My Husband's First Wife Died a Saint, Then I Found Her Key novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Chair
On her first night as Mrs. Habersham she eats at a table where the dead wife's chair stays pulled out, finds a brass key and a card in the dead woman's jewelry box, and goes down at 3 a.m. to push the chair in.
The dress Beatrix chose for my first dinner had been taken in at the waist by someone who never met me.
It was cream silk with a high neck and a row of covered buttons down the spine.
It had belonged to my husband's first wife, and the seamstress had not let out an inch.
I am a size six and she was a four, so I ate nothing I could not breathe around.
The dining room seated twelve and held three places.
My husband's was at the head of the table, mine was at his right, and the third was on his left.
The third had a crystal glass, a bread plate, a folded napkin and a lit candle.
Its chair was pulled out from the table.
"Is somebody joining us?" I asked.
"Ivy always does," Beatrix said.
She stood at the foot of the table in navy, with pearls at her ears and a cane she held and did not lean on.
She was sixty-six, soft-voiced and very pleasant.
In four days she had moved me out of my apartment and into her dead daughter-in-law's closet.
My husband came around the table and drew out my chair.
His name was Patrick Habersham.
He was forty-one, six foot two, with grey coming in at his temples and hands scarred white across the knuckles.
I had known him eleven days, and we had been married for three.
He put his palm at the small of my back to guide me down.
The zipper had not been pulled all the way up, so his hand landed on my skin.
Neither of us moved.
His hand was warm and dry, and it stayed a second longer than a chair requires.
"Mrs. Habersham," he said, very low.
Then he took his hand away and sat down, and he looked at his plate for the rest of the meal.
Beatrix bowed her head.
"For the ones at this table," she said, "and for the one who is not with us."
She did not look at the empty chair when she said it.
She did not need to.
The soup was good, and I ate it.
"She went into the river off the family dock," Beatrix told me, though I had not asked.
"She was a dreamer, Ivy. She went out at dawn to draw the herons."
Patrick's spoon stopped.
"The river kept her," Beatrix said. "The Coast Guard gave us a scarf and one shoe."
"Mother," Patrick said.
"Edith should know the house, dear. It's her house too."
My name is Edie, and it had taken her four days to start saying Edith.
"Where were you?" I asked Patrick.
"Hospital," he said. "I'd come off a scaffold the week before. My skull was in two pieces. I woke up nine days later."
"Mother saw to everything," he added.
"Someone had to," Beatrix said. "He was in no state. We held the Mass in July, when the court finally allowed it."
She turned her water glass a quarter turn on the cloth.
"Three years is a long time to hope," she said. "I am glad he has stopped."
I looked at Patrick, and he looked at the candle at the empty place.
I had a mother in a care home in Pooler who could no longer say my name.
I had signed a paper that paid her debts and her bed for a year.
I had read every page of that paper, and I knew what I was.
I was a stand-in who had been cast for her height and her hair.
After dinner Beatrix walked me upstairs to the master bedroom and showed me the closet, the dresser, and a bottle of perfume called Fleur Blanche.
"Wear it to breakfast," she said. "And the pearls are in her box. Ivy never came down without them."
The box was walnut with a mirrored lid, and it sat in the middle of the dresser.
"Goodnight, Edith."
"Goodnight."
Patrick stood in the hall with a pillow under his arm.
"I'll be in the study," he said. "I haven't slept in this room since the funeral. I won't ask you to share it."
"Then who sleeps in it?" I asked.
"The shrine, mostly," he said, and he went down the stairs.
I sat on the edge of a bed I did not want to touch and lifted the lid of the box.
The mirror showed me my own face, tired and made up as someone else's.
There was a velvet tray of earrings and a rope of pearls.
The tray lifted out too easily, and I pulled up the false bottom with my thumbnail.
Under it lay a small brass key on a ring with a brass tag stamped 3C.
Beside it was an index card, soft from three years in the dark.
It was written in blue ink in a quick, slanted hand.
If you are reading this, run now.
I read it four times.
I took my pulse, which is what a nurse does, and it was racing.
I thought about my suitcase under the stairs.
I thought about the bed in Pooler with my mother's name on it, paid for through next October.
I did not run.
At three in the morning I went down in my bare feet and my own T-shirt, with the key in my fist.
The dining room was dark except for a streetlight on the silver.
The place was still laid and the candle was cold.
I took hold of the chair that was waiting for a dead woman, and I pushed it in.
"That chair stays out."
Beatrix stood in the doorway in a long grey robe, with her cane against her hip.
"Not tonight," I said.
I walked past her and up the stairs with Ivy's key against my skin.
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