Hamilton. I’ll eat pizza.”
Anna laughed. She thought of Mimi with a slice. Never in a million years.
She ordered enough food for twice as many people. Prosciutto with burrata. Two Neapolitan-style pizzas. Linguine with clams. A salad that went untouched. They had to send back the share plates; there was no room for anything else.
“I obviously overdid it,” she said.
“I’m okay with it, honestly,” Mary said.
Mary, Anna noticed, had been drinking quickly. She was already moving toward the third wine by the time they made it to the pizza. Her face had flushed, and she seemed hesitant to make eye contact.
“I have a feeling we’re not here to talk about the pizza, though,” Anna said.
Mary looked up and put down her fork. Sitting back, she laced her hands in her lap. She went to say something, but nothing came out.
Anna waited.
