Olivia Goldsmith - Young Wives

Angela’s heart began to beat even faster. Jewelry? Real jewelry? Aside from her engagement ring and wedding band, he’d never given her jewelry. She tried to be calm as she reached out for the box. It was navy blue leather, unwrapped, and had SHREVE, CRUMP & LOWE stamped in silver letters across the top. Only the best jewelry store in Boston! And the most overpriced, but hey, this was a present. Angela still couldn’t get over the fact that Reid paid retail for things. But on this occasion she was glad. Maybe her mom was right. He was trainable.

Angie stared at the enchanting box and told herself to be calm. It was probably only a sterling key chain or thimble or something, but she’d treasure it forever. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” she asked, vamping for time.

“Well, I’m the animal, you’re the vegetable, and the gift is certainly from the mineral world,” he told her.

Yes! She took the little case in her hand. Mineral world. As in gems? Ready to faint, she flipped open the lid; a small but exquisite sapphire surrounded by seed pearls winked at her from the satin interior.

A ring! “Oh, God. It’s beautiful.” She stared at it. “Oh, God,” she repeated.

“It’s a funny thing,” Reid said dryly. “Is this a religious difference? I can’t tell if it’s a Jewish or a Catholic one. But only sex and jewelry get you to mention the Lord’s name.” He squeezed her thigh again and laughed. Angie vowed she’d get to the gym tomorrow after work for sure. She was so grateful to him that she’d keep those thighs thin and toned forever. She reminded herself that her father had started cheating on her mother after her mom had gotten a little—well, zaftig. I’ll eat nothing but fruit salad tomorrow , she thought. The kind packed in water. And I’ll drink four bottles of Evian—the big bottles—even though it means I’ll pee like a horse all day .

“You know what I’d like?” Reid asked her. “I’d like you to promise to do something for me.”

As if she wasn’t already starving and flooding herself for him! As if she wouldn’t give up breathing if he asked her to. “Anything except prostitution or getting my nose fixed,” Angela told him.

He laughed. That was one of the reasons she loved him: he was an easy laugh. Then his face took on a sort of choirboy earnestness that she rarely saw. “Let’s renew our vows,” Reid proposed as he took her hand. “I want to marry you all over again.”

Angela was so touched she felt herself flush. Reid had been unusually romantic lately—flowers, little gifts—but this was so … so very, very sweet . She felt she could either laugh or cry, so she went with the first option. After all, it was a Goldfarb-Romazzano family tradition, especially on her mother’s side. “Might as well laugh,” her mother always advised in crisis. “Then you don’t have to fix your mascara later.”

Angela put her hand out, covering Reid’s beautiful long fingers. “Oh, honey. It’s a wonderful thought. A lovely thought, but …” She paused. He watched her face, as attentive as a puppy, but a lot less mature. She didn’t, now or ever, want to hurt him. So how could she explain? “We only married a year ago, sweetie. It’s … it’s inappropriate to do it again so soon. If you want to say our vows privately I will, tonight or tomorrow or—”

“No!” Reid interrupted. “I want to say them publicly. I mean, with people there. People from work. My family. Yours. You know. A ceremony.”

“A renewal ceremony?” Angela tightened her hand around his. “I just got over the wedding! It took me this long to write and thank your family for all those cheese boards. Anyway, sweetie, people just don’t do it.” His family was usually the one that talked about what was “done.” She thought of the pain she’d caused her mother-in-law already with her social gaffes. They’d nearly fainted when she’d had both a rabbi and a lapsed—and married—former Catholic priest at their ceremony. “It’s … not done,” she repeated. “Not for at least ten years, anyway. Or twenty-five.”

“Why? I love you more now than I did when I married you,” Reid protested. “I want everyone to know that.”

Angie felt tears of total happiness rising. The hell with the mascara. “And I love you more, too,” she agreed. “It’s just that people might think that it’s … well, you know, greedy. Like we expect presents or something.”

“Angie, will you do this for me?” Reid asked earnestly. “Your eyes are so beautiful now, so warm and wet.” He lowered his voice. “I want you this minute. I want to kiss you on your eyelids and make love to you, right here on the floor. But instead, just say yes to the ceremony.”

She couldn’t, not ever, say no to that level of desire in him. She was ready to nod her assent when he continued. “Look. You know my parents didn’t want us to marry. And you didn’t like most of my friends. Plus, let’s face it, they didn’t like you. People said you wouldn’t fit in. Hey, even I had some doubts.”

Angie nodded, still smiling though he’d never mentioned his doubts before and the news surprised her. Of course, she’d had plenty of doubts—about him. His fear of commitment, his family’s coldness, his lack of … well, depth. She’d thought he might back out of the wedding right up until the moment when he turned to the rabbi and said, “I do.”

“Anyway,” Reid continued, “it wasn’t an easy year. I admit we’ve had to take some time to adjust. And then, five months ago, I started this affair. I thought things between you and me weren’t … well, I thought maybe my parents had been right.”

Back up! Angela wasn’t certain she’d heard him. “What! I mean, who …?”

Reid made a gesture with his hand, a sort of flutter that matched the one her heart was making in her chest. “An older woman. From work. But she meant nothing. The affair … I don’t know. It just showed me—after the first gloss of lust wore off—it showed me just how much I really love you .” He leaned forward. The setting sun gleamed behind him. “I want to show that I’d choose you over any woman in the world, Angela. It was a mistake, but my affair taught me something. And I just want to make that knowledge public. I want to—”

His affair? Angela couldn’t really hear anymore. She saw Reid’s lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him. Deafness wasn’t the issue. She was afraid she might die right there at the table. But her pride wouldn’t let her. Her heart was beating so loud that Reid must have heard the noise. She certainly couldn’t hear anything else. She sat, frozen in shock, and watched her husband’s lips move. Lips she’d just kissed. Lips that had lied to her and kissed another woman’s mouth, another woman’s….

“I have to go to the toilet,” Angie said. Then she stood up abruptly and almost ran across the dining room.

In which we meet Michelle Russo, Pookie the dog is walked

Michelle got Frankie into bed, which wasn’t easy now that he was six. She shrugged into her jacket and told Jenna she was going out to walk Pookie, their cocker spaniel. In the driveway she looked around guiltily. Frank always yelled at her when he caught her walking the dog. “It’s the kids’ job. You spoil ’em,” he said. It was just that it was easier for Michelle to do it herself than nagging at Jenna. And she could use the air.

As Michelle walked the dog through drifts of leaves she took a moment to look up at the stars. It was chilly and Michelle took her hair out of the scrunchie that bound it up. It fell down below her shoulders in an unmanageable cascade of blond curls that would keep her warm and make Frank hot. She shivered. Elm Street was dark, and despite the cold, this was a time Michelle really enjoyed. It was perhaps the only moment of the day that she spent alone—if you didn’t count Pookie as a companion. The dog pulled on the lead a little bit and Michelle stepped along the sidewalkless curb.

Pookie paused. Uh-oh. Her neighbors, the Shribers and the Joyces, went ballistic if Pookie even lifted a leg anywhere near their property, so she discreetly tried to tug him in the opposite direction. But then she noticed the Joyces’ windows were dark. Maybe they were traveling. Since Mr. Joyce had retired, they had been doing a lot of that. They had lived on this block longer than anybody else. They were pleasant, but never really warm.

Still, Michelle loved them, just the way she loved the entire street and every house on it. This was where she and Frank had chosen to live. The place she had brought both of her children home from the hospital. Frank had taught Jenna to ride without training wheels right here, and one winter afternoon Frankie Junior had gotten his tongue frozen stuck to the lamppost that Pookie was now sniffing. This street was filled with, if not friends exactly, then friendly acquaintances; it was the place they all called home, where their children and their cats and their dogs ran in the grass and fought and played.

Michelle hadn’t had a home growing up. Her mother usually worked as a waitress and came home with some take-out and a six-pack of beer. Her father was always involved in some scheme or other, none of which ever made any money, but did require hours spent in bars.

For a moment Michelle shivered, as if someone had walked on her grave. There was no reason for her to wind up so lucky, unless it was a payback for a really rocky start. Michelle had been born in the Bronx, which was only twenty or thirty miles south of here, but a whole other world. Her mother was Irish, straight from County Cork. Her father was Irish-American, the son of a fireman and a fireman himself—until he reported to work one night so drunk that he walked into a burning building and, feeling invincible, fell six stories when it collapsed.

Michelle hadn’t missed her loud, frightening father. But Michelle was that rare Irish entity, an only child, and she’d been left with her depressed, unreliable mother. And when her mom’s mom got sick “back home,” Sheila returned to Ireland to help. Michelle, only a little older than her own daughter was right now, had waited and waited for her mother’s return. A month seemed a long time to a child; half a year seemed a lifetime. The two years it took before Sheila came back had been enough to do a job on Michelle, dumped as she was with her paternal grandparents, lonely and suspecting that her mother stayed away because she couldn’t face coming back. Michelle had decided then that nothing was as important as loving your husband and your children. She would never be a Sheila.

If Michelle could do it all over again, every bit of her hard, sad early life, she would live through it all as long as she could be assured that she would wind up with Frank Russo, her two kids, and her dog in the safety of this clean suburban harbor in Westchester County; no crime, no grime, no horrors. Healthy food on the table. Clean sheets on the bed. Clothes folded in neat piles in dresser drawers. A yard full of flowers, and two nice cars which never broke down. In the first couple of years of their marriage, Michelle had watched every glass of dago red that her husband drank, expecting him to get drunk and for the picture to fall apart. But he never had. Not once.

Michelle walked the dog up and down the street and, as she did nearly every night, couldn’t help feeling grateful for the fact that her family, her marriage, and her friendships were going so well. She knew that just five houses down the street, Jada was having to deal with her unemployed husband sitting on his butt while Jada worked hers off all day at the bank. Michelle also couldn’t get over the fact that Clinton, Jada’s husband, was “acting up” again. How did Jada put up with it? Michelle was only a little sorry the partnership that Frank had tried to put together with Clinton had never worked out.