Page 2 of The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie
I suck in a breath. This man looksexactlylike Grant.
I watch him for as long as I dare in the reflection, and then I turn. But as expected, he has vanished, like he never existed in the first place.
I push back a wave of nausea. The resemblance between that man and Grant was uncanny. Of course, it was hard to get a good look in that sliver of a mirror, and the man was at least twenty feet away from me. It’s entirely possible that I simply imagined the similarities in appearance. In fact, that is by far the best explanation.
I return the polarized sunglasses to the display. I continue marching down the aisle until I reach the cash registers and join a line that is much longer than it ought to be at two in the afternoon—there are a few people ahead of me, and they seem to be taking forever. One woman is paying with a check. A check? Really? Who pays with a check in this century? She may as well be trading with gold trinkets.
And all the while, I have a creepy-crawly sensation in the back of my neck. I turn around one last time, searching for the man who looks like Grant. I look past the counter where you can print your photos and the snack-food aisle and the one with all the feminine hygiene products. But there’s nobody there who looks like my husband.
I need to calm down. Whatever I saw in the mirror of that sunglasses display must have been my imagination. Or an optical illusion. But the important thing I need to remember is that it wasnot Grant. It was definitely not my husband standing in the middle of the drugstore and watching me while I chose shampoo and browsed sunglasses. It couldn’t have been.
Because my husband has been dead for two weeks.
2
I havethe most beautiful home.
It’s an old house with the first two floors fully renovated, although the attic is yet untouched. Grant owned it for many years before I moved in, and I always wondered why he never bothered to update the topmost floor of the house, but I didn’t probe too deeply. The house is made of brown bricks with a white trim and a large chimney rising majestically from the roof. The home boasts five bedrooms that we fantasized about filling with children after reading in a magazine that this Long Island neighborhood had some of the best schools in the state.
These days, it just seems empty.
When I pull into the driveway and park just outside our two-car garage, I find a woman standing on my front porch, wearing yoga pants and a hoodie, her brown hair in a messy bun, clutching a large rectangular dish. It’s Poppy, my next-door neighbor and closest friend, and she has what I presume is a casserole.
I don’t want another casserole. However, ever since Grant died, it seems that people have decided that casseroles areallI want. I have received more of them than flowers, despite the factthat casseroles are more of a family thing, and there’s just one of me. My refrigerator is only one rectangular pan away from being a solid mass of noodles and cream of mushroom soup.
I kill the engine and climb out of my Lexus, clutching the brown paper bag containing my tea tree oil shampoo. Poppy brightens when she sees me, balancing the dish on one hand so she can wave to me. For a moment, I hope that the dish will fall, spilling egg noodles and broccoli everywhere.
“Alice!” she calls out. “I brought you dinner!”
I try to smile, although I suspect the smile doesn’t touch my eyes or even my nose. “That’s very thoughtful.”
“Just pop this in the oven for thirty minutes at 350,” she chirps, even though I am well aware of how to heat up a casserole, thank you very much.
I unlock the door to the house. For a split second, I get that sensation, again, that there is somebody watching me. Poppy is smiling eagerly as she waits for me to unlock the door, but when she notices my expression, her smile falters.
“Are you okay, Alice?” she asks.
People keep asking me that. How could I be okay? My husband is dead. He was one month shy of thirty-eight years old, and he died in a fiery car wreck. How exactly am I supposed to be okay?
Yet I can’t say all that. What they are really asking is if I am going to suddenly dissolve into a blubbering mess, ripping my hair out with my fists, and then run up to the roof and throw myself off. That is the actual question.
“I’m okay,” I say.
I finally manage to get the door open, and Poppy tags along after me with her casserole. “Are you hungry?” she asks. “I can heat it up for you now.”
It wouldn’t do to tell her that I hate casseroles with every fiber of my being. Not after she’s made me five of them.
“No, thanks.” I wrench open the coat closet by the front door—one of the few closets in the house that does not allow you to walk inside. I look up at the LED lights mounted on the ceiling of the closet, and I swear softly under my breath.Useless. “I’m not really hungry.”
“I’ll make you some tea, then,” Poppy says.
Before I can protest that I don’t actually like tea either (I find it just barely tolerable if you put a little milk in it), Poppy is inside my kitchen. She fills a pot with warm water and sets it on the stove to boil. She searches in a cupboard over the sink until she locates a box of herbal tea. It must have belonged to Grant.
While Poppy is brewing the tea, I wander into the living room. There’s very little in this room that doesn’t remind me of Grant. The television set is almost comically large, because he said that we have the money and should treat ourselves. There’s the antique coffee table that he saw me admiring in the store and insisted on buying in spite of the outrageous price tag. Even the Italian leather sofa still has a dent in it from where he always used to sit.
The most memories, however, are reflected in the frames sitting on the mantel over the fireplace. I step across our Oriental rug to get a closer look at the photographs that catalog our relationship from beginning to end. There is one of the two of us at a fancy seafood restaurant, celebrating the anniversary of our first date. Our wedding photo: me wearing a white lacy gown, with my vivid crimson hair pulled up into a French twist, little tendrils falling around the side of my face, and Grant looking devastatingly handsome in a tuxedo. Another photo of our honeymoon in Cancun, looking happy and tan on the beach.
“You must be missing him a lot.”
