apartment from an eight-foot-high brick wall.
Debbie had her prison. Barbara had hers.
The air conditioning pumped in its battle with the intolerable outside furnace. It was a Mexican standoff.
She went to the dining room table on which she’d dumped today’s mail. All of it was addressed either to her husband, Lou Durocher, or to Barbara Durocher, or to both Mr. and Mrs.
Tom Adams had fired Lou after learning of his adulterous relationship with Babs and that Lou was the father of her baby. He offered Lou the opportunity to do the honorable thing. Having no sword to fall upon, Lou was given the chance to divorce his wife, Pat, and marry Barbara, the widow.
Lou refused. So he was fired. Pat divorced him and got a huge financial settlement plus all their property. And he ended up married to Barbara anyway. No one had ever accused Lou Durocher of being exceptionally intelligent.
In truth, they would have been on the dole had it not been for Lou’s brother, who owned a used car franchise in Irving, Texas-a suburb of Dallas-where the Durochers now lived in a vast rabbit warren of an apartment complex.
On the rare occasion when Barbara ventured outside, she seldom saw anyone. Not a human, not a dog, not a cat. It seemed that Dallasites stayed inside their air-conditioned apartments, homes, offices, cars. While swimming pools bubbled in the simmering heat. Some more enterprising citizens dumped 500-pound blocks of ice in their pools to render them swimmable. And one woman’s published letter to the editor claimed that she preferred to think of the Dallas temperature as a wind chill factor of 123 degrees.
Barbara turned the fan on the baby to maximize the a/c’s cooling. Debbie first looked startled, then burst out crying. Barbara felt like screaming.
The doorbell rang.
Who would venture out on a day like this? The discomfort would discourage Jehovah’s Witnesses. She opened the door-and staggered as if she’d been struck. “J … Joyce! It can’t be! You’re dead!”
Joyce Hunter smiled. “May I come in? Or would you rather watch me melt?”
Wordlessly, Barbara stepped aside to let her erstwhile lover enter. Joyce looked wonderful, just the way Barbara remembered her.
“What’s going on? You committed suicide!”
“That’s what we wanted everyone to think. I worked it out with Harry. In return for my ‘disappearance,’ he and I faked the suicide.”
“But all this time! Why didn’t you contact me? How could you not contact me?”
“It was part of the deal. Something like the Witness Protection Program where a person is given a new identity. The agreement I reached with Harry was that I would move far away and continue to practice psychotherapy. In return, Harry would not reveal that I was gay.
“But I couldn’t tell anyone … especially not you. It was part of our agreement. Otherwise I would have been destroyed as a therapist.
“This … this is such a shock. I mean, you’ve come out of nowhere. What are you doing here? What about your agreement with Harry?”
“Harry’s dead … a little while ago. Cancer. So now, all bets are off.”
Barbara felt faint. “It’s … it’s going to take me a while to get used to this.” She shook her head.
“I understand. After Harry died I began looking for you. You were hidden away almost as well as I was. Then, once I found you, I wasn’t sure how to handle this. If I phoned you, you’d never believe it was I. I had to come in person. So … here I am.”
“So here you are. And what are we going to do about this?”
“Why … take up where we left off.”
‘“Take up …’? Joyce, I’m married. Lou Durocher. You never met him. He came along after … after you died. What am I saying? You didn’t die. Anyway, you didn’t know him. And we-he and I-we’ve got a baby.”
“So I see.” Joyce walked over to the playpen, leaned over, and picked up the baby. “Boy or girl?”
“Girl?”
“Name?”
“Debbie.”
“Pretty. I like it.”
“Joyce! How are we going to pull this off?”
“Why, the same way we did before. Only now in reverse.”
“Reverse?”
Joyce continued to bounce the baby gently. Debbie seemed to love it. “Sure. When we first became lovers, you had the freedom to get a room at a motel, or when the coast was clear, we met at your apartment. I had the husband and family. Now you’ve got the family and I’ve got the open house. See how simple it is?”
“It’s not that simple, Joyce. What am I going to do with the baby?”
“Why … bring her along, of course.”
“I don’t know …” Barbara tapped a tooth with her fingernail. “It could get complicated in a hurry. Lou is an idiot, but he comes home at unpredictable times. The chances of his finding out about us are too good.”
“There’s another, even better solution.” Joyce smiled broadly.
Barbara raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Leave him.”
“Leave him! You mean divorce Lou?”
“Sure. He means nothing to you. Dump him. If he had an offer like this, don’t you think he’d dump you in a minute? You never should’ve married him in the first place.”
“I know … I know.” Barbara was filled with remorse. “I thought I had that all figured out when Al-he was my husband-”
“I know.”
“Well, when Al died I had four guys on the string. Any one of them could’ve been Debbie’s father.”
“You wicked thing, you!” Joyce said with a smirk.
“I thought I could get all four of them to contribute to me and the baby. I thought I had it made. Then, one by one they proved they couldn’t have been the father. Only one had no excuse. He had to be the father, and he knew it.”
“Lou Durocher.”
“Lou Durocher.”
“Even so, Babs, you shouldn’t have married the jerk.”
“What was I to do? I was going to have Lou’s baby. The only way I could get support from him was to marry him. He was virtually destroyed by the scandal. There was no alternative. I
“I don’t know.” Joyce held the baby aloft and, like a sword swallower, fed the baby into her mouth and down her throat. Somehow, Barbara did not find that odd.
The phone rang. It rang again. And again.
Barbara awakened. She was covered with perspiration. She was alone in her apartment. Instead of a parking lot and a brick wall, she looked out on the magnificence of Belle Isle and the Detroit River.
Struggling to return to the present, she sat up and reached for the phone. “Hullo …”
“Barbara? Is it you?”
“Yes, it’s me, Tom.”
“You don’t sound yourself.”
“I was resting. I fell asleep and had a ghastly nightmare.”
“You’re all right?”
“Yes, I’m okay.”
“Listen, Barbara, I’m coming over now, a little early. I just wanted to call ahead. I’ll be there in a little while.”
“I’ll be here.”
“See you soon.”
