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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Heidi hit the light switch by the front door and plunged the great room into darkness. She put her back against the wall, closed her eyes, and massaged the bridge of her nose.
Christ.
Nana had always said they were living in interesting times. Heidi hadn’t anticipated just how unpredictable the times could truly be. She didn’t know what kind of magic Valerie had spun up. The woman had somehow managed to wind down the dinner party, direct the kids into Kevin’s truck to gowherever, put the Murrays into their car—sans Nana—and offered for her and Tim to drive Nana to her senior living facility.
Perhaps she’d known that Heidi’s head was about to split like an over-frozen grape. Or perhaps she was doing what she would have done for herself had her family been dragging skeletons out of closets and immediately sweeping the bone fragments under dusty rugs.
The fact that Heidi’s mother had opened her mouth to tell Nana that maybe she wasn’t well and maybe she’d forgotten who she was had Heidi nearly ready to flip the table. Of course, her father wasn’t any better. He’d sat unspeaking, looking at his mother as though his entire world had caved in. He likely hadn’t given a thought to his mother’s caving in when she was barely nineteen.
“How dare they?” Heidi spat. “How fucking dare they?”
“I… I mean, I don’t know who you mean, but I could make three guesses.”
Heidi dropped her hand from her face and opened her eyes.
Shit.
Carine stood in a pale light shard cast by a fixture deep inside the master bedroom.
Heidi had forgotten she hadn’t left yet.
Carine’s borrowed brooch and sweater were absent from her attire.
Heidi suspected she’d been in the closet putting things away while Heidi had been busy seeing people to their respective vehicles.
“I guess it’s a good thing that birthdays only come once a year,” Carine said.
“I’ll say.” Heidi snorted and pushed away from the wall she was holding up. She kicked off her shoes one at a time and grabbed them by their collars. “She looked so smug when she left, didn’t she?”
“Eunice?”
“Yes.”
Carine gave the most minimal of shrugs. “I just met her tonight. For all I know, that could be her baseline expression.”
“Nana’s baseline is rural fatalism, and smug has never been one of her temperatures.”
“Maybe it rubbed off from her friend.”
Heidi snorted again and made her way around Carine into her room. “Herfriend. Charmingly euphemistic.”
“Well. Whatever you want to call her. She didn’t assign a label, so I don’t really know what to use.”
The thought stopped Heidi in her tracks for a moment. She didn’t know what label to use, either. “Paramour? Belated love? End-of-life partner?” She shook her head and got moving again. The rural fatalism seemed to be an epidemic.
Or perhaps just inherited.
She slid her shoes into their cubby in the closet. Realizing Carine was in the entryway behind her, she said, “I suppose a lot of things make a lot more sense to me now, though. I’m perfectly aware that many women dislike their husbands for reasons that have nothing to do with not wanting to sleep with them. I’d always thought her resentment toward my grandfather was because he was so humorless and cheap.”
“I’m sure his personality only added to her misery. Can you imagine? Having to bump into someone time and time again who you once had something special with and seeing them with their passel of kids or their husband?”
“Oh, I don’t even want to try.” Heidi freed the buttons of her shirt and found the hanger the garment had come from. “Any idea of where Kevin went? My head was in the clouds. I guess I didn’t make much of a mother hen tonight.”
“I doubt he’d blame you for that. He left looking like someone had revealed to him that the tooth fairy is a serial killer. Said he was going to Kalimah’s.”
“Probably for the best.” Heidi fastened the shirt onto the hanger and snugged it into the sea of other black shirts. She unclasped her belt and yanked it from her pant loops.
