The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Out Loud

Twelve women turned and looked at me.

The cake-stand woman's mouth was a little open.

"His name is Daniel," I said. "I hadn't seen him or spoken to him in eight years. He came to my door at ten o'clock on my birthday because he'd made a bet with me when I was twenty-two. At ten o'clock, your son was at the hospital with his sister."

"So he says," Marjorie said.

"Enough," said Holt's father.

He looked at his wife down the whole length of that table.

"I'm going to the firm's apartment," he said. "Don't call it."

He walked out.

He didn't take her arm on the way, and she didn't reach for his.

Ruthie and I went down the stairs behind him.

Her Civic was still there.

There was a ticket on it.

She framed it later, and it hangs behind the bar.

By Friday the lie was in Newport.

Daniel heard it at the pilot station from a deckhand, who'd heard it from his aunt, who cleaned for one of the committee women.

"The sailor," the deckhand said. "That's you, right?"

Daniel called me from the dock.

"Saturday night," he said. "Wear something you can stand on a chair in."

"Why would I stand on a chair?"

"You probably won't. I just like options."

The yacht club sits on a point at the mouth of Newport Harbor, grey shingles and white trim and a flagpole older than the state.

The Thackery Foundation's fall dinner was in the long room upstairs.

Sixty people in navy blazers and good pearls.

Windows on three sides, black water, the lights of the harbor.

"We're not on the list," I said at the door.

"The commodore's a retired pilot," Daniel said. "He trained me. He owes me for a bad night off Block Island."

The commodore was a small man with white eyebrows.

He shook Daniel's hand and looked at me and then at the room behind him.

"Is this going to be loud?" he said.

"A little," Daniel said.

"Good." He stood aside. "They never are."

We walked in.

I heard my own name go around the room.

Marjorie was by the windows in black silk, with the woman from the cake stand and three of the partners' wives.

She saw us.

She didn't look surprised.

She looked pleased.

"Well," she said, loud enough for her circle. "The sailor himself."

Daniel walked straight across the room to her.

I went with him.

People got out of the way.

"Mrs. Thackery," he said.

"Mr. Keough. I hear you're a great comfort to Margo."

"I'm a harbor pilot," Daniel said. "Some of your friends' husbands own the ships I bring in. I brought one in on Wednesday while you were telling twelve women I'd been sleeping with her since before her rehearsal."

The room went quiet in rings, the near tables first, then the far ones.

"Eight years ago I spent three weeks with her," he said. "She was twenty-two and pouring wine on Thames Street. I asked her to wait for me, and she said no, and she was right. She said she'd be married by thirty. I said if she wasn't, she owed me one chance. We shook on it on the Cliff Walk."

Somebody near the bar said, "Oh, come on," in a voice that had already decided to believe him.

"I didn't call her once in eight years," Daniel said. "Not once. I drove up on her birthday. That's the night your son was in the emergency room with his sister. And I'll tell you something else."

He turned away from Marjorie.

He turned to me, in the middle of all of them.

"I'm not going to sneak around like I'm something to be ashamed of," he said. "Not on a porch, not in a whisper, not in your committee minutes. Margo. Be with me. Out loud. In front of anybody you want."

I didn't think about the sixty people.

I thought about the iPad, and a canopy bed, and a report attached.

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