Tuesday, Same Place

Episode 2 of 5 of My Husband’s Second Phone by Helen Abbott

I did not go in her room.

I stood in the hall outside it for most of the night with my back against the wall, and I listened to my daughter breathe, and I did not go in. I want that understood. A stranger told me not to and I did what the stranger said, because I did not know yet who I was more afraid of.

Nate came home at eight.

I heard the truck. I heard the door. I heard him put the bag down where it always goes, handles to the door.

He came into the kitchen and kissed the top of my head and said, “You look wrecked.”

“Didn’t sleep.”

“Ruby up?”

“Not yet.”

He poured coffee. He drank it standing at the counter, looking at the backyard, and he did not check the bag. He did not go anywhere near the bag.

A man with a secret phone checks for the phone. I’ve thought about that a hundred times since. A man with a secret phone reaches into the lining the second he’s alone, and my husband stood in our kitchen with the sun on him and drank his coffee and asked me whether the glue kid had gotten in trouble yet.

He knew it was gone. He had to know. And he said nothing.

That should have told me something. It told me the wrong thing.

The messages had said Tuesday. It was Monday.

I spent Monday being a wife. I made lunch. I did the pickup line. I let Ruby watch two shows instead of one. At four Nate came down and we had dinner and he was funny and he was tired and he touched my hand across the table, and I let him.

At eight thirty he picked up the bag and left.

Tuesday I asked the neighbor to take Ruby after school. The neighbor is the one who owes me. Everyone has one of those. She said yes before I finished the sentence.

Then I sat in my car around the corner from our house with the phone in my lap and waited for my husband to wake up and go somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

He left at two fifteen. Not in the truck. On foot, to the end of the block, where a gray car I had never seen picked him up.

I followed it. Six cars back, the way you see on TV, and I felt ridiculous the whole time and I did it anyway.

It went out past the edge of town to a diner by the highway. The kind with a sign that only lights up on one side. The gray car parked in the back. Nate got out. So did the driver.

The driver was a man.

I want to tell you what that did to me. I had spent three days building a woman in my head. I had given her a face. I had decided how she laughed. And it was a man in a work jacket with his hands in his pockets, and they went in the back door of a diner together, and I had no idea what I was looking at anymore.

I parked where I could see the window.

They sat in a booth. They did not eat. The man talked with his hands. Nate mostly listened, and once he put both palms flat on the table and leaned in, and I know that move, it is the move he makes when he is trying not to raise his voice in front of Ruby.

The man took an envelope out of his jacket. Thick. He slid it across.

Nate put it inside his coat without looking at it.

And then the man turned his head to look out the window, at the parking lot, at nothing, the way people do when a conversation has gone somewhere hard.

He looked right at my car.

I knew him.

I knew him the way you know your own handwriting. I had not seen that face in six years, and I had spent six years making sure I didn’t, and there he was in a diner booth across from my husband with an envelope between them.

My brother.

Cole.

He saw me. I watched him see me. And he did not look surprised.

He closed his eyes, slowly, like a man whose worst day had just moved up on the calendar.

My Husband’s Second Phone · ← The Phone in the Gym Bag · The Brother Nobody Talks To →