Untold Story Read Free Page A

able to say. And it had been sweet and dandy for a while, before she found out about another affair, with a waitress at their favorite “date night” restaurant, but he said it was “only physical” and she had forgiven him again. She’d cried about it anyway, as anyone would, and it was Donna who comforted her. Donna, her best friend. Who was still sleeping with her husband as probably everyone knew except Amber, who, when she walked in on them, in the moments before they noticed her, fought the urge to tiptoe away and pretend to have seen nothing. At the age of thirty-nine with two children and no career, it seemed more sensible to treat it as a hallucination than to face the howling truth.
    “You had to move out all this way from Maine,” said Lydia. “I think I know why.”
    “I don’t know. Getting away from him?”
    “You were afraid you’d forgive him again.” Lydia touched Amber’s hand.
    “Oh my God, you are so right. He was such a bastard. But”—she shrugged a little apology—“he would have talked me around. Not the talk, more the way he walked, the way his jeans fit. I’m so stupid. Why did I stay so long? Really? Because I liked the way he moved, and I liked the way he smelled.”
    Amber emerged from the stockroom and Lydia made way so that she could set the dresses down on the couch, which Amber did with such tenderness that no mortician at J. C. Dryden ever took more care in laying out the deceased.
    “Ten gowns, three sizes, six-fifty wholesale. Tell me I’m not crazy.”
    Lydia wiped her fingers on the seat of her jeans before unshrouding the first offering. Closet, the store, turned over nicely on the staples of wraparound dresses, A-line skirts, and little beaded cardigans favored perennially by Kensington women, supplemented by the prom season business, flirty numbers in fuchsia and gold and white that retailed around $300, and formal floor-length durables that offered good bosom support and value to the Kensington matrons who invested for a silver wedding and expected, God willing, to be seen through to the diamond anniversary. The good women of Kensington were not short of a dime but wise enough to know that dimes didn’t grow on sweet gums and, besides, there was little occasion for occasion wear.
    “Wow,” said Lydia, “gorgeous.” Should she ask if the dresses were sale or return? She didn’t want to dishearten her friend. Inspecting the needlework would give her time to think, and she traced a finger around the embroidered neckline.
    Back when they had first met, Amber had poured out her story and it had seemed as natural and expected to Lydia as tea being poured from the pot. She hadn’t been able to reciprocate exactly, but had talked about moving to the States in her thirties with her husband, how exhilarating it had been to get away from stuffy England, how everything here had been both strange and familiar, and how the marriage had not worked out. She was expert at telling the story and when she was talking it didn’t feel like telling lies. No names and dates and places, best to leave that vague, just the weaving of little details—the novelty, for an English person, of having a flag fly over one’s own home, the thrill of finding Marmite in a grocery store, the way she’d picked up words and phrases she had never dreamed she would use, ass, hang it, darn .
    Over the weeks and months that followed there were questions, because when Amber wasn’t with Lydia the story reduced to a bundle of threads that Amber would gather and later hold out for repair. Lydia told her some things that were not true—that she didn’t have children, that was the worst, denying them got harder, not easier, over time, as if each telling made it more of a reality. Some things she said were true enough, for example, that her husband had been cruel. Amber never pushed too hard. And Lydia had done this professionally for a large part of her adult life—given moments to strangers that