Pru didn’t have much experience with affairs with married men. She knew such things went on. Her friend Kate had had one—more than one—so she at least knew the routine. It seemed to consist mostly of keeping your expectations to a sub-minimum. But to get this far involved . . . to move across the country, with a child, to be near someone who was married . . . Pru sat there, in her coat, the only light coming from over the stove.
“So,” she said, “what happens now? Do you just stop seeing each other. Or what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is this all okay with her? The wife, I mean?”
“Well, they have some kind of an understanding. But we haven’t talked about it.”
“Why not?”
“Why are you getting so angry?”
“I’m not angry.”
“Then why are you shouting at me?”
“I’m not shouting, I just want to know if the guy who my niece calls Daddy . . .”
“Just shut up,” Patsy said.
“Fine.”
For a while, neither one of them said anything. She began unbuttoning her coat. Whoop came out of the bedroom to twine himself between her legs, purring.
“He’s not the Great Pumpkin, honey,” she said, at last. “He’s not going to disappear just because you want a little clarity. Is that so wrong, to want to know if he’s on board with all of this, or not? Why don’t you wait to unpack the rest of your things, until you can talk to him? You know, maybe you should call the school, see if they’ve found a replacement—”
“I have to go,” Patsy interrupted. “I’m exhausted, and so is Annali. You just have to trust me on this, Pru. It’s what my gut is telling me to do. It’s what my whole body says to do.”
Great, Pru thought, hanging up the phone. Her niece’s entire well-being depended on a hundred twenty pounds of inert, unthinking, Jacob-obsessed flesh.
Thirteen
For days she kept trying Patsy’s cell phone, and the number at the beach house. Patsy never answered, never responded to any of Pru’s messages urging her to call as soon as she could.
Pru wanted to be not shocked and saddened by this development, this Jacob-was-married thing. She hated thinking of herself as she suspected she really was, prudish. She was old enough to know that marriages were like children. They had lives of their own and didn’t necessarily act the way you thought they should. And that the rules were different for each one.
But she was shocked, and saddened. She liked Jacob. She liked Jacob because Patsy liked Jacob, and Patsy never liked anybody, for very long. Pru could almost understand her sister’s actions, but Jacob’s? Did he have to get Annali to fall in love with him, too? It didn’t seem fair to say that Patsy had made her own bed and now must lie in it. She’d had plenty of encouragement to make that bed. Pru had seen it herself.
It wasn’t that she had such puritanical positions on monogamy. Okay, maybe some of them were puritanical. Maybe her basic position—that monogamy was a good thing, and rather inflexible—was puritanical. But she wasn’t unevolved on the subject. Weren’t there worse things than being cheated on, weren’t there other ways of being disloyal? Of being unloving? Of betraying?
She doubted that Jacob’s wife was completely in the dark about his affairs. (Affairs, plural? More than one? Probably so.) When Pru looked back at the past few months, she couldn’t see a lot of sneaky, suspicious behavior. There seemed to have been no limits on Patsy’s access to him. They talked on the phone every night, well into the night, according to Patsy. Of course, they’d never spent any time at his apartment in the city. Always the beach house. Perhaps that was part of the wife’s requirements, that he not conduct his extramaritals in their home. Pru wondered if they had one of those “open marriages.” She pictured an open marriage like a Venus flytrap, waiting to snap closed on some unsuspecting victim.
Almost a week after Patsy’s move, Pru still couldn’t reach her. She was growing frantic. She went mechanically through her day with her head full of questions: When had Patsy found out that he was married? That first night, out on Pru’s stoop? Had he told her that the marriage was ending? Did she have hopes that it would? Patsy had to think that being nearby would change things. Pru simply couldn’t believe otherwise. Even for the love of her life, Patsy would never do something like that to Annali.
She kept remembering the day they walked around Rehoboth with the puppy. Jacob showing off his “daughter.” There was a picture on her refrigerator that represented that day, drawn in crayon. Annali had asked her to draw it. It didn’t look any different from what it would have looked like if Pru had drawn it thirty years earlier, so lame were her artistic skills: Stick mommy, stick boyfriend, stick little girl, stick dog. Stick auntie. The crudeness of it made her sad now. Annali deserved so much better.
She’d give Patsy one more day to call, Pru decided, before renting a car and driving up to Rehoboth herself. She was just about to turn off her computer and go to bed, when someone buzzed from downstairs. It was Patsy, her voice ragged and raspy, over the security speaker.
“Let us up,” she said.
She came in carrying Annali, who was fast asleep. Pru could see right away that Patsy had been crying. Her nose and eyes were red, and she was nervously chewing the inside of her bottom lip, as she always
