Page 44 of Stay Away from Him

One thing I’m pretty sure of is that she likes me.

We met at a school event, a PTA silent auction thing, raising money for something or other. It was a wine andcheese night, which meant a table of sweaty sliced cheddar, crackers, and boxed red and white on a table by the entrance. Then, after you got your plastic cup and paper plate, you walked through the gymnasium, looking at the items and deciding what to bid on. It was the usual—time-shares, free golf lessons, spa packages, baskets of environmentally friendly cleaning products—each prize with a clipboard next to it, for us to write down our bids.

I wandered between the tables, then stopped at one. The prize was a collection of paintings by a local woman—a mom at the middle school Kendall attended. I didn’t recognize the woman’s name. What drew my eye were the paintings, five of them, each propped on a gold-lacquered wooden stand, so they stood upright on the table. At first glance they looked like treacly watercolors of nature scenes: flowers, ponds, long grasses, autumn leaves. The kinds of paintings my classmates and I would have made fun of in art school, dismissed as kitsch. But something about the paintings pulled at me. Particularly one, showing a small frozen lake, brown leafless trees, a path, and a gray sky above. An unfinished quality to the brushstrokes gave the piece the feeling of a dream. And on the path, so small I had to squint to see it, was the hint of a figure I somehow knew to be a woman, the ends of a red scarf blowing out behind her.

I looked at her, struggling against the wind under that ugly sky, and thought about the person I’d been before I’d gotten married, before I’d even met Thomas. When I’d been a painter. I hadn’t put hand to brush in years, and I felt an overpowering grief at losing who I’d been. I thought that maybe the figure in that painting was her, the me I’d have been if I’d chosen the road not taken. She was cold and alone, struggling against a harsh wind, but I thought she was happy.And I was jealous of her—just as I was jealous of the woman, the woman I didn’t know, who’d painted these paintings.

I felt a presence next to me, and I turned to see someone standing there. I didn’t know her. I only knew that she hadn’t painted the paintings in front of me—there was a little photo on a placard on the table, and the faces didn’t match.

“What do you think?” asked the woman. There was a sneer in her voice.

“I hate them.” I felt bad as soon as I said it—it wasn’t true, or at least it wasn’t the whole truth. I didn’t hate the paintings. I only hated how they made me feel as though I’d died long ago.

But then the woman next to me cackled low and leaned in to press her shoulder conspiratorially against mine. I glanced at her, and her eyes sparkled with cruel glee.

“I know,” she said. “It looks like a four-year-old drew them. You should meet the woman who paints them. She’s so full of herself. Thinks she’s an artiste.” The last word she said with a mocking flamboyance, and when I glanced at her, she’d pinched the fingers and thumb of one hand together, as though she was holding an imaginary teacup, or perhaps a cigarette—I didn’t know which, and maybe she didn’t either.

“You want to get out of here and get a real glass of wine? Something better than this boxed shit?”

***

Here is what I’ve learned about Kelli Walker in the year and a half since I’ve known her. She claims to love her family—while having a husband she doesn’t seem to care for very much and two unruly sons who treat her with open contempt. She likes to drink, likes to laugh, eats a bit too much,struggles with her weight, ten pounds she constantly claims to want to lose. She is fun—but her idea of fun usually involves complaining about someone else. She’s unhappy but likes it, treats unhappiness as a kind of sport. She has causes: virulently opposes new housing developments in the area, hates her elderly neighbor’s yappy dog.

She listens to my complaints about Thomas. It is her favorite thing to talk about: the problem with Thomas. This fits with her general negative demeanor, the joy she takes in talking about everything she does not like—but, strangely, the one time she met my husband, she flirted with him openly. I think she might believe that if we were ever to split up, she’d be able to hate-fuck him while also having me entirely to herself.

She is fiercely loyal, but God help you if you’re one of her enemies. She calls the cops on people for the smallest infractions, maintains deep resentments with a handful of acquaintances and neighbors, and I’m pretty sure she poisoned that dog, the yappy one that lives next door. (I don’t know this for sure, but she was a little too joyful when she told me it ate something bad and got sick.)

She is also, I believe, obsessed with me. Ever since that first day, the day when we made fun of that poor woman’s paintings together and then went out for a glass of wine, she contacts me a few times a week, asking if I can come out for coffee, a drink, dinner—and her favorite activity, shit-talking. I don’t particularly enjoy her company, and there are days when I wish I’d never gone for that drink with her, but she is the only person I can really talk to, the only person who will receive my darkest, angriest thoughts and not shame me for them.

The only thing that scares me is what she’d do if I evergave her cause to turn on me. If I went from being a person she thinks of as her friend, to someone on her ever-growing list of enemies.

Chapter 11

The next few weeks passed for Melissa like a dream. The beginning of a relationship was usually a carefree period, and that’s what her time with Thomas Danver became after she let her guard down, after she allowed herself to see Thomas without constantly wondering what happened to his wife, if he had anything to do with it, if he was a murderer. The thing that happened at the park—Kelli Walker, Bradley’s fall, then Thomas gently bandaging him up—wiped all that away. Their first few days may have been more intense than most new couples got. Mostly because of his past but because of Melissa’s too, they’d spent more time than usual excavating their baggage, talking about how their previous marriages ended. Stuff most new couples didn’t get to until they were a month or two in, until they’d had some fun together and knew they liked each other. That was where Thomas and Melissa had started.

But after the park, Bradley’s injury, and the clinic, they dropped all that. They put the usual relationship rhythm in reverse: hard stuff first, then fun. There were dinners, long hikes through the many parks and nature centers that seemed to dot the Twin Cities’ suburbs, flirty midday texts. And sex. Lots of sex. Melissa would sometimes pause, in those heady weeks, to wonder how she andThomas were making this work, dating (and having sex) like carefree twentysomethings when Melissa had a kid and Thomas had two, plus a job. But somehow the work of it—the constant logistics, the finding of babysitters and the scheduling of dates and spontaneous quickies in the midst of everything else they had going on—barely registered in Melissa’s mind because of the high, the absolute euphoria, of being so tirelessly pursued by Thomas, by seeing him hunger for her the way he did, every day, every minute.

Thomas owned his own pediatric practice, with younger doctors coming on below him to pick up some of the work. As a result, he was able to sometimes get away in the middle of the day to see Melissa, to take her to a lunch that went long and became an early-afternoon happy hour, getting tipsy, groping at each other under the table. Or he’d text her to meet him at one park or another for a hike, where he’d eye her hungrily in the tight black leggings she put on for such outings. His hands always seemed to find their way to the small of her back, the curve of her hips, in places where the trail turned and they found themselves alone in the trees. The bark of a tree trunk rough against Melissa’s back, Thomas’s mouth on hers, grabbing for her breasts through the down of a puffer vest. No matter what, lunch or hike, they always seemed to end up back at Melissa’s place, in the basement apartment, tearing at each other’s clothes in the curtained half-dark of her bedroom, devouring each other, needing each other, with a ravenousness that startled Melissa—but that she never wanted to end.

They didn’t put their kids together anymore, not after that first date, realizing it probably wasn’t a great idea. This was something theydidtalk about, both agreeing that they didn’t want to confuse the kids, didn’t want to bring any more uncomfortable questions, didn’t want to go too fast for them. Not until they were ready. So whenever they went out in the evenings (as opposed to the midday trysts that were their most common way of seeing each other),they got separate babysitters. Often, it was Lawrence and Toby who hung out with Bradley (he loved their landlords, whom he called his “uncles”) and Melissa guessed that it was Amelia who checked in on Rhiannon and Kendall, to the extent that the older girls even needed someone to watch them anymore. Melissa knew Thomas still spent time with Amelia, met with her at least once a week for coffee—probably more than that, since they were neighbors. She didn’t ask about it.

Summer gradually became fall, and Bradley moved from daycare to school—kindergarten, where Melissa hoped he’d make new friends. Changes came for Melissa as well: specifically, a job, which just happened to be at Thomas’s pediatric clinic. He made the job offer one afternoon after they’d just made love, in fact. He’d given some appointments to a colleague so he could sneak off and get a fix—that’s what he called it, “a fix,” like he was a junkie and Melissa was his drug.

She lay on the bed afterward with no covers on her, which was the way Thomas liked it: he wanted to see her after they had sex, all of her, and she was happy to oblige—happy to be adored. She was on her stomach and he was running his hands down her back to her thighs, her legs, then back up, shivers rippling up her spine as he explored her. Then her phone buzzed. She reached for it and saw an email from a company she’d applied to. They wanted her to come in for an interview.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering with that,” Thomas said after he asked what was so interesting on the phone, and she told him.

“Bothering with a job?” Melissa asked. “You mean making money? Supporting myself and my son?”

“Withlooking,” he said. “I’ll give you a job. We need an accountant at the clinic.”

“You do?”

“We pay a freelance bookkeeper, but we probably need to bring someone on full-time now that the practice is growing.”

“Are you being serious right now?” Melissa turned onto her side and looked at him. “Are you really offering me a job?”

He reached for her, pulled her close. “Do you want it?”

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