Shirley Jump - The Other Wife

“I got the feeling she doesn’t want to talk,” I said. “Besides, I’m not so sure I want to know what went on between her and Dave. I’ve had enough information to last me a lifetime.”

“Have you asked the dog?”

“Asked the dog? Are you nuts? I can’t talk to a dog.”

“I bet Harvey is your key.” Georgia nodded. “And I bet he knows a lot more than he’s letting on with that little snout.”

“I am not asking the dog. Or anyone on his upcoming six-city ‘tour.’”

“He has a tour planned?” Georgia’s turquoise contact colored eyes grew bright. “Perfect! I see a road trip in your future, sis.”

“No, no, no.” But even as I said the words, Georgia was off and running, retrieving the road atlas from the den.

“You have to do it, Penny,” Georgia said. “Where’s Harvey supposed to go first?”

“The Dog-Gone-Good Show in Tennessee in three days.”

“How cool,” Georgia said, flipping the pages, moving us visually toward Tennessee. “It could be the key to solving the greatest mystery of your life.”

There’d been a reason I’d hated Nancy Drew books as a kid. I couldn’t suffer through two hundred pages of mystery. I wanted to know the end before I began. I didn’t want to take a path filled with unknowns. Dave was the one who would read Clive Cussler and Stephen King into the wee hours, who’d watch all eight weeks of an eight-week miniseries, content to wait a month and a half for the story’s resolution. Me, I went for the TV Guide recap, the fast way to cut to the quick and eliminate anything extraneous.

I thought I’d lived my life the same way.

Until this week.

But as I sat in my kitchen, looking around at the sage-green room Dave and I had painted on a sunny afternoon last month, I realized I was living in a house filled with questions, not memories. There wasn’t a corner of this house, a picture on the wall, that I could look at and not feel the doubts crowding in, jostling around in the spaces of my mind. Was any of it real? Or was I just clueless?

All I wanted to do was return to the life I’d recognized. Not run around the country with a dancing Jack Russell terrier, trying to figure out who Dave Reynolds had really been.

Even as I held back another round of tears, as reality slammed into me with the force of a nor’easter, I knew I had no choice but to start assembling this puzzle.

And the first place to start was with Susan.

Susan Reynolds’s phone number stared back at me in rounded tiny numbers, displayed on the tiny screen of Dave’s Motorola phone. After my sister left and after two more glasses of Chardonnay, I’d finally gotten up the nerve to scroll through the listings in his phone book. I recognized only a handful.

What scared me was the names I didn’t know. There was an Annie, a Kate, a Mindy. Two Pats—which could have been men or women—and a Matt. I’d stopped scrolling at the S’s, too afraid to go farther. None of those names were familiar. They weren’t people I’d met at the Greendale Insurance Company Christmas parties. They weren’t names Dave had used in conversation.

I could, of course, call them and ask, Uh, how did you know my husband? And did he tell you he was married to a Susan or a Penny?

But no, I couldn’t do that—not yet, anyway. I wanted the truth, but I also didn’t want it, as if I could hold on to my fantasy that everything between Dave and I had been genuine.

Because if he’d duped me about being married, what else had been fake?

That was the real question I didn’t want to answer. The one that clubbed my heart and broke it into smaller pieces every time I gave it voice.

I put the phone down, avoiding it to dig through drawers and filing cabinets, searching for Dave’s will. I came up empty-handed and made a mental note to check his desk at work. Any man who was trying to hide multiple marital beneficiaries probably was smart enough to store that kind of evidence elsewhere.

Throughout it all, Harvey sat there and watched me, his little face jerking quickly with my every movement.

I found nothing. Not so much as a matchbook with a number scribbled on it. The only clues I had were in the Motorola.

I went back to the phone and scrolled through it again, leaving Susan down in the S’s and went to Kevin. I hit Send, then waited for him to pick up.

“’Lo,” he said. Behind him, I heard rock music playing in his bachelor apartment. Apparently Lillian was gone, because he had heavy metal going at full blast.

“Kevin, it’s Penny.”

“Oh, hi, Pen.” His voice softened and he turned down the volume on his stereo. Kevin was the quiet one in the Reynolds family, who’d lacked the charm and sense of humor of Dave, but had the same studious way of watching someone while they talked, making them feel like the only person in the room. “How you holding up?”

“Fine. Ah, listen, I wanted to talk to you about Dave. About…well, what he did when he wasn’t with me.”

A pause. “I don’t know anything about that, Pen. Sorry.”

Across from me, Harvey started nosing at his little denim backpack, his name emblazoned in red glitter across the front. He pawed at it, then sat back and whined.

“You’re his brother. You knew everything there was to know about him. You guys went everywhere together. Fishing, hunting, you name it.”

“I didn’t go.”

The words lingered between us, made raspy by the cell-phone static. There hadn’t been an annual hunting trip to Wisconsin. Or the fishing trip to Maine each May. I’d never thought my husband was much of a sportsman, considering I was the one who baited the hooks at our lake vacation last August, but now I realized he hadn’t been out looking for elk at all. He hadn’t gone to any of the places he’d said he’d gone.

He’d been with her.

And Harvey.

It had all been a show. Another batch of lies. And Kevin had known, at least that Dave had been lying to me. The new betrayal slammed into me.

“I have to go, Kevin,” I said, the nausea lurching up inside my throat again. I closed the phone and tossed it onto the sofa, not wanting to touch it—and the dozens of names I didn’t know—for another second.

I curled into a chair and drew an afghan over my knees. The worn, multicolored blanket was as old as me, made by my grandmother when I’d been born, a blend of blues and pinks. I pulled its softness to my shoulders, then over my head, burrowing myself inside its comfort and darkness.

Here, the world was gone, quieted by the muffling weight of the thick, fuzzy yarn. Like I had throughout the rocky, tumultuous years of my childhood, I imagined staying right where I was until the worst was over. Harvey stuck his head under a corner, took one look at me and began wagging his tail.

The ringing of Dave’s cell phone forced me out of my cocoon. I threw off the blanket and watched the Motorola, its face lighting up in blue to announce the incoming call. For a moment, I hesitated, afraid to answer it. Afraid of who might be on the other end.

Eventually curiosity won out and I reached for the cell, flipping it open. “Hello?”

“Hey, is Dave there?” said a male voice I didn’t recognize.

“No. He’s…” I couldn’t get the words out. I tried, even formed them with my lips, but they refused to be voiced. It wasn’t bigamy I was afraid to say, it was dead. “He’s gone right now. But I’m his wife. Can I help you?”

“You’re Annie? Hey, cool to meet you. Dave talks about you all the time, you know.”

Annie? Who the hell was Annie? A nickname for Susan? Or worse…

Another wife?

“Who did you say you were again?” I asked the voice.

“Oh, shit, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Vinny. I’m Harvey’s trainer.”