Sweet

My next-door neighbor, Simone, has always been a very sweet woman.

She brought pound cake the afternoon Daniel and I moved in. Everyone else brought wine. Simone came across the lawn carrying a loaf pan beneath a dish towel. Daniel was upstairs arguing with a mover about a scratch in our dresser, so I stood at the kitchen counter and ate a piece with my fingers while she watched. She asked what I thought. I told her it was perfect, and she laughed because we both knew it wasn’t. “You’re a terrible liar for a chef,” she said, and then she took a piece for herself and ate it beside me.

By the following summer, Simone no longer knocked. She had our spare key, knew which weeks I closed the restaurant and understood that any container sent home with me might not come back for months. Terrence, her husband, traveled often for work, so Simone and I spent a lot of evenings together whenever I happened to be home. She was the kind of friend who could sit at my kitchen counter without needing conversation. She would read something on her phone while I cooked, occasionally holding out a spoon when I needed someone to taste something, and if she hated it she said so. Once, when I spent two weeks trying to get a lamb dish right, she ate six different versions and finally told me the first one had been better. I took it off the menu out of spite and put it back three days later.

When my father had his second stroke, Daniel and I left for Richmond before sunrise. Simone watered the plants for nine days and sent photographs of my basil because she knew I would ask. When her mother died, I handled the food for the repast. Long after everyone else left, Simone sat barefoot at her mother’s kitchen table while I washed aluminum pans. Neither of us said much. Eventually she came over, picked up a dish towel and began drying them. There was no conversation about whether she was okay. I knew she wasn’t, and she knew I knew.

Daniel liked her too, although there had been a time when Daniel liked almost everybody I liked. He was the first person to eat anything I cooked without suggesting what I should change. When I was still working hotel kitchens and talking about opening a place of my own, he took extra shifts and covered more of the rent so I could save. The night investors finally agreed to back the restaurant, I came home at nearly two in the morning and found him sitting on the living-room floor with champagne because we didn’t own enough furniture yet to have a dining table. He drank from a coffee mug because the wineglasses were still packed and spent most of the night asking what I was going to call the restaurant.

Years later, the restaurant had become successful enough that strangers occasionally recognized my name and unsuccessful enough that I still couldn’t leave it alone. I worked sixty-hour weeks when things were good and more when they weren’t. There was always something: a refrigeration unit dying before service, produce arriving warm, a cook disappearing on a Saturday. Daniel stopped asking when I would be home, and I stopped promising. We became good at discussing groceries, property taxes and whatever repair the house needed without discussing much else.

Nothing dramatic happened to our marriage. That made it harder to explain when people asked. We still kissed goodbye most mornings. We remembered anniversaries. Daniel still brought my car in for oil changes because I would forget, and I still made the German chocolate cake his mother had made for his birthday when he was a child. We had simply become two people with a long history and increasingly little to say about the present.

Simone knew how bad it had become. She never treated my marriage like entertainment, which was one reason I trusted her with it. When I complained about Daniel, she listened until I was finished and occasionally told me I was wrong. Once, after a counseling session in which Daniel admitted he no longer knew whether he was lonely because of my job or simply lonely with me, I went to Simone’s house instead of home and cried at her kitchen table. She let me embarrass myself for twenty minutes before sliding my keys back across the table and telling me to go talk to my husband.

I went home angry with her and found Daniel asleep on the sofa. I sat beside him until he woke, and we talked until almost three in the morning. Things improved afterward, at least for a while. He started coming to the restaurant again. I took two Sundays off each month. We had sex without either of us treating it like proof that counseling was working. Simone remained part of our lives, and sometimes the three of us ate together when Terrence was traveling.

The first thing I noticed was Daniel showering at night. He had showered in the morning for as long as I had known him, hot enough to leave the bathroom mirror useless for twenty minutes. Sometime in March, he began showering before bed instead. Then he started running again and bought three shirts without asking whether I liked them. None of it meant anything, which made me feel ridiculous for remembering it. His phone bothered me more, though even that was difficult to explain. He didn’t hide it. It was simply with him more often. Once it buzzed while he was making coffee, and he smiled before he had finished reading whatever was on the screen.

Around the same time, Simone began canceling on me. Not constantly. Enough that I noticed.

One Sunday afternoon I sat in her kitchen while she cut strawberries for something she was taking to work the next morning. I mentioned Daniel had been acting strange, then immediately regretted it when she asked what I meant. By the time I finished describing showers and running and his phone, I sounded like a woman constructing an affair from toiletries. Simone laughed and told me maybe he had finally discovered basic hygiene. I called her an asshole. She pushed the bowl of strawberries toward me and told me the case was closed.

“At least the new mattress is helping him sleep,” she said a moment later.

I had ordered the mattress three days before. Daniel knew because he had complained about the price. I had not told anyone else.

“What mattress?”

Simone’s knife rested against the cutting board for a moment before she picked up another strawberry. “I thought you mentioned it.”

I hadn’t, but I ate another strawberry and asked about her sister. We spent the next hour talking about everything except my husband, and by the time I left I had almost convinced myself that I must have mentioned the mattress after all.

That night Daniel was already asleep when I came upstairs. I stood beside the bed longer than necessary, looking at the gray beginning near his temples and the foot he always left outside the blanket. Eleven years of marriage had given me thousands of small facts about him, most of them useless until suddenly they weren’t. I could have woken him and asked whether he talked to Simone when I wasn’t around. Instead I got into bed.

For the next three weeks, I went to work. I changed the spring menu, fired a cook after his second drunk shift, argued with a fish supplier about an invoice and sat through another counseling appointment beside Daniel while he said he thought we were doing better. I wondered whether he meant it. I wondered whether I did. I stopped mentioning Simone to him just to see whether he would mention her first, and when he didn’t, that bothered me more than it should have.

A few days later, Simone invited me to dinner while Terrence was in Dallas. She complained that he barely touched her anymore, and I told her Daniel had woken me before work that morning. It wasn’t true. Daniel had been asleep when I left.

Simone took a drink before asking, “So things are better?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s good.”

She asked whether we were still seeing the therapist. I said yes, and she spent the next ten minutes telling me about a woman at work who kept stealing yogurt from the refrigerator. Nothing about her reaction was large enough to accuse her of anything. I drove home wishing it had been.

Four days later, Daniel said he was having dinner with a client. That afternoon Simone texted that she was driving to Annapolis to see her sister. I left the restaurant before seven, something I had not done on a Thursday in months, and found myself driving home without having consciously decided to. Daniel’s car was in our driveway. Simone’s was parked behind it.

I pulled over down the street and sat there while the neighborhood continued without me. Mrs. Carter dragged her trash cans behind her house. A teenager walked a pit bull past my car. A delivery driver left food across the street and photographed the bag on the porch before leaving. I watched our house and waited for something that would make what I already believed easier to prove. Nothing did.

Eventually I drove away.

Daniel texted me later asking how late I would be. I told him probably midnight. He answered that he loved me, and I went back to the restaurant.

My sous-chef was finishing inventory when I walked through the kitchen. He asked whether I had forgotten something, and I told him apparently I had. There were six hotel pans of stock on the bottom shelf of the walk-in and a case of asparagus nobody had dated. I dated it, checked tomorrow’s prep list and moved a container someone had put in the wrong place. Only when there was nothing left to fix did I stand there with my hands inside my pockets and think about the afternoon Simone first came to our house carrying a pound cake beneath a dish towel.

I stayed until somebody needed me.

Daniel was asleep when I got home. In the morning he made coffee, and I kissed him goodbye without asking about his client.

For the next two months, I became more available. I took Saturdays off. Daniel and I returned to the restaurant where we’d had our first date and discovered the food wasn’t nearly as good as we remembered. We fought in the car afterward, finished the argument at home and slept together for the first time in weeks. He started waiting up for me again. Once, after I fell asleep on the sofa, I woke under a blanket he had put over me and lay there longer than I needed to because I could remember another version of us when that would not have surprised me.

I remained friends with Simone. That was easier than I expected and more painful because of it. She was still funny, still impatient, still the person who remembered which anniversaries I wanted acknowledged and which ones I didn’t. She still called from stores to ask which lamp I liked and bought the other one. There were afternoons when I sat beside her and forgot what I suspected. Then she would say Daniel’s name or my phone would light up on the table, and I would remember.

In May, Terrence left her. He had met a woman in Houston and wanted a divorce. Simone came to my house after midnight with swollen eyes and a half-empty bottle of wine. Daniel was asleep upstairs. She sat at my kitchen table trying to understand how a man could come home every week, kiss his wife and maintain another life she knew nothing about. I listened until she ran out of ways to ask the same question, then reached across the table and held her hand.

“I’m sorry.”

She cried harder after that. I let her sleep in the guest room, and sometime after two I went upstairs and got into bed beside Daniel. I stayed awake for a long time with my husband on one side of the wall and my best friend on the other. In the morning I made eggs for all three of us.

Simone disappeared seven weeks later.

Her car was found in long-term parking at the airport. Her purse was beneath the passenger seat, but her phone was gone. The police learned she had withdrawn four thousand dollars from a savings account two days earlier. Her sister said Simone had talked vaguely about getting away for a while, although she insisted Simone would never leave without telling her where she was going. Terrence said the money meant she had run. Her sister said the purse meant somebody wanted it to look that way. The police did not publicly agree with either of them.

They questioned Terrence first and Daniel sometime afterward. I learned about Daniel’s interview when he came home one evening and found me trimming green beans. He said detectives had asked about his calls with Simone. There had been more of them than I expected. When I asked why she had been calling him, Daniel initially said he didn’t know, then said she had been having a difficult time after Terrence left and didn’t want to worry me. I put another bean with the others and told him I understood.

The police spoke to me two days later. I told them Simone was my closest friend. I told them she had been devastated by the divorce but had never talked about hurting herself. When the detective asked whether she had been involved with anyone else, I thought about Daniel sitting beside me in counseling saying our marriage was improving.

“No,” I said. “Not that I knew of.”

Searches continued through the summer. Simone’s sister flew in from Georgia. Terrence postponed his move. Flyers appeared on utility poles, restaurant windows and gas pumps, and Daniel spent two Saturdays helping search neighborhoods before coming home sunburned and exhausted. I made food for the volunteers because that was the thing everyone knew I could do.

By September, there were fewer searches. By December, the flyers had faded. The four thousand dollars was never traced beyond the withdrawal, and no ticket, hotel room or rental car ever appeared under Simone’s name. Police never announced whether they believed she had left voluntarily. Eventually people stopped asking what they believed at all.

Terrence sold the house the following spring. A young couple moved in with a baby and painted Simone’s red front door blue. The woman introduced herself one afternoon while we were both getting the mail and asked whether I had known the previous owners. I told her the wife had been a close friend of mine. She said she was sorry and, after a pause, asked whether I thought Simone was still alive. I told her I hoped so.

Daniel and I stayed married, and over time we became happier. Not suddenly. There was no conversation in which we forgave each other, especially because there were things neither of us had admitted required forgiveness. We simply began enjoying each other again. He started making pancakes on Sunday mornings, always too large and slightly raw in the middle, and I stopped correcting him. I took fewer closing shifts. He came to the restaurant and sat at the bar until I finished, then followed my car home even though we were going to the same place. We started having sex regularly again. Sometimes I would wake on Sunday with his arm across my waist and lie there listening to him sleep.

He never confessed anything.

I never asked him to.

Tonight is our twelfth anniversary. I took the evening off, and Daniel opened a bottle of Cabernet while I cooked. He sat at the counter telling me about a hotel he’d found for a trip we were considering in January, occasionally reaching across the cutting board for pieces of whatever I was working with until I threatened him with the knife. He laughed because I had made the same threat hundreds of times. The meat had been cooking most of the afternoon with wine, onion and thyme, low enough that the smell had settled into the house hours before we sat down to eat.

Daniel set the table. We opened another bottle of wine and talked about the trips we wanted to take. Halfway through dinner, he stopped talking long enough to point his fork toward his plate.

“This is really good.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

He took another bite and asked what kind of meat I had bought. I told him, and he nodded. A minute later he dragged another piece through the sauce and said there was something different about it, something almost sweet. I told him it was probably the onions.

“That's not it.” He tasted it again, considered whatever he was trying to identify, then gave up. “Whatever you did, do it again.”

Outside the dining-room window, the porch light next door came on. The new neighbors had installed a motion sensor, and sometimes a cat set it off. Daniel glanced toward it and then back at his plate. He finished what was left and handed it to me when I stood to clear the table.

“Anymore?”

“There’s plenty.”

I took his plate into the kitchen and lifted the lid from the Dutch oven. Behind me, Daniel changed the music and called out something about the hotel again. I answered him while spooning another serving onto his plate, added some of the sauce and wiped the edge with my thumb before carrying it back.

Daniel smiled when I set it in front of him.

My next-door neighbor, Simone, has always been a very sweet woman.