The Secret Lives of Married Women Read Free Page A

time bonding with my niece,” Darren suggested to Lillian the next morning.
    “Nice try.”
    “C’mon, it’s only fair. You had your turn at the fun job.”
    “Overruled.”
    As I set a bag of trash outside the front door, I thought—as I had many times before, and never without envy—about how Lillian and Darren spoke the same language. The jargon of the law, of American culture, the countless shared nuances of native English: they bantered and bickered and jousted and joked with nothing lost in translation. Whereas Stas and I—
    “Hey, how’s it going?” It was Jack, raising a hand from the next yard.
    “Oh, hey,” I said. “Well, there’s always something, I guess.” I mentioned the leak.
    “I can probably help you out with that too,” he said. “I’ve fixed a lot of ceiling leaks in my time. Let me drop by when the work day’s done.”
    I stepped back into the house and almost collided with Stas, who was just inside the front door.
    “Leda,” he said, in a tone of clear reproof.
    “What?”
    “I don’t want this guy coming over every day.”
    “You mean Jack?”
    “That’s who I mean.”
    “Uh...okay,” I said, trying to strike just the right note between amenable and bewildered, even as I fought off a secret sense of culpability. “But, I mean...where is that coming from? Do you dislike him?”
    “Well, let me put it this way. I don’t ever want you to be alone with him.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked. “What are you worried about?”
    “I don’t trust him.”
    “Trust him how? I mean, what’s he going to do? We know who he is. We know where he works.”
    Stas was silent.
    “We know his cousin,” I added.
    “All right,” Stas said. “You don’t want to listen to me? Don’t listen to me then.”
    He left the room and I didn’t go after him.
    * * *
    The tension lingered all afternoon: at the hardware store where we made copies of our new keys, at IKEA where we picked up a lamp for Clara’s room, at Home Depot where Stas thought someone could trim the ill-fitting marble surface of our kitchen counter.
    “Can’t be done here, son,” a man in an orange apron told him.
    “Well, where should we go?” I asked. “There’s an alcove for the fridge cut into our kitchen wall, but right now the marble’s overlapping it. We have our refrigerator out in the middle of the kitchen floor.”
    “Ma’am, I don’t rightly know what to tell you. You need industrial machinery for that.”
    “I cannot believe it is so difficult,” Stas said.
    “It’s not as simple as you seem to think,” said another employee who’d stopped to listen. “You need a diamond-coated blade to get through that kind of stone, and you need a stream of water to cool the blade on its way through. It’s a highly specialized process. Might be easier just to replace it.”
    A Slavic-looking man came over. Without preamble, without a glance at the other two men, he addressed my husband directly in Russian. The two conferred a moment in their native language and then the man wrote an address on a slip of paper.
    Our destination turned out to be a low-slung, windowless building in the middle of a desolate parking lot. “Look at this place,” Stas said, cutting the ignition. “It looks like a mafia warehouse.”
    Inside were stacks of stone, tile, and marble and dozens of Russian workers. One of them had a dramatic scar stretching from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. It was he who took the slab from Stas, set it on a nearby table, and drew a tool from his belt. The task took him less than ten minutes.
    In the three years I’d known my husband, I’d never heard him say a good word about anyone or anything Russian. But as he replaced the marble on the counter and eased the refrigerator into its intended space, I heard him muttering to himself.
    Highly specialized process, my ass...I spent more time talking to those fucking Americans than it took that Russian guy to get it done.
    * * *
    It was