I Don't Forgive You

we know it’s even Mark’s?
A rap on the car window startles me, and I look up to see Heather, my next-door neighbor, cranking her hand in the universal roll-down-your-window gesture.
“Hey, neighbor!” she says, pushing an errant honey-blond strand back into her high ponytail. “Did you hear about what happened over on Arleigh?”
“Yes, it’s really crazy.” My words are measured, my tone even.
“Did you know him?” Heather asks.
The question startles me. Does she know something? “No,” I offer tentatively, trying to remember if I saw Heather at the party last night. She had to have been there. She has two kids at Eastbrook—Sam and Isabella—and from the emails I get, it looks like she is on almost every committee the school offers. Maybe she saw Rob and me talking in the kitchen.
“Me, neither,” Heather says. “I mean, I knew him to say hi. I’d seen him around, at like the Backyard Pub Crawl and school things, but I didn’t know him know him. So sad. He has a daughter, you know, Tenley, who’s in the fourth grade with Isabella. That poor kid.”
“Terrible.” Guilt washes over me. I hadn’t even thought of his daughter when I heard the news. But of course, some little girl just lost her dad.
“Of course, from what I hear, the poor thing basically lives at her mom’s apartment in D.C., and the dad stayed in the Bethesda house so she could go to school in this district.”
I nod, amazed at the intel Heather has on a man she claims not to know. What does Heather do? I rack my brain and then remember. She handles communications for a senator from Rhode Island. She can sure sniff out a scandal.
“I wonder what happened,” she muses. “You know, my boss’s brother had a heart attack at forty-five. And he was a marathon runner, super-fit guy.”
“I have no idea. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Just goes to show you. I mean, we’re at that age, aren’t we? Well, you’ve got a few years to go, but once you hit your forties, it’s nuts. Cancer, heart attacks, strokes. It’s really scary.” Heather winces as her little dog yanks at the leash. “Cut it out, Thurston.” She refocuses her attention on me. “So what are you up to this lovely fall day?”
“Just visiting my mother.” It comes out more clipped than I’d like, and I immediately regret that. Heather is in my book club, a potential friend, and she’s been nothing but kind to me. A few weeks ago, I came home to see her leaving through my front door. I wondered if I had found some dark side to Heather, but it turns out she was just bringing in some Amazon packages that were getting rained on, using the spare key I had given her for emergencies.
“So I’ll see you at book club Tuesday?” she asks.
“See you at book club!”
She steps back and waves as I pull away. No way, I think. No way am I going to book club. After all, I’ll never finish Disheveled in time, and I’m not sure I’m ready to face a room full of neighborhood women buzzing about Rob Avery’s death. But as I pull onto Western Avenue, I realize I am being silly. No one knows what happened to me last night. And now that Rob Avery is dead, no one ever will. It would be weird not to go to book club. If I am going to make new friends, I need to step up.
On Connecticut Avenue, I make sure to stay below thirty miles an hour to avoid being caught on one of the many speed cameras. My mother’s assisted living facility is a good thirty-minute drive away. Squinting, I focus on which Beltway entrance to take, since the signs don’t offer clear instruction—one says Baltimore, the other Richmond, which always confuses me. The Beltway is a loop, so you’d arrive at both places eventually if you stayed on it long enough. Which I have. When I first moved here, I found myself doing loops around D.C. after a photo shoot in Alexandria, wondering where the heck to exit.
The traffic is reasonable, something I am grateful for, since at any moment of any day, the Beltway can come to a standstill.
I dial Krystle’s number, and soon my sister’s scratchy voice is booming through the speaker in the car. Her voice is sodden in the way it gets when she’s hungover.
“Late night?” I ask. My mother was only twenty-two when I was born, and she was a huge Dynasty fan. I was named for the raven-haired villainess. Two years later, her second daughter was named after the platinum-blond power wife on the show. This was apparently a source of contention with my father and his family, who, being good Catholics, felt children should be named after saints, not soap opera characters.
“It’s not even ten o’clock, Allie,” she grumbles. “What the fuck? Oh, shit, sorry. Is Cole in the car?”
“He’s not. He’s at church with Caitlin and Mark.”
“Barf.”
“Be nice, Krys. I’m heading up to see Sharon.”
“Yes, Madame. I’ll be nice. Hey, did you bring her Dots?” I hear a sharp inhale of breath on the other line, and I can picture my sister inhaling from that little tube she carries everywhere. She and her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Ron, traded in cigarettes for vaping a few months ago.
“Yes.”
“And US magazine. Sharon likes US, not People.”
I glance at the basket next to me. “People, US, Star, In Style. I’ve got them all.”
“You should have left her where she was. She doesn’t like this new place. We should move her back,” Krystle says without pausing for breath. “Sharon doesn’t need to live in some fancy-schmancy place.”
I bristle. Every time I think we’ve settled this argument, she brings it up with renewed vigor. Sharon was not the type to scrupulously save for retirement, but she lucked into an inheritance my senior year of high school. A long-forgotten relative left her an old house on the water in Westport,