He put his arms around her, and she let herself burrow against his warmth for one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, and that was it, or she’d start crying.
“You hungry?” She tried to pull away, but he held her so all she could do was lean back and pretend she needed the distance to focus. Nearly forty and her eyes weren’t what they used to be, something like that. “I brought out your mom’s pea soup. So you’d have something
hot
waiting for you, which I know you like.”
The dig was too subtle. He didn’t react. “Fabulous. I’m starved.”
Then he kissed her, and she actually had to hold back a gag thinking of those lips pressed against some other woman’s.
Again. She managed to pull away this time, or maybe he’d just released her.
“Ten minutes and soup will be on the table.”
“I’ll go change. Sorry the house was such a mess when you got back. I was—”
“I understand. You were busy.” How she kept acid out of the word
busy,
she didn’t know, but she deserved a medal.
“Yeah, it was a crazy weekend.”
“I’ll just bet.” The smile stayed on her face, and she even softened her eyes into what would look like wifely sympathy and affection, nearly choking with the need to scream,
How could you? How could you
? Melodrama of the type he hated most, which he’d only use as proof of her inadequacy.
No doubt the woman who’d left underwear upstairs was as cool and sophisticated and brilliant as the other two, not that As Good As It Got
9
Cindy had met either of them. But she knew. Because if he wanted someone just like Cindy, he wouldn’t need to stray.
He shot her another glance before turning and walking up the stairs, decorator-covered with a runner and brass rods, which Cindy hated. Ten years they’d been in this house, moving from Chicago for this fabulous new job he’d been lusting after for so long. And now there was more lusting of the other kind. Because Kevin couldn’t get enough sex or good-enough sex or whatever it was he missed from her. She wasn’t sure. Sometimes during counseling sessions she’d felt as if she were trying to understand the feelings of a block of wood.
Ten minutes later, jacket off, business suit exchanged for gray sweats and a faded blue Orlando Magic T-shirt he’d gotten on a family trip to Florida, Kevin Matterson was ready for dinner.
And so was his lovely wife, Cindy.
She put the deep cream soup bowl in front of Kevin, then got her own and sat down to watch. He would dip his spoon in cautiously, skim the surface, testing for temperature against his lips. If it was too hot, he’d make a pained face and drink water, avoiding her eyes. If it was too cold, he’d eat, but without comment or relish. If it was just right, her wee baby bear would smile at her and say that it was good.
He smiled at her tonight, and dipped his spoon again.
“Delicious.”
She watched him over the silver bread basket, a gift from some aunt of his, which held the still-warm breadsticks. She was too nervous to do more than stir her soup around.
On his fifth spoonful, a bit of red lace surfaced in his bowl. She would have expected him to take longer to reach 10 Isabel
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paydirt, but there it was. And now the whole goop-coated thing came into view, dangling forlornly on the end of his spoon.
“What the hell is this?”
“Looks like panties.” She managed a calm mouthful of soup, but it tasted like plaster. Or how she imagined plaster would taste, since she wasn’t in the habit of eating it. Her heart was thudding so painfully she was afraid it was the beginning of a heart attack. But she wouldn’t give him and Ms. Sexy Sophistication the gift of her death.
“What are panties doing in my soup?”
She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to be indignant.
Unless he thought they were hers. Or unless . . . there was some other explanation?
Hope again. Beautiful hope, a shining ball of it, rising up from the pit of her raging stomach. Would she never learn?
“That’s strange. There were panties in our bed when I got home too. Maybe aliens are planting women’s underwear throughout the city? Or maybe they’re a gift from above.
Isn’t there a song about that? Panties from heaven?”
Okay, she was starting to sound a little hysterical. But really, she was entitled.
By now Kevin had put two and two together and come up with a rose is a rose is a stinking cheater. His face had gone wooden, and her fear and dread joined forces to squeeze the hope ball until it imploded and sank back into the gloom of her guts.
“Cindy, I had no idea . . . I didn’t realize . . . ” He was looking very ill now, and she realized with certainty that for the rest of her life she would never want to eat split pea soup again.
As Good As It Got
11
“Last time was supposed to be the last one, Kevin. Is this like old rock stars who have seven farewell tours? Or is this really the end? The grand finale? The last hurrah?” She gestured to the dripping mess in his soup. “Your swan thong?”
The line was so clever she almost giggled. She wasn’t much of a punster, not like her father, but that one was pretty good.
Or would have been if she wasn’t sounding even more hysterical now.
Kevin put his head in his hands and gave her a good view of the slight thinning on his crown, which she wasn’t sure he’d discovered yet.
“God, Cindy. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“No, of course not. Why would you want me to find out?”
He lifted his face and the expression on it scared her. He wasn’t looking contrite, or angry, or stubbornly unaffected, not like the other times. He looked . . . anguished.
“You would have found out.” He nearly whispered the words, but just when she was going to say
What?
her brain managed to sort them out.
“What do you mean?”
“I was going to tell you.”
She snorted her disbelief, and then what he was saying hit her another way, and the bright ball rose again. “You mean it’s over?”
“No.” Anguish again, and a tear, then another one. His, not hers. Her shock made it very hard to take in what they were talking about.
Kevin was crying
. Something dark and terrifying sounded a warning, like the shark chords in the movie
Jaws,
as if her subconscious had already lived her life and was letting her know a really bad part was coming up.
12 Isabel
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“I was going to tell you, Cindy.” He spoke gently, as if he were talking to a special needs child. “Because . . . I’m leaving.”
She was so stunned that this didn’t compute at all.
“Leaving.”
“Yes.” He couldn’t look at her, and she couldn’t look away from him.
“Leaving . . .” She had become suddenly stupid and nothing made sense. “ . . . me? Our marriage?”
“Yes.
Yes.
” He was impatient now, anxious to get this little unpleasantness over with.
He couldn’t mean it. Twenty-one years of marriage, solid in every way but his affairs, which she’d chosen to put up with. He always came back. He would always come back. It was an unspoken agreement. His breaking that agreement was worse than breaking his vow to be faithful. Way worse.
They were married. He had to stay with her until death.
That was how it worked.
She stood and started pacing. “Why are you saying you’re leaving this time and not the others?”
“Because . . . I love her.”
She stopped to stare at him until a harsh laugh broke out, a bitter middle-aged woman’s laugh, not hers. Nothing he could say could have been more horrible. Not that this panty-leaver had bigger tits, a tighter ass, straddled him better than a bronc rider—all that Cindy could forgive and understand.
But love was reserved for the wife, and sex for the mistress, everyone knew that.
“You
love her
?” She screeched the words, which she thought was pretty understandable given the circumstances, but he wouldn’t.
As Good As It Got
13
“I knew you’d get this way.” His jaw set like cold rock; they were back on familiar ground.
She threw out her arms then brought her hands back to grip her head, fingers bent like claws. “What
should
I do, Kevin? Say, ‘There, there, I understand. I’ll be gone by morning, don’t give me another thought’?”
“You’ll be taken care of. By me, financially. And Patty has—”
“You are in love with someone named
Patty
?” Control was gone, she might as well face it. “I
hate
that name.”
“She’s found a place that will help you—”
“What?”
Finding out he loved someone else was bad, but the pain of finding out this woman had done research to help Cindy get over the agony
she
caused was so acute, Cindy just stood there, trying to get more words out over little gasps that took the place of breathing.
“It’s in Maine. It’s a camp. For women who—”
“You plotted with her to send me off to
camp
? Like I’m a child you want out of the
way
?”
“She was trying to help.”
“That . . . bitch.”
“She’s not—”
“Bitch
.”
“You don’t know—”
“All-bitch Patty, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pick—”
“Stop it.” He stood abruptly, gesturing, and knocked over his soup. The thick green liquid flowed, lavalike, over the table, chunks of ham and black and red lace in sharp relief as the rest settled into the thick cotton cloth. “We’ll talk about it in the morning, when you’re calmer.”
“Calmer.” She laughed bitterly again, regretting the panty 14 Isabel
Sharpe
trick, regretting her fury, regretting everything but her daughter and her marriage to this wonderful handsome man who was her whole adult existence. “I’m supposed to take the ruin of my life calmly? Go away quietly to the camp your mistress picked out, so you and she can screw in our bed? In our house? In—”
“I’m staying at her place tonight.” He walked out of the room and then upstairs. She stood in the dining room, staring at the split-pea-coated panties on her beautiful table, which had belonged to his grandma Matterson. He was supposed to back down at the sight of the thong. He was supposed to apologize. He was supposed to get rid of the woman, or promise to be discreet going forward, swear it was just sex and that he was always faithful to Cindy in his heart, where it mattered.
She crumpled back into her chair, the humid hammy smell of the soup making her want to throw up.
He wasn’t supposed to want to leave.
Chapter 2
Inching. No, centimetering. No, millimetering. Ann pulled her silver Mercedes—one of the few things she’d been able to keep from her old life—ahead until it practically climbed onto the back of the Honda Civic in front of her, wishing every car on the Mass Pike except hers would be sucked into the belly of a spaceship and taken to a far distant planet.
Another inch forward. An idiot in an SUV—or was that redundant?—drove past on the shoulder. She gave him the surreptitious finger. Special place in hell for people who thought the rules were for someone else.
The traffic shifted again. Following the barrier of the Civic, she made it an entire half foot that time. Whoa, she’d better slow down. At this rate she might get home sometime this century. “Home” being a temporary concept, her childhood home in Framingham, which hadn’t been hers since she graduated from Brown and moved out two decades ago.
She’d just had the substantial nonpleasure of having to sell 16 Isabel
Sharpe
her real adult home, along with nearly everything in it, to settle surprise debts her late husband had apparently been sure he could pay off before she found out.
Best laid plans . . .
The guy in the car next to her started honking his horn over and over, loud, futile ear-splitting blasts. She understood his frustration, even as she rolled up her window and sent him a glare. Four lanes packed with cars in front and behind as far as she could see, engines idling with suppressed energy, gallons of fossil fuel needlessly burning. Too many people. Just too damn many people. Why didn’t everyone stop having so many kids? Couldn’t they see what was happening around them?
On either side of the cars channeled along their asphalt conveyor belt, sunlit trees stood swaying in the warm July breeze, unaffected by timetables or commuter duties, delays or frustrations. Above them, endless sky and the type of puffy peaceful clouds Paul had called “Simpson clouds” because they looked like those that parted during the cartoon’s opening theme song.
Right now Ann wanted to invoke another cartoon and have her Mercedes sprout helicopter blades so she could rise, Jetson-like, above the claustrophobia and sail blissfully onward.
What had she been thinking not to insist her interview be held that morning so she could avoid rush hour? She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been so grateful to have a shot at a job, she would have gone to an interview at 3:00 A.M. In her underwear. On the moon.
For the first time in her life she was in the terrifying and humbling—God, she hated being humble—position of need-As Good As It Got
17
ing money. Badly. No, desperately. No, frantically. The first time she’d ever been in the position of lacking a definitive answer to the question, “What happens next?”
She knew hers was a risky field. But she and Paul had plenty of money, or so she thought, ha ha ha. He’d retired early from real estate and was making even more for them investing, or so he said, ha ha ha. She’d done well in the tough field of Information Technology sales, and was proud of adding not only to their comfortable lifestyle, but also to their promisingly affluent retirement.
Ha ha ha.
Oh, they had such plans. A chalet in Aspen. A farmhouse in Tuscany. She’d trusted Paul’s financial savvy. Didn’t blink when he said he’d invested this much in this or that much in that. Didn’t notice when he stopped talking about his work.
Didn’t see or rather ignored the signs that something was wrong. No, really wrong. No, fatally wrong.