“All right, I just want it on the record: I didn’t cheat on you.”
“Fine. You weren’t a cheater. Duly noted.”
She stroked Whoop’s fur and thought about all the times she might have picked up on the fact that Rudy and Andrea Schwaiger were involved. She wasn’t about to get into the fine points with Rudy about what constituted “cheating” and what didn’t. But it made her feel stupid. How could she have not known?
He fell asleep on her couch while she sat thinking about everything and stroking the cat. Something about the way he looked in sleep, vulnerable and slow, always made her a little resentful. She watched him sleeping, and remembered driving to his aunt’s summer home in Pennsylvania. Rudy had fallen asleep next to her while she drove. His mouth was open a little, and he looked like a little boy. They’d just survived a horrendous visit by his vicious parents, and Pru, who wasn’t used to such behavior, was still reeling. She’d felt very sorry for Rudy in that moment, and determined to show him something better.
After a while, Rudy stirred on the couch, then sat up. He drank a little more water from his special cup, then said he was ready to leave.
“Can we see each other sometime?” he said, putting on his coat.
“I don’t know,” Pru said. “Why?”
“You know, to be friends. I’d like to stay friends with at least one of my exes.”
“Sure,” she said. “We can do that.” She was pretty sure he’d never call.
“Great,” he said. He stopped, outside her door. “Hey, are you going to the Fresh Fields on P Street anytime soon?”
“I wasn’t planning on it. Why?”
Rudy shrugged. “I could just use some things, from time to time. It’s hard for me to get out as often as I need to.”
She began to laugh. “You really are something, Rudy.”
He looked at her, a little uncertainly. “I’ll give you money,” he said. “It’s not like I’m expecting you to pay for my groceries.”
“I’ll let you know, the next time I go,” she said, pushing him out the door.
“That’d be great,” came his voice, as she closed the door between them.
She found Whoop waiting for her in bed. He blinked at her silently, and she said, “Don’t worry, buddy, mean old crazy Rudy isn’t taking you anywhere.” As if relieved, he settled down and began to groom himself.
They were like two old people, in bed together. Whoop licked himself while she rubbed moisturizer into her hands and feet. She read for a while, then turned out the light. Whoop had taken to resting his chin on her nose while she slept. If he didn’t do it, she picked him up and made him reposition himself until he remembered: chin on nose.
You, we get. You, we get.
Twelve
“Come on in,” Edie said. She climbed down from a ladder where she’d been cleaning the track lights and came over to kiss Pru on the cheek.
Edie was big and surprisingly unkempt, for one of the town’s few fashionistas. Her lipstick was never quite right, but her taste in clothing was beyond question. In Pru’s opinion, her boutique, just past Dupont Circle on Connecticut, was one of the few places in town where you could find clothes that actually made you hold your breath. She hadn’t been here since she’d been fired.
But now, she finally had a bit of money. The writing job for a foundation, which she’d landed after meeting the Mortensens, thanks to Kate, had turned out to be a huge amount of work. There were hundreds of pages to be read and absorbed, and major revising to be done on three different grants, all of which came due on the same day. The foundation’s work had to do with medical compliance laws in developing countries, not an easy thing to wrap her mind around. For weeks, she was up and at her desk first thing in the morning, staying up well past her usual bedtime to scour the pages. She couldn’t believe it when she’d gotten paid two days after she’d e-mailed the final drafts. Having replenished her dwindling checking account, she found herself drawn irresistibly to Edie’s on Connecticut. It had been ages since she’d bought anything for herself.
“I was starting to think you were seeing another boutique,” Edie said, as Pru gazed around. There were body-hugging skirts, pointy-toed heels, a whole rack of slinky evening gowns. She hardly knew where to start.
“I’ve been too poor to shop,” she said, fingering a silk Pucci print blouse with a plunging neckline.
Edie made a sound with her tongue. “Tell me about it,” she said. “I can’t afford a damn thing in my own store. I was just in a cleaning frenzy. You take your time.”
Pru was either a terrible shopper or a very good one. She was attracted to clothes the way arsonists were attracted to fire, but she took forever making up her mind. Typically, she would try on absolutely everything and buy almost nothing. She had to touch every piece in the store, feel the fabrics next to her skin. There was nothing as satisfying as a dress settling over your body in just the right way. Unless it was a pair of great-looking shoes that didn’t make you feel like a wounded racehorse begging to be shot and put out of your misery at the end of a workday.
She knew that other people’s childhood memories consisted of vacations, favorite teachers, and perhaps the odd humiliating moment or two. Pru remembered what she wore. At seven years old, when she fell and got her first stitches, she’d been wearing a patchwork jumper made by her grandmother, brown tights, and brown oxfords. When, at twelve, she got her first period, she was wearing a blue bandanna on her head, like Laverne and Shirley on the line at the bottling plant. She wore a seven-tiered white Gunny Sack dress that made her look like a wedding cake for the junior prom.
