ANDREA

Her time in the farm attic was coming to an end. The thought was hard to bear. She and Jeffrey had painstakingly detailed twenty of Tess’s thirty-five years on earth, and Jeffrey had suffered through stories from Tess and Andrea’s childhood in South Boston with the police department, the Mafia connections, the priests and nuns. Jeffrey had aired out a few stories of his own, stories Andrea had never heard (Jeffrey and Tess had discovered a mangy fox while hiking around Saranac Lake, and Tess had insisted that Jeffrey call a vet to try to save it. Did Andrea know that? No, she didn’t, and the story delighted her.)

They were down to the wire now, though. They had talked, circumspectly, about the April Peck incident. Andrea had been very tense during this session. She waited for Jeffrey to reveal details she had never heard before, but no, he had been fed the same story as the rest of them. They had talked about the trip to Stowe, their last group trip. This brought them to within six months. And it was the last six months that troubled Andrea, because for the last six months of Tess’s life, Tess had been different. She had been distant and unavailable; she had stopped going to mass with Andrea. She had told Andrea lies.

Lies! Andrea had not confronted Tess about the lies, because she had been baffled by them, embarrassed even. If Tess was lying to Andrea, then there must be something wrong with Andrea. Andrea was hesitant to discuss all this with Jeffrey, but maybe he could help her. This process they’d been through together had been painful and rough in places, but ultimately it was working. It was allowing Andrea to keep a tenuous grip on her sanity.

“So, let me ask you,” she said. She was, as ever, at Jeffrey’s desk, in his chair, overlooking charts and graphs of various crops’ growth, piles of invoices to go out to restaurants, and bills. Jeffrey sat on a milk crate a few feet away. “Did you notice a change in Tess last winter?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Maybe,” he said. “She seemed sadder to me, less gullible, less innocent. All of which you can chalk up to a woman who had been through what she had been through with Greg.”

“Every Saturday night, five o’clock, rain or shine, we used to go to mass, right?”

“Right,” Jeffrey said.

“So, at the beginning of February, the start of Lent, she quits church altogether. She cancels on mass for the first time, saying she has a PTA meeting. At five o’clock on Saturday? And there, at the church, I see both Karen and Lizzie, president and vice president of the PTA, and I know there’s no meeting, I know she’s lied to me. But the thing is that Karen and Lizzie were always at five o’clock mass and Tess knew it, so why would she hand me that particular story if she knew she was going to get caught?”

“Did you say anything to her?” Jeffrey asked.

“No. I let it go.”

“And then?”

“Then she skipped Ash Wednesday. For the first time in thirty years, she did not go to get her ashes. When I asked her what was up, she said her day had been busy. She had a conference with a parent after school. Then she canceled on mass the following week, and then the next week she told me she would meet me at St. Mary’s and she never showed. And when I called her, she said her car wouldn’t start.”

“The Kia?” Jeffrey said.

“The most reliable car in the history of automotives,” Andrea said. “And there was other stuff…” It was all little stuff, stuff only Andrea would notice: Tess’s tone of voice, her attitude. She was at times euphorically happy and at other times she burst into tears for no reason. She was uneven. But all women were uneven, weren’t they? They suffered from PMS, hormonal ups and downs; Tess had had her share of reproductive chaos. Maybe her body chemistry was out of whack. But deep down, Andrea didn’t buy it. Tess was not like other women. For starters, she was a kindergarten teacher: she was patient and kind, creative and organized. She loved children and she believed in the power of paint and crayons and glue and clay and story-books. She had a class pet, a long-haired rabbit named Knickerbocker. She liked to play kick ball and push kids on the swings; she kept a drawer full of snacks and clean underwear and Band-Aids. Her room was always clean, she always wore a skirt or dress, she did not raise her voice. When she wanted quiet, she turned out the lights and held a finger to her lips. She was a saint. To see her moody and peevish… something was wrong.

Andrea had asked Ed more than once, “Do you think there’s something wrong with Tess?” In response, Ed would shovel in mashed potatoes or grunt from behind the newspaper. If Andrea pressed him for an answer, he would say, “She seems fine to me.” Andrea called this a typical male answer. To which Ed said, “When I give you a typical female answer, you can complain.” Andrea brayed with disgust and Ed gave her some line about how women clearly felt things more deeply; they read sub-text where men saw only white space.

“If you think there’s something wrong,” Ed said, “why don’t you ask her?”

Right. Andrea found, however, that she was afraid. Afraid of her own best friend, her own younger cousin, whom she protected and worshipped. It took a night at Delilah’s house and seven glasses of wine for Andrea to confront her. It was Oscar night. Every year Delilah served champagne and good caviar and she made Beef Wellington and they all dressed up (Addison always wore a tux and Phoebe her Valentino or Dior, and the rest of them did what they could). They filled out ballots, threw money into a pot, and the person with the most correct guesses won. This was usually Jeffrey, which was ironic, since he was constitutionally unable to stay awake through an entire movie. Oscar night usually saw them very drunk, and this past year had been no exception. Andrea stumbled across Tess sitting alone on the stairs in her black lace top and black silk pants, and Andrea, with chardonnay courage, decided that this was the time to confront her.