19

   WINNIE

When Winnie’s phone lit up on Tuesday morning with a text from Amber, she was crossing Pike Street with her arms full of dried flower arrangements. She’d volunteered to pick up the flowers for the winter banquet at Samuel’s school.

The flowers, which you could buy from the market in huge, inexpensive bouquets, were sold dried through the winter. Winnie found that depressing. They crunched slightly in her arms as she waited for the light to change. She was freezing, her nose still raw from the cold she’d had last week. She wondered who on the school board thought bouquets of dead flowers were Christmassy, and why hadn’t someone invented a heated coat?

She had to hike uphill back to the parking garage where she’d left her car, so she didn’t read the text until the flowers were loaded neatly into the trunk, and even then, she was distracted as she glanced at her phone while she walked around to the driver’s side door. She had to read the text again, sure it was a mistake, clearing her throat incessantly as she did when she was anxious. Surely Amber, who routinely drank two glasses of wine with lunch, had it wrong. But Winnie also knew that Amber, who’d grown up in Brooklyn and had once shoved a man down a flight of stairs for touching her rear, was not the type of person to raise false alarms.

So Winnie typed a reply: Send the photo.

She waited with her back leaning against the car door, feeling her stomach lurch repeatedly as the seconds ticked by. It was cold four floors up in the parking garage, the wind skating right off the Sound and passing through the open, yawning windows—but Winnie didn’t want to get in the car yet. She shivered, staring at the side of a black Suburban. Someone had written Idiot in the dirt on the passenger door. It would be different if this were coming from someone else, but Amber was her cousin. If she came bearing bad news, chances were, it was valid bad news. Something you had to see but didn’t want to see.

She opened her eyes to read the text again, just to make sure:

I debated sending this but I feel it’s the right thing to do. I was at lunch yesterday at Palomino. I spotted Nigel and thought he was with you so I headed over to say hi. When I reached the table I saw that it wasn’t you. He was with some woman. They were sitting on the same side of the booth, very close. Something wasn’t right. They were turned toward each other. They didn’t see me but I took a photo as I walked by. I’m sorry.

That was Amber; no butter on her toast, she delivered everything dry. Winnie’s hands were shaking—no, her whole body was shaking—as she waited. The photo came, the notification lighting up the phone. She stared at it hard—so hard her eyes hurt. It was there; it was right there in front of her. The photo blurred as soon as it came into view, the faces of the two people disappearing as her eyes filled with tears. But she’d seen them, she knew the faces well: her husband and Dulce Tucker.

The photo was blurry; Amber had taken it on the move and there was a blur of a red fingernail in the corner of the shot, but there was no mistaking Nigel, whose body was turned sideways toward the woman next to him, his arm thrown casually across the back of the booth behind her. She was wearing a bright red sweater that accentuated the swell of her breasts. The thing that bothered Winnie the most was the hand that rested on her husband’s chest, a hand so comfortable being there that it surely had been there many times before. And where else, Winnie thought. Where else had this woman’s hands been? Both of them were smiling. Isn’t that something, Winnie thought. It’s possible to smile while breaking someone’s heart.

Thank you, she sent back to Amber, and then she had a panic attack on the cold ground of the parking garage, her car filled with pretty, dead flowers.

Winnie dropped the flowers off then drove straight to Nigel’s office. She’d yet to cry, she’d yet to feel anything other than a greasy dread that was working its way through her mind at that very moment. She was no longer in charge; some other woman had access to her husband’s heart. Did he love Dulce? That was the question of the hour, nagging under skin like a splinter. Had her husband fallen in love with someone right under her nose? She’d been distracted, she definitely had been...between work, Samuel, and her volunteer hours. She was a busy person, like everyone else. The truly rotten part about this was that she hadn’t even suspected. What did you think, you idiot? That he really wouldn’t leave you eventually after what you did...?

Nigel worked in a stout brick building in Belltown just off the railroad tracks. There were always a couple of homeless men wandering around outside at this time of day; Nigel called them the Belltown Hoppers. She saw one of them now shuffling up the sidewalk, holding a can of soda and walking slightly off-kilter. It made her uncomfortable that Nigel nicknamed them, but still, she found herself referring to them by the very name that disturbed her. It was 12:30, Winnie noted on her Apple Watch. Nigel took his lunch around this time; Winnie had often met him for a quick bite at one of the bistros in the area.

He hated it when Winnie called their lunches a quick bite. “This is a real quick bite—” And then he’d nip Winnie playfully on the neck. Now, apparently, he was nipping other women on the neck, taking bites out of things that weren’t his.

She took a seat on a bench half a block away and, facing the entrance to Nigel’s building, crossed and uncrossed her legs. If he left for lunch, she’d be able to see him from there. If he left for lunch with Dulce, she’d also be able to see him from there, and she was unsure as to whether or not she wanted to. The man with the can of soda was now feeding a dog scraps of a sandwich a little ways down the street. She renamed him Mr. Soda, thinking that less derogatory than Nigel’s moniker for him. Winnie watched their exchange without really seeing it; Mr. Soda and his dog were just background. She was reviewing the last few months in her mind, looking for some clue to mull over. Exactly how stupidly blind had she been? And how sneaky had he been to pull this off?

Winnie desperately didn’t want to be the idiot wife who was cheated on by the bored husband, but ten minutes later, she found out that’s exactly what she was. Nigel was wearing the sweater Winnie bought him for his birthday as he held the door open for Dulce. Winnie sat forward on the bench as the five-foot-four brunette stepped past her husband onto the sidewalk, smiling up at him with a surprising sweetness. They fell into step together, talking with their hands in happy gestures. It looked like the end scene to some happy movie, only with Mr. Soda in the background. They were headed to the quick bite places. If he takes her to 360, I’m going to lose it, she thought, standing up to follow them. She stayed on the far side of the street, a few paces back, trotting to keep up with them. All she had with her was a small crossbody bag, and as she walked she held on to the strap across her chest with both hands, her eyes never leaving them. She half expected someone else to join them, calling for them to slow down, but no such thing happened. This was a lunch date, and not of the business variety. You don’t know that yet, she thought. But when they walked into the very restaurant Winnie feared they were headed to, she knew.