Chapter 20: Two Wives

Etienne read the text twice.

Then he put his phone back in his shirt pocket.

"Five weeks," he said.

"Thanksgiving's five weeks and five days."

"You counted."

"I'm a taster," I said. "I count barrels."

He went down the stairs.

I went up.

I lay awake beside Lise's snoring until the window went gray.

Somewhere around four in the morning I knew what I had to do, and I hated it.

Ten days later I drove to Lafayette alone.

Mireille's mother lives in a brick ranch house on a street of brick ranch houses.

There's a concrete goose on her porch dressed as a pilgrim.

I sat in my truck looking at that goose for ten minutes.

Then I knocked.

Mireille opened the door in gray sweatpants and a T-shirt from a 5K, with her hair in a clip and no makeup at all.

She looked younger.

She looked about nineteen and very tired.

"I'm not paying," I said.

"Then why are you here, baby?"

"Because you're the only other person on earth who knows exactly what he sounds like when he's lying."

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she stepped back and let me in.

Her mother was at work.

The kitchen had a yellow linoleum floor and a rooster clock, and a pot of coffee that had been on too long.

She poured me some anyway.

We sat across from each other at a little table with a lace cloth.

The two wives.

For a minute neither of us said anything.

"He used to tell me you were cold," she said finally. "That you never kissed him back."

"He used to tell me you were his marketing problem."

She laughed, short and surprised.

"He said that?"

"Every week. 'Mireille's a problem, Jo. Mireille spends like a senator.'"

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