“Perfect, I was just making sandwiches,” she says. “Grab a seat.” She points toward the bed—we have no sitting rooms here—and moves into her kitchenette, which has the same plastic cutting board, the same dull knife, as mine. She slices the tomato. A plastic disc of lunch meat sits on the counter, the stomachy-sweet smell filling the room. She sets two slippery sandwiches on paper plates, along with handfuls of goldfish crackers, and marches them into the bedroom area, her hand already on the remote, flipping from noise to noise. We sit on the edge of the bed, side by side, watching the TV.
“Stop me if you see something,” Greta says.
I take a bite of my sandwich. My tomato slips out the side and onto my thigh.
The Beverly Hillbillies, Suddenly Susan, Armageddon.
Ellen Abbott Live. A photo of me fills the screen. I am the lead story. Again. I look great.
“You seen this?” Greta asked, not looking at me, talking as if my disappearance were a rerun of a decent TV show. “This woman vanishes on her five-year wedding anniversary. Husband acts real weird from the start, all smiley and shit. Turns out he bumped up her life insurance, and they just found out the wife was pregnant. And the guy didn’t want it.”
The screen cuts to another photo of me juxtaposed with Amazing Amy.
Greta turns to me. “You remember those books?”
“Of course!”
“You like those books?”
“Everyone likes those books, they’re so cute,” I say.
Greta snorts. “They’re so fake.” Close-up of me.
I wait for her to say how beautiful I am.
“She’s not bad, huh, for, like, her age,” she says. “I hope I look that good when I’m forty.”
Ellen is filling the audience in on my story; my photo lingers on the screen.
“Sounds to me like she was a spoiled rich girl,” Greta says. “High-maintenance. Bitchy.”
That is simply unfair. I’d left no evidence for anyone to conclude that. Since I’d moved to Missouri—well, since I’d come up with my plan—I’d been careful to be low-maintenance, easygoing, cheerful, all those things people want women to be. I waved to neighbors, I ran errands for Mo’s friends, I once brought cola to the ever-soiled Stucks Buckley. I visited Nick’s dad so that all the nurses could testify to how nice I was, so I could whisper over and over into Bill Dunne’s spiderweb brain: I love you, come live with us, I love you, come live with us. Just to see if it would catch. Nick’s dad is what the people of Comfort Hill call a roamer—he is always wandering off. I love the idea of Bill Dunne, the living totem of everything Nick fears he could become, the object of Nick’s most profound despair, showing up over and over and over on our doorstep.
“How does she seem bitchy?” I ask.
She shrugs. The TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family will be happy. Then to a commercial for very thin panty liners so a woman can wear a dress and dance and meet the man she will later spray air freshener for.
Clean and bleed. Bleed and clean.
“You can just tell,” Greta says. “She just sounds like a rich, bored bitch. Like those rich bitches who use their husbands’ money to start, like, cupcake companies and card shops and shit. Boutiques.”
In New York, I had friends with all those kinds of businesses—they liked to be able to say they worked, even though they only did the little stuff that was fun: Name the cupcake, order the stationery, wear the adorable dress that was from their very own store.
“She’s definitely one of those,” Greta said. “Rich bitch putting on airs.”
Greta leaves to go to the bathroom, and I tiptoe into her kitchen, go into her fridge, and spit in her milk, her orange juice, and a container of potato salad, then tiptoe back to the bed.
Flush. Greta returns. “I mean, all that doesn’t mean it’s okay that he killed her. She’s just another woman, made a very bad choice in her man.”
She is looking right at me, and I wait for her to say, “Hey, wait a minute …”
But she turns back to the TV, rearranges herself so she is lying on her stomach like a child, her chin in her hands, her face directed at my image on the screen.
“Oh, shit, here it goes,” Greta says. “People are hatin’ on this guy.”
The show gets underway, and I feel a bit better. It is the apotheosis of Amy.
Campbell MacIntosh, childhood friend: “Amy is just a nurturing, motherly type of woman. She loved being a wife. And I know she would have been a great mother. But Nick—you just knew Nick was wrong somehow. Cold and aloof and really calculating—you got the feeling that he was definitely aware of how much money Amy had.”