“Well, I’m right here if you need anything.”

“I don’t need anything from you,” she managed this time, and snapped up the key, turned on her heel, and walked to the stairs carrying her small suitcase. When she got to the room she dropped the suitcase on the floor, closed the door and locked it, and then looked around at the furniture to figure out which piece she could push up against the door so she’d be able to sleep.

That was another thing. She’d been sleeping next to Edward for nearly sixteen years, and having a great big bed without him in it was unsettling. The sheets were scratchy. The mattress sagged. Every noise made her jump. The man in the room next to hers hadn’t stopped coughing in the last hour and a half.

After lying awake in the dark for three hours, she lost her patience and kicked angrily at the covers. She sat bolt upright in the bed, grabbed the extra lumpy pillow, and smashed her face into it and screamed, “GODDAMN YOU, EDWARD!,” allowing each muffled word to vibrate through the fabric and filling for several seconds. The force with which she screamed stiffened every muscle in her upper body, and when she finally let the pillow fall into her lap she felt pretty tired. She set the pillow back next to her head, collapsed onto her back, and fell right to sleep. The sleep was fitful. She dreamed her teeth were being pulled out all over again and she was scrambling to pick them up and jam them back into her gums.

The next morning Vivian stood on the porch of a late-Victorian clapboard house and pulled a Lucky Strike from the package. She’d quit the moment she knew she was pregnant with Charlotte, and hadn’t planned to start up again, but everything had changed. Edward hated when she smoked. But who was he to have an opinion now? Who was he at all? Who was this man she had married, who’d married someone else before her and kept it a secret for sixteen years?

“We were just kidding around. It wasn’t serious.” These were Edward’s words about his first marriage that were ringing in her ears as she stood on that porch on South Salina Street in East Syracuse in the biting morning cold, balancing the clipboard on her left forearm. She still held the cigarette between the first two fingers in her right hand, and with her thumb she pressed the doorbell.

Chapter 31

Mildred Fischer Dalton Taggart took her time in answering the door, as a small dog barked in the background. Of course there’s a dog. Vivian felt her heart hop a little, and could see a short figure lurching down a long hallway behind the gauze curtain in the door’s small eye-level window. She smoked the Lucky all the way down to the nub by the time the lurching figure reached the door. She quickly stubbed out the butt on the underside of the clipboard, dropped it into a pile of snow that hadn’t been cleared from the porch, and pasted on what she hoped was a winning and official-looking smile as the door opened.