get at the last of the dirt. The hot water humming over my body made me feel both powerful and safe at the same time. When my mother opened the bathroom door and said my name, I jumped and nearly fell, my foot squelching along the bottom of the shower.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing, darling. Daddy and I were wondering if you wanted to go get breakfast at Shady’s?”
“Okay,” I said. “When?”
“Soon as you’re out of that shower.”
We used to go to Shady’s Diner more often. It was my father’s favorite and probably my favorite, too, especially for breakfast. I got the French toast with a side of extra crispy bacon. My parents sat across from me in the booth, their shoulders touching, even sharing a fruit bowl to go with my dad’s corned beef hash and my mom’s omelet. Thoughts about Chet crept into my mind all during breakfast, then they would disappear when one of my parents said something to make me laugh, or when I was thinking about how good my food was. My stomach felt like a hollow bowl that I could fill forever.
“You’re hungry, Lily,” my mother said.
“She’s a growing girl, almost a woman,” said my father.
Breakfast was a good time, even when my parents ruined it by asking me again if I wanted to skip another grade. Some of my teachers had recommended it at the end of the school year and I had already said no at the beginning of the summer. My mother had kept bringing it up, so I punished her by refusing to go to art camp in July. I knew that the two weeks when I was away was something she looked forward to. I was surprised that the subject came up again, but it didn’t last long and it didn’t entirely ruin breakfast.
I didn’t hear anything about Chet for a week, and began to worry, wondering if it was unnatural that I hadn’t said anything about it. So one day during lunch, my father nowhere to be found, and my mother in a silent mood, I asked what happened to Chet.
“Chet left. Didn’t you know that?”
“Where’d he go?”
“God, Lily, I don’t know. Someone else’s couch, I guess. He never said good-bye, ungrateful prick.”
That afternoon I wandered out to the apartment. It looked as though my mother or father had been in and straightened it out a little. The cot had been stripped of sheets and the trash bucket in the kitchen area was emptied. I sat on my chair for a moment, even though I didn’t have a book. The windows were open and a cool breeze, the first we’d had for a while, came through into the apartment. I’d been waiting for two things since killing Chet. Waiting to get caught and waiting to feel bad. Neither had happened yet, and I knew that neither would.
CHAPTER 7
TED
When I told Miranda that I was planning on coming up to Kennewick for a week at the beginning of October, there was a look of genuine pleasure on her face. We were sitting across from one another in the first-floor kitchen of our brownstone, eating linguini with clam sauce (the one dish I can make), and finishing a bottle of pinot gris. “That’ll be amazing,” she said. “I’ll get you all to myself for an entire week.”
I watched her face for any signs of deceit, but saw none. Her dark brown eyes had brightened with what looked to me like real excitement. And for a moment, I believed her and felt the warmth and reassurance one feels when someone else wants to spend time with you. A second later that feeling passed, and I was again amazed at my wife’s acting skills, her duplicitous nature. Did she feel no guilt for what she was doing with Brad Daggett?
“Should we get that suite again?” she asked.
“Which one?”
“Boo. How soon you forget. The first place we stayed. With the whirlpool tub.”
“Right. Sure.”
After cleaning up, we went upstairs to watch television, settling on a remake of Sleuth that was being shown on one of the five hundred movie channels we had. Miranda had changed into the short nightshirt she’d taken to wearing in the evenings and was stretched out along our couch, her feet in my lap. I studied her toes, meticulously painted a deep shade of pink. I took one of her feet in my hands and pressed a thumb along its baby-soft sole. She said nothing but her body reacted by sliding