The red digital numbers on my kitchen microwave read 4:52 when Paulette called me last Tuesday, and honestly, nobody calls our house at that hour unless something broke or someone died.
Paulette is my older sister by four years. She married Craig back when we were still living out near Cleveland, before the sprawl reached the river and before any of us knew what mortgage rates were.
Craig sells farm equipment for a big outfit out on Highway 58. He is the kind of man who shakes your hand so hard your knuckles pop and remembers the names of your kids even when you wish he wouldn’t. He coaches a church softball team every Thursday night. People like Craig. I liked Craig. I used to joke that Paulette had the easiest husband in Hamilton County because he never stayed out past nine and always hung his jacket on the same brass hook by the back door.
Except last week she didn’t hang his jacket up. She called me while she was standing right there in her utility room with a wicker laundry basket balanced on her hip.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said. She sounded almost amused, the way people do when they find a twenty-dollar bill in an old coat. “Craig must have grabbed the wrong gym bag at the YMCA. I’ve got two white towels in here instead of one. And honestly, Faye, the smell coming off this second one is giving me a headache. It’s like a whole bottle of something floral spilled right on the terry cloth.”
I was standing by my sink rinsing a coffee mug. The water was lukewarm and running slow.
“What kind of floral?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she laughed. “Some cheap department store stuff. You know how those locker rooms are. Somebody probably shoved their bag into his locker by mistake.”
I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t, because two days before that phone call, on a Sunday afternoon when I was driving back from my eye doctor out on Gunbarrel Road, I had seen Craig’s maroon Ford F-150 parked in the back lot of the Riverbend apartments off Amnicola. It sat right under a metal carport next to a green dumpster. Craig wasn’t inside it when I first drove past, but on my way back around because I missed the turning lane, I saw him sitting behind the wheel with his cap pulled low, watching the entrance.
A woman in a green cardigan had walked right out of the breezeway and climbed into the passenger side without even knocking.
I didn’t get a look at her face. The windshield glare was too thick. But I saw the way she pulled her bag into her lap, easy and familiar, like she had done it a hundred times before.
“Faye?” Paulette asked when I stayed quiet too long. “You still there?”
“Yeah,” I said, my throat feeling dry like I had swallowed dust. “I’m here. Are you sure it was an accident?”
“Of course it was an accident,” she said, though her voice dropped just a little bit on the end. “Craig doesn’t even know anyone over on that side of town. His gym is right on Gunbarrel. You know that.”
I didn’t tell her about the maroon truck. Not then. You don’t take twenty-nine years of marriage apart over a truck parked in an apartment complex lot, I told myself. People park places. People drop things off. My husband used to run errands for his boss all over the county. I kept telling myself that until my head started throbbing right behind my eyes.
The real trouble started three days later when Paulette called me back. This time she wasn’t laughing at all.
Her voice had that flat, dead sound it used to have back when our daddy was in the hospital and we were waiting to hear if the surgery took. She was sitting in her car in the driveway of their house on Crestview Drive. She had the engine running because she told me the air conditioning inside the house felt too heavy.
“I went looking for his gym membership card,” she said. “The new one they sent in January. I thought maybe I’d drop it by his office since he left his wallet on the dresser.”
“And?” I asked. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a legal pad I hadn’t written anything on for an hour.
“The wallet wasn’t on the dresser,” she whispered. “He took the whole thing. But I found his old gym bag in the trunk of his Buick. The one he keeps for emergencies.”
She paused. I could hear the hum of the Ford’s blower motor through the speaker.
“It wasn’t empty, Faye. There was a set of keys in the side pocket. A Honda key and a little blue fob that doesn’t go to anything we own. And inside the small zipper pouch, there was a tube of lipstick. Not mine. I wear the same mauve stick I’ve bought at the Kroger since 1998. This was bright red. Like cherries.”
I stared out my kitchen window at my neighbor’s tomato cages rusting in the dirt.
“Paulette,” I said, and my voice sounded thin even to me. “Did you smell the towel again?”
“I didn’t need to,” she said. “The smell was all over the inside of that bag. Musk and roses. Heavy. The kind of perfume that stays on your coat even after you leave a room.”
That was when the memory hit me so hard I had to grab the edge of the laminate table. Two months before, we had all gone out to eat for Craig and Paulette’s anniversary at that steakhouse down by the river. Diane Miller had been there too. Diane’s husband had passed away three years back, and Paulette had been taking her under her wing, bringing her casseroles, inviting her over for pot roast every other Sunday after church. Diane had sat right across from me at the end of the long table. She had hugged Craig hello and lingered just a second too long with her hand on his shoulder, smelling of heavy roses and sweet vanilla. I remembered thinking it was just church perfume. I remembered thinking Diane was just a lonely widow who needed people around her.
I didn’t say Diane’s name to Paulette. I couldn’t bring myself to drop a bomb like that without something more solid than a memory of a dinner table.
“Paulette, listen to me,” I said, leaning forward until my forehead nearly touched the wood. “Don’t say anything to him yet. Just wait.”
“I’m not going to yell at him,” she said, and her voice went terribly quiet. “That’s not how I do things. Twenty-nine years, Faye. You don’t scream when you find out your whole life was built on top of a sinkhole.”
Then she hung up.
The next forty-eight hours were the longest I have ever lived through. I kept my phone right next to me on the sofa, turned up as loud as it would go, jumping every time the refrigerator clicked on or a car door slammed outside on the street. I didn’t drive over to her house because I knew Paulette when she got that look in her eye; she needed room to move before she let anyone see her shake.
Saturday afternoon at 1:15, the text came through. It was just one sentence, typed all in lowercase like she had been in a hurry.
I followed the bag.
And then nothing.
I called her phone at two o’clock. It went straight to voicemail. I called at three. Same thing. By four o’clock my stomach was tied in knots so tight I couldn’t even swallow my own spit. I got my car keys off the hook and drove out to Crestview Drive, running every yellow light between my house and hers, my hands sweating so bad on the steering wheel I kept having to wipe them on my jeans.
When I turned onto her street, Craig’s maroon truck wasn’t in the driveway. Neither was Paulette’s station wagon. The garage door stood wide open, showing an empty concrete floor where the cars usually sat side by side like two old shoes.
I pulled my car right up behind the grass and sat there with the engine ticking in the quiet afternoon heat. The front door of the house wasn’t even locked. I turned the knob and walked straight into the hallway, calling her name until my voice cracked.
There was no answer from the kitchen. No answer from the den.
I walked back toward the utility room where she had stood a week ago with the laundry basket. The folding table was still there, but it wasn’t empty anymore. Someone had dumped the contents of Craig’s gym bag right across the white laminate surface. A pair of dirty socks, a sweaty gray t-shirt from the hardware store, two white towels, and a small leather pouch.
Right on top of the pile sat a stack of four glossy 4x 4 photographs printed at the CVS down on mandatory-shot paper.
I didn’t want to look at them. I honestly didn’t. But my eyes went straight to the top one because the light from the small window caught the gloss.
It was Craig’s truck parked right in front of the Riverbend apartments. And leaning against the passenger door, laughing while Craig handed her a Styrofoam cup from McDonald’s, was Diane Miller in her green cardigan, holding a bunch of yellow grocery bags.
The second photo showed them walking through the breezeway together, Craig’s hand small and proprietary right at the small of her back, just above her belt.
I stood there in that empty laundry room with the afternoon sun coming through the little window, listening to the hum of the refrigerator down the hall, and for the first time I understood what Paulette meant when she said she wasn’t going to scream. There wasn’t any breath left for screaming.
The back door clicked open behind me.
I turned around, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Paulette stood on the threshold with her car keys in one hand and a white paper sack from the pharmacy in the other. She looked smaller than she had a week ago, her graying hair pulled back into a loose clip that was sliding sideways down her neck, but her eyes were dry and clear as river water.
“He’s at the hardware store on Highway 58,” she said, her voice steady and flat as a board. “Buying bolts for his softball shed.”
She walked past me into the utility room, set the paper bag down on the folding table right next to the photographs, and reached out to pick up one of the white towels she had washed twenty-nine times too many.
“Did you talk to her?” I asked, my voice shaking so bad it sounded like it belonged to someone else.
Paulette didn’t look at me. She just stood there smoothing the damp terry cloth between her palms the way she had done every Sunday since we were young women living three towns over.
“I didn’t have to,” she said. “She was sitting right there in the passenger seat when I pulled up behind them at the red light on Amnicola. She rolled her window down to see who was honking.”
Paulette finally looked up, and the small corner of her mouth twitched just enough to let me know she was still my sister, even if the woman who had walked into that kitchen twenty-nine years ago was already gone for good.
“She asked me if I wanted to borrow her cardigan because I looked cold,” Paulette said, and then she folded the towel in half, exactly the way Craig liked it, and dropped it into the empty basket at her feet.
