The Summerhouse Read online

  When she was three months pregnant with Joe, Leslie made the trek out to the summerhouse. In the months since Alan had first set up a TV in the place, Leslie had almost forgotten that her retreat still existed. But from the first day, Joe was an easier pregnancy than Rebecca, and Leslie’s mother had started taking her granddaughter on short jaunts about town. “There’s nothing more uninteresting than a nursing baby,” her mother had said in her usual forthright style. “When she starts walking and looking at something besides her mother’s bosom, then I’ll take an interest in her.”

  So, on her first afternoon of freedom, for that’s the way it felt, Leslie had made her way out to the summerhouse. Maybe this time, she’d be able to stretch out on the wicker chaise lounge she’d found in an antique shop and read a book.

  But when Leslie pushed open the door, her breath stopped. Vaguely, she’d wondered why Alan had used the summerhouse only a few times, then never said anything about it again.

  Someone had left the doors open and it had rained in on her furniture. Before she was first pregnant, she’d made the slipcovers for the little couch and the two chairs. She’d made the matching curtains and hung them herself. But now mice were nesting in the stuffing of the couch, and it looked as if a neighboring cat had clawed the arms of the chairs.

  Turning away, she felt tears come to her eyes. She didn’t even bother to close the door as she ran back to the house.

  Later, she’d tried to have a confrontation with Alan, but he’d expressed such concern that her anger was going to harm the baby, that Leslie had calmed down. “We’ll fix it up after you’ve had the baby,” he said. “I promise. Scout’s honor.” He’d kissed her then and helped her with Rebecca and later, he’d made sweet love to her. But he didn’t fix the summerhouse.

  After that, Leslie had been so busy with children and helping Alan establish himself within the community that she wouldn’t have had time to get away even if she’d had a place to go. And as the years followed each other, the summerhouse became a storage shed.

  “So how’s my old girl this morning?” Alan asked from behind her. He was two months younger than Leslie and he’d always found jokes about their age difference to be amusing. Needless to say, Leslie didn’t see the humor.

  “I made pancakes,” she said, keeping her face turned away to hide her frown. She hadn’t yet come to terms with the idea of turning forty. Hadn’t it been only last week when she’d boarded a bus and headed to big, bad New York City, where she was going to turn the town on its ear with her dancing?

  “Mmm,” Alan said. “Wish I had time, but I have a full schedule today.”

  When she turned around, he was looking down at the newspaper, absorbed with the financial section. In the seventeen years that they’d been married, Alan hadn’t changed much. Not physically anyway. His hair was now gray, but on him it looked good. He said that an insurance agent was considered more trustworthy if he looked older. And he kept in shape by going to the gym regularly.

  What had changed about him was that he no longer seemed to actually see any of them, not his wife, not his two children. Oh, Rebecca could throw one of her look-atme fits and she could get his attention, but Joe and Leslie, with their easygoing ways, were mostly ignored by him.

  “You ought to leave him,” Leslie’s mother said, even more outspoken now than she had been when her husband was alive. Widowhood agreed with her. “If you left him, he’d find out how much he needs you. You need to shake up his perfect little world. Show him what matters.”

  But Leslie had seen what happened to women her age who left their handsome, successful husbands, and Leslie had no desire to live in some dreary little apartment and work at the local discount store. “Mother,” Leslie often said in exasperation, “I have no skills to make my own way in the world. What would I do? Go back to dancing?” That she had failed at her one and only attempt at success in the world still haunted her.

  “Where did I go wrong with you?” her mother would moan. “If you left him, he’d fall apart. You’re the man’s entire life. You do everything for him. If you left, he’d—”

  “Run off with Bambi,” Leslie said quickly.

  “You were a fool to let him hire that little tart,” her mother had snapped.

  Leslie looked away. She didn’t want her mother to know how she’d fought her husband’s hiring the beautiful, young girl. “You hired a girl named Bambi?” Leslie had said, laughing in disbelief, at the dinner table the first night he’d told her. “Is she over twelve?”

  To Leslie, it had been a joke, but when she looked at Alan’s face, she could see that he didn’t think his new secretary was a joke. “She is very competent at her job,” he’d snapped, his eyes drilling into his wife’s.

  As always, Joe had been sensitive to any disagreement and he’d pushed his plate away. “I got some homework to do,” he’d mumbled, then left the table.

  Rebecca never seemed to see anything outside her own realm. “Did I tell you what that dreadful Margaret said to me today? We were in chemistry class, and—”

  Leslie had at last looked away from her husband’s eyes, and she’d never again made a snide remark about Bambi. But Leslie had been curious, so she’d called a woman she’d gone to high school with who worked in Alan’s office and invited her to lunch. After lunch, Leslie had gone home and made herself a strong gin and tonic and taken it to the bathtub with her. She’d been told that Alan had hired Bambi six months earlier and that she was more than just his secretary, she was his “personal assistant.” Paula, who’d been on the cheerleading squad with Leslie in high school, warmed to her story and seemed to enjoy “warning” Leslie. “If he were my husband, I’d put an end to it, I can tell you that,” Paula had said with emphasis. “That girl goes everywhere with Alan. All I can say is that it’s a good thing we don’t have one of those unisex bathrooms or she’d—”

  “Would you like to have some dessert?” Leslie had said rather loudly.

  Now Bambi had worked for, with, “under,” if the gossip were to be believed, Alan for over a year. And, quite frankly, Leslie didn’t know what to do about it. Every friend she had had an opinion and freely gave it to Leslie.

  One day Rebecca had overheard some women giving Leslie advice about this young woman who worked so closely with Alan, and later, Rebecca had said, “Mother, you ought to tell them to go to hell.”

  “Rebecca!” Leslie had said sternly, “I don’t like that kind of language.”

  “It’s possible that your husband is having an affair with his over endowed secretary and you’re worried about bad language?”

  Leslie could only stand there and blink at her daughter. Who was the adult? How did her daughter know—?

  “It’s all over the church and at the club,” Rebecca said, sounding as though she were thirty-five instead of just fifteen. “Look, Mom, men stray. They get itchy pants. It’s normal. What you ought to do is tie a knot in his—”

  Leslie gasped.

  “All right, go ahead and live in the nineteenth century. But that Bambi is a bitch and she’s after Dad and I think you should fight!”

  At that Rebecca had left the room, and all Leslie could do was stare after her. Leslie hadn’t the least idea of how to deal with a child who had just said what her daughter had, so Leslie pretended that it hadn’t been said.

  In fact, that’s what Leslie seemed to be doing a lot of lately: pretending that nothing was wrong, that nothing bad had happened. She couldn’t go so far as to, say, call Alan’s office and tell his assistant to remind him of so and so party. No, instead, Leslie just worked around the whole idea of Bambi by pretending that the young woman didn’t exist. And when the women at church or the club tried to warn her, Leslie perfected a little smile that let them know that she was above such low suspicions.

  But now, looking at Alan as he bent over the newspaper, she wondered if he wasn’t eating her pancakes for fear that he’d put on weight and Bambi wouldn’t like that.

  “So, M