Page 69 of Wrong Mail

Peggy would have hated them.

They came from a florist in Bellevue in a refrigerated van, along with a large invoice that Lil paid. She makes sure to tell me so twice, in case I missed the price the first time.

Peggy would have done the flowers herself, out of her garden. She would have stood over the caterers reciting the name of every stem, making sure we all understood it had cost her a Saturday.

Now Peggy is lying in the medical examiner's office in Seattle, and there are hydrangeas on my birthday table that no one fought over.

I stand at the end of the terrace with a glass of wine, looking at flowers, and I miss a woman I could barely stand.

"Thirty-nine," Yvette says, appearing at my elbow with her phone already lifted. "You don't look it. What's your secret?"

"A husband with a scalpel," I say, because it's the answer they want, and she laughs the professional laugh and takes a photograph she will never show me.

Above the lake, the sky has gone the color of a bruise beginning to bloom.

The heat has been building for three weeks, and now it is finally about to break. The water lies still and metallic beneath a bank of cloud stacked so high it looks painted. The air on the terrace is thick enough to lean on. Everyone keeps saying, “Isn't it close?” and glancing up as if waiting for the clouds to break.

David wanted this.

That’s what I keep coming back to as the evening goes on, until it becomes clear that I never wanted it at all.

He wanted tonight to go the way all birthdays go, with the deposit paid and the caterers booked. Ordinary life carrying on as if there was no murder up our road and no break-in in our kitchen. The party itself is meant to prove that we're fine.

But we’re not.

No one is. Even if Lil and Yvette put on brave faces.

I take another sip of my drink.

David has been standing near the bar for an hour being the man everyone likes. Easy and warm, one hand on a shoulder, a story about the resident who fainted. Only I can see the thin wire of strain running beneath that charm. David’s holding the party together by sheer force of will.

I look around the terrace.

Henry came because I asked him and David let me, which is a small marriage negotiation I won't examine tonight. I see him arrive late and alone, lifting a hand to me from the top of the terrace steps and to no one else. He keeps to the edges. He has a way of being at a party without really being in it. He stands near the rail with a drink, perfectly still. Every so often I feel him not looking at me, which I know by now is something he does on purpose. I've stopped minding.

Julia is here with Chris.

I clock it the way I clock weather. She is bright and quick and lovely, in a dress the color of the lake before the cloud came. To everyone else, she looks like she's enjoying herself. But I know what she's really doing because I've watched her do it before.

She’s managing him.

She refills the plate he doesn't ask for. She laughs half a second before his jokes land, giving the rest of the table permission to laugh too. She keeps her body angled a few degrees toward him at all times, a compass needle that has learned where north is and never lets it out of sight. When he goes for another drink, she watches the level in the glass, not his face.

When Chris excuses himself to use the bathroom, Julia crosses to me with her wine in hand and kisses my cheek.

"Happy birthday, my lovely."

"Thank you."

She glances around the terrace. "It's going well. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves."

"Or pretending to."

"I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed."

I look toward David. "He seems oblivious."

"That's the doctor in him. They have to stay stoic. Can't fall to pieces like the rest of us."