The Husband's Secret Read Free Page A

to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing that her family and friends commented on and teased her about, it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now
extraordinarily
well organized, as if motherhood were a sport and she were a top athlete. It was like she was thinking,
How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?
    And that was why other people, like her sister, had rooms full of dusty junk, whereas Cecilia’s attic was stacked with clearly labeled white plastic storage containers. The only part that didn’t look quite Cecilia-ish was the tower of shoe boxes in the corner. They were John-Paul’s. He liked to keep each financial year’s receipts in a different shoe box. It was something he’d been doing for years, before he met Cecilia. He was proud of his shoe boxes, so she managed to restrain herself from telling him that a filing cabinet would be a far more effective use of space.
    Thanks to her labeled storage containers, she found her piece of the Berlin Wall almost straightaway. She peeled off the lid of the container marked “Cecilia: Travel/Souvenirs. 1985–1990,” and there it was in its faded brown paper bag. Her little piece of history. She took out the piece of rock (cement?) and held it in her palm. It was even smaller than she remembered. It didn’t look especially impressive, but hopefully it would be enough for the reward of one of Esther’s rare, lopsided little smiles. You had to work hard for a smile from Esther.
    Then Cecilia let herself get distracted (yes, she achieved a lot every day, but she wasn’t a
machine
, she did sometimes fritter away a little time) looking through the box and laughing at the photo of herself with the German boy who did the ice cube thing. He, like her piece of the Berlin Wall, wasn’t quite as impressive as she remembered. Then the house phone rang, startling her out of the past, and she stood up too fast and banged the side of her head painfully against the ceiling. The walls, the walls! She swore, reeled back, and her elbow knocked against John-Paul’s tower of shoe boxes.
    At least three lost their lids and their contents, causing a mini landslide of paperwork. This was precisely why the shoe boxes were not such a good idea.
    Cecilia swore again and rubbed her head, which really did hurt. She looked at the shoe boxes and saw that they were all for financial years dating back to the eighties. She began stuffing the pile of receipts into one of the boxes when her eye was caught by her own name on a white business envelope.
    She picked it up and saw that it was John-Paul’s handwriting.
    It said:
    For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick
    To be opened only in the event of my death
    She laughed out loud, and then abruptly stopped, as if she were at a party and she’d laughed at something somebody said and then realized that it wasn’t a joke, it was actually quite serious.
    She read it again—“For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick”—and oddly, for just a moment, she’d felt her cheeks go warm, like she was embarrassed. For him or for her? She wasn’t sure. It felt like she’d stumbled upon something shameful, as if she’d caught him masturbating in the shower. (Miriam Oppenheimer had once caught Doug masturbating in the shower. It was just so
dreadful
that they all knew that, but once Miriam was on to her second glass of champagne, the secrets just bubbled out of her, and once they knew it was impossible to un-know it.)
    What did it
say
? She considered tearing it open right that second, before she had time to think about it, like the way she sometimes (not very often) shoved the last piece of chocolate in her mouth, before her conscience had time to catch up with her greed.
    The phone rang again. She wasn’t wearing her watch, and suddenly she felt like she’d lost all sense of time.
    She threw the