Laura Lippman - Hardly Knew Her

“I missed the part where they sing karaoke,” Maggie complains bitterly, and Meghan thinks, Well, thank your lucky stars. Because seventy, eighty years from now, when you’re on your deathbed, you are not going to be thinking about the day your brother changed the channel and you missed twenty seconds of some stupid pop tart singing karaoke. You are instead going to wonder why you spent sixty of those years married to an idiot who had bad breath and a repertoire of sexual moves that basically boil down to thrust-in thrust-in thrust-in and areyouthereyet?

No, wait, that was Meghan’s deathbed. Maggie will have to make her own deathbed and then lie in it.

Meghan shoves the papers back into the cherrywood pigeonholes above her desk, a touch meant to evoke an old-fashioned roll-top. Meghan’s work area is really a corridor, a narrow stretch of hallway between the family room and the mudroom that the Realtor insisted on calling “Mom’s office.” This not-quite-room is just wide enough to accommodate this built-in shelf, which in turn is just wide enough to hold a computer and a drop tray for a keyboard. “A place for all your work,” crooned the salesman, Paul Turner. No, Meghan had yearned to correct him, Mom’s work area is every square foot of this 6,800-square-foot house. What Mom needs is a soundproof bunker in the basement. Meghan would trade the whirlpool in her en suite bath, the laundry room that is bigger and nicer than her childhood bedroom, and even her Portuguese-blue Lacanche range for such a retreat. Especially her Portuguese-blue Lacanche, which mocks her with its smug French competence, its readiness.

She marches into the family room and an uneasy truce settles as soon as she appears, so she moves past, into the kitchen, checking to see what ready-made dishes she can pass off as homemade. Meghan once liked cooking, but the level of rejection possible when making food for five people is simply too staggering. She doesn’t take it as personally when the rejected salmon comes from the Giant, when the mashed potatoes are whipped by the folks at Whole Foods. She still winces at the waste, but at least she’s spared mourning her own time. Her mom had been one of the last of the mackerel snappers, insisting on fishy Fridays despite the Vatican ’s relaxed rules-and despite the fact that the Catholic church wanted no part of her, after the divorce. The Lewis children had not been allowed to turn up their noses at her worst concoctions. If you didn’t clean your plate in the Lewis household, it just followed you through the next three meals. Until it spoiled, you didn’t eat again, not in Mother’s sight. This was her father’s rule originally, but her mother enforced it even more strictly after he left.

She remembered asking Heloise, in their wine-coaxed moment of candor, if things had worked the same way in her version of the Lewis household. “Not exactly,” Heloise said, refusing to elaborate, infuriating Meghan, for Heloise was clearly implying that her version of the Lewis household was all lovey-dovey, the place where true love triumphed and who cares if the first Lewis family was left in the dirt, with only support checks and occasional visits from Hector. Visits, Meghan knew, where he often banged the first Mrs. Lewis once Meghan was asleep, or so he thought. Her own mother always called the second Mrs. Lewis that-whore-Beth, just one word, said very quickly. Meghan was eleven or so before she realized it wasn’t an actual name, Thatwhorebeth, a distant cousin of Terebithia.

She pulls out the plastic boxes of prepared food-salad, a roasted chicken, asparagus-and places them on the broad granite counter where they eat most of their meals. She could put the food on actual serving platters, but why bother to disguise its origins? Brian, who flew to the home office in Atlanta this morning, won’t be home until almost ten, and he’s the only one who cares if food is homemade, and only because he hates to think she’s had a free moment to herself. As if, she thinks, gathering up the pair of Crocs that Maggie has left in the middle of the kitchen floor, then rinsing the glasses and plates left over from the kids’ snacks, which almost certainly ruined any appetite they had for dinner. The phone rings. Once, the kids would have vied to grab it, but the two oldest have cell phones and the youngest have IM accounts, so the phone holds no interest for them. She lets it ring, thinking it might be Brian, whining for an airport pickup, which she has no intention of providing, but then notices that the caller ID is displaying her insurance agent’s cell number.

“Meghan,” Dan Simmons says. “I didn’t think I’d catch you.”

“Oh, I’ll always let you catch me, Dan.” More cute than pretty, Meghan has been an outstanding flirt since her early teens. Much better than Heloise, with her ice princess shtick. Does she drop that superior manner when she is with her clients, or is that part of her appeal? Her sister’s secret life excites Meghan, a fact she barely admits to herself. On those rare occasions when Brian wants to have sex with her and she manages to muster up the energy, she pretends she is Heloise and he is a client. That she is in charge and he has to leave when they are done, handing her a nice stack of large bills. As if.

“You’re working late,” she says.

“Yes and no. I’m in my little home office, returning all my calls, but already starting on cocktail hour, as you can see.”

The Simmonses are next-door neighbors, their house a mirror image of Meghan’s, only Dan has availed himself of “Mommy’s office.” Sure enough, she looks through the window over her kitchen sink and sees Dan across the way, hoisting a martini. Dan is fun.

“Ah, Daddy’s little helper,” she says, walking over to her refrigerator and locating a bottle of wine, suspiciously deep on the bottom shelf. The health education segment at Hamilton Point turns children into anti-alcohol Nazis, and Michael keeps hiding her wine behind the milk. “We’ll have a drink together. What’s up?”

“You called me,” he reminds her. “Two days ago. Left a message at the office.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

“Hey, it’s a pleasure to have a client who calls me,” he says. “Most people run when they see me coming, like I’m that guy in Groundhog Day.”

She laughs, although she has no idea what he is talking about. Movies, sports-most of men’s conversational milestones are lost to her, but she pretends to get them. “Well, with four kids and a husband who’s on the road three days every week, I have to make sure we have all the coverage we need.”

“Don’t worry,” Dan says, “if a plane goes down, you’re fine.”

“I worry that the airlines are so broke these days that we won’t recover a cent.”

“Well, it’s true, if Brian actually died in a plane crash, there probably would be a war of deep pockets, with my company fighting the airlines’ carrier over who had to pay out. But it’s also true that we’re talking about something that has virtually no odds of happening. What you really have to worry about are the kind of mundane accidents that no one thinks about. Slip in the bathtub, a fall down the steps. And cars, don’t get me started on those death traps. I think you have adequate coverage for that, but I’ll review everything. I know you told me that Brian has a handgun, but it is kept in a safe, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay, because we require that. Meanwhile, I don’t think you have enough disability coverage, but almost no one does. And have you thought about some of the financial products I mentioned to you the last time you both were in-”

Screams rise from the family room, providing her a graceful way to end the conversation. “I better run before blood is shed,” she says. “It’s so hard to get out of leather.”