The Perfect Mother by Nina Darnton

counting backward from one hundred—a strategy that rarely worked—and it was as unsuccessful as usual. She finally gave up and phoned Mark to tell him about Paco. She used her cell phone, and although she stepped into the bathroom and turned on the faucet to avoid being overheard, she did it self-consciously and felt slightly foolish and paranoid. She reached his office, but his secretary told her he had just left for a lunch appointment, so she sent him a quick e-mail and promised to fill him in as soon as she learned anything new.
    She was about to put her phone away, but thought better of it and punched in the cell number of her closest friend, Suzie Berenstein. She was going to tell her that she’d lied in her e-mail—that everything wasn’t fine, in fact nothing was and she was worried and afraid and needed her. She was going to swear her to secrecy. She was sure Suzie would keep her confidence—she always had over the years, everything from her doubts before marrying Mark to her suspicion a few years ago that he was having an affair. That suspicion had turned out to be baseless. He was just going through a difficult time at work, he’d said, and had withdrawn from her in a palpable way, but talking it through with Suzie had helped her see that she needed to try to bridge the distance between them and restore some of their former intimacy. She’d been so tied up with the kids, so centered on them that naturally she and Mark had drifted apart a bit, Suzie had suggested. Jennifer had agreed, but she didn’t worry too much about it at the time. Their children were doing so well, and their shared pride in them would sustain their marriage too, she had believed. There’d be time to work on their relationship when there was just the two of them left, she’d decided, imagining the day when even little Eric would go off to college and her daily mothering would come to an end.
    She’d promised Mark not to talk to others about Emma’s predicament, but it was simply too hard, with him not here and Emma acting so strangely, to go through this without Suzie’s help. Besides, she thought, Suzie was Emma’s godmother. She had a right to know. The phone rang a long time, but there was no answer, so she left a message: “Suze, it’s me. I need to talk to you. I haven’t been honest. I’m in Spain with Emma, but she’s not fine and neither am I. Please call me. My cell works here.”
    Mark still hadn’t called back when it was time for her to leave to meet Roberto. She’d told him that she’d fill him in tomorrow, she knew, but she still felt he should have called. He should be calling all the time, she thought, not just for information but to share this experience with her, to console her and shore her up. After all, she was here and he was in Philadelphia. She had to live with the day-to-day developments and both her own and Emma’s worry, anger, and frustration.
    She was glad she was going out for dinner. She showered, changed into a navy blue sleeveless dress, did her makeup, and left her room, taking the elevator down to the lobby, where she asked the doorman to get her a cab. She had written the name and address of the restaurant on a piece of paper and she gave this to the driver, who nodded and stepped on the gas.
    Roberto was already there when she arrived; the hostess showed her to his table. He sprang up to hold her chair. He had already ordered a bottle of Marqués de Riscal rioja, and he filled her glass. She scanned the menu, suddenly feeling slightly ill at ease.
    She chose fish—the
merluza
—as did he. After the waitress took the order, Roberto leaned forward slightly.
    “Senora, I must talk to you about what may be a delicate subject. It is the media.”
    Jennifer looked puzzled.
    “You do not read Spanish, so you have not perhaps followed it, but every day there is a story about this affair.”
    He opened his briefcase and extracted several copies of the
Diario.
Each had front-page headlines