paintings had been; the stained-glass window that she’d crafted so carefully was missing from where it hung on the screened porch. Every day when he arrived home from work, Rick would amble around the house, glumly taking note of the things that were newly missing, then sit down to a tasteless frozen dinner heated in the microwave.
At first he’d thought that before she left Miami, Trista must have known Martine wasn’t going to come home from the hospital with him, but when she called two days after Martine left the hospital, she seemed astonished when he told her that Martine was living at Steve’s place.
“Oh, Rick, I’m sorry,” Trista said, her voice low. Other women shrilled when they were upset, but not Trista. If anything, she became more centered.
He greeted this with silence. Though Trista and Martine had grown apart in recent years, he couldn’t imagine Martine’s embarking on such a course without running it past Trista first.
Trista sighed. “Rick, she told me on Saturday that she was going to file for divorce. She mentioned that you’d had a fight before Padrón forced her into the car, and she said she wanted to leave you. I couldn’t talk her out of it. I tried. She never mentioned that another man was involved.”
“She and Steve have been having an affair for almost a year. Maybe she’ll fill you in on what’s happened,” he said.
“She doesn’t talk to me,” Trista replied despairingly. “And I don’t understand her or the things she does sometimes.”
“Ditto for me.”
After they hung up, Rick buried his face in his hands. Through his pain, he was furious with Martine for putting them through this and angry with himself because his wife had felt a need to include another man in her life. He was well aware that it was too late to go back and change the way things were, and he didn’t much like the way they were going to be, either.
Shortly after this conversation, Rick descended into a depression the likes of which he had never experienced. As always when things got tough, he began to ruminate over his life as it was before things got so complicated. Before he had a job that was becoming increasingly difficult to perform.
Maybe that was because he was drinking too much, staying out later and later at one bar or another and avoiding one-on-one social situations of any kind. Still, he believed that he was performing his job to the best of his ability until his boss called him into his office late one Friday in early March.
“Rick,” Shorty said, walking around his desk and perching on the edge of it as he was wont to do when attempting to establish rapport. “You’ve been through a lot, and I think you need a break. I hope you don’t take this as a put-down, and I have great respect for your ability, but I’m going to put you on an extended leave starting today.”
Rick hadn’t seen this coming at all. “Extended leave?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll welcome you back after a few months. We’re giving you time to pull yourself back together, that’s all. I’ll keep in touch, and—”
“What have I done wrong?” Rick was in a state of bewildered disbelief; how could this be happening? On top of everything else?
Shorty sighed and stared out the window for a long moment. “Son, you’re not playing at the top of your game. People complain that you don’t call them back, you forgot an important meeting last week, and I suspect that your mind’s not focused on your work. I’m doing this for your sake as much as the department’s. I don’t want you finding yourself in an edgy situation and getting into trouble.”
I’m already in trouble, at looks like. “My divorce will be final this week. After that—”
“Please don’t argue, Rick. What’s the name of that place in South Carolina you go to every summer? Where your family has a vacation cottage?”
“Tappany Island,” Rick said in a low tone.
“Take a break—that’s all I’m asking.” Shorty paused at the door and appeared to be thinking something over for a moment, before abruptly leaving the room. Rick sensed that the conversation had been almost as hard on his boss as it had been on him.
Numb after this dismissal, still scarcely believing it, Rick cleaned out his desk and set about getting roaring drunk as soon as he got home. When he emerged on the other side of this binge with a nasty hangover, he tossed some things into a suitcase in preparation for leaving.
He’d planned to head for Sweetwater Cottage anyway. He just hadn’t expected to be going alone.
Chapter 3: Trista
1981
Click: Class picture of Miss Davison’s third grade, Class 3-A, Eugene Field Elementary School, Columbia, South Carolina. Rick, the new boy in class, stands in the back row because he’s tall. I’m grinning, Martine is biting her lip, and we’re holding hands.
The first picture of Rick, Martine and me was snapped on his second day in Miss Davison’s third grade. There he is, standing in the back row with the other big boys, grinning widely and completely at home.
In the picture, Martine and I sit in the front row, two skinny nine-year-old girls missing various front teeth. We were the twins. Our names were always scrunched together—TristanMartine. If you’re not a twin, you probably have a hard time imagining how we were never separate identities but a collective noun, not to mention that people could hardly tell us apart, though we are mirror twins. I’m left-handed, Martine is right-handed. I part my hair on the left, and Martine parts hers on the right.
Rick was a transfer student who arrived in the middle of the semester, and we were drawn to him as soon as we spotted him shuffling his feet beside the teacher’s desk on that first morning. He had sandy hair shading toward brown and blue eyes tending more toward gray than ours, which were on the violet side. Freckles. A strong, straight nose. High cheekbones that were to become craggy in adolescence and a ready smile that would become his trademark.
I can’t explain it, but it was as if the three of us were instantly connected on sight, as if someone somewhere had thrown a master switch and we were three instead of two plus one. Soon we were no longer TristanMartine; we were Trista, Martine and Rick. Three names were more difficult to run together than two.
By Rick’s second week in our class, we’d formed a secret club we called the ILTs. This came about when the school cafeteria served tacos and we discovered that we all loved them more than any other lunch food at Field School. For some reason, Rick felt compelled to trade his prized red-and-blue Richard Petty Matchbox car for Goose Fraser’s unwanted taco and chivalrously presented it to us. We showed our appreciation by sharing it with him, after which the three of us raced through the wide halls back to the classroom in spite of the No Running rule, screaming, “I love tacos!”
Even today I can almost smell the chalk dust in the air as I remember how, under Miss Davison’s stern eye, we laboriously wrote “I will not run in the hall” a hundred times on wrinkled notebook paper with our stubby pencils. In the back of the school bus on the way home, we unanimously agreed that ILT was our shorthand for I Love Tacos. On the reverse side of one of the “I will not run in the hall” papers, the three of us added our first initials to ILT so we’d have names that rhymed. Rick became Rilt, Martine was Milt and I was Tilt. The password to our secret club was “Burrito,” and that was what we also named the club goldfish, which belonged to Rick.
I
