“No,” April said in frustration. “I know if he hasn’t told you yet, he’s going to, because he’s got to. So let’s just say I quit, as of last Friday. Forget whatever work I’ve done since then. I know you can’t pay me for it, anyway.”
Emily said, “Honestly, I don’t know what you think he’ll tell me, but he hasn’t said anything. I don’t think that anything he could tell me would make me want you to leave. It’s important to me that everybody who works at the agency stays. Once the four of you are gone, my chances of finding out what happened to Phil are gone, too. I need you.”
“I’m sorry, Emily. The reason is that Phil and I were…” She stood there with her purse and began to cry. She sobbed, her shoulders shaking.
“Were what?”
“In love.”
“Oh.” Emily’s voice was almost a whisper. “Oh. You’re … Oh, God.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“I wish I didn’t.” Emily’s tears were starting, too. Instead of hating April, she felt concerned for her, the way she might have felt looking at a lost child. But even as she felt the urge to hold April and soothe her hurt, she wanted to hit her. She should not have had to watch this young woman weeping for Phil.
“I’m sorry, Emily. I’ll leave now.” April walked away from the grave.
Emily cried, “Wait!” April stopped, looking pained.
“I know that later on, we’re both going to need to talk. When I’m up to it, I’ll call you.”
“Okay.” April got into her car and drove down to the gate.
Emily stared down at Phil’s grave. There was no marker yet, and it would be weeks before the earth settled to be even with the rest of the grass. She whispered, “I would have died before I ever did this to you. Fuck you, Phil.”
She turned, then walked down the hill to her car, got in, and drove off.
10
Emily went into the office, carefully placed all the files she had been reading into the lower-right drawer of Phil Kramer’s big steel desk and locked it, then dropped the silvery key into her purse. At the moment she didn’t care what happened to the files. Putting them away was just a stray impulse in the part of her brain that disliked clutter. She locked the door of Phil’s office, walked through the outer office, turned off the lights, and locked the door. She walked without having the sensation of her feet touching the floor, and for a moment she wondered if that meant she was fainting. Then she decided that she couldn’t faint in the hall, so she wouldn’t. She wanted to be away from this place. The thought of having people look at her right now brought a feeling like a burn to her face. As she walked toward the elevator, she began to move faster, trying to get out of this place where she was vulnerable. She passed the elevator because she didn’t want to be trapped in there with someone looking at her, and stepped into the stairwell.
As she walked down the stairs, she tried to keep her steps quiet as though that would preserve her privacy. She tried to keep her mind off Phil. When she came to the foot of the stairwell, she opened the door a crack to see if anyone was in the foyer before she pulled it open the rest of the way. Then she was out of the building and in the parking structure.
She got into her car and started it, then began to pull forward when Bill Przwalski pulled into the structure in his dirty green Toyota Corolla. He waved and grinned as though passing each other in the lot were the greatest good luck, so she gave a little wave as she drove past him to the street. She wondered if he knew.
She drove out to the street in a detached, automatic way. Of course Billy knew. If April was so sure Ray Hall knew, then Billy knew, too. Billy must have been with Phil much more often than Ray was, because he was an apprentice, learning from Phil. And Billy was also young, practically a teenager. He would be very interested in everything about April. The thought triggered a wave of nausea so strong that Emily began to pull the car toward the curb. There was the blare of a horn, and she realized she had nearly cut off a young man in a tall white pickup truck lurking in her blind spot.
As he pulled forward on her right she glanced at him, cringed, and mouthed the word, “Sorry.” He scowled, held his clenched fist toward her, raised the middle finger, then stomped on his gas pedal to accelerate past her.
When she reached the house, Emily drove all the way into the garage and sat still for a moment. While she had been approaching the house, she had been aware of the beautiful front lawn with the two towering trees, their wide canopies of leaves shading the house from the summer sun. It had always been a sight she stared at hungrily. Part of the sight was the improvements and replacements she and Phil had made: new roof, paint, the small addition. Now the sight of the house gave her no pleasure.
She noticed that she had not turned off the engine yet. All she would have to do was press the button on the garage-door opener, look in the rearview mirror to watch the door slide down behind her, and then sit here calmly for a little while. Phil had made sure the garage didn’t have any leaks, so he could heat and air-condition it and do woodwork out here, but he had always been too tired or too busy. Most of the power tools in the world were probably sitting in suburban garages. She looked at the carefully fitted seams of the wallboard that covered the insulation. It wouldn’t take very long to die in here.
As an experiment, Emily pressed the button and watched the door come down to close on the afternoon sky, like an eyelid shutting. She sat still for a few seconds, waiting to feel something, then opened the car window. She could smell the engine’s exhaust, but she didn’t feel any different. She got bored waiting for a feeling. She realized she could turn on the radio. The engine was running, after all, so it wouldn’t drain the battery. Phil had always been afraid of exhausting the charge on a car battery.
The radio came on, and she recognized the voice of a familiar talk-radio host. Once again he was railing against the supposedly bad influence of college professors, reporters, lawyers, members of minorities, and laborers, who were mortgaging the country’s future. She muttered, “Shut the fuck up!” and hit the power button. The words surprised her, but they expressed her feeling perfectly, so she was satisfied. She turned off the engine, opened the car door to get out, and realized she had forgotten about her suicide experiment. She went in the house and locked the door.
Emily sat at the kitchen table and stared through the window at the big tree in the side yard. There was a smudge on the window. She opened the cupboard under the sink, picked up the Windex and a paper towel, stepped to the window, keeping her eye on the spot so she wouldn’t lose track of the smudge, and cleaned the pane. She didn’t have the temperament for suicide. There was just too damned much to do.
She put the Windex away and went into the living room to sit on the couch. She began the thought, “How could he-” but then stopped. She knew how he could. Phil was a middleaged man who was tall and trim and attractive, and he was the boss. April was pretty and sweet-natured, but brainless, and there she was, right in front of him all day long. How could he not? April must have been amazed by a man like Phil, may even have been naive enough to think that there was a nice future in a relationship with a man old enough to be her father who was cheating on his wife.
Emily corrected herself. She was a fine one to be calling April stupid. April was twentyfive years old. Whether she wanted it to be or not, her unfortunate mistake with Phil Kramer was over. She had all those years ahead of her. She was sad right now, but she had lost nothing of any importance. Emily was forty-two. She had invested twentytwo years of her life-her attractive childbearing years-in loving Phil Kramer. As of today, there was no way to pretend that she had done the right thing, made the right choice. She had devoted her life to a man who hadn’t really loved her but hadn’t bothered to tell her, to bearing and raising the beautiful, strong son they named Pete after her father, and then having the child crash a car into the front of a tractor-trailer truck. It was a hard time to find out that Phil had been with other women.
Women. Plural. She had suspected it for years. April had certainly not been the first. The suspicions Emily had pushed to the back of her mind so many times were true. There had been a hundred moments over the years when the only reason she had to believe he was faithful was that she wanted to.
She realized she was crying, and hearing herself cry this way was the loneliest sound she had ever heard. Phil was dead, Pete was dead. It didn’t matter if she cried loudly or softly. She was as alone as a person floating in the
