The Narrows by Ronald Malfi Page B

lifelong friends), was not the type of man to be easily persuaded. They lived together, took care of each other. What more did she want? Marriage, she’d informed him. Commitment. To this, Evan would always chuckle and ask what more commitment there was than a man forking over his paycheck every two weeks. It was then that she realized this approach wasn’t going to get her anywhere with him.
    Like a sailor tacking for new wind, she decided on a different approach: she lied and told him she was pregnant. You really want to be responsible for bringing a bastard kid into the world? That did the trick. They went down to the courthouse the following week and got hitched. It seemed Evan Quedentock could be caught after all; she just had to put the right bait in the right trap.
    A week or so after they got married, she had summoned some tears by spraying perfume in her face. She thought she’d done an admirable job telling him she had lost the baby. At the news, Evan had seemed both relieved and a bit disappointed (the latter emotion a surprising revelation to Maggie since she knew Evan, much like her, had no great desire to have children). He had comforted her in his clumsy, brutish way, and that had been the end of it. Fifteen years later, they were still married.
    Fifteen years…
    Tom was one of Evan’s friends and had been over to the house countless times. The flirtatiousness between them had always been of the innocuous variety, or so Maggie had thought. She had flirted with men in the past but never adulterously. So how had the situation with Tom gotten so goddamn out of hand? Tom had been over at the house one night, drinking too much with Evan. Under the pretense of using the bathroom, he’d followed her into the house while Evan remained on the back porch. Yet he hadn’t used the bathroom; he’d followed her into the kitchen, his shirt partially unbuttoned, and leaned against the refrigerator while they talked in quick, glib, declarative sentences. It wasn’t that he was drop-dead gorgeous or even roguishly handsome—Tom Schuler was a bit too skinny and his face was patchy with old acne scars—but that did not seem to matter to Maggie. For whatever reason, she felt a flutter of uneasiness while he talked to her, his eyes drinking her in. And she found that she liked this uneasiness.
    Tom had left their house that evening with Maggie’s cell phone number, along with some indistinct promise in his eyes. Later that evening, she had lain awake in bed, staring at the misaligned panels of moonlight playing across the ceiling as Evan snored like an old hunting dog beside her. She wondered what Evan would think if he knew she’d given Tom Schuler her cell phone number. Moreover—and this was the forbidden part, yet at the same time, the part that elicited some childlike glee within her—she wondered what Evan would do if she were to have an affair with Tom Schuler and he found out.
    That childlike glee was gone now. Sitting behind the wheel of her husband’s car, cleaning up the smeared streamers of makeup from her face, she felt as obvious as a beacon of light on a darkened coast. Terror enveloped her when she realized that there would be no way to hide the smell of sex from her husband once she got home. Would he leave her? Would he hit her? On both counts, she thought maybe he would.
    Tonight’s rendezvous at Crossroads was the culmination of a monthlong game of cat and mouse. Tom had pursued her with regularity, calling her whenever he knew Evan was at work, trying to convince her to meet him for a drink. A few times she promised she would but later backed out, sending him vague texts that suggested conflicting schedules and last-minute chores. If Tom was ever dissuaded by her continual misdirection, he never let on.
    Finally, when he proposed they have a few drinks at Crossroads while Evan was on the late shift—strictly platonic, he had assured her—she had agreed. Of course, she did not put any stock in