The Other Widow Read Online Free Page A

fix the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. What did you expect me to do? Or the time he spent on a backyard deck in semi-darkness with yet another attractive neighbor. Mapping out a summer garden , he told her on the way home, as she sat smoldering beside him. Maybe Samuel’s strayed and maybe his flirtations never went beyond a backyard garden or a running toilet. Maybe he’s an innocent or maybe he’s just really good at hiding what he does. In either case, she isn’t innocent at all. Dorrie is the one who’s strayed.
    She sighs. She won’t tell him the truth about the accident. She can’t. Not even part of it. She’s on her own—to understand what really happened, to figure out if someone truly tried to run her down, and if so, why? And who? It’s up to her to save herself.
    She takes a deep breath, puts on her best Mariska Hargitay on Law & Order face. Strong. Focused. Calm. She clears her throat. “I guess I had too much to drink,” she tells Samuel’s reflection in the cupboard door. “I tripped over a barstool and cut my head on the counter.” She turns around, shows him the butterfly bandage, looks him in the eye. “See?” She tells him how she went with Jeananne to a bar on Charles Street and about the man at the table next to theirs who ordered drinks for all of them. She tells her husband how Jeananne stopped sniffling over her ex to smile at this man with the blond hair and the dark eyes and the scar on his left cheek, elaborates on Jeananne dancing in the tiny aisle of the bar, going home, eventually, in a cab, and how Dorrie sat alone, sipping her drink and waiting for the snow to let up, not realizing how tipsy she was until she stood and lost her balance, hit her head.
    When he’s had enough, Samuel puts on his coat and steps outside, closing the door behind him. Smoke flies up from his cigarette and blows off into the sky. He coughs a raspy cough into the cold morning, and Dorrie knows he hasn’t believed a single word she’s said; she just doesn’t know why.
    She looks behind him at the door popped back open by the wind. It stands ajar. She stops. Panic sends a chill along her spine beneath her heavy sweater, beneath the quilt that used to lie across the bed she shares with Samuel. She feels as if she’s sliding, plummeting, that there is no one anywhere to catch her. And then she remembers staring through the snow at Joe’s wrecked Audi, the clumps of people pointing, shouting, as she took small steps back toward the car. There was something different then from the way she’d left it only a moment or two before, but at the time she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. And now she can. Crossing the small foyer to the door that Samuel has neglected to close properly, she knows. The driver’s-side door— Joe’s door—the one that had been tightly shut right after the accident, was open when she came back with the crowd. And the car with only one headlight—it was there, she thinks, across the street. Lurking. So whoever was inside the waiting car had likely seen her slip away. She takes a breath, and Joe’s last words come back to her. It isn’t safe. For us.

IV
    DORRIE
    T hey’ll bury Joe today. Dorrie touches the cut on her forehead, puckered and healing, an ugly train-track lie leading backward to the night he died. She tugs at her bangs, covering the naked scar, runs her hands down her straight black skirt, pencil thin, demure, adjusts her stockings. Her blouse is black brocade beneath a black silk sweater, a plaid wool scarf the only touch of color.
    She stands at the kitchen window, staring at the small backyard, where an old elm shivers. Behind it remnants of the autumn garden rot into patchy ground and Dorrie lets her eyes go out of focus, hoping for some sign of Joe. Nothing comes. The sky that started out a pastel blue has grown much darker through the morning and the