“Shouldn’t we talk about Paul and your fight?” I ask.
“We will. I need to pee. Do you want me to come back out here?”
“No, I’ll come with you.”
I follow her to the master bathroom, meaning to tease her a little, but as we walk down the narrow hallway, I see her transitioning from postcoital languor to purposeful intent. It’s in the straightness of her back, the level set of her shoulders. She’s got murder on her mind now.
My back bathroom is larger than what usually comes with an older house. The elderly couple who owned the place before me expanded the room so that the husband, who was wheelchair-bound when I met him, could shower in it. As I pick up a couple of stray socks, Jet begins urinating behind the small partition that shields the commode.
“Hey,” she calls. “You feel like putting on some coffee? It’s going to be a long night with that party.”
“Sure.”
I pull on jeans and a T-shirt, then walk back to the kitchen and pop a K-Cup into the Keurig. For the first time since this morning, the weight of Buck’s loss has lifted slightly from my shoulders. Spending myself in Jet has reset my neurotransmitters, at least for the moment. Had I been able to see her alone this morning, I might not have been sucked into the whirlpool of flashbacks that Buck’s death triggered.
A thin stream of coffee begins to drip from the Keurig, and the welcome scent fills the kitchen. I wonder at her ability to heal me this way. For three months I have felt this peace, after decades of yearning for her. What is the essence of that connection? A thirty-year-old fold in my cerebral cortex? Is the first neural imprinting of love and sex so deep that nothing ever supplants it? Like the music you listened to during those years? No matter how I analyze it, this reality remains: being with Jet is a necessity, an involuntary compulsion like breathing. Except that I managed to live without her, with only the memory of air, for nearly three decades. I held my breath and pretended to live. Somehow, the memory of this woman sustained me, even through my grief over my son. Now that I have her once more, I don’t ever want to stop breathing again.
Jet’s sock feet hiss on the hardwood of the hallway. Wearing my ancient orange Cavaliers T-shirt, she pads over to me, kisses my shoulder, then leans back on the kitchen island to wait for her coffee.
“Three things,” she says. “First, Paul asked me about last Thursday.”
I shake my head blankly. “Last Thursday?”
“Yesterday he ran into Claire Maloney, who I was supposed to have run with last Thursday. I was out here, of course. Claire’s kind of ditzy—that’s why I used her for my excuse—so I got away with it. But Paul noted the disconnect. I realized I had really pushed the envelope.”
“Are you sure he believed you?”
“I think so. But that wasn’t all.”
My mouth goes dry.
“Breathe,” she says, looking up at me. “The second thing was Josh, which is just ridiculous. Paul didn’t have any specific reason to suspect Josh. I think he’s just picked up that I’ve emotionally checked out of the marriage, and he knows I spend hours a day with Josh—even out of town. So he’s the first target of suspicion.”
“You said he mentioned me.”
She shifts uncomfortably. “Yeah. This is the sticky part.”
“Tell me!”
“He asked why I’d grown my pubic hair back all of a sudden.”
“All of a sudden? Didn’t you grow it out before I moved back?”
“Just before. So I’ve had it back for six months. But I kept it shaved for twenty years. From Paul’s point of view, that’s sudden.”
“How long has Josh worked for you?”
“Five months. I hired him in January.”
“Okay.” I think about this.
“It gets worse. Paul associates you with me being natural down there.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s the one who likes it bare. And at some point back in the mists of time, I admitted to him that you liked it the other way.”
“Jesus.”
“I know, it was stupid. But he was always asking me about us, so I told him to get him off my back. I couldn’t possibly have foreseen that a day like this would come.”
I’m trying to get my mind around Paul spending hours obsessing about this. “So he thinks you might have grown your bush back for me.”
She shrugs. “I did. So, sure, he’s thinking that. He’s in paranoid