Free The Secrets She Keeps by Deb Caletti Page A

own small beach house, with white rugs and blue curtains and popcorn for dinner. I was sure right then that freedom was every woman’s secret wish.

    Thomas was the husband every friend of mine envied. He was sweet and smart and he cooked and worked hard and he was still so damn handsome, with those broad shoulders, and that hair, and those brown eyes that brought to mind softness and suede. He was funny, too. But he could turn into a spiteful child and claim that’s what people did when they got mad.
    And I, too, was the wife who was admired by his friends, and the wife no one knew, with my own arsenal. My preferred weapons were large and light, nothing sharp or speared or bloody for me. They were powerful, though; make no mistake about it. Silence and distance can drive a person crazy.
    I hung up on him.
    I could feel the tendrils of change crawling upward, wrapping themselves around everything usual and daily. I could feel them squeeze; at least, I could barely breathe. No one had made the call to fix that rot that made our house slope. He hadn’t, but I hadn’t, either. It was mystifying (frightening, alluring) the way you could let it all just go.
    The worst kind of cocktail, fury and fear, roiled in my stomach. I put that old bathing suit in the drawer and slammed it shut.
    “Take all the time you need,” I said to my empty room.
    —

    “I didn’t want to say anything before, but guess who I saw when I went to get dinner? The forest-service guy. He was coming down the road to see us. He stopped and stuck his head out the window. I waved him off, pointed at my wrist like I was in a hurry,” Shaye said.
    It was late, and Shaye looked exhausted. She lay on the couch, feet up, arms crossed on her chest like a corpse. Her eyes had ashy half-moons beneath them. Thomas and I weren’t the only ones fighting long-distance. Just after she arrived, I’d heard her outside, crying and yelling on the phone with Eric. I hated that sound. Other people fighting—it sent me right back to being seven when Mom left Gene. She’d been married to him for a long time, and he felt like a father. Shaye and I had hid in her room, clutching hands.
    “Why didn’t you talk to him? I mean, clearly we can’t just let those horses run around and wreck everything.”
    “I didn’t want to talk to him! I looked awful. I needed to brush my teeth! You should have seen him, Cal. Very Redford- Out-of-Africa -y. I mean, wow.”
    “We’ll have to deal with him one way or another,” I said, which was true, truer than I knew then. “You can’t just go around ignoring government agencies.”
    “You can when your deodorant gave up an hour ago. Anyway, we should at least get Nash’s side of the story first.”
    “I tried! All she’d say was that she wanted the horses left alone. I’m worried Harris is right. This is some kind of emergency. I told you, that stuff in Nash’s room? It looked crazy . She said it was ranch business. Closing out the paperwork. No way all that stuff is ranch business. She doesn’t even have a ranch anymore, for starters.”
    “Maybe she’s writing her memoirs.”
    “She’s not writing her memoirs.”

    “She could be!”
    “This might sounds nuts…I sound like Mom.” Our mother loved a conspiracy. She once became convinced that a garbage bag of couch cushions was the dead wife of our neighbor, the murderous Mr. Fluke, who worked at a garden store. “But I saw a date. I think I did. It all happened so fast.”
    “What kind of date?”
    “A year. On file boxes, on a folder, lots of places. Kind of jumped out at me: 1951.”
    “You do sound like Mom,” Shaye said.
    I threw a pillow at her and missed. I was in my pajamas, too, and I lounged in the leather chair. Its seat had a permanent crater from all the time it had spent accommodating demanding asses, something Shaye was pretty familiar with, too, if you asked me. “Well, we’ll never know now. She locked her door. I tried to go in there to snoop