Chapter 2
Chapter 2 - The Woman Who Knew My Kitchen
The next morning I went through my own house like I would clear a building.
I started in the bathroom and worked out.
In Aaron's medicine cabinet there was an extra toothbrush in the box, not opened by me, and a small bottle of face wash I never bought.
In the kitchen, on the shelf above the stove, there was a can of dog food.
We don't have a dog.
In the pantry, behind the flour, there was a bag of dog food, half empty, the kind that comes in the brown bag with the red label.
I stood in my kitchen for a while with that bag in my hand.
In the hall closet, on the top shelf behind the folding chairs, there was a small overnight bag that wasn't mine and wasn't his.
I left everything exactly where I found it.
That afternoon I called my neighbor Doreen, who has lived in the yellow house next door for thirty years, and I asked her to have coffee.
I didn't tell her why.
She sat down across from me in her kitchen with her hands wrapped around her cup, and she looked uncomfortable, and I understood right then that she already knew something.
"I didn't want to be the one to say it," she said.
"Say it now," I said.
She told me a woman had been coming and going from my house since the spring.
She said sometimes it was early in the morning, before Aaron left for work.
She said sometimes the woman had her own key and let herself in when Aaron wasn't home yet, and Doreen knew that because she'd seen the woman come out to the mailbox and back in.
She said she assumed Aaron and I had some kind of arrangement.
She said it wasn't her business.
I told her it was not an arrangement.
I told her I didn't know the woman's name until the day before, when I saw her.
Doreen's face changed when I said that.
Then she told me the thing that made the whole year make sense.
She said the woman drives a silver sedan with a dent in the back left door, and she's seen it in the lot of Aaron's insurance office on Main.
I knew the office.
I'd been to the office.
I'd been to the Christmas party there.
I sat in Doreen's kitchen and I thought about the anniversary dinner last year, the one Aaron took me to at the Italian place downtown, and I thought about the woman I met that night, the one who ran the front desk and shook my hand and told me Aaron talked about me all the time.
Melissa.
She was not a stranger from a bar.
She knew my kitchen.
She knew where the flour was.
She knew which shelf the dog food went on, because she had a dog, and she'd had it in my house.
I went back home and I did the math on my hands at my own table.
Eleven months of deployment this rotation.
Six the one before.
Spring was eight months into the one before that.
Whatever this was, it had started while I was gone, and it had been run out of my own house, and the woman had been fed dinner at my table more than once.
I still didn't read the messages on the phone.
I did something else instead.
I took a picture of every room, every drawer, every bag, with my phone on the counter, dated and organized, like a walk-through of a scene.
I called my first sergeant and told him I needed the number for legal assistance on post.
He didn't ask me any questions he didn't need to ask.
That night, Aaron came back to the house to collect clothes.
He texted first.
He said he wanted to talk.
I let him in.
I made him sit on the far side of the kitchen table, the chair facing the window, the one he never liked.
I put Melissa's phone face-down on the table between us.
I didn't unlock it.
I just let him see it there.
He looked at the phone and then at me and then at the phone again.
"Whose is that," he said, even though he knew.
"Start with how long," I said.
"And don't round down."
He didn't say anything for a while.
Then he said, "We need to talk about this properly."
"We are talking about it properly," I said.
"You are in my kitchen, at my table, and I am giving you one clean chance to tell me the truth before I find it myself."
He put his hands on the table.
He still didn't answer the question.
May you like
That was when I understood that the affair was not the biggest problem in the room.
The biggest problem was that he had a plan for this conversation, and I was not in it.
