“I need proof,” she told me. “On the chance that I ever feel the need to get a lawyer involved.”
A lawyer?
“For the divorce, naturally. If it comes to that. I’m sure we both hope it won’t.”
There was that word again.We.I wasn’t following her. But it had an effect. As did the worddivorce. Until now, it had seemed to me that Regina held tenaciously to her marriage. She might be critical of Forrest (relentlessly so). She might even be disdainful. But I’d never heard the slightest suggestion that they wouldn’t be together always.
Now a side of her I’d never seen revealed itself. Her eyes had taken on a steely cast. She drew her lips tightly together as if she were sucking on sour fruit.
“I can’t do this without you, Frances,” she told me.
In my whole life, I’m not sure anybody had ever said they needed me. Oh, maybe Forrest needed me to take the children to their tennis lessons, and sailing. Prudence needed me to set the table for dinner, or clear off the plates afterward. My mother mostly needed me to keep quiet and ask as little of her as possible. My father needed me to listen to him talk about the novel he was never going to finish, the poems and music I didn’t understand. But Regina Emerson needed me to do something that mattered. To Regina, I wasthe key player.
“You’re too young to understand all of this, but there’s a lot of money and property at stake here,” Regina said. “Forrest understandsvery well that if he leaves me, he’ll be penniless. If this woman he’s playing around with is foolish enough to throw everything away to be with him, she’ll be penniless too.” Something like a smile crossed over Regina’s face.
“Brenda.” She spoke the name as if just saying it out loud felt physically disgusting. As if she had maggots in her mouth and needed to spit them out. And then she laughed.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” I told her. What was I saying? What did it matter? Did anything matter anymore?
Regina shifted gears then. She was typing.
“You’ll be like a private investigator,” she said, fingers flying over the keys. “Collecting the evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“We need proof of what’s going on between those two,” she said. “In the unlikely event that Forrest is actually stupid enough to believe that he and his little girlfriend have a future together. I need proof of what Forrest’s been up to, in case he ever goes after me for some ungodly amount of money he doesn’t deserve so he can start a whole new life with her.”
This didn’t sound like the Forrest I knew, and it was not how Regina had ever portrayed him to me either. The Forrest I knew never cared much about money. On the other hand, the Forrest I thought I knew never would have said those things to Brenda Barnett that day at the library. Maybe I never really knew Forrest after all. I didn’t know anything anymore.
“He’d have to accuse me of being an unfit mother. He’d probably say I’m a drug addict. He’d testify that I have mental health issues. Just to get his hands on my money.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, indignation rising up in me.
When you thought about it, the potential accusations Forrest might make about Regina were not so far off base. Still, it would be pretty terrible for a person to actually raise them.
“You do a lot around here. Like those lists you make.” There had to be more. I just couldn’t think of it.
“We’ll make sure it never happens,” she said, patting my hand again. “You’ll be my personal detective. Think of yourself like that woman inMurder, She Wrote. Or Nancy Drew. Harriet the Spy.”
“I never did anything like that,” I told her. “I wouldn’t know how.”
“Oh, but you’re a natural,” she said. “You’ve been sitting on the sidelines, watching other people all your life. You notice everything. And you’re so good at being invisible.
“See how interested Brenda Barnett is in sticking around,” she said, “once her dream lover’s sleeping in a double-wide trailer. See if she still believes in forever then.”
41
Life as Usual
An odd thing happened after that: nothing. The day passed with no further word concerning Regina’s plan, whatever it was she was cooking up. And another day after that. I’d almost come to believe that her words to me—about my being her personal detective, collecting evidence, the possibility of divorce—were a product of some drug-induced altered state she must have been in that afternoon. Maybe she’d forgotten the whole thing. One way or another, she gave no indication of taking action.
It was a few days later. At dinner that night, served on the patio, Regina wore a surprisingly becoming outfit (silky black pants and a silk shirt, electric blue, in her appropriate size for once. Zero, probably.) She had makeup on, and earrings, and she’d done something with her hair. It didn’t seem as lank as normal. She looked pretty.
At the table across from me, seated in the chair he always favored, with Regina on one side, Jilly on the other, Forrest was entertaining us with a story from his swim around the lake that afternoon—a swim neither Regina nor I believed he’d actually undertaken.
“I was just going along, minding my own business, doing my crawl stroke, when who should come up to me but the Loch Ness Monster,” he told us.
“You’re pulling our leg, Daddy,” Jilly said.
