Reputation(3)

“Marrakesh,” I answer, because I went there once with my parents when my father was on sabbatical—just a few years before I had to identify my mother’s mangled body in the morgue after a drunk driver T-boned her car at ninety miles an hour. Marrakesh was the most magical place I’ve ever been. I’ve always meant to go back, and though my new husband has the cash to make such a trip happen, it’s a little exotic for his taste. “And what do you do?”

“I’m a weather pilot. I fly into the center of hurricanes.” He answers swiftly, like he’s done this before. “And on the weekends, I race antique cars professionally. Preferably around old, crumbling cities with lots of tight turns.”

“So you like danger.” I crunch down on a piece of ice. “Thrills.”

One eyebrow lifts again. “You could say that. And what do you do, Kit?”

I think of Pulp Fiction, which my sister, Willa, and I used to watch obsessively in high school, especially in those months after our mother died. “I’m the keeper of the meaning of life. It’s in a box in my room right now, and I have to guard it with my life. I get paid very handsomely for doing so.”

“Did they let you in on what the meaning of life is?” Patrick asks.

I nod mysteriously. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

“So you’re a woman who likes to hold all the cards, then.”

I shrug. “I like certainty.”

Our eyes meet. Even in our lies, we have told one another something real.

There is lime residue in my teeth. The bartender has his back to us now, perhaps having written us off as flirtatious philanderers. And then Patrick—is that even his real name?—glances at my left hand and says, “And what’s your husband like?”

I turn my fat diamond ring to the inside of my palm. “Actually, I’m a widow.” This isn’t a lie. “Do you have a husband? A wife?”

There is something about the way he’s looking at me that makes me feel scooped out and raw. “Neither.”

Is he serious, or is this just what he wants to be true? I’m not sure which answer I want more.

We have two more drinks and spin tales about ourselves. He has jet-setters for parents. I have distant relations to royals. I say I committed a few stealthy murders in my youth. Patrick says he was once shot off into space and spent days in orbit before NASA figured out he was missing. Midway into drink number three, we turn somber. Patrick tells me he has never fallen in love and isn’t sure love is real. I tell him that I have, when I was young, but then I discovered it’s a fallacy. This is actually my truth, which I know isn’t the rules, but I’m tipsy, and Patrick is inching closer to me with every word he breathes, and something is happening, something I can’t quite understand.

Naughty, the cautious part of my brain reminds me again and again. I’m married to a handsome, successful man. I have two smart, successful teenage daughters. From an outsider’s perspective, I have it all. But here in the darkness of this strange bar, it all feels so far away. When I look back at that life, the one I’d been steeped in only twelve hours before, it’s that Kit who seems false, not this one.

Patrick’s chili-infused breath could ignite a forest fire. He looks at me as though he’s known me forever. I’m so dazzled, and I wonder if he somehow has. “And what, royal murderess keeper-of-truth, do you want to do right now?” he asks.

The world is my oyster. I could tell him anything: that I want to cliff-dive off the moon, buy out a Chanel boutique, time-travel to Benjamin Franklin times, crawl into a cocoon and transform into a butterfly. But I know in those acorn-brown eyes what he’s really asking, and it’s what I want, too.

I let him take my hand and lead me out of the bar. Our lips touch as soon as the elevator doors close, and quickly, the kissing goes from tentative to full-on passionate. His fingers fumble for the tiny, delicate buttons at the neckline of my blouse. My hands are on his waist.

“Oh God,” Patrick moans into my ear.

But then, coming to my senses, I push away. “Wait,” I whisper. “No. I can’t.”

His eyes are two tragic pools. “Okay . . .”

I look down, panting. Adjust my blouse. Pull down my skirt. I fumble for my key card, deliberately not inviting him back to my room. I want to—believe me. I’m dying to.

“I’m sorry.” I shake my head and give him a sad, regretful smile. “This just isn’t me.”





2





LYNN


TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2017


After being Mystery Reader in my son’s class, after a workout at Flywheel, after a blow-dry touch-up and makeup reapplication, after strutting out of the gym and getting double takes from nearly every man on the street—something I’ve become used to—and after popping into the gourmet grocery next door to my office, I get a lovely compliment. I pass a bottle of wine for tonight’s dinner across the scanner at the checkout counter, and the shopgirl asks me for ID.

“Me?” I blink hard, grinning. “Goodness, I’m almost forty! I have two kids!”

“Oh.” The girl—she can’t be much older than twenty-two—squints at my face, then my ID, then back at me again. “Well, whatever you’re doing, it’s working.”