Lee might have heard the disappointment in her voice, but he was distracted. He told her to hold on a minute, and he covered the phone as if he was talking to someone else. When he came on again, he said he had to run, he'd likely be late, she shouldn't wait up for him. She told him she'd stay in costume for a while in case he freed up, but he said she shouldn't bother, she should let the sitter go, he wouldn't break free before midnight now.
After he hung up, Kath kept telling herself that the person he was talking to was one of the nurses, or maybe another doctor. Medical staff. She repeated that rationalization for well over an hour as she sat there in her Daisy dress, having a sidecar while the sitter played crazy eights with the children. At nine, Kath tucked them into bed herself, asking the sitter not to go yet. Maybe she would just meet Lee for a drink, she said.
When she called the hospital and asked for Lee, she had no idea what she'd say if he came to the phone. The receptionist came back on, though, to say she'd paged Dr. Montgomery twice and he hadn't answered. “I think he went to the Halloween party,” the woman said. “The one the nurses organized. I saw him in funny clothes and boots, carrying a golf club or something a while ago.”
How long a while? Maybe an hour, maybe two. It had been a busy night, she wasn't sure.
Even then, Kath made excuses for Lee. He'd finished earlier than he'd expected; he was exhausted but he thought he ought to make an appearance at the party and was stopping by for just a few minutes on the way home. Still, she told the sitter she wouldn't be too long, and she got in her little blue convertible and headed for the University Club out on Foothill Expressway. Sure enough, Lee's car was in the parking lot.
She parked a good distance away, turned off her engine, and sat there, trying to figure out what to do. She watched people coming and going for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour: a nurse in a sexy black cat costume, unaccompanied; a Superman; Albert Einstein and Minnie Mouse walking arm in arm. She was still trying to make up a plausible story to take inside with her when the door opened and Lee came out—alone. She thought she would cry with relief.
He'd just stopped by for a few minutes. Probably he'd arrived just before she had.
He got into the car and just sat there himself, staring through the windshield for the longest time. She was beginning to worry about him—maybe he'd lost a patient, that was always so tough on him. She had to get home and get rid of the sitter, she realized. She had to be changed and ready to comfort him when he got home.
She started the engine and was pulling forward, through to the other parking lot entrance, when the door to the club opened again and a young woman stepped out into the porch light. She was dressed like someone from the 1920s, Kath thought. Not a flapper, but someone substantially less fashionable. She wore a housedress, and she carried some kind of stuffed animal in her arms. A dog? She was pretty, though.
Kath stared at her, trying to figure out who she was supposed to be—Dorothy with her little dog, Toto?
The woman walked down the steps, crossed the parking lot, slipped into Lee's car.
The engine fired and the car pulled out quickly, its lights still off. At the stop sign, Lee popped on the lights and leaned over to kiss the woman. Kath saw their silhouettes in the glow of the streetlight, Lee's face turning the way he used to turn to her at the drive-in movies, when the lovers on the screen were getting romantic. Kath closed her eyes against the other woman, the other Kathy, remembering the baby-rough skin of Lee's cheek just after he'd started to shave, the stiff feel of his varsity letter on his sweater pressing into her cashmere twinset, that first breathtaking moment of his hand sliding up to the side of her breast.
Like any self-respecting jealous wife, Kath tailed them. Surreptitiously at first. But as she drove, as she watched the shadow of Lee caught in the streetlight, his head tipped back in laughter, as she remembered the phone call—she wouldn't mind missing the party, would she?—and imagined him dancing with this slut at the party, with everyone knowing he was there and Kath was not, and all the time their children sleeping in their beds as if their lives could not be touched by this moment, this infidelity, she began to wonder why she cared if he saw her, to think he ought to be the one caring about being seen.
She pressed harder on the accelerator, pulled closer behind him, the lights of her little blue car splashing onto the shiny chrome of his bumper, his black-and-yellow license plate. Tailgating, closer than was really safe, her daddy would have said. She ought to leave five car lengths between her and the car in front of her.
She imagined her daddy finding Lee with this sleazy little white-trash gal. Would he grab his shotgun as he'd done when her mother had told him Kath was pregnant? Kath had gone not to her daddy but to her mother, in a tearful mass of streaked mascara that her mother seemed to find nearly as shameful as the pregnancy. Kath had been almost relieved when she heard about the shotgun. She thought it meant somehow that her father was not so ashamed of her as she'd feared. But he hadn't spoken to her for days, not even at the wedding, a quiet affair in the chapel—not in the main church—on a rainy Thursday morning three days later, with only her parents and Lee's attending. Not even her sisters, who were not to be taken out of school for something like this. No walking down the aisle. No flowers. No giving the bride away. A new dress only because her mother had secretly taken her out to buy it, making her promise not to say a word about it to her daddy. The dress not white, either, but the palest pink.