The Affair. Colette Freedman
said he’d get them for me.”
“I’ll have a look first.”
“Don’t be mean, Mom. Dad said he’d get them; he had no problem with the list!” She gathered up her bowl and padded back into the family room, ignoring the no-food-in-the-family-room rule. Kathy was too tired, too drained to argue. She could hear Theresa speaking urgently to her brother, no doubt explaining how mean their mother was going to be over the Christmas presents.
They had this battle every year. Theresa would produce a list of just about everything she had seen on TV, on the Internet, found in a magazine, or that her friends had talked about. Kathy would then edit the list down to one or two big presents, plus some small stocking fillers. The trick was always to try and make sure both kids were opening approximately the same number of presents on Christmas morning. More recently, however, Theresa, who was her father’s pet, had discovered that if she asked him directly for something, he would more often than not just get it for her. Last year there had been a major upset on Christmas Eve, when Kathy discovered that Robert had bought Theresa just about everything on her list. She’d had sixteen presents to unwrap. Brendan had had eight.
Robert had promised her that it would be different this year. Obviously he’d forgotten.
Kathy tidied up the kitchen, put her wineglass in the dishwasher, and filled the coffeemaker for the morning. Robert had started to forget lots of things: points on his license, a new credit card account . . . and the fact that she was still his wife.
“Time for bed.”
“Ma.”
“Aw, Mom!”
Kathy crossed the floor in two quick strides and shut the TV off. “Bed. You’ll be on Christmas break soon. You can stay up late then.” She picked cushions off the floor and tossed them back on the chairs. “And, Theresa, when I call you in the morning, get up. If you miss the bus I’m not driving you to school.”
Theresa uncoiled from the chair and marched out of the room, leaving her cereal bowl on the floor. Kathy was going to call after her, but Brendan hopped up and grabbed the bowl and spoon. “I’ll get it.”
“Thanks.”
“Is everything all right?”
She glanced up, struck by the note of concern in his voice. He looked so much like his father. She’d first met Robert when he was in his late twenties, and she had worked for him before they had started dating. He’d been handsome then—still was, she supposed—and Brendan had inherited his father’s dark good looks. He was seventeen now and had had several on-and-off-again girlfriends. She’d discouraged them, trying to get him to concentrate on his studies. The problem was that Robert had already promised him a place in the company when he left school. Brendan had then decided that there was little point in breaking his back studying, inasmuch as he already had a job to go to. Since then, his grades had slackened off. Too many C’s, a couple of D’s. Before he’d talked to his father it had been mainly B’s and a few A’s.
“Mom?” Brendan asked again.
“I’m fine. Tired. Too much to do with Christmas coming.”
Brendan nodded, though he didn’t look convinced. “When’s Dad getting back?”
Kathy shrugged. “Who knows? I don’t.” Something in her voice betrayed her. She caught the frown that appeared on her son’s face and added quickly, “It’s a busy time for him, wining and dining clients. So much of the business he gets comes from networking. He could be home at any time.”
Brendan nodded. But she could tell that something was disturbing him. She opened her mouth to ask, then shut it again. She didn’t want to run the risk of upsetting her son, and maybe have him go to Robert.
“Go to bed, honey. I’ll lock up down here.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, and no computer games,” she added. “It’s late enough.”
She waited until she heard Brendan’s door click shut before she moved around the house, turning off lights and locking doors. She flicked on the porch light, then stood in the hall watching isolated flakes of snow drift past the cone of light.
She wondered if her husband was on the way home to her, or if he was going to spend the night with his mistress.
CHAPTER 12
It was close to two thirty in the morning when Robert finally returned home.
Kathy wasn’t asleep. She’d tried reading for a little while—the new Patricia Cornwell—but she gave it up when she discovered that she’d read the same paragraph at least half a dozen times and it still didn’t make any sense. Dropping the book on the floor by the side of the bed, she’d flicked off the light, then climbed out of bed, pulled back the heavy curtains, and stood by the window, staring down the road. Watching. Waiting. Though she was not entirely sure what she was watching or waiting for.
For the first few years of their marriage, she had never gone to bed until Robert returned home. As the clock ticked on beyond midnight, she’d feel her tension increase as she began to imagine the worst: a drunk driver, a car accident, a carjacking. She couldn’t remember when she had stopped waiting up for him. When he had started staying out regularly, she supposed, when it became the norm rather than the exception.
Finally, chilled through to the bone, she had climbed back into bed and had lain on her back, staring at the patterns cast by the streetlights on the ceiling. She was trying to make sense of the last two days, but she couldn’t.
It kept coming back to questions, with one question dominating all others: Why?
Why would Robert have an affair?
Was it something she’d done? Something she hadn’t done?
Why?
Kathy dozed off with the question buzzing in and out of her consciousness.
The dream was formless, incidents from eighteen years of marriage running together into an endless sequence. In the dream she was always alone, alone in the house, alone with the kids, shopping alone . . . alone, alone, alone.
Weekends alone, weekdays alone, vacations alone.
Alone, alone, alone.
Kathy came awake with a start, suddenly snapping from disturbing images to consciousness.
Even fully asleep she’d heard a key turn in the lock. She was out of bed and at the window before she realized what she was doing. A curious mixture of emotions—relief and disappointment—flooded through her when she saw Robert’s car in the driveway. Then she slipped back into the warm bed and pulled the blankets up to her chin.
Alone.
Listening to Robert moving around downstairs, trying and failing to be silent, she realized that the abiding emotion of the dream had remained with her. And it overpowered her.
She felt lonely.
Where had the boyfriend she’d married gone? What had happened to the man with whom she’d shared everything? Where was the man she’d fallen in love with?
A flush of emotion brought tears to her eyes. She blinked furiously, then brushed her fingers roughly across her face, wiping away the moisture. And suddenly, she was able to identify that empty feeling she’d been living with for the past few years.
She was lonely. She was just so, so lonely.
She filled her time—she took classes, she volunteered—but there was always something missing. She had the children to keep her busy, friends to keep her company, her sisters to confide in and fight with . . . but it still didn’t fill the emptiness.
She heard Robert