Chapter 14: The Necklace Under the Collar
At three o'clock the roast sat trussed on the counter, rubbed with juniper and coarse salt the night before and coming up to room temperature under a dish towel. The pie crust rested in the refrigerator, wrapped in wax paper. Carrots, parsnips and a pint of cream stood in a neat row beside the sink.
The key turned in the mudroom lock at ten past three.
Hugh was early. He came through the door with his jacket over one arm, dropped his keys into the dish, and the whole entry filled up with it. Gardenia, and under the gardenia something sharp and green, and under that, salt and skin. Vera's perfume and Vera's sweat, riding in on a man who had left the house at seven that morning.
Marnie wiped her hands on the towel and didn't turn around. "You're back early."
"Meeting fell through." He loosened his tie at the throat. His collar had gone soft and grey with damp.
"Mm." She turned the flame down under the pan.
He went upstairs. The shower started. Marnie stood at the stove with the wooden spoon in her hand and let herself have it, just for a minute, the way she let herself have anything.
What had he been doing, and with whom. She turned the thought over the way she turned dough, pressing it flat and folding it back. It wasn't the woman. There had been a red smear on his collar after the gala, and she had read it and said nothing then, and she would say nothing now.
It wasn't even the lying. It was the carelessness. He had told her about the dinner right before bed, so that there was nothing she could do about it until morning and the shops opened. He knew she hated that.
She scraped the bottom of the pan and made herself breathe out. When she needed to be calm she thought about Joaquin's eyes. The way they went flat and still in the second before he moved, like water going over a ledge. There was no noise in him then. It settled her. She got her shoulders down out of her ears.
At half past four he came back downstairs in joggers and a t-shirt that had gone grey in the wash. He crossed the kitchen and came up behind her and kissed the side of her neck.
"Need any help in there?" he said, against her skin.
"I've got it." She leaned away from him, toward the pan. "I'm behind."
He didn't stop. His mouth moved down under her ear and his hand slid up under the hem of her dress, flat and warm on the back of her thigh.
"Not now." She said it light, the way she said things to him. "Hugh, really. I still have the pie."
His hand went higher. She brought hers down hard on his wrist and knocked it away.
"No."
He stepped back. She felt him standing there behind her, not moving, and she kept her eyes on the pan because the pan was what needed her.
Then his hand closed around her throat from behind.
He turned her face up toward the ceiling with it. His grip was hard, harder than he had ever touched her. Somebody had told him to do this.
"Put that spoon down," he said. His voice came out thin and borrowed. "Get on your knees and suck my dick."
Marnie didn't flinch. She reached past his arm and turned the burner down to low, and laid the spoon across the rest, and only then did she look at him.
"Hugh Merrick."
The kitchen went very quiet. She hadn't raised her voice at all.
"You have five seconds to take your hand off my neck. I started counting three seconds ago."
He let go before she finished the sentence. He stepped back, and something in his face came apart, the way a man's does when he walks into a room he has lived in for ten years and doesn't know the furniture.
She turned back to the pan and shook it once.
"Now I'm going to finish up here. Why don't you put on something more appropriate for dinner, then get us some wine. A nice red would go with the roast."
Her voice had come back warm, soft as butter. That seemed to frighten him most of all.
Hugh said something that came out as yes dear, and left.
At half past six she pulled the roast from the oven and slid the pie in behind it. The door clapped shut. Hugh came down in slacks and the blue shirt she had ironed on Thursday, set two bottles on the table without being asked, and laid the plates and the good silver out himself.
His hands shook once around the neck of the second bottle. Then they steadied.
The bruise had begun to bloom on the back of her neck. She had pinned her hair up that afternoon and then taken the pins out again and let it fall. Everything else on her was impeccable. The one flaw was the one she had chosen to leave showing.
He stood in the doorway and watched her move. "You look beautiful."
"Thank you, honey." She wiped her palms on the towel. "Do you mind opening one of those? Our guests will be here in a minute."
"Sure thing. Look, Marnie, I'm—"
She gave him a look. Not one of her sweet ones. The one she had used in the kitchen three hours earlier, at low volume, with no words in it at all.
"I'll just open the wine," he said.
"Thank you. I'll have dinner on the table shortly."
She watched him go into the dining room and fit the corkscrew to the cork. She could wait a few more weeks if she had to. Benadryl was cheap and bourbon hid the taste of anything. The merger had six weeks on the clock.
This dinner, though, was going to be fun.
The doorbell rang at three minutes to seven. Marnie opened the door with her hair down.
Vera stood on the step in a crimson silk blouse with the top two buttons open, and Joaquin behind her in a grey jacket, holding a bottle by the neck.
"Is that rosemary?" Vera said, tilting her head.
"Rosemary and juniper. Come in."
Vera stepped past her and her eyes did what her eyes always did, going over Marnie the way an assessor goes over a house, top to bottom, hunting for the flaw. They reached her throat.
They stopped there.
The smirk flickered. It was quick, half a second at most, but Marnie saw the circuitry behind it reroute. Vera had expected a woman with a bruise on her neck to be covering it. A turtleneck. A story. Some apology of a scarf. Instead Marnie stood there with it in plain sight, and Vera's mouth thinned.
"Interesting necklace," Vera said.
"Nothing at all." Marnie stepped back. "Wine?"
Joaquin came in last. He handed her the bottle and his fingers stayed on hers a beat longer than they needed to. His eyes went to her throat too. He didn't say anything about it. He just looked, and the water went over the ledge in him and came back still, and then he put on his shy smile and stepped inside.
Hugh came out of the dining room with the open bottle. "Joaquin. Vera. Glad you could make it."
"Wouldn't have missed it." Vera let him take her coat. "Hugh, you look tired."
"Long week."
"Mmm." Her eyes slid to Marnie again. "I'll bet."
They sat. Marnie carved and served, and Vera talked about escrow and integration and how the board would need to be managed, and Hugh nodded and poured. Joaquin passed the potatoes. Vera's signet ring clicked against the stem of her glass.
"Doesn't it bother you?" Vera said, over the rim of it. "Being in here all day, cooking, while he's out making the money?"
"It suits me," Marnie said.
She looked down the length of the table then, past the roast, at Joaquin. He looked back. It lasted a second and a half. Nothing moved in his face and nothing moved in hers.
Vera was describing a vendor in the Valley. Hugh was laughing at the end of it. Neither of them saw a thing. They were too busy being the two most important people in the room.
Marnie set the carving knife down on the mat, and turned the blade toward Vera.
Vera never saw the knife. She had already turned back to Hugh, asking him about the data center in Ashburn, and Hugh came alive in his chair the way he only did when somebody asked him a real question.
He refilled her glass without being asked. Vera let him. Her signet ring clicked the stem again.
After that they were gone, the two of them, off down their own road. Ashburn to the merger, the merger to a half marathon she had run in April, the marathon to a restaurant on Fifth that had changed its menu and gone to hell. Hugh knew the chef's name. Vera knew the owner's wife.
Joaquin ate with his head down. Marnie cut her roast into pieces the size of a fingernail and moved them around her plate without eating much of anything. Neither of them looked at the other. Neither of them needed to.
"Salt," Joaquin said.
She passed it. His fingers brushed hers on the shaker, two seconds and no more. Vera was describing the tasting menu up to the moment the service had failed her.
"How's your roast?" Marnie asked him.
"Tough in the middle. I rushed it."
"You have to let a thing sit."
"I know that now." He twisted the silver band on his index finger. "I did a big piece Tuesday and I should have started it sooner."
"Tuesday," Marnie said. "That was quick."
"It was already thawed out."
The cream sauce had skinned over in the bowl. Marnie broke the skin with the back of the spoon and did not look at Hugh, who was laughing at something, showing his teeth.
"What about you, Joaquin?" Vera said from her end of the table, without turning her head. "You've been quiet. Nothing to add?"
"I'm listening."
"He's always listening." Vera showed her teeth at Marnie too. "It's his one talent."
"Listening's underrated," Marnie said.
Vera touched Hugh's wrist to make a point. She left her hand there a moment past the point. Hugh did not move it.
"Mm," Vera said, and went back to him.
Marnie set her fork down and turned her glass a quarter turn on the cloth.
"You get the pie in?" Joaquin said.
"Half past six. It needs the hour."
"Cherry?"
"Cherry. There's a tree out by the fence. You'd be surprised how much it gives."
"You freeze the rest?"
"I freeze most of them." She smoothed the napkin under her glass. "The freezer's fuller than it should be right now."
Joaquin smiled down at his plate. It was the first real smile he had made all night.
By twenty to eight the candles had burned down an inch. Vera had covered the merger, a villa in Cabo, and whether the school district had been worth what they paid for the house. Hugh had opinions on all three.
The timer went off in the kitchen.
"That's the pie," Marnie said, and pushed back from the table. "Excuse me."
Joaquin's chair scraped. "I'll grab it."
Hugh waved him down with his fork, easy, friendly, absolutely certain. "Sit down, Joaquin. She's got it. That's women's work anyway."
Marnie stopped at the head of the table. She looked past the roast at Vera, and her face did the thing it did at bake sales and school fundraisers, warm as a lamp.
"Oh, well. In that case, Vera, come join me in the kitchen."
Vera laughed. It came out thin and short. "Oh no. I'd be no good in there. It's not my place." She picked her wine back up. "Unlike you."
"Are you not a woman?" Marnie said.
Vera's glass stopped halfway to her mouth.
"Yes," she said. "I'm just not that kind of woman."
"Hm." Marnie gathered two plates in one hand and the serving spoon in the other. "Well, that's okay. I guess some women are just better than others."
She was through the doorway before Vera had anything ready for her. Joaquin came behind her and let the door swing shut on its spring.
The kitchen smelled of rendered fat and hot cherries. Marnie took the oven mitts off the hook and left the oven door cracked to let the heat out, and through the doorway into the dining room she could see them both. Vera had leaned in close over the table. Hugh was talking back with his hands, then not with his hands.
Their voices had dropped to the floor. She caught the shape of it and none of the words. Two people arguing in somebody else's house, keeping it under the music.
"Well," Joaquin said. He leaned against the counter by the sink and folded his arms. "You're going to get me in trouble."
"You like it."
"I do." He reached over and lifted a loose curl off the back of her neck and tucked it behind her ear. The bruise came up whole under the kitchen light, ink at the middle and going yellow at the edges. "What I don't like is this."
"Don't worry about it. I handled it."
"I'm sure you did." His thumb came to rest on the edge of the mark, light enough to barely touch. "It doesn't change the fact that he hurt you."
"I'm fine."
His mouth found the shell of her ear. Her hand found the oven door.
"I can't wait," he said, "to see his blood sprinkled all over that beautiful face of yours, baby girl."
She pulled the pie out one-handed and set it on the trivet, and the crust was the color of a good penny, and she bent at the waist with the mitts still on and put the heat of herself back against him, unhurried, the way you press a cut to see if it still stings.
"Careful, Mr. Hollis," she said.
His hands stayed exactly where they were. He did not move at all, which was its own answer.
At the table the voices went up a notch and then stopped.
"Do we need plates?" he said, flat again, the water gone over the ledge.
"Down. Second shelf, on the left."
Vera was sitting up very straight when they came through with the pie. Hugh had his napkin flat in his lap and a shine at his hairline. Nobody said anything about the interval.
Marnie set the dish down in the middle of the table and took up the knife. Juice had pooled under the lattice and gone almost black.
"That looks beautiful," Hugh said. He said it too loud.
"Give me the recipe," Vera said. She hadn't touched her fork. "For the crust."
She said it like an order, because everything she said was an order.
"I'll write it out for you." Marnie cut the first slice and set it in front of Vera, and the juice ran out over the white plate. "Get it from me soon, though. The tree's only good for a few more weeks."
Joaquin pulled out his chair and sat back down across the table. He watched the juice spread and he did not look away.
Vera went back for thirds before anyone else had finished seconds. She cut the wedge down the middle with the side of her fork and scraped the filling up whole, and the lattice broke across her plate in a wet black collapse.
Hugh watched her do it. He had pushed his plate back an inch and turned his chair out from the table, and his eyes followed her fork the whole way up. Vera lifted one cherry by the stem, put it in her mouth, and drew the stem back out between her teeth, clean. She did it slow. Then she did it again with the second one, holding his look the entire time, letting her tongue come out at the end to take the juice off her lip. Nobody at that table was meant to miss what it was for.
Joaquin was looking at his own plate. He had a piece of crust left and he was pushing it through the juice with the flat of his knife, drawing lines in it.
Marnie watched the other two instead. She watched Hugh's throat move when he swallowed. She watched Vera's jaw go tight in the half second after the second stem came out and nothing happened, no flush, no glance, no heat coming back at her from either of the people she had aimed it at. Vera's ear went pink along the top. She reached for her water like that had been the plan all along.
Marnie took a bite of her own pie. The cherries had gone too sweet along the edge of the tin. She would pull the next one sooner.
Across the table Joaquin drew one more line and set his knife down.
"Well," Vera said. She stood and her chair legs scraped the wood, and she reached over for Hugh's plate before he had finished with the last of his cream. "Marnie, dinner and dessert was delicious." Her voice had a flake of rust under it. "Please let me help you clean up."
She already had two plates stacked in one hand.
Marnie folded her napkin. "I thought you weren't the kind of woman who did that sort of thing."
"I'm not." Vera's smile came up, and it did not reach anything above her mouth. "However, it is the least I could do after you cooked such a wonderful meal for me and my husband."
"Very well." Marnie stood and gathered the serving dish. "Who am I to turn down free help. Right this way."
She went through the swinging door first. Vera followed, and the spring brought the door to behind them with a soft slap.
The kitchen had cooled enough to fog the bottom pane of the window over the sink. Marnie ran the tap hot, put the stopper in, and squeezed soap in under the stream until it climbed in grey foam. She showed Vera where the towels hung and where the rack was, and which drawer the dry cloths lived in.
Vera took the towel. She held it like something she had been handed in a store.
"Soap's under the sink if you run out," Marnie said.
"Mm."
They worked. Marnie washed, Vera dried, and the plates went onto the rack one at a time, ticking when they touched. Out in the dining room the men's voices started up again, low, Hugh's and then Joaquin's, the easy rhythm of two people talking about nothing much.
"You two have been in the house a month now," Marnie said. "It'll be four weeks Wednesday."
"Something like that."
"Still settling in?"
"We're settled." Vera turned a plate over in her hands, front and back, before she racked it. "We don't take long to settle."
"That's a gift."
"It's a decision."
Marnie passed her the next plate. Water ran, and the two of them stood close enough at the counter that their elbows nearly touched.
Then Vera set the towel down.
"Can I ask you something."
"You can ask."
"How long have you and Hugh been married?"
"Ten years in June."
"That's a long time." Vera picked the towel back up. "Long enough that a person stops noticing things."
Marnie washed the roasting pan and said nothing.
"He's doing a lot of late nights lately," Vera said. "With the integration. I imagine you don't see much of him."
"I see him enough."
"Do you?"
Marnie rinsed the pan and slid it into the rack.
"You know," Vera said, and her voice had dropped into something almost kind, the way a person talks to a dog right before it bites, "he's come by my office most evenings this month. Some of them quite late. I'd hate for you to be the last to know what your husband is like out of the house."
The water was still running. Marnie reached past her and turned it off.
She put the last of the dishes in the rack. She wiped her hands on the towel at her own waist, wrist over wrist, and hung it on the bar.
"Oh my," she said. "You seem to know everything. What should I do?"
She turned to look at Vera then, and whatever Vera had been braced for, it wasn't that. The warmth in Marnie's face had not gone anywhere. The concern was all there, and the blue eyes were wide and soft and patient. Underneath it, though, there was nothing. No give in it, no floor, no bottom. Like looking off a dock at night.
Vera took half a step back into the counter and stopped herself.
She was not going to be walked into a corner by a woman who stayed home and made pie. She got her shoulders square again. She put her hand on Marnie's shoulder, warm and unhurried, the pressure of it friendly and total.
"If I was you," she said, "I would just stay out the way and do whatever he says."
Her eyes went down. They landed on the bruise, low on the side of Marnie's throat where her collar didn't cover it, and they stayed there.
"You wouldn't want to make Hugh angry, would you?"
Marnie looked at the hand. She looked at the weight of it on her shoulder, and at the big gold signet ring on the finger, and then she looked back up into Vera's face and smiled her warm smile.
"Of course not," she said.
She reached up and lifted Vera's hand off her shoulder and set it down on the counter, gently, the way you set down a glass that isn't yours.
"We should head back. We shouldn't keep our husbands waiting."
Vera went through the door first. Marnie stood a moment longer at the counter with her hand still on the towel. Through the window the yard had gone black past the fence, and the cherry tree stood at the end of it with the last of the fruit hanging, dark and heavy and not quite ready to drop. She could hear Hugh laughing at something in the other room, using his real laugh, the one he used with clients.
She pulled the drawer open an inch and looked at the paring knife lying in its slot.
Then she pushed it shut and followed Vera out.