This felt like a pointed jab, and I didn’t know if I could afford to ignore it. “Am I doing something wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far. Would you?”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and I said so.
“I’m hearing that you’re spending a lot of time with a local reporter.”
I was floored. She washearingI was spending a lot of time with a local reporter? From whom? Of course, I immediately thought of Laura, but all Laura knew was that she’d seen me with Teo at Feast Day and that I hadn’t shown up to a potluck. “Who are you hearing that from?” I finally asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. We were approaching the hospital, and she reminded me that I needed to take a right at the traffic circle. My hands felt clammy on the steering wheel, but I did as I was told.
I couldn’t let Mary Lou make too big a deal out of whatever she had or hadn’t heard, and I certainly didn’t want her running to Paul. So I decided to tell her as much as I could get away with. “He’s the nephew of my Italian teacher. We’ve been thrown together a couple of times, but it’s not like I’m—”
We were nearing Mary Lou’s house, and she interrupted to tell me that the driveway was difficult to find in the dark. I slowed the car and put on my blinker.
“I don’t need all the details,” she said. “But can I give you some free advice?”
“Sure,” I said tentatively as I turned in to her driveway and rolled to a stop.
“You need to clean up your act.”
I was speechless, which was fine, because she wasn’t done.
“Paul’s got a promising career ahead of him. And you may think that how you comport yourself has nothing to do with it, but I’ve been on this ride for a long time. And it does.”
86.
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON,all the wives got dressed up, and we gathered down at the pier to welcome our husbands home.
While we waited for the liberty boats to arrive, Laura and I sat on the hood of my car, catching up. She was telling me how she’d devoted the final days of the cruise to going through her apartment; she’d donated a bunch of clothes, organized her spice cabinet, even alphabetized her record collection.
“That sounds awful,” I said.
She didn’t disagree. “I was so bored.”
Of course, I hadn’t been bored. Not for a single minute. But it wouldn’t do me any good to say so.
“You get anything done around the house?” she asked.
I wracked my brain, trying to think of something I could offer her. “I found a flea collar for the cat at that shop that sells all the odds and ends down at the harbor.”
“Big doings,” said Laura.
“I know.”
The first liberty boat to arrive at the pier was full of little boys, who looked bedraggled but happy as they hauled their duffel bags off the boat and threw themselves into their mothers’ arms.
I felt for Laura, watching Mary Lou and Beverly and a bunch of other women gush over their sons. She wanted to be a mother so badly, and the reunions unfolding in front of us made the whole enterprise seem pretty great. Well, except for Carla’s kid, Kevin, who had come home with a busted lip and his arm in a sling. When Carla looked to her husband for answers, he just shook his head and said, “Don’t ask.”
Paul and Bobby were on the second boat. They’d barely disembarked when Laura gave Bobby a big, exaggerated wave, hopped off the hood of the car, and did a fifty-yard dash into his outstretched arms. The way shewas carrying on, you’d have thought he’d been deployed to a battle zone for the better part of a year and not the Med for the better part of a fortnight.
I moved a little slower. When I reached Paul’s side, I gave him a quick peck on the lips, then made a big deal out of pushing my hair, which was whipping around in the wind, out of my eyes. “How was everything?” I asked in a tentative voice I didn’t recognize.
I suppose I felt guilty about running around with Teo behind his back, but I think the bigger issue was we’d been married such a short time that, in ten days, I’d already sort of forgotten the natural ebb and flow of our conversation, the way we fit into each other’s arms, even the taste of his kiss.
Paul apparently had not forgotten anything.
As soon as we were in the Chevelle, he pulled me onto his lap and pushed my mouth open with his tongue. I kissed him back and in no time at all felt him slide a finger inside my underwear.
