“If Donna finds out, we are DONE. You understand me? Done.”
That was my husband’s voice. I was standing outside our rental cabin door with two bags of groceries and a bottle of wine I’d grabbed for the four of us.
We’d been planning this trip for a year. Me, my husband Craig, my best friend Patrice, and her boyfriend Derek. Seven days in the mountains. Patrice and I had been friends since we were nineteen.
I stood there long enough to hear Derek say, “She’s not going to find out. Patrice is careful.”
I walked in like I hadn’t heard anything.
“Got the rosé,” I said, setting the bags on the counter.
Craig smiled. “Perfect.”
That smile. I’d seen it ten thousand times. I didn’t know what I was looking at anymore.
Patrice came out of the back bedroom and hugged me from behind. “I love you,” she said, which she always said, and I said it back, which I always did.
My hands were shaking.
That night after Craig fell asleep, I went through his phone.
There was a folder I’d never seen. Locked. I knew his passcode – his mother’s birthday – and it opened.
The pictures went back eight months.
I sat down on the floor without deciding to.
In the morning I made coffee and waited.
“You sleep okay?” Patrice said, coming into the kitchen.
“Not really,” I said. “You?”
“Like a rock.” She poured herself a cup and leaned against the counter. “This place is so good for me.”
I looked at her. “Patrice. How long?”
She went still. “What?”
“How long.”
She set her cup down. “Donna – “
“Don’t.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then: “Eight months. I swear to God it didn’t mean anything, I was going to tell you, I just – “
“You were going to tell me.”
“Yes.”
I nodded. I took a sip of my coffee. I looked out the window.
“Okay,” I said.
She looked confused. “Okay?”
“I called your mother last night,” I said. “While you were sleeping. I told her everything. She’s on her way.”
Patrice’s face went white.
“Donna. Her heart. She can’t – you know she can’t handle – “
“I also called Derek.”
What Derek Didn’t Know
Derek didn’t know.
That was the thing I hadn’t been sure about, standing in that kitchen. Patrice being careful, Craig had said. But careful with who? Careful how?
I’d called Derek at 2:14 in the morning. He picked up on the second ring, voice thick with sleep, and I’d said, “I need to ask you something and I need you to be honest with me.”
He was honest.
He didn’t know. He thought this trip was exactly what it was supposed to be. Four people, seven days, a cabin in the mountains. He’d taken two vacation days for this. He’d bought new hiking boots.
When I told him, he went quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Say that again,” he said.
I said it again.
I heard him sit up in bed three states away. I heard him set something down, or knock something over. I heard him breathe.
“How long?” he said.
“Eight months.”
Another silence. “She told you that?”
“The pictures told me that.”
He didn’t say anything else for a while. Then he said he was getting in his car.
I said okay.
I went back to bed and lay next to Craig with my eyes open until the sky started going gray.
The Morning After the Night Before
Patrice’s face in that kitchen. I keep coming back to it.
She’d hugged me the night before. She’d said I love you with her chin on my shoulder and I’d said it back. We’d sat on the porch after dinner and shared the rosé I’d brought and she’d told me she was thinking about going back to school. Craig had been laughing at something Derek said. It had looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like.
And she’d known. The whole time, she’d known.
Now she was standing at the kitchen counter with both hands flat on the tile and her face the color of the cream she hadn’t put in her coffee yet.
“You called my mother,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Donna, my mother has a heart condition. You know that. You’ve known that for twenty years.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to drive up here alone, she’s going to be upset, she could – “
“Patrice.”
She stopped.
“You slept with my husband.”
The kitchen was very quiet. Outside a bird was doing something in the trees, some repetitive single-note call, over and over.
“I know,” she said. Small voice. Smaller than I’d ever heard from her.
“For eight months.”
“I know.”
“In my house,” I said. “I found a picture. I recognized the bedspread.”
Her eyes closed.
That bedspread was burgundy with a white stripe. I’d bought it at a closeout sale three years ago. I’d been proud of it. Good quality, she’d said when she saw it. You always find the good stuff.
I turned around and poured the rest of my coffee down the drain.
When Craig Came Downstairs
He came down at quarter to nine in the flannel shirt he’d packed specifically for this trip. He’d been excited about this trip. He’d made a playlist for the drive up. He’d researched trails.
He saw Patrice’s face first.
Then he saw mine.
He stopped on the third step from the bottom.
“Morning,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“Coffee’s fresh,” I said.
Craig had a tell. When he was caught at something – not just caught, but fully, completely caught with nowhere to go – he’d rub the back of his neck with his right hand. He’d done it when he’d dented my car and tried to hide it. He’d done it when I found out he’d been skipping his father’s chemo appointments to go to the bar with his work friends.
He did it now.
“Donna,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said. Same word I’d used with Patrice. I was getting good at it.
He came down the last three steps and stood in the kitchen doorway. He and Patrice weren’t looking at each other. That was interesting. You’d think they’d look at each other. Some instinct toward alliance, toward strategy. But they weren’t. They were both just looking at me.
I wondered what that meant. I didn’t wonder long.
“I found the folder,” I said.
Craig’s jaw moved.
“I know his passcode,” I said, mostly to myself. “I’ve always known it.”
Derek’s Car
Derek pulled up at eleven forty-three.
I know the exact time because I was watching the driveway from the porch, had been watching it for a while, and I had my phone in my hand. I’d been texting with his sister Marlene, who I’d met twice at holiday things and liked more than I’d ever told Patrice. Marlene had said I’m so sorry, Donna. I’m so, so sorry. Like it had happened to her too. Maybe it had, a little.
He drove a gray Civic with a crack in the passenger side mirror he’d been meaning to fix for two years. Patrice had complained about that mirror. Said it was an eyesore. Said he needed to just deal with it already.
He got out of the car and he looked terrible. Red around the eyes. He’d driven four hours and he hadn’t stopped to change, still in the shorts and t-shirt he’d probably been sleeping in when I called.
He looked at me on the porch.
“They inside?” he said.
“Yes.”
He nodded. Stood there a second. He was a big guy, Derek, played softball on weekends, the kind of person who takes up comfortable space without trying. Right now he looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
“You okay?” he said.
Nobody had asked me that yet.
“Not even a little,” I said.
He nodded again, like that was the right answer. Like he appreciated the honesty.
He went inside. I stayed on the porch.
I heard the door. Then voices, not words. Then Patrice’s voice going high. Then nothing for a while.
Patrice’s Mother
Carol got there at two in the afternoon.
I’d been worried about that, a little, in the abstract part of my brain that was still doing logistics while the rest of me was just trying to get through each hour. Carol was sixty-eight and she’d had two cardiac episodes in the last four years and she didn’t like highways. But she’d driven up alone, four lanes of mountain interstate, because I’d called her at midnight and told her what her daughter had done.
She was a small woman. Patrice got her height from her father. Carol barely came up to my shoulder and she had white hair she kept short and she’d always smelled like the same lotion, something with lavender in it, and she’d been at my wedding.
She’d been in the front row at my wedding.
She got out of the car and she looked at me and she opened her arms and I walked into them like I was twelve years old.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, honey.”
She went inside a few minutes later. I didn’t follow her.
I heard crying, eventually. I couldn’t tell whose.
The Part Nobody Asks About
People want to know what I said to Craig. What the big confrontation was. Whether I screamed, whether he cried, whether I threw something.
Here’s what happened: not much.
He tried to talk to me twice that afternoon. The first time I walked away. The second time I said, “I don’t have anything to say to you right now,” and he looked at me for a long moment and then went and sat on the back porch by himself for two hours.
I didn’t feel the satisfaction I think people expect. I didn’t feel clean or powerful or righteous.
I felt tired. The specific tired that lives behind your eyes when you haven’t slept and your whole life has just been reshuffled like a deck of cards and you don’t know what game you’re even playing anymore.
Patrice knocked on the bedroom door at four o’clock. I’d been sitting on the bed with my shoes still on.
“Can I come in?” she said.
“No,” I said.
She stood there a second. I could see her shadow under the door.
“I love you,” she said. “I know that doesn’t mean anything right now. I know. But I do.”
I didn’t say anything.
I heard her walk away.
What I Took
I left the next morning. Packed my bag, put it in the car, and drove down the mountain alone.
I didn’t say goodbye to Craig. I didn’t say goodbye to Patrice. I stopped and hugged Carol in the kitchen and she held on for a long time and didn’t say anything and that was exactly right.
Derek walked me to my car.
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “What about you?”
He looked back at the cabin. “Same.”
I got in the car. I had the whole drive home to think, which is a lot of hours, and I used most of them not thinking at all. Just watching the road and the trees and the sky doing its thing.
I’d planned this trip for a year. I’d looked up the cabin reviews, I’d mapped the trails, I’d made a grocery list that had three different kinds of cheese on it because Patrice liked variety.
I’d been so excited.
I stopped for gas somewhere around the halfway point and I sat in the parking lot and I ate a granola bar from my purse and I watched a man try to get a shopping cart unstuck from a curb for about four minutes before he gave up and left it there.
Then I got back on the highway.
The rosé was still in the cabin. I’d left it on the counter.
I hope nobody drank it.
—
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For more tales of shocking revelations and unexpected twists, you might enjoy reading about how My Husband’s Girlfriend Introduced Herself to Me at His Work Party or the time My Best Friend Said “Don’t Post Anything” to His Wife. He Was Talking About Me. And for a moment of true audacity, check out when A Man Laughed at My Husband’s Prosthetic Leg in the Grocery Store. I Went Back In.
