Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

If that had been me, he’d complain that I was
being too sensitive
.
The older women keep swirling around me, telling me
how Maureen has always said what a wonderful couple
Nick and I are and she is right, we are clearly made for
each other.
I prefer these well-meant cliche´s to the talk we heard
before we got married. 
Marriage is compromise and hard
work, and then more hard work and communication and
compromise. And then work
. Abandon all hope, ye who
enter.
The engagement party back in New York was the
worst for this, all the guests hot with wine and resentment,
as if every set of spouses had gotten into an argument on
the way to the club. Or they remembered some argument.
Like Binks. Binks Moriarty, my mom’s best friend’s eighty-
eight-year-old mother, stopped me at the bar – bellowed,
‘Amy! I must talk to you!’ in an emergency-room voice. She
twisted her precious rings on overknuckled fingers – twist,
turn, creak – and fondled my arm (that old-person grope –
cold fingers coveting your nice, soft, warm, new skin), and
then Binks told me how her late husband of sixty-three
years had trouble ‘keeping it in his pants.’ Binks said this
with one of those 
I’m almost dead, I can say this kind of

---

stuff
grins and cataract-clouded eyes. ‘He just couldn’t
keep it in his pants,’ the old lady said urgently, her hand
chilling my arm in a death grip. ‘But he loved me more than
any of them. 
I
know it, and 
you
know it.’ The moral to the
story being: Mr Binks was a cheating dickweasel, but, you
know, marriage is compromise.
I retreated quickly and began circulating through the
crowd, smiling at a series of wrinkled faces, that baggy,
exhausted, disappointed look that people get in middle
age, and all the faces were like that. Most of them were
also drunk, dancing steps from their youth – swaying to
country-club funk – and that seemed even worse. I was
making my way to the French windows for some air, and a
hand squeezed my arm. Nick’s mom, Mama Maureen, with
her big black laser eyes, her eager pug-dog face. Thrusting
a wad of goat cheese and crackers into her mouth,
Maureen managed to say: ‘It’s not easy, pairing yourself off
with someone forever. It’s an admirable thing, and I’m glad
you’re both doing it, but, boy-oh-girl-oh, there will be days
you wish you’d never done it. And those will be the good
times, when it’s only 
days
of regret and not 
months
.’ I must
have looked shocked – I was definitely shocked – because
she said quickly: ‘But then you have good times, too. I know
you will. 
You two
. A 
lot
of good times. So just … forgive me,
sweetheart, what I said before. I’m just being a silly old
divorced lady. Oh, mother of pearl, I think I had too much
wine
.’ And she fluttered a goodbye at me and scampered
away through all the other disappointed couples.
‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ Bill Dunne was suddenly
saying, and he was saying it to me. ‘Why are you here?

---

You’re not allowed here.’
‘I’m Amy,’ I say, touching his arm as if that might wake
him. Bill has always liked me; even if he could think of
nothing to say to me, I could tell he liked me, the way he
watched me like I was a rare bird. Now he is scowling,
thrusting his chest toward me, a caricature of a young sailor
ready to brawl. A few feet away, Go sets down her food and
gets ready to move toward us, quietly, like she is trying to
catch a fly.
‘Why are you in our house?’ Bill Dunne says, his mouth
grimacing. ‘You’ve got some nerve, lady.’
‘Nick?’ Go calls behind her, not loudly but urgently.
‘Got it,’ Nick says, appearing. ‘Hey, Dad, this is my
wife, Amy. Remember Amy? We moved back home so we
could see you more. This is our new house.’
Nick glares at me: I was the one who insisted we invite
his dad.
‘All I’m saying, Nick,’ Bill Dunne says, pointing now,
jabbing an index finger toward my face, the party going
hushed, several men moving slowly, cautiously, in from the
other room, their hands twitching, ready to move, ‘is 
she
doesn’t belong here. Little bitch thinks she can do whatever
she wants.’
Mama Mo swoops in then, her arm around her ex-
husband, always, always rising to the occasion. ‘Of course
she belongs here, Bill. It’s her house. She’s your son’s wife.
Remember?’
‘I want her out of here, do you understand me,
Maureen?’ He shrugs her off and starts moving toward me
again. ‘Dumb bitch. Dumb bitch.’
It’s unclear if he means me or Maureen, but then he

---

looks at me and tightens his lips. ‘She doesn’t 
belong
here.’
‘I’ll go,’ I say, and turn away, walk straight out the door,
into the rain. 
From the mouths of Alzheimer’s patients
, I
think, trying to make light. I walk a loop around the
neighborhood, waiting for Nick to appear, to guide me
back to our house. The rain spackles me gently,
dampening me. I really believe Nick will come after me. I
turn toward the house and see only a closed door.

---