Lady in Waiting: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Everything would be fine in the end. Dad needed to check out the New Hampshire job alone for a lot of little reasons, none that he needed to worry about. We didn’t talk long. He clearly didn’t have a clue as to how to process the situation. And that actually made me feel somewhat vindicated. Connor hadn’t seen it coming either.

     
    I had left the shop a few minutes before six. It was Stacy’s night to close. I had just kicked off my shoes in my apartment and was sorting through the mail when my cell phone trilled. It was Molly inviting me over for dinner; Jeff was at a Yankees game, and it was just her and the girls. I declined, but she kept after me until I finally said yes. She didn’t like me eating alone every night.
    We hung up, and I changed into jeans and a sweater. Coming back through the kitchen, I sifted through the contents of the bag that I took to the store every day, looking for a tube of lipstick. My fingers brushed up against the flannel-wrapped package that contained the prayer bookand the rosary. I gently removed them and placed them in the center of the table. I stared at them as I painted my lips a plummy red. Then I grabbed a bottle of wine and began to walk the seven blocks to Molly and Jeff’s apartment.
    I’d known Molly since my freshman year at Boston University. Her older brother, Tom, knew Brad before I did, and it was at a birthday party for Tom that I met Brad. Molly had often said if it wasn’t for her, I would never have met the man I married.
    She hadn’t offered any advice on my dilemma, other than to reassure me that women aren’t mind readers. I told her I felt foolish for not picking up on Brad’s signals that he was unhappy.
    “What signals?” she had said.
    What signals indeed?
    Molly and Jeff had moved to Manhattan before Brad and I did, coming here as newlyweds a few years after Brad and I got married. Jeff was an investment broker, a loyal fan of the Yankees, and had a hard time talking about anything other than stocks and baseball. Molly was the principal at the private school her twin twelve-year-old daughters attended and where Connor had graduated two years before.
    Brad and Jeff were, I suppose, as close as two men could be with few interests in common. Brad enjoyed reading biographies and preferred the water—sailing, canoeing, fishing—to any televised sport. Brad and Jeff weren’t close, but they’d spent time together; they’d talked. I hadn’t, to that point, asked Jeff if he knew how frustrated Brad was with our marriage. And I was glad he was going to be at a baseball game because of that. I was somewhat afraid Jeff had known Brad was leaving me before I did.
    Twilight was turning Seventy-eighth Street into an amber palette of shining colors. The evening commute was still in full swing as I stepped into the swell of pedestrians—some in suits, some in denim—as they made their way out of the heart of downtown to quieter streets and boroughs.
    Brad didn’t find any poetic charm in the human sea that is the streets of Manhattan. Embracing the persistent press of people was one of the concessions he made when we moved to Manhattan the year Connor turned thirteen. As I walked, brushing up against the elite and the ordinary, it occurred to me that the year Connor turned thirteen was the last time Brad made a decision that changed everything for us. The extended hours at Memorial and the hourlong—sometimes longer—commute home to Long Island had been keeping Brad away from Connor and me for too many hours of the day. Brad decided to move to the Upper West Side without even tossing the idea around with me. He wanted to be home more, and I wanted the same thing. It was easy for me to rationalize that he’d made that decision for me and Connor.
    As I rounded the corner to Molly and Jeff’s apartment building, I couldn’t help but wonder if Brad had been feeling a disconnect with me, even then. And had made a rather impulsive move to reverse it.
    I