As Husbands Go by Susan Isaacs Page B

O’Shea had asked him to mail something to her at her home address. Sadly, he’d lost it. Who would have believed a story like that? Anybody. I’d always told him I trusted everything he told me. Whenever I said that, he’d smile and say, “Why wouldn’t you?” But most other people had that reaction to him, too. So at nine the next morning, four hours before we had to leave Miami to get back to New Haven, the two of us rang Grandma Ethel’s bell.
    “I’m . . .” I began to say to the woman at the door. She was me plus forty-something years—assuming a good dermatologist and a great colorist and plastic surgeon. Her jaw dropped. She barely looked at Jonah before turning back to me. Even without makeup, her eyes were her most beautiful feature: pale green jade. Her smooth skin was an almost completely unwrinkled pearly pink, and her hair an incredibly believable blond. She was built like me, too, tall and long-legged. Even though we didn’t have any money yet, I already knew enough about fashion to realize the satin robe she had on was a Donna Karan.
    “You’re mine?” Grandma Ethel asked at last. She knew the answer. Before I could say a single word, she took my arm and brought me inside.
    But my blocking out the reality of my parents’ alternating grilled cheese and diet-ginger-ale burps with the memory of my grandparent ceased when my father boomed, “Excuse me!” It so startled methat I twitched, dropping my last bite of sandwich, a near-perfect circle, onto the floor. “I know this is a bad time for you,” he said.
    He does have empathy, I thought. “Thank—” I started, but never got out the “you” because he cut me off: “Maybe you haven’t gone shopping, but do you happen to have a piece of fruit?”
    One navel orange and two decafs later, they left. Four hours after that, the police rang my doorbell.

Chapter Nine

    On either side of the front door, there were tall, slender panes of glass, so even before I opened it, I could see Detective Sergeant Timothy Coleman looking down at the doormat. He stared with an intensity born of a desire to face anything but the person who would open the door. Beside him stood an African-American guy in his forties—the ex-jock type who looked like he’d discovered doughnuts, though only recently. He had on a gray overcoat and a long black knit scarf, the kind male models wrap around their necks a hundred times. It ended at his knees in a hysterical eruption of fringe. He studied me through the narrow window. It was nearly midnight, but he appeared more weary than physically tired, probably because he knew too well what the next hour would bring.
    As if to live up to his expectations, I began to cry as I tried to turn the stiff, heavy lock. I clutched the brass knob, and it felt like forever before I was able to turn it.
    “Mrs. Gersten,” Coleman said, “this is Lieutenant Gary McCorkle Paston from the NYPD.”
    “Corky Paston,” the other cop said.
    It wasn’t until the gusting icy wind made me shiver that I realized my hand was still gripping the knob and the two men were outside. “Sorry. Please come in.” I led them into the living room, though all I wanted was to stand right there in my bare feet on the cold marble floor of the hall and shout at them, “For God’s sake, just say it! Get it over with!” I was still crying as we passed through the hall, yet when we got to the living room and I turned, a small part of me expected to see Paston smiling and giving the thumbs-up to signal, Hey, no reason to cry. I’m here with good news. Your husband’s fine: just a little worse for wear.
    “I’m sorry, but I have bad news,” he said.
    “Is Jonah dead?”
    “Yes.”
    I didn’t move. I didn’t wail. I stared at his scarf and thought it looked hand-knit.
    “We found him just a few hours ago.”
    “What happened?” My voice emerged as an awful croak. I got so busy clearing my throat again and again that I didn’t notice Paston had