"It's been bothering you," Barbara said. "Poor baby."
"Do you want to hear about it or not?"
"I don't know. Maybe I don't."
"All right, let's forget about it."
"Forget about it!"
"I mean talk about it some other time. Maybe I shouldn't have brought it up."
Barbara shook her head, almost in wonderment. "You're too much. Maybe you shouldn't have brought it up."
"Look, it isn't a simple thing to explain."
"I guess not, if it could blow a perfectly good marriage that's lasted twenty-two years." She paused. "Or hasn't it been so good? God, all of a sudden I'm not sure I know you. Much less her. Is she pretty or flashy or what? She have big knockers?"
"Barbara-she's not what you picture. She's kind of plain-looking."
"Well, tell me what the big attraction is. She know a lot of kinky sex tricks?"
Mitchell shook his head. "We got along, that's all. We laughed, we had a good time together."
"We get along," Barbara said. "We laugh. At least we used to."
"I know it. It doesn't make sense. It's just something I felt."
Barbara frowned. "Wait a minute. Why the past tense? Aren't you going to see her again?"
"I don't know. Right now I don't even know where she is."
"You mean she left you? But you're still interested?"
"It's a little more complicated than that."
"What is?"
"If I told you the whole story-I don't know, I guess my timing's bad. It'd sound like I was sucking around you for sympathy."
"Boy, it would have to be an awfully sad story to get any sympathy from me."
"Well, it's not something that happens every day."
"But you won't tell me about it."
"Not yet."
"So all I know is you've been fooling around."
Mitchell let it pass and took a sip of his drink. Barbara stared at her glass. She said, "I never thought it would happen to us. I never even considered it. Ever."
"I didn't either," Mitchell said. "I think about it now-it would've ended, you never would have known the difference."
"I think I have known," Barbara said, "for at least a month. But God, I wish you hadn't told me."
From ten until twelve that morning Barbara Mitchell played doubles with her regular Wednesday group at the Squire Lake Racquet Club. It was twenty-five minutes past twelve when she reached home and turned into the drive. Barbara didn't get out. She sat in the Mercedes and lighted a cigarette. She was alone. She could hear the engine idling and, faintly, Roberta Flack's voice on the radio. It was warm in the car, reasonably comfortable. She wore a scarf and a suede coat over her tennis whites, no pantyhose; her legs were still tan from two weeks in Mexico in February. She could go in the house and change into slacks and go to Marion's for lunch and talk to the girls and laugh and pretend nothing had happened. Or she could back out the drive and get to a freeway and go north or south or any direction, it didn't matter, and keep going and feel the speed of the car-see how fast it would go-and see fields and trees and road reflectors rushing past and… what?
Or she could drive over to Ranco Manufacturing and go into Mitch's office and kick the great lover in the balls. The bastard. The rotten son of a bitch. Twenty-two years. And he had to tell her about it.
She wondered if he'd ever had a girlfriend before. No, he would have somehow given it away. Or, with his conscience killing him, he would have told her. She doubted that he had ever lied to her. Harry Straightarrow. The good guy.
But God, he was dumb. Falling for some little ass-shaker, cute little mindless fluff who probably didn't wear a bra and said "groovy" and "cool" and smoked pot.
She could see Mitch trying it, holding the twisted cigarette delicately in his big tool-grinder fist, trying to hold in the smoke curling out of his nose. The dope. The wrong dope got the dope. Bob Hope had said that in a movie. She remembered the line but didn't know why. She didn't remember the name of the picture, only that they had seen it together before they were married: Mitch working days at Dodge Main and taking engineering courses at night-while she was working on her masters in English lit, which she never completed-and every Saturday or Sunday they'd go to a show or a ball game, Tigers or the Lions, depending on the season.
Twenty-two years used up, gone. Photographs in a bottom drawer. She remembered sitting on the floor with Mitch-a year ago, right after Sally was married-looking through the pile of snapshots they were going to sort out someday and put in albums, chronologically, with dates, a pictorial family record. But there were no dates on most of the photographs. Sally and Mike, little kids on the beach. Sally and Mike standing by the car. Barbara younger, with a tight hairstyle and a long skirt. By the car. Mitch, heavier, with a crewcut. By the car. Why did they always take pictures standing by a car? It was a good thing, Mitch said. It was a way to identify the year. The cars changed and the people changed. A time they could look at but not remember as a particular day. There were pictures taken at a party at least eighteen or twenty years ago. Look at how young everyone looked. Good friends who were still friends, most of them. Everyone laughing. Every weekend. Bring your own. A case of beer or a bottle of Imperial, two-forty-nine. No money, but they talked and laughed and seldom seemed to worry about anything. She remembered saying to him-perhaps a month ago-"Why don't we have fun anymore?" And he said, "We have fun. We go to Florida and Mexico, we've gone to Europe, we play tennis, we go out to dinner every week, we go to shows." And she remembered saying, "You haven't answered the question." That time, looking at the photographs, she said, "Can you hardly wait till Sally has a baby?" And she remembered him saying, "I guess not, except then I'd be married to a grandmother, wouldn't I?" Being funny, but telling her something at the same time.
Go upstairs and throw his clothes out the window. His drip-dry shirts and jockey shorts and ratty sport coat and the blue sweatsuit he jogged in every morning. Let him come home and find all his things in a pile on the front lawn, the bastard, and have to shovel them into his showboat bronze Grand Prix.
Grow up, she said to herself, and go to lunch.
Barbara got out of the car and crossed the lawn to the front steps. She was reaching for the handle when she noticed the door slightly open, the copper weatherseal touching the jamb but not closed all the way. This morning she had gone out the back to the garage. Had she opened the front at all? Yes, to get The Free Press. Then had slammed it closed. She could have left it unlocked easily enough-they had lost the key to the front door and usually didn't make a point of locking it until they were in for the night. But, she knew, she had not left the door open this morning.
In the foyer she took off her coat and draped it over a chair. It was when she paused then, listening, that she knew someone was in the house. There was no sound that she heard; she sensed it. Someone was here, now.
Alan Raimy was sitting in a big chair by the fireplace, his legs crossed, an attache case on the floor at his feet.
He watched Barbara come into the living room: nice tan legs in the short tennis dress, yes, very nice. A good-looking well-preserved broad. Nice hips; she moved nice.
He said, "Slim, I'll tell you what I'm going to do."
Barbara turned abruptly to see him fifteen feet away from her in the easy chair: a bony, pale-looking young man with long hair, wearing a dark business suit, sitting in Mitchell's chair. She noticed his boots and the attache case.
"I'm going to give you a personalized monthly accounting service," Alan said. "Take care of all your bills and expenditures for a low three-and-a-half-percent charge, guaranteed to be accurate or we eat the difference."
"Who are you?"
"In fact, that's our motto. Silver Lining Accounting Service-we satisfy or we eat it."
"How did you get in here?"
"I walked in, Slim. I knocked, nobody answered. The door was open so I walked in."