I saw him, and immediately, I wanted him. I couldn’t have told anyone why at that moment. I just did.
Maybe it was the way he stared up at the ceiling of the café, looking at nothing but looking at everything. Maybe because I like men who wear black tees. Plain, unpretentious, confident. Maybe because he had both an iPad and an iPhone, the tablet to his right, the phone to his left, perfectly parallel, each face down as if hiding a secret. Maybe the way the dim yellow light from the two glass-enclosed sconces above his head cast shadows across his thick black hair and smooth-shaven face, touched the tip of his Grecian nose and caused the tiny hairs on his muscular arms to glisten.
Or maybe just because he was alone.
Café Blend had many empty tables that morning, but I chose to sit at the bar, where he was. It wasn’t until I was within three feet of him that I noticed he was watching a television screen tucked in the corner airing the local news. Recalling my grandmother once telling me that a conversation can always be started with an item on the front page of a newspaper (she’s met my grandfather over a discussion of a murder), I cringed as I saw the red banner stretched across the bottom of the screen. The first two words were Donald and Trump. I placed my large Americano with oat milk on the smooth cherrywood surface and raised myself on the stool.
“Is this taken?” I said, only after making myself at home.
“No.” I liked his voice, a soft baritone. I liked how he elongated the o at the end of “no,” just slightly, like an actor might.
I looked up again at the TV screen, hoping the story would change before the friendly chat I imagined having with the man died before it was born. The camera then panned to a reporter named Maria Escovedo saying something to the camera I couldn’t make out, followed by, of all things, a report of a recently solved cold case, the 1992 murder of a schoolteacher, two towns over. I wondered if I had met my future husband. Or my past grandfather.
“Twenty-five years,” I said. “Can you imagine?”
He didn’t respond, just stared up at the screen. I wondered if he had even heard me. I sipped my Americano, trying to figure out what to say next, if anything.
“He probably thought he’d gotten away with it,” the man said. Then he turned and smiled. His teeth were Pepsodent commercial white, even, squared, and he had only a whisper of a dimple on his left cheek. I felt a sudden warm rush sweep across my neck. I’d never experienced a physical response like that to anyone before. Not my first boyfriend. Not my ex-husband. Not my current husband, a cardiothoracic surgeon who was out of town on business. Not even the college student from the Jiffy Lube I’d hooked up with last year who’d gotten me pregnant.
“Brendan Welles,” he said. He hadn’t even waited for me to respond to his remark about getting away with it. Or was it even a question?
“Sarah McKinney.”
Ice broken, we spent a minute and a half more speculating about a cold case that he probably didn’t care about and moved on to more important subjects. He was an executive with TeleSpiral, a tech company in Silicon Valley, California, in town for a “deal,” probably here for a week, possibly longer. He was staying at the Bellevue, which had been recommended by a local friend (“Dave”), though it was out-of-policy according to his company’s expense reimbursement protocol, but, you know, screw it. They’re not the ones who have to disrupt their lives with travel.
“You come here often?” he asked. Then he smiled, almost biting on the cliché he just dropped, and apologized with his darting eyes and quick smile.
“My favourite coffee place,” I said. “In Litchfield, anyway.”
“You lived here a long time?”
“Ten years.”
“Married? Kids?”
“No.”
That made three lies. I only moved here last year, and I much preferred the Starbucks down the street, where I have a rewards card, which was closed due to a water pressure issue.
I was ten minutes late for an appointment with Sam Barnes, a prospective client. I was determined to put his five-bedroom, four-bathroom Craftsmen with a recently renovated kitchen on the market. His wife had died last year, and he was ready to downsize. Or at least I was ready for him to downsize. But it would take some coaxing.
“I need to run,” I said.
Brendan looked at my black Kate Spade bag. “Let me guess,” he said. “Designer?”
“Schoolteacher. Eighth grade.”
It must have been that news report that made me think up that lie. I wondered if Brendan noticed the coincidence. A schoolteacher was the last thing in the world I’d ever want to be. I had hated school, and I hated all my teachers. Especially the ones who lied to me and gave me Fs.
“Do you happen to be free after school? Or for dinner?”
“Don’t you need to meet up with Dave?” I said.
“Dave?”
“Your friend who recommended you stay at a five hundred dollar-a-night hotel?”
“He’s busy. Baseball practice with his ten-year-old.”
I smiled. I wanted him to ask me out again, just to be sure.
“So, do you have baseball practice tonight, too?” He laughed at his joke, and I laughed, too.
“No,” I said.
“Where shall we meet?” He said shall like he was a character in a fairy tale. For a moment, I wished I wasn’t attracted to him, but I decided to let it go.
“The lobby of the Bellevue. Seven o’clock.”
“It’s a date.”
As I texted Mr. Barnes, apologizing and assuring him I was on my way, the word date lingered in my ears.
#
I spent most of the morning with Mr. Barnes, pouring through a pile of comparables and listening to the story behind every home improvement project he and his late wife had completed. The addition of the fourth bedroom and en suite bath they had built for Mrs. Barnes’ mother, who had MS and died after a fall three weeks before the project was complete. The screened-in porch that had exceeded three times their budget because of the termite damage the contractor found after attempting to replace part of the railing. And the kitchen … he went on and on about the kitchen, the first contractor who had abandoned the project halfway through, the issues with extending the gas line to the new island, the cherrywood cabinets that had been back ordered for three months, the hardware for the cherrywood cabinets that had been back ordered for six months. In one five-minute walk-through, I found so much I would have done differently. No one does light gray granite anymore; it shows the gravy stains and coffee grounds too easily. But I didn’t really care as long as someone liked it enough to make an offer.
Mr. Barnes was still on the fence about selling. Unless he could get an exceptional price, it wasn’t worth sacrificing the memories of his late wife that were etched in the paint on the walls, the grooves in the flooring, the tiny crack in the bathroom mirror. As if a high offer would somehow validate their relationship’s worth. It wouldn’t happen. He and I had this conversation before, and once again, we were going over the list of recent sales, arguing the pluses and minuses of a two-car garage versus a mudroom.
He leaned forward and skimmed the listing for 2 Redford Street, just a block away, his eyeglasses delicately balanced on the tip of his thin nose, his bulbous nostrils badly in need of a trim.
“This shithole’s going for two million,” he said.
As Mr. Barnes mouthed his baseless arguments about why his house was worth so much more, I completely tuned him out. Because I was thinking about him. About the way the lighting in the café had highlighted the tip of his perfect nose. About the “date” that, unlike my appointment with Mr. Barnes, I didn’t intend to be late for.
We left things as we usually did. No listing contract and a promise to meet again the following week. I had been determined to close the deal today, but I didn’t care anymore. I had other things to think about. Other things that were suddenly more important. I lightly shook Mr. Barnes’ cold, bony hand and got into my car quickly.
At home, on my laptop, I searched for whatever information I could find on him. Brendan Welles. Brendan Welles Linked In CEO TeleSpiral Santa Clara California. Brendan Welles California Facebook. Search after search turned up nothing. Then I sifted through the TeleSpiral website. Their CEO was a woman named Amy. There was no one on their management team named Brendan. I jotted down the company’s main number before I resumed my search. Still blanks. Brendan Wells (no e) was a project manager at a construction company in Akron with a receding hairline and a Snidely Whiplash moustache. (Perhaps the same man who had absconded with Mr. Barnes’ kitchen renovation deposit.) Brendan Welles (with an e) was a retired gynecologist from Orlando who ran a nonprofit that subsidized eco-friendly landscaping in suburban housing developments.
I finally reached a human being in the TeleSpiral HR department after figuring out which combination of press-1-2-3 sent me to the employment verification support line. There was no Brendan Welles currently employed and no former employee by that name. I was pretty convincing as a credit bureau analyst. My high school English teacher, the one who hadn’t bought my story about a gust of wind blowing my midterm project down the storm drain, once told me I could lie better than anyone she’d ever met.
“While I have you on the line,” I said, “may I ask you a few questions about your expense reimbursement policies, just for my own information?”
No hotel blacklist, no audit function, everything was okay as long as the employee received their manager’s approval. We at TeleSpiral aim to create an environment where employees feel empowered to make decisions and determine what’s in the best interests of the company, in all matters.
I closed my laptop and walked into the kitchen for water. I hated the cabinet where we kept our drinking glasses, the way it was tucked into the corner by the sink as if it were an afterthought. Brian and I had poured over the plans for months, he with his keen surgical sense of space and detail, me with my notions of what would sell. But he’d made a mistake. Now, the door didn’t fully open, and I had lost count of how many times I’d bruised my wrists on the edging trying to manoeuvre a glass out of the back of the cabinet.
It was three o’clock before I called the Bellevue Hotel and asked to be connected to Brendan Welles. With an e. I waited for the longest thirty seconds of my life before the crisp male voice from Guest Services told me that no Brendan Welles was registered and no recent guest with that name. “While I have you on the line,” I said, “may I ask you a few questions about your corporate rates, just for my own information?”
No, he’d never heard of TeleSpiral, Inc.. Though he couldn’t recall anyone from that company having recently stayed there, in the interest of confidentiality, they did not disclose the company affiliations of their business guests. We at The Bellevue Hotel aim to create an environment where guests feel welcome, and their privacy and security are respected in all matters.
I was angry. Not at Brendan, but at the cardiothoracic surgeon I married. For assuring me how happy we’d be, when we were not. For failing to notice that a cabinet wouldn’t fit in the recessed corner of our kitchen when he could supposedly spot the beginnings of a tear in the heart valve of a sixty-year-old or a tiny abnormality in the formation of a child’s chest. For leaving town for a “medical convention” when I needed him there to keep me from doing something stupid. I know what anger does to me. It makes me feel weak, and weakness makes me angrier. Always angrier.
#
I smoothed the black chiffon dress I chose instead of the hip-hugging white satin one, then turned slightly, raising myself on my toes as if about to execute the entrée of a pas des deux with an invisible man. Even at 41, I looked good with my hair loose. I slipped into the high-heeled shoes I’d bought in Paris on our last vacation and had never worn. No one would ever think I was a real estate agent, much less a schoolteacher. I looked like the Black Widow at a cocktail party.
It was almost 6:45 pm. The Bellevue was a twenty-minute drive with no traffic, but I wanted to be late. Fashionably late, as I had joked with Mr. Barnes. His wife had been the same way, he’d said. They had once spent forty-five minutes outside in the car on a snowy winter evening before she would allow them to enter the reception hall at their niece’s wedding. No one should ever appear desperate, she had told him.
Is that what I was tonight? Desperate? Hellbent on having dinner with – and let’s admit it, hopefully fucking — a stranger while my husband was out of town at a quote-unquote conference. A stranger without credentials who had lied to me about being a CEO and working for a tech company.
I thought of my out-of-town husband. A husband to whom I had already placed my dutiful out-of-town daily call so he wouldn’t call me later and interrupt us. A husband who sounded in a bit too much of a hurry to get to the last presentation of the day, the one on applications of ChatGPT to surgical outcome metrics and computer-assisted incisions, likely being held at his hotel bar. Or perhaps, like me, in the bedroom of a stranger he had met that morning.
That’s how he had supposedly met Rachel – Dr. Rachel Carrera – two “conferences” ago. How funny it had been when they discovered they worked for the same hospital and had never met. How funny it was that with their incredibly busy schedules, they somehow found the time to meet for coffee at a recently opened place called Café Blend, where I had first seen them together while grabbing my usual Americano at Starbucks. Seeing them holding hands, leaning into each other, occasionally glancing up at the TV in the corner and laughing. That had been my reward for getting an early start and dropping two suits he’d brought back from the quote-unquote conference at the cleaners before heading for a Wednesday open-house tour.
I had forgiven him for Rachel because she had moved on, and he had moved on. But I had never forgiven him for the kitchen cabinet, because it hadn’t moved on, and I had to look at it every day. Because it made me unhappy. And because I was unhappy, I had to meet a man for dinner in twenty minutes, a man with no name and no job and no room, a loser. Looking absolutely stunning except for another bruise on my wrist from scraping it on the edge of the goddam cabinet.
I saw him sitting on the dark green chaise in the front of the lobby. He was dressed the same as this morning, except he wore a black wool jacket, not an Armani but an Alfani. The Macy’s house brand. I could tell because of the way it pulled at his sides as he stood up, the sleeves inching up over his watchband, and the vents sticking out like he had oversized love handles. I’d bought enough jackets with my cardiothoracic surgeon husband to tell the difference.
“You look … great,” he said, showing his even white teeth before he hugged me. Not well done at all, too tentative, almost a bro hug. Perhaps he really was from Silicon Valley. It made me wonder when he’d last been with a woman.
I smiled and didn’t answer. I wasn’t about to lie and tell him his Alfani jacket looked great. I had told him enough lies already. One, schoolteacher. Two, unmarried. Three, Sarah McKinney. (My real name is Grace Adler. Nice to meet you.) All lies. And I was about to tell him some more. Match him one-for-one.
“Did you want to have dinner here?” I said. I wanted him to squirm a bit. Make him wonder how he’d charge the expensive meal to his nonexistent room, or put it on his nonexistent expense account, or maybe sit there and wait for his likely overdrawn credit card to be declined. I would enjoy that. “Or somewhere else?”
“Up to you,” he said.
“You invited me, remember?”
“Let’s go out somewhere,” he said. Clever, the way he’d handled that. Making it seem like my idea. “Though I’m afraid I have no suggestions. I haven’t eaten anywhere except for the hotel since I arrived.”
I enjoyed watching him lie almost as much as I would enjoy watching him squirm. “How hungry are you?”
He shrugged. “I could eat. You?”
“Not very,” I said. “We could wait a bit. Do something else.” Then I gave him my biggest smile, even batting my eyelids twice, all the while hating that jacket and wanting to rip it off his back. I let the something else sink in a bit. “Take a walk, or perhaps you’d like to show me your room.”
He grinned like an eight-year-old, then moved closer to me, touching my arm. “Let’s do both,” he said.
I was surprised he wasn’t flinching, not one bit, which I guess shouldn’t have surprised me. He was an accomplished liar, a practiced one. He must have told the story about being the C-something-O of TeleSpiral and being in town to close a deal a hundred times in a hundred different towns to a hundred different women who hadn’t bothered to check.
“In that order?”
“In that order,” he said.
So I led him to my car. He climbed into the passenger’s side seat and adjusted the height and back as soon as he sat down. I drove from the parking lot to the main road, away from town.
“Where are you taking me, pretty lady?” he said, in the same voice he’d used this morning. Deep, firm, more than a whisper, but not overly showy. Inviting, I would call it later. An inviting voice.
“There’s a beautiful path across from the beach,” I said. “Just two towns over.”
“Two towns?”
I laughed. “Relax. This is Connecticut. Everything runs together, and nothing is ever very far from anything else.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a terrific spot to watch the sunset,” I said. And to fuck, if that’s what he had in mind, and if he didn’t object to screwing in a back seat.
“Okay,” he said again. “I trust you.” My right hand rested on the seat cushion, and he slipped it into his. Good thing, because I’d forgotten to remove my wedding ring, and he would have felt it and started asking questions. It was too soon for that. He could ask me questions later.
I. Trust. You. What a mistake.
I had trusted people once. I trusted my high school English teacher, who had promised to pass me if I did well on the final paper.
We talked about all sorts of stupid little things on the drive, the early summer weather, the congestion on the main road that made him late for his first meeting, how Dave’s son’s practice had been cancelled, but sorry, he’d already made dinner plans. But those three words were the only ones I remembered. I wanted so badly to explain to him that a liar should never say those words to anyone, least of all to another liar.
Least of all to a woman driving a car one-handed and hiding her wedding ring.
Least of all to a woman taking him to a secluded place two towns over, only a mile from where she had grown up.
Least of all to a woman who had been angry all her life from everyone being angry at her. Who had run away from home four times before she was ten years old. Who had run out of the high school after a teacher had given her an angry red F on the one paper she hoped would impress her, then humiliated her in front of the entire class for writing about the wrong topic. Who knew how that same teacher liked to take walks on a secluded path across from the beach at sunset, twenty-five years ago.
I parked the car next to a large white cedar at the edge of the beach, its leaves filtering the remnants of daylight peering through the darkening sky. Then I opened the driver’s side door, and the overhead light illuminated the inside of the car. The dim yellow streamed across his five o’clock shadowed face. Then he kissed me on the mouth, not letting go of my hand.
“You’re not a schoolteacher,” he whispered in my ear.
I looked up at him, trying to hide my surprise. I didn’t know how he knew that, but he most definitely did know. That smug expression on his handsome face.
“You’re not even named Sarah,” he said.
“What makes you think –”
“You left your receipt on the counter,” he said. “Grace.”
I tried my best to smile as I sat up. “Let’s take a walk,” I said. “I can explain.”
“I’m all ears, “ he said.
As we walked down the wooded path, holding hands, I felt sad in a way. Sad that I’d never get the chance to feel the tiny hairs on his arms I’d noticed this morning or the warm breadth of his naked chest that encased his heavily pounding heart. There would only be memories of him that would eventually fade. I would return to my loveless marriage to the cardiothoracic surgeon, the inconvenient cabinet with the glasses, and the endless conversations with Mr. Barnes about selling a house he would never leave.
And wait another twenty-five years until they caught the wrong man once more.