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  561

  KATHERINE HEINY

  Copyright

  4th Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  www.4thEstate.co.uk

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

  Copyright © Katherine Heiny 2018

  Cover design by Heike Schüssler

  Katherine Heiny asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

  Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008319540

  Version: 2018-06-25

  Dedication

  For my father

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  561

  Acknowledgements

  Keep Reading…

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  561

  Just as Jane Austen believed that four people cannot comfortably walk abreast, Charlene believes that three people cannot amicably move one person’s belongings. At least, not when two of the people used to be married to each other, and the marriage resulted in a bitter divorce in order for one of them to marry the third person.

  What’s more, Charlie’s husband, Forrest, had knee-replacement surgery six weeks ago and is still using a cane, and Forrest’s ex-wife, Barbara, has some mysterious but convenient ailment—sciatica? nerve damage?—that prevents her from lifting things so Charlie will be the only able-bodied one today. This is the true price of infidelity, she thinks: twenty years later you and your husband have to help his ex-wife move out of the former family home. On a Saturday. In January. In DC. It is fifteen degrees below freezing with a brisk wind slicing through the air.

  The wind hits Charlie as soon as she steps out of her front door, chilling her all the way through. She waits for Forrest to make his way past her, then locks the door and helps him down the driveway to their car. She leaves him by the passenger door and hurries around to the driver’s side, her breath pluming out in front of her, like white feathers. Snow is piled high on either side of the damp asphalt driveway. The air is cold and flat and smells of nothing.

  Charlie gets into the car and starts the engine. “Tell me why we’re doing this again,” she says to Forrest.

  He buckles his seatbelt, not looking at her. “Because we’re friends.”

  “Barbara and I are not friends,” Charlie says emphatically.

  “Well, sort of friends,” he says. “Friendly.”

  Charlie gives him a look as she backs the car out of the driveway. “She called me a whore once.”

  “But that was a long time ago,” Forrest says. “Now you’ve reached a détente. You’re more like North and South Korea.”

  Charlie frowns thoughtfully. “Would South Korea help North Korea move, though?”

  “Well, it’s more like pre-moving,” Forrest says. “Barbara just needs someone to help her pack up the more fragile stuff before the real movers come tomorrow.”

  “But why us?” Charlie asks.

  “I know it means a great deal to Stephen and Ross,” Forrest answers, and a little silence falls between them because, really, that says everything there is to say. Stephen and Ross are Forrest and Barbara’s twin sons, now all grown-up and living in California. Forrest will do anything to stay in their good graces, and so will Charlie, actually, though she can’t help thinking that if it means so much to them, maybe they should come do it themselves.

  Why can’t Barbara and Forrest be one of those acrimonious divorced couples who spit when they say each other’s names? They had done that for a while, in the beginning, with threats and insults and stormy phone calls. It had not been without its satisfactions.

  Charlie had met Barbara before she met Forrest, when she and Barbara had volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline. Charlie had been a psych major at American University then, fulfilling her community-service requirements, and Barbara had been doing something she referred to vaguely as “good works”. As far as Charlie could tell, good works meant that Barbara did a lot of volunteer work—at the hotline, at the hospital gift shop, at the humane society—but no place where she might actually come into physical contact with a real live homeless or mentally ill person. Charlie had always had the impression that Barbara liked her good works to be once-removed.

  Charlie had met Forrest at a fundraising concert Barbara had arranged for the hotline. It was held in the back room of a Mount Pleasant music center, and folding chairs had been provided but not set up—Charlie and Forrest had done that while Barbara supervised the ticket table in the hall. (This is how Charlie knows about Barbara’s nerve damage or whatever the hell it is that prevents her from lifting anything.) During the concert, Charlie and Forrest had sat in the back row and whispered to each other, wondering whether the string quartet was playing so solemnly because that was their style or because they were afraid of their chairs toppling off the stage, which was on the small side. Afterward, Charlie and Forrest took much longer than necessary taking down the chairs—Charlie’s love for Forrest would always be inextricably linked with pain in her lower back—and she could remember standing next to him as they stacked the last chairs on the metal racks. Not even their shoulders were touching but she had felt as though their bodies were pressed together. Then she had glanced toward the hallway and realized that Barbara was watching them from behind the door, one eye visible, like a disapproving cyclops.

  Barbara lives way out in Falls Church, and it takes them forty minutes to get there. Charlie wishes it took longer. She drives as slowly as possible up the long, curving street to Barbara’s home at the top of the hill.

  The house is a white elephant, in the figurative, financial sense—you wouldn’t believe the mortgage, let alone the heating bills—and it looks like a white elephant, too, all sprawling white clapboard with gray flagstone paths winding across the big lawn. It has always seemed to Charlie like the caricature of a doctor’s suburban home—Forrest is an orthopedic surgeon, somewhat ironically given that this is his second knee replacement—and she thinks it’s too showy and old-fashioned. (Forrest and Charlie live in a modern brick house in Georgetown; second place must try harder, or whatever that expression is.)

  They park in front, right by the path so Forrest can get out easily. Charlie sees that an orange-and-white U-Haul trailer has been backed into the long driveway. She helps Forrest out of the car and they walk up to the large front porch and ring the doorbell.

  Barbara answers right away. “Hello, Forrest,” she says. “Hello, 561.”

  Believe it or not, she’s speaking to Charlie. At the suicide hotline, the volunteers were known by number so that no caller could startle a volunteer into revealing another’s name. (Such a thing had happened. A caller had tracked down a volunteer named Bonnie and run his hands through her hair at a bus stop. It was very upsetting for everyone. Also, a caller named Rose had ferreted out the address of the call center and sent them all a box of homemade éclairs.)

  Charlie’s number had been 561 and Barbara still calls her that, possibly as
a way to indicate that Charlie was merely the 561st in the long string of Forrest’s meaningless dalliances. (“I wish,” Forrest had said wistfully, when Charlie shared this theory with him.) Charlie puts up with being called 561 because there are certain concessions you make when you run off with someone’s husband.

  “Hello, Barbara,” she says.

  There is a long moment when Charlie and Barbara size each other up, and Charlie worries that Barbara is thinking the eye-candy isn’t as sweet as it used to be, now that Charlie is in her forties. (Although even in her twenties, Charlie wasn’t what you’d call eye-candy: her looks had always been sharp-edged and intense, more like eye-tequila.) On all of her own moving days, Charlie has worn tennis shoes, sweatpants and a baseball cap, but today she has on a clingy beige turtleneck and jeans tucked into brown Frye riding boots. Over this, she wears a buff-colored suede trench coat with a shearling collar as soft and creamy as bubble bath, and brown kidskin gloves. Her eyeshadow could make a teenage girl sigh with longing, and her short blonde hair is carefully tousled because—because—well, there’s payback for that 561 thing. Don’t go thinking otherwise.

  Barbara looks pretty much the same as always. Her thick ebony-colored hair is still on loan from Cleopatra, though surely it must be dyed by now—nobody’s hair is that black in their sixties. The pageboy cut is no longer as flattering as it once was: the short heavy bangs show too much of her eyebrows and her face is too wide for chin-length hair now. But she’s wearing a turquoise-colored velour warm-up suit and chunky turquoise jewelry, and she looks short and curvy and ripe, which were always her strengths, in Charlie’s opinion.

  “Come in,” Barbara says at last, standing aside, and Forrest shuffles in, followed by Charlie.

  There are many things Charlie dislikes about this house but she especially dislikes how oversized it is. Does anyone really need rooms bigger than playgrounds and ceilings higher than silos and floorboards wider than pizza boxes? (No, they don’t, Charlie thinks.) The house also has an uncomfortable amount of dead, furniture-less space—like, right now, are they standing in a foyer or on the salt flats in Bolivia? At least hotel lobbies have chairs.

  Barbara leads them down the hall toward the dining room. “How’s the knee?” she says to Forrest, over her shoulder.

  “Not bad,” Forrest says. “I can get around now.”

  “Did Scotty Brannon do the surgery?” Barbara says.

  Charlie assumes that this is Barbara’s way of pointing out that she had been close to Forrest’s colleagues, so she says quickly, “No, it was Joel Wiggins,” to establish that times have moved on.

  (Between certain pairs of people, no conversational exchanges are ever neutral.)

  Now they are all standing in the living room. Charlie has been in this house officially—meaning when Barbara was present—on only a handful of occasions, but unofficially, during her affair with Forrest, she was here dozens of times. Barbara probably thinks Charlie had only ever seen the hall and the living room, the bathroom and a glimpse of the kitchen, when in reality she has been upstairs, has had sex with Forrest in nearly every room, had actually lived there for sixteen days with Forrest while Barbara was off tagging sea turtles in the Galapagos. (Charlie has always felt obscurely guilty that it was a turtle-tagging trip and not something less redeeming, like a knitting convention.)

  “Now, Forrest, you sit right here at the dining-room table and help me pack,” Barbara says. On the table there is a brand-new box of bubble wrap, two full rolls of sealing tape, and two sets of shiny-bright scissors. Where are the scissors with the nicked blades and worn handles, the broken tape dispenser? Barbara’s life has always seemed artificial to Charlie, like props and scenery on a stage set. She has never been able to quite believe it goes on when no one is there to witness it.

  “Now, you come with me,” Barbara says to her, and leads her toward the back of the house. “The U-Haul man backed the trailer in last night, so if you could just carry these boxes out and put them in there.”

  She says this as though there are a couple of boxes, a few boxes, maybe four or five boxes, a limited number of boxes, but when Charlie comes around the corner and sees the mountain of boxes stacked outside the kitchen (in another of those dead zones with no furniture), she is appalled. Not only are there dozens upon dozens of boxes, they are all small, about the size of shoeboxes, and wrapped with layers and layers of slick carton tape. A person could carry only one, perhaps two, without dropping them. Of all the times for Barbara to give up her stage-like presentation! These are a real person’s boxes: soft, bendy, grubby cardboard.

  “I’ll be in the dining room if you have any questions,” Barbara says brightly, and goes back along the hall.

  Charlie pulls a soft ribbed hat with a fake-fur pompom from her coat pocket and puts it on.

  She carries the first box out of the back door and realizes that the thing she hates most about this house is not how oversized it is: the thing she hates most is the back porch stairs. The steps are too steep, the treads too narrow, the risers too short—perhaps a goat or other animal with very small hooves could navigate them safely, but not Charlie. Why they were constructed this way, and why they have never been replaced, she can’t imagine.

  But her only choice is to go up and down these awful stairs, or go all the way through the house and out of the front door, then down on the flagstone path and up the driveway, which would be about ten times longer. Clearly this move is going to be like pitting cherries, or doing long division, or traveling with children: difficult and unpleasant however you do it.

  She sighs and descends the back porch stairs, her free hand gripping the railing, and opens the door of the U-Haul trailer. She puts the box on the metal floor bed and pushes it toward the back. In the thirty seconds she’s been outside, the insides of Charlie’s nostrils have shriveled with cold and her lips feel stiff and waxy, like they would stick to her teeth.

  She goes back up the stairs, placing each foot sideways on the narrow treads. She is in the warm house only long enough to know how cold she is, and then she grabs another box, goes down the stairs, puts it in the U-Haul trailer, slides it to the back, goes back up the stairs, feet turned sideways, into the warm house, grabs another small box—

  When Charlie was twenty-seven, she’d had electrolysis done on her bikini line in a dodgy downtown salon owned by an Asian woman who looked like Mao Tse-tung, only less friendly. Having one hair follicle destroyed is not too awful—but having one destroyed every eight seconds for an hour made Charlie nearly gibber with pain. Zap. Zap-zap. Zap. (“Tough one,” the woman had said, clucking her tongue and reaching for a bigger epilation needle.) This move is like electrolysis; it is the unending nature of it that Charlie can’t stand. Zap. Zap. Zap-zap. Zap. On and on.

  By the tenth trip, Charlie’s nose has begun to run, and her feet are numb. Also, something is wrong with her hands—even inside the gloves they seem to be made of metal, like the skeleton hands of the cyborg in Terminator. Surely there is no flesh on or blood in her fingers, keeping them warm.

  Zap. Zap. She decides she will make the next trip out of the front door just to stay inside as long as possible. She takes a small box labeled “brandy snifters”—it couldn’t possibly hold more than three glasses—and walks down the hall past the dining room, where Barbara and Forrest are.

  Right away she wants to kill them. They have turned on the fire (yes, there’s a fireplace in the dining room), put on a Johnny Cash CD, and are sitting at the table, looking warm as toast, and slowly swathing jade figurines in bubble wrap.“Remember that first house we lived in on Jefferson Street?” Barbara says to Forrest fondly. “Where we woke up one morning and found a mouse had died in the candy dish?”

  “And Stevie got so upset,” Forrest says, smiling, “because he wanted to keep it as a pet.”

  “We had to bury it in the backyard,” Barbara muses, “still with a lemon drop stuck in its mouth.”

  “I never felt the same about lemon
drops after that,” Forrest says, and they both laugh softly.

  Really, it’s a good thing that at this moment, Charlie is carrying a box of glassware and not a bunch of steak knives, because otherwise she’d be serving a double life sentence for murder in the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, and serving it proudly.

  She stops in the doorway to the dining room. “I didn’t realize I’d be outside so much,” she says pointedly. “Barbara, do you mind if I borrow a coat?”

  Barbara frowns, and Charlie can almost hear the low, whirring buzz of Barbara’s brain as it tries desperately to think of some valid excuse for not lending her warmer outerwear. But there is no excuse. When someone is making a hundred trips outside with your belongings, you can’t withhold all favors, much as you’d like to. It’s like having to let workmen use your bathroom, even though you know they’re going to leave the door open a crack.

  “Why, certainly,” Barbara says at last, pushing back her chair. “The coat closet is—”

  “I saw it,” Charlie says, turning. “Don’t get up, I’ll help myself.”

  “The blue wool is especially warm,” Barbara calls.

  So, clearly, any coat but the blue wool, Charlie thinks. She steps into the coat closet, which is bigger, of course, than most people’s kitchens. But it is reassuringly jumbled, and smells of athletic socks and wet leather, like all coat closets. Charlie chooses a puffy white down parka that looks warm and also like it might stain easily and have to be dry-cleaned, all of which are positives to her. She pokes through a basket of gloves until she finds a nice pair of fur-lined deerskin ones and pulls them on. Her fingers are too long for them, as they are for all gloves, everywhere. No one has fingers as long as Charlie’s. She puts her own gloves back in her purse.

  She makes a few trips out of the front door and down the flagstone paths, but it’s even worse than the slippery back stairs because she’s out in the cold longer. She begins alternating, first the long route, then the short one. Zap. Zap. Zap. (Actually, not even electrolysis was this bad.) By late morning, Charlie is so cold that her teeth hurt. It feels like the fillings in her molars have been dipped in liquid nitrogen. Zap. Zap-zap. The mountain of boxes doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller.