Round Robin (16 page)

At first she had told herself that once the novelty of the new store wore off, her sales would bounce back, but that didn't seem to be happening. “Maybe it's time to close the shop,” Craig suggested when she mentioned the problem as she fixed his breakfast. “You could always find a job somewhere else.”

The very idea of closing Grandma's Attic had horrified her. The quilt shop wasn't just a job; it was her passion, her calling, and her inspiration. She had broken down in tears that afternoon as she counted the week's receipts. Fortunately, Summer was there to console and encourage her. Better yet, the younger woman offered to help. Bonnie accepted, more grateful for the compassion than hopeful anything would come of the offer, but to her surprise and delight, Summer returned the next week with page after page of ideas. “Once I started brainstorming, I couldn't stop,” Summer had said, so excited she could hardly stand still long enough to hand Bonnie the papers. “Grandma's Attic isn't beaten yet, and won't ever be, if I can help it.”

Summer's master plan included putting the shop on-line so that quilters from all over the world could purchase their fabric, notions, and books. They also created Grandma's Attic Friends, a club offering discounts to frequent shoppers. As the shop's losses gradually declined, Bonnie decided to implement more of Summer's ideas. Still, as much as she appreciated the help, Bonnie worried that Summer was sacrificing too much of her study time to what was really only a part-time job.

“Are you kidding?” Summer had replied when Bonnie tentatively approached the subject. “I'd much rather help Grandma's Attic than study. Besides, classes will be over in a few weeks.”

“But doesn't that mean you have finals coming up? And won't you need to prepare for graduate school?”

Summer laughed and told her not to worry. Bonnie tried, but she still had misgivings. Gwen would never forgive her if her brilliant daughter got less than straight A's because Grandma's Attic was monopolizing her time.

Smiling, Bonnie let herself in through the back door and locked it behind her. She flicked on the lights and chose a CD to play in the background. Simple Gifts, a folk group from Lemont, suited her mood that morning, and soon the sounds of hammered dulcimer, guitar, violin, and flute were coming through the speakers over the main sales floor. Humming along with the music, she went through the aisles straightening bolts of fabric and tidying shelves. The bathroom was clean, but she gave it a quick going-over anyway before vacuuming the carpet in the main room, her office, and the small classroom in the back. She taught fewer classes there than in the days before Elm Creek Quilts, and now the room was more often used as a playroom for customers' children. Bonnie lingered over the toy box. The stuffed animals were store samples she had made to help promote pattern sales, but the other toys had belonged to her own children. It pleased her to have an excuse to hold on to them long after her own kids had put them aside.

After retrieving her money bag from its locked hiding place in her desk, filling her cash drawer, and dusting the items in the display window, Bonnie unlocked the front door and turned the sign in the glass so that passersby could see the shop was open. It was exactly half past eight o'clock, and another workday had begun like so many others before it—and, God willing, like many more to come.

Since the morning hours were traditionally slow, Bonnie went to her office to take care of bills and prepare deposits. The bell on the door would ring if any customers entered, and she could see the entire sales floor through the large window beside her desk.

Even pausing to help a customer or two, Bonnie was able to finish her paperwork within an hour. Then, with her inventory checklist in hand, she turned on her computer and logged onto the Internet. Some of her
suppliers accepted orders by E-mail, which shaved at least a day or two off delivery time. Summer had shown her how even a business based on something as traditional as quilting could benefit from technology.

But not today, apparently. To her exasperation, her server was down for the second time in less than a week. “That does it,” she said. Before the week was over, she would find a new service provider. It was bad enough that she couldn't place her fabric order, but how many sales had she lost because customers couldn't log on to her web page?

A second attempt and a third were equally unsuccessful. Bonnie realized it was useless and chewed on her lower lip, thinking. What now? She could fax the order, but that would delay the shipment. Regular mail would take even longer.

She could log on using Craig's account; his E-mail used Waterford College's server, and she knew his password—JoePa, the nickname of Penn State's famous football coach. Craig had been so proud of his clever choice that he hadn't been able to keep it a secret.

“I'll be able to hack into your account now,” Craig Jr. had warned.

“Do it and I'll disinherit you,” his father had retorted, with a grin to show he was only teasing.

Bonnie wondered if Craig would mind if she used his account, and decided that if he had, he wouldn't have announced his password to the entire family. If their places were reversed, she would let him use her account without a second thought. Besides, as long as she sent just one message and didn't download anything, he would never know.

It took only a moment to change the settings on her E-mail software, and soon she was connected to the Internet. Breathing a sigh of relief, she typed in her fabric order and sent it off with a click of the mouse. Then, by force of habit, she checked for incoming messages.

“Oh, no, no, no,” she exclaimed, frantically tapping the sequence of keys to cancel the request. But it was too late. A message was downloading. With growing chagrin, Bonnie watched the indicator bar showing the transmission's progress. Now she'd have to print out the message and give it to Craig when he got home or forward it back to his account so that he would receive it the next time he checked his E-mail. Either way,
he'd know she had been using his account. He might not mind, but what if he did?

She should have just used the fax machine and damn the delay.

The computer beeped cheerfully and flashed an announcement on the screen: “You have new mail!”

“No kidding,” Bonnie muttered. The question was, what should she do with it? She could just delete it. Eventually the sender would ask Craig why he hadn't written back, and they would attribute the message's disappearance to the vagaries of cyberspace.

But what if the message was important?

Bonnie resigned herself to reading the note. If it was important, she'd fess up; if it was just another piece of spam, she'd delete it, breathe a huge sigh of relief, and never again use Craig's E-mail account without permission.

She double-clicked the message—and with the first few words, her sheepish embarrassment was driven away by wave after dizzying wave of shock and disbelief.

“My dearest Craig,” the letter began. What followed was a jumbled muddle of words and phrases that were incomprehensible and yet all too clear. A strange roaring filled her ears; she read the note over and over again, her body flashing hot and cold as the words sank in.

Her hands trembled as she clicked the mouse—first, to send the message back through cyberspace to her own account, and a second time, to print it. When the sheet of paper emerged from the laser printer, she deleted all traces of the message from Craig's account. Then she shut down the computer, shaking.

Craig was carrying on some kind of relationship—no, she ordered herself, say it—an affair. An affair over the Internet. A passionate affair, if this message was any indication, with a woman named Terri.

Woodenly, Bonnie rose from her chair, and before she was entirely sure of her purpose, she locked the shop door and flipped the Open sign to Closed, then set the plastic hands of the display clock to indicate that she would return in ten minutes.

That's all she would need, she thought as she went upstairs to the
home she and Craig had shared for most of their marriage. Ten minutes to see how far it had gone. Unless he had erased all the other messages, because surely there had been others. One didn't write “I can't wait to meet you in person” in a first message. She prayed that he had erased the evidence of his infidelity.

But he hadn't. When she called up the E-mail software on Craig's computer, she found a file of messages from Terri dating back to the previous November. A second file contained messages Craig had sent to her; Bonnie choked out a sob when she saw that he had written to Terri on their wedding anniversary. And on New Year's Eve he had sent a special note: “It's nearly midnight, my darling, and I'm standing beside you ready to give you the first kiss of the New Year.” On the stroke of twelve, Terri had responded, “Happy New Year, Sweetie! My arms are around you and I'm kissing you!”

Bonnie had been in bed by then. She had given Craig his kiss at ten o'clock and had gone off to bed, still weary from the previous weeks of holiday sales and entertaining, but glowing from the joy of the kids' visit home.

She read all the messages, every one, and pieced the story together. Craig and Terri had met on some kind of Internet mailing list for fans of Penn State football. Eventually they began exchanging private notes, first about the Nittany Lions and then about themselves. Bonnie learned that Craig's wife was so wrapped up in her two jobs and her friends that she couldn't carry on a conversation without mentioning them. Terri was divorced, with two preteen girls.

Bonnie calculated the approximate difference in their ages, not that it mattered. Terri was significantly younger.

Craig's wife didn't share his interests; she didn't know former Lion KiJana Carter from President Jimmy Carter. Terri found that enormously funny, and confessed that her ex was an Ohio State grad. Messages had flown back and forth regarding rumors that Notre Dame might join the Big Ten; they eventually agreed to disagree whether this would be good for the Penn State team or disastrous.

And then the messages grew more serious, more longing. There was a
brief discussion of Craig's guilty feelings regarding the wife; Terri wrote that what the wife didn't know wouldn't hurt her, and no more was said on that subject. They wrote of how much they looked forward to each new message, and how they ached when none arrived. From the sheer volume of messages, Bonnie figured they weren't aching very often.

Finally she shut down the computer. She sat very still for a long time, staring at the dark screen, numb and dazed.

Her life had been eroding for months, and she had been entirely unaware. All the while she was doing her best to be a loving wife and partner, Craig and this woman were joking about her. They called her “the wife” like she was a pet or a piece of furniture—“the dog” or “the chair.”

A wave of nausea swept over her. She bolted to the bathroom and leaned over the sink, retching and gasping, but nothing came up. Eventually the heaves subsided, and she clutched the basin to steady herself until she caught her breath. Then she turned on the tap full blast, cupped her hands beneath the icy spray, and splashed her face, over and over again, until her hands were red from the cold and her stomach had settled.

As she turned off the water, she glimpsed her face in the mirror and was frozen in place by what she saw there. Eyes shadowed and haunted. Skin pale and dripping wet. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. No, she looked like the ghost itself—the ghost of a suicide by drowning.

She leaned closer to the mirror, close enough to see the fine lines around eyes and mouth and the deeper grooves crossing neck and brow. Gray had returned unnoticed to her hair, though she'd dyed it after seeing herself on
America's Back Roads.
She had never been slender, though she wasn't heavy, either, and the weight in her face made her look puffy and drawn. Or maybe it wasn't the weight. Maybe it was the shock, the betrayal.

She wondered what Terri looked like. She wondered if Craig knew.

“You must confront him,” she told the ghost woman in the mirror. When he came home from work that evening, she would be waiting for him. She would tell him she knew that “Terry,” the fraternity brother he planned to meet at Penn State that weekend, was actually “Terri,” single mother and potential
homewrecker. She would remain calm and grave as she spoke, giving him no sign that he had torn her heart out. And then Craig would—

Would what?

Would he break down and beg forgiveness? Would he become angry and claim ignorance so she would have to drag him over to the computer and point to the incriminating evidence? Would he grow silent and distant and disappear into the bedroom, emerging with suitcase in hand? In any event, a confrontation would ruin everything. There would be no salvaging their relationship if they openly acknowledged Craig's betrayal. Her pride and his shame would be too great to overcome. If she wanted them to stay together, she would have to think of something else.

But
did
she want them to stay together after what he had done?

Yes. Yes. He was her husband, and she loved him. She did not want her marriage to end.

He had betrayed her, but he had not yet committed adultery, something she would not have been able to forgive. Her only hope was to keep him from doing so and to have him decide on his own that he wanted no woman but herself. He had to chose her of his own free will, without any tears or threats or begging from her. It was the only way.

“It's the only way,” she explained to the ghost woman, and left the bathroom in a daze. She returned to the shop downstairs, her movements stiff and requiring great effort, as if her joints had locked up after years of inactivity, or as if she had slipped inside someone else's body and had not yet learned all the connections between brain and nerve and muscle.

As soon as she entered through the back door of the shop, she heard rapping on the front door. It was Judy, knocking frantically and peering through the glass.