I should have realized then it would be Tom who’d break my heart first.
I guess after everything that happened between us, I shouldn’t have expected my husband to remember my funeral request. After all, it had been ten years since I’d made it. We’d just been married and, filled with the kind of paralyzing fear that the great big bubble I’d stepped into when I’d entered Tom’s world would burst, I had given him my last request. “You’re crazy to even think that,” he’d said, kissing my head, much like a father would a child. “You’re only twenty-nine.”
Well, now I’ve just barely cracked forty and I’m about to be buried. Who’s the crazy one now?
I wasn’t surprised when the police ruled my drowning accidental. What else was the medical examiner going to find beyond a woman who had had a little too much to drink and was skinny-dipping on a balmy June night? I knew I shouldn’t have taken the Valium. Now they’re blaming the whole thing on me.
I suppose I couldn’t really complain about the funeral. If there was one thing I could always count on Tom for, it was to throw a good party. In fact, it was one of the things in our marriage we did best together. We put on a good show. Though I was a little surprised when he chose oak for my coffin. Oak? Have I ever liked oak? Ten years and two houses of furniture later, you’d think he’d know I was a solid mahogany girl. But it just goes to show you how many years you can live with a person and not pay attention. It bothered me though. If nothing else, I’m all about the details.
It wasn’t that Tom and I didn’t have a good marriage. In fact, some would call it fairy-tale. I know my friend Amanda did, but then I had gotten the fairy tale that she was hoping for. Others, mostly Tom’s family and even some of the more snide in his circle, saw it as a classic case of Midlife Crisis Meets Gold Digger. Mostly because I was a decade younger than Tom. Those people really annoyed me. Gold Digger. I hadn’t even been interested in marriage when I met Tom. I had just started working for WQXY radio. It was my first job in my field of choice, though I had studied communications in college with some vague idea of doing something a bit more glorious than working for the accounts payable department, I had discovered I was good at what I did. I had a good head for numbers and had one of those filing systems so organized some might attribute it to mental illness. I was happy enough though. I was young and, mostly due to Amanda, who was in PR, I got to go to my pick of parties. I could give a shit about all those things that seemed to fuel Amanda—like marrying well and before thirty. Thirty seemed like light years away and marriage like one of those things you did when you started thinking about IRAs and 401Ks. And since I was barely supporting my half of the two-bedroom apartment Amanda and I shared on the West Side, I was nowhere near that mindset. But according to Amanda, that was exactly when you met your proverbial Mr. Right. When you weren’t looking.
I didn’t even feel like going out the night I met Tom. But Amanda insisted. She had gotten invites to some kind of fundraiser. I had been dragged to enough of them by Amanda to know that they were boring as hell. Filled with the kind of people who identified themselves by what class they came out of Harvard or Yale. I usually went and entertained myself by making up identities as I went along. When I had too much to drink—and I drank at lot at these humdrum affairs—I was Maggie Germaine, reporter for Rolling Stone. Or Maggie Germaine, brain surgeon.
But the night I met Tom Landon, I didn’t care about impressing anyone. I was simply Maggie Germaine, the fifth child of an otherwise unremarkable family living on the South Shore of Long Island. Usually I never admitted to South Shore, except to give some vaguish impression that I lived somewhere near Southampton, the more desirable part of the South Shore. But the truth was, I grew up in Shirley, later restyled Mastic Beach, though the real estate values never came up to par with the kind of name that suggested cocktails and cabanas. Mastic Beach was more Budweiser and monster truck shows. To Tom, the only son of a North Carolina manufacturing family, Long Island was the legendary home of Howard Stern and the Shoreham nuclear power plant. It was bizarrely exotic in the way a seven hundred pound cat on the cover of the National Enquirer is. Though you don’t want to understand the forces that could bring such a thing into being, you can’t look away.
It seemed Tom couldn’t look away the night we met, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the Long Island upbringing I’d tossed in his face. But when I forked over my phone number, it was with the kind of blase indifference born of having had this kind of conversation one too many times already.
Of course, it was just the kind of indifference that works like a charm, at least according to Amanda.
He took me to La Grenouille on our first date. I figured he was trying to impress, but
