The First Time Read Free Page B

called to wish you good luck.” How many times had she said that already? Three? Four? Didn’t she know when it was time to say good-bye, time to exit gracefully, time to pack up her good wishes and her pride and move on?
    “I’ll see you later.” Jake’s voice resonated with that fake, too-cheery tone that was too big for the thought being expressed. “Take care of yourself.”
    “Jake—” Mattie began. But either he didn’t hear her or he pretended not to, and the only response Mattie got was the sound of the receiver being dropped into its carriage. What had she been about to say? That she knew all about his latest affair, that it was time for them to admit that neither was happy in this prolonged farce of a marriage, that it was time to call it a day?
The party’s over
, she heard faint voices sing as she hung up the phone.
    Mattie moved slowly out of the kitchen into the large center hallway. But her right foot had fallen asleep again, and she had trouble securing her footing. She stumbled, hopping for several seconds on her leftfoot across the blue-and-gold needlepoint rug while her right heel sought in vain to find the floor. She realized she was falling, and even more frightening, that she could do nothing to stop it, ultimately giving in to the inevitable, and crashing down hard on her rear end. She sat for several seconds in stunned silence, temporarily overwhelmed by the indignity of it all. “Damn you, Jake,” she said finally, choking down unwanted tears. “Why couldn’t you have just loved me? Would it have been so hard?”
    Maybe the security of knowing her husband loved her would have given her the courage to love him in return.
    Mattie made no move to get up. Instead, she sat in the middle of the hallway, her wet bathing suit soaking into the fine French needlepoint of the large area rug, and laughed so hard she cried.

T WO
    E xcuse me,” Mattie said, crawling across the stubborn knees of a heavyset woman, dressed in varying shades of blue, toward the vacant seat smack in the middle of the eighth and last row of the visitors’ block of courtroom 703. “Sorry. Excuse me,” she repeated to an elderly couple seated beside the woman in blue, and then again, “Sorry,” to the attractive young blonde she would be sitting beside for the better part of the morning. Was she the reason Jake didn’t want her in court this morning?
    Mattie unbuttoned her camel-colored coat, shrugging it off her shoulders with as little movement as possible, feeling it bunch at her elbows, pinning her arms uncomfortably to her sides so that she was forced to wiggle around in her seat in a vain effort to dislodge it, disturbing not only the attractive blondeto her right but the equally attractive blonde she now noticed to her left. Was there no end to the number of attractive blondes in Chicago, and did they all have to be in her husband’s courtroom this morning? Maybe she was in the wrong room. Maybe instead of
Cook County versus Douglas Bryant
, she’d stumbled into some sort of attractive-young-blondes convention. Were they all sleeping with her husband?
    Mattie’s eyes shot to the front of the room, locating her husband at the defense table, his head lowered in quiet conversation with his client, a coarse-looking boy of nineteen, who appeared distinctly uncomfortable in the brown suit and paisley tie he’d obviously been advised to wear, the expression on his face curiously blank, as if he, like Mattie, had wandered into the wrong room and wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here.
    What was
she
doing here? Mattie wondered suddenly. Hadn’t her husband specifically told her not to come? Hadn’t Lisa advised the same thing when she gave in and called her? She should get up now and leave, just get up and slink away before he saw her. It had been a mistake to come here. What had she been thinking? That he’d be grateful for her support, as Kim had suggested? Was that why she was here? For support? Or had