His Other Wife (5 page)

T
he doorbell rang three times in quick succession. All of Hilary’s good intentions flew out of her head; she was a bundle of
nerves. She peered out the peephole as she scrubbed her palms on her slacks legs.

The glass in the peephole made everything on the porch look compressed, as if she were peering down on them from a bigger
world. How it pleased her that her ex-husband appeared somewhat small.

Through the hole, Hilary watched Eric as he prepared to face her. He straightened his collar with short, sharp jerks. When
he didn’t get it right, Pam reached over and fixed it for him. Eric beckoned eleven-year-old Ben away from the doorway, offered
him a chummy high five followed by a shared bop of the knuckles. Pam crossed her arms over Lily’s collarbone and rocked this
child, this one she and Eric shared, back and forth in front of her.

Pam shot Eric a look of reassurance that any other woman could read:
You’re going to be fine, honey. Just enjoy this as much as you can.

Hilary opened the door so fast that she almost caught them. But no. Instead, she got them standing in the door frame as if
they were posing for a portrait, Pam with her dark hair and symmetrical features, Eric with his fixed, dazzling smile, the
children’s faces eager.

“Hello, Hilary,” Eric said.

The warmth in his voice actually surprised Hilary. She found herself doing the unthinkable, examining the physical changes
in her ex-husband, the lines that ran from his nose to his mouth, the skin thickening around his eyes. He looked older. Good.
Handsome, in fact.

“Hello, Eric.”

There were all sorts of things they could say to each other, but nothing came. They spoke in scripted sentences. He asked,
“How have you been?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Fine.”

As she searched for words and analyzed the changes in him, she could kick herself for the moment she found herself awash in
the loneliness again. Not from missing Eric exactly, she’d gotten beyond that, but just from missing
someone
. Someone stepping through the door at the end of the day. Someone in the bed next to her, a warm body that left an indentation
in the mattress, a fading warmth on the pillow, a body spooning against hers, someone who would tug the covers and she could
tug back.

All those feelings, which Hilary had managed to tame into submission, rose again while this man and his wife and their children
stood on her front porch.

The important thing is to watch out for Seth’s best interests.

This has nothing to do with protecting myself.

Pam’s two children — not ankle biters, thank you very much — peered past Hilary’s legs as if they expected the Magic Kingdom
to materialize behind her. “Hello,” she said to the boy. “Ben, isn’t it?” For the first time, she realized he was carrying
a basketball against his hip.

“Yeah,” he answered. “That’s me.”

“That’s not the way you act when you meet someone, Ben.” Pam stopped her son mid-exchange and directed him what to say; heaven
forbid he wouldn’t introduce himself properly.

This time, Ben extended his hand toward Hilary as prompted. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said.

“Nice to meet you, too.” When Ben spoke again, his voice was oozing with hope. “Do you think Seth will shoot hoops with me?”

“Oh, I’ll bet he will.”

“You really think so?”

“I’m pretty sure. You’ll have to talk to him about it, though.”

The little girl, Lily, gazed past Hilary into the house. “Where is he?”

Hilary honestly hadn’t known the kids would be this excited. “He isn’t here right now, sweetheart. He’s gone for a little
while.”

“Oh.”

Hilary had never seen such dejected faces in all her life. She hadn’t expected hero worship. “He’ll be back soon, honey. I
promise.”

Their moment of greeting stretched into something awkward. Hilary took an abrupt step back so the Wynn family could enter.
“Come in. Come in.” She gestured. “Oh, Pam. What are you doing still standing out there on the porch? The airports are the
worst, aren’t they? You’ve been traveling all day.” And after Eric entered, she watched him stand in the middle of the living
room with his arms crossed as if he wasn’t certain how to move inside her space anymore.

“I’m glad you finally bought this,” he said at last. “There are such bargains in this market. And Pam likes the waterfall
beside the front gate.”

Hilary’s pride took over. Hadn’t he lost the right to tell her if he thought something was wise or not?
This is what you get with a household divided, Eric. A modest house with a water feature.

Luckily, she had her nurse’s salary to rely on. Hilary had only agreed to let Eric help with a small amount of child support,
which would end when Seth turned twenty-one. She’d refused the alimony payments Eric had offered. She’d turned down Eric’s
offers to send money when she and Seth had gone through the rough spots. And, even without that, she’d managed to scrape together
enough to get them into a neighborhood where Seth could stay in the same school district where he’d started. She’d managed
to put together a comfortable home for the two of them, although there hadn’t been room in the budget for many extras. The
nurse with the purse, Gina had called her. Thank heavens for that. “It’s been good for me and Seth. Good for him to feel settled.”

The little girl began to twirl in the middle of the living room, her skirt billowing around her like a morning-glory blossom.
Hilary remembered loving to twirl at her parents’ house. She recalled falling down, seasick, as the floor pitched and she
couldn’t stand up anymore. If this had been any other child, Hilary might have found her charming.

“Lily,” Pam said. The one word, “Lily,” and the child stopped. “You don’t behave that way when we’re guests.”

“Oh, please,” Hilary said. “Let her. I don’t mind.”

Pam turned to Hilary. “The last time I let her do that until she stopped, she wore the wax off my mother’s floor.”

“Well, I don’t wax my floors,” Hilary said, and was instantly sorry for the disclosure.

Lily took a seat on the sofa. Ben sat beside his sister. He held the basketball between two hands and stared at it the way
he would stare into the face of a friend who had forsaken him.

“You told Seth what time we’d be here, didn’t you?” Eric crossed the room and rumpled the boy’s hair. “I can’t believe he
isn’t here waiting for us.”

“Of course he’s not here waiting for you, Eric.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. “He’s
eighteen
.”

The rain had cleared, but the air was damp. A breeze ruffled the limbs outside the window. The sun, which had broken through
the clouds, slanted across the carpet. A reflection of leaves danced on the coffee table. Hilary hadn’t meant to sound so
sharp. She tried to soften the words a bit. “They had to finish the senior video. Then he went to work on his girlfriend’s
bike.”

“He has a girlfriend?” Ben asked, shifting in his seat.

“Yes, he does.”

“Daddy didn’t tell us he had a girlfriend,” Lily said.

“I don’t think” — Hilary met Eric’s eyes —“that your dad knew.”

Eric interrupted her. “Why did you let him go out with friends when we’ve come all this way to see him?”

“They make a senior video every year. They’ll show it at commencement tomorrow.” Hilary kept her voice as even as iron. “It’s
a big deal. It’s
important
, Eric.”

“This is a disappointment to the kids,” Pam said.

Only later, when Hilary called up memories of this day, would she realize that this was the moment she should have started
to worry: these few sentences, this slight misunderstanding, how she had to explain to this family that they weren’t the center
of Seth’s world. At the time, she’d taken it only as a slight offense (this was her domain and Eric and Pam were walking into
it…the life she and Seth had managed to build together…
their
territory) when she ought to have recognized it as a red flag of danger. “I promised I’d call him the minute you got in.
My mother’s going to be here in a few minutes, too.”

Which made Eric flinch. Hilary enjoyed that. The last person he probably wanted to see was her mother.

“Well, we’ve gotten in,” Pam reminded her. “Why haven’t you already called him?”

“He’ll come home, Pam,” she said. “He wants to see everyone, too.” At that exact moment, Hilary’s Nokia rang with a download
from The Fray
,
Seth’s distinctive ring. Hilary couldn’t resist a smile of satisfaction. That’s the way things happened with them; they
usually stayed so in tune, it seemed like one of them always knew when the other was about to dial. Hilary touched the screen,
feeling vindicated.

“Hey, sweetie. What’s up?”

In the background she could hear about four different conversations, the grinding of an icemaker, the steady beat of hip-hop.
“Is he there yet?”

Only for a moment did Hilary’s mood darken, as she remembered the story Patty Winkler had told her. But now wasn’t the time
to ask Seth about the essay, not with everyone standing there. “I have something to ask you about later.”

“What is it? Mom, is something wrong?” He must have heard it in her voice.

“We’ll talk about it when you get home, okay? And yes.” She glanced toward Eric. “Your dad’s here. They just got in.”

The hesitation on the other end of the line made Hilary both surprised and alarmed. She’d given Seth pep talks when he’d been
twelve and anxious about flying alone to California. But he’d always returned from L.A. with stories about the beach, carrying
a new guilt gift from Eric, usually a skateboard or a new computer game, and talking about his baby sister. Maybe she’d been
crazy, but Hilary thought Seth had accepted the situation over time.

After a while, he’d stopped talking about it. To his friends and to his mother, he had remained warm and steadfast. He had
become a great support to her; month by month her son’s presence had helped her grow stronger.

Hilary wasn’t about to pursue the question right now. You lived through what you couldn’t change. And Eric had paused beside
her momentarily, his shoulders squared, as if he might be suspecting some secret language passing between them in their conversation.

So she fudged. “Are you at Emily’s?” she asked lightly.

“Yep. Fixed her bike. Now there’s a bunch of us hanging out.”

“Does Emily have family coming in today, too?”

“Yeah. She’s got to go to the airport to pick up her gran.”

“Well, you’d better get over here pronto. You know how it is. Everyone’s getting antsy.”

“Will you tell him something for me?” Eric asked. “Tell him we want to take him to dinner before baccalaureate. Baccalaureate
is tonight, isn’t it?”

Seth must have heard his dad. He groaned. “Mom.
Baccalaureate?
Tell me I don’t have to go to that thing.”

Hilary let her silence speak for her.

“Who wants to sit in a room and listen to more people talking behind a microphone? It’s time to
celebrate
. Besides, I need to write my
own
speech.” Hilary tried to remember if she’d even mentioned the speech to Eric yet. A few days ago, Seth’s friends had elected
him to speak during the ceremony.

“So
you
can stand behind a microphone. Make people listen to
you.
”

“Right. It’s sure better than the other way around.”

Hilary finally laughed. “Just get your sweet self over here,” she told him in that tone of voice that implied she was almost
exasperated. “I’m going to let you deal with this.”

“The video went great. We got this great close-up shot of Remy dissecting a frog in Biology. It’s going to gross everybody
out. Then we got my touchdown reception and the parade when the swim team won regionals and Jess Forney’s mom turned in about
a dozen pictures of girls having a mud fight at Jess’s birthday when they were four.”

Ah, Hilary loved the parts of his life that Seth was willing to share with her. She also knew that he was trying to divert
her attention away from baccalaureate. “Sounds like it’ll play well to an audience.”

“Oh, it will, all right.”

“Ben said you promised to shoot hoops with him.”

“I did. Oh, and Mom? When we get a minute, I need to talk to you about the senior party.”

Once more, Hilary’s mind went to the party the parents had been planning, the rental of the rec center with the pool, the
DJ they’d hired, the ice-cream sundae bar and the inflatable outfits for sumo wrestling.

“I’d be willing to pay big money to see you in a sumo suit,” Hilary said.

“No, Mom. I’m talking about that
other
party.”

“Oh. The campout.”

“Yeah.”

“I just —”

“What?”

“Well, I’m so lucky. I know I can talk to you about anything.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, a lot of the other parents don’t know about it. A lot of the other kids didn’t tell. So you shouldn’t say anything.”

Hilary had to be honest. Her son’s request made her feel half-proud and half-uncomfortable. “Seth. If there’s this much secrecy
attached, maybe you guys shouldn’t go.”