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“Work stuff.” He dropped a few ice cubes in a highball glass and reached for the bottle of scotch.
“That client?”
He stared at me blankly.
“The one you had to meet on Sunday.”
“Oh yeah, right.” He tossed back his drink, poured himself another, and left to watch television without answering.
After I finished cleaning the kitchen, I joined Kyle in the living room. As soon as I settled on the couch, he popped up from his recliner. “I’m taking Oliver for a walk.”
“Are you sure?” Usually I took Oliver for his evening walk while Kyle watched his home-improvement show.
“Positive.” With his head, he gestured toward the television. “I’ve already seen this.”
An hour later, the side door clicked open. I heard Oliver lapping up his water. Kyle stood in the entrance to the living room, staring at me with an expression I didn’t like, a mixture of sadness and worry.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He clenched both hands into tight fists and released them. “I don’t know how to tell you this.” He bit down on his lip.
I assumed he had received a phone call on his walk, bad news. “Did something happen to Dana, Aunt Izzie?”
“Nothing like that.”
I released a deep breath, resting my arm on a throw pillow.
“I did something stupid.”
This got my attention because other than marrying me, a woman who hadn’t been able to give him kids, Kyle had never done anything stupid. My eyes went to his, but he quickly looked away. “I was with someone else.” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed.
“What?” I heard what he said, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. He couldn’t be saying what I thought he was. He wouldn’t do that. Not Kyle. My eyes pleaded with him.
“I slept with someone else.” He said those words that cracked open my heart with no emotion, as if he were telling me we were out of milk.
I hugged the throw pillow to my chest without saying anything. Who was she? How had he met her? At work? One of Luke’s friends? The women calling his name at the hockey game popped into my head. I’d never gotten a good look at them. All I could remember was their hats with the pom-poms. One of them had touched him before she left the game.
Oliver scampered into the room. The clinking of his dog tags was the only sound. Maybe he sensed the tension, because instead ofparking himself at my feet or jumping up on the couch next to me, he returned to the kitchen.
“Who is she?”
Kyle stood in front of the picture window, his head bowed so that his chin rested on his chest. “No one you know. I met her at the Penalty Box.”
“The woman with the red hat. At your hockey game.”
He pulled at the collar of his shirt. “It only happened once.”
“What’s her name?” I didn’t know why I wanted to know this, maybe to get a better picture of who she was.
He blinked hard. “Why does that matter?”
“What’s. Her. Name?”
He sighed. “Casey,” he whispered, as if saying her name softly made her less real.
Casey, I repeated to myself, knowing I had heard that name recently but not remembering where. Had Kyle mentioned her? Had one of his hockey buddies said something about her? I imagined him sitting at the bar in his red-and-gold number-seven shirt, drinking a beer or sipping scotch, flirting with a tourist, one of the rich divorced women from Connecticut with a ski house on the mountain, getting her thrills with a local blue-collar guy. Or maybe she was one of the townies, a lonely waitress who had never been over the state line looking for Kyle to save her from her boring life. “Does she know you’re married?” I spun my rings around my finger.
He nodded. I bet he’d told her I was crazy, the psycho wife obsessed with having a baby.She bought a crib, turned our home office into a nursery,I imagined him saying. She’d probably listened with that same sympathetic look Dr.Evans used to give him. They’d probably had a good laugh at my expense.
