The Consequences. Colette Freedman
better. I’ve always been a little envious of you.”
“Envious of me? Why?” Stephanie frowned, unsure at the sudden change of topic.
“You live in Boston, you have a great job, a nice house, awesome car . . . at least that’s what Mother keeps telling us all. She keeps hinting that you’ve got a man, but we all know that’s untrue.”
“Why?” Stephanie blurted, surprised.
“Because we all know you’re a lesbian. Well, she knows too, but she doesn’t want to admit that two of her three daughters are gay.”
“What! What?” For a moment, Stephanie didn’t know if she had heard correctly.
“CJ’s gay,” Joan said matter-of-factly.
“I know that. I’ve always known that. But why do you think I am?”
Joan turned awkwardly in her seat to look at her sister. “There’s no need to be embarrassed. You’re thirty-three, pretty, successful, and single. It’s kind of obvious. And Mom says you’re always talking about this Izzie friend of yours. It was CJ who suggested that she must be your partner. And she should know!”
Stephanie started to laugh. It began as a giggle, then grew into a full, bellyaching laugh that came remarkably close to hysterics. She could feel the tension of the past hours seep away with the laughter. The thought of her rather straitlaced mother thinking that her daughter was a lesbian simply because she rarely spoke about men was hilarious. The only reason Stephanie rarely spoke about the man she was dating was because for the past eighteen months she had been involved with a married man. And that was hardly something she could share with her conservative Catholic mother on the telephone. But because of that her mother had assumed . . .
Pressing the heels of both hands against her cheeks she wiped away the tears. “I’m not gay. My friend Izzie is just that—my friend, my best friend, who is getting engaged tonight. To a man. And the reason I don’t talk about men is because first of all, it’s not something I want shared on Mother’s weekly e-mail blasts, and secondly, I am concentrating on building a career and I don’t have a lot of free time. It’s why I don’t have goldfish. Too time consuming. But—and please don’t tell Mom—I have been seeing someone, a man,” she emphasized, “on and off for about a year and a half. But that’s over,” she added, not saying just how recently it had finished.
“Mum’s the word.” Joan laughed as she craned her neck, seeing something in the darkness. “There’s the accident. Happens all the time on this stretch,” Joan said. Ignoring the sudden blaring of car horns, she floored the accelerator, and the VW lurched forward and managed to crawl across two lanes of traffic. There were flashing blue and red lights ahead and a trio of police cruisers were parked at an angle, blocking two lanes. Beyond them, ambulance lights rotated over a traffic accident. Just at the exit off the bridge, a small, nondescript Japanese import had run into the side of a white stretch limo. Half a dozen young men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns stood shivering on the sidewalk, while ambulance crews struggled to cut the driver out of the smaller car.
“Their Christmas party is ruined,” Joan remarked, nodding at the partygoers.
“Not as much as his,” Stephanie said, looking at the bloody driver of the small car, now being laid out on a stretcher. “I wonder if there’s a family waiting for him to come home?” She suddenly glanced sidelong at her sister. “Is Eddie waiting for you? Does he know what you’re doing?”
Joan drove in silence for a minute, then said suddenly, “No.”
Stephanie straightened in the seat. “You mean, he’s expecting you at home tonight?”
Joan checked the clock on the dashboard, not entirely sure if it was accurate or not. “Yeah, he’s probably home by now. I left him a note.”
“Joannie, he’s probably frantic. Call him now!”
“No,” Joan said stubbornly.
“You have to talk to him.”
“I don’t have to do anything. You have no idea what it’s like to have a man lie to you for weeks on end.”
Stephanie opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again. “Tell me what happened.”
“He lied to me,” Joan snapped.
“All men lie,” Stephanie murmured. And women too, she added silently. “But let’s be honest, we wouldn’t want them to tell us the truth about everything, would we?”
“We were married for a year in October. We were starting to talk about having a family.”
Stephanie was freezing. She was beginning to feel a headache—a combination of stress and recycled airplane air combined with jet lag and the bitter weather—pulse at the back of her eyes. Her stomach still felt queasy. She’d just flown halfway across the country, running away from her own affair; the last thing she needed to hear was that her brother-in-law was also behaving badly.
“We were doing fine: Eddie was working as a beer distributer for Miller Brewing; I had a part-time job in a graphics studio in Riverwest. We were even managing to save a little every month. We talked about buying a house and getting a dog. I really wanted to adopt a greyhound. I’ve always loved greyhounds.”
And Eddie got bored with this little domestic idyll, Stephanie thought, found himself a woman, made her some promises, told her some lies. . . .
“And for six weeks afterward, morning after morning, he went out to work. He even came home at the right time.”
“Stop, stop, stop! I think I missed something between beer distributer and greyhound.” Stephanie reached out to touch her sister’s arm. “And would you mind slowing down a little—you’re speeding.”
“Oh.” Joan eased up off the accelerator. As she’d been telling the story, she’d unconsciously been pushing her foot to the floor.
“I’m sorry, I’m a little edgy. What do you mean he went out to work?”
“After he was fired,” Joan snapped. “He pretended to go out to work. I only realized it when the bank statement came in and his salary was no longer directly deposited.”
“I’m sorry. . . . I thought . . . when you said he’d lied to you . . . I thought there was another woman involved.”
“An affair! No way, Eddie knows what I’d do to him—and her—if I ever caught him with another woman!”
“So you’re leaving him because he lost his job?”
“No, I’m leaving him because he lied to me. More than once. He pretended to go to work for six weeks—and every day I’d ask him how things had gone at work, and every day he’d spin me a tissue of lies. One lie leading to another leading to another . . .”
Stephanie closed her eyes. Her own affair was built upon a series of half-truths, each one tugging her farther and farther into an intricate web. She hadn’t fully realized until today just how deep and twisted that web was, just how limiting her relationship with Robert had been. A smile curled the corners of her lips: It had even made her mother think she was a lesbian!
“Maybe it was pride that prevented him from telling you that he’d lost his job,” she suggested cautiously.
“Maybe. But he told me that he’d been let go because they were cutting numbers. That was a lie—another one. He was fired for claiming overtime that he hadn’t done. I only found that out today. Once I realized that, I knew I couldn’t live with him anymore.”
“Why?” Stephanie wondered.
“Because I knew I could never trust him again. Once you catch your man lying to you about one thing, you know he’ll lie to you about others. I didn’t want to live with that mistrust.”
“What will you do?”
“Go home for Christmas.