Trapped in Stepmoms Shadow

The smell of another woman's perfume doesn't wash out of a marriage. It settles into the fibers of the couch, the curtains, the collar of his shirt. For three weeks, I'd been smelling it. Not on him. In the house.

I found the first bottle behind the guest room toilet. A slim glass rectangle, rose-gold cap, a name I didn't recognize in looping script. I held it to my nose, then wished I hadn't. Jasmine and something sharp, like a lemon rind left too long in the sun. I put it back exactly where I'd found it, angled the same way against the baseboard, and I didn't say a word to Marcus.

That was three weeks ago. Now it was Tuesday, and there were four bottles.

I stood in the guest bathroom with the door locked, even though I was alone in the house, even though the school pickup wasn't for another two hours. The fourth bottle sat on the edge of the sink where anyone could see it. That was new. That was a message.

Downstairs, the back door slammed.

"Stepmom! I'm home!"

Ellis. Twelve years old, all elbows and attitude, and he'd been calling me Stepmom for eight months, ever since the wedding, ever since his mother moved to Portland with a man who sold boat parts. He said it like a title. Like a diagnosis.

I pocketed the bottle and went down.

He was in the kitchen, shoes on, backpack dumped in the middle of the floor like a dead animal. He had the refrigerator open and was drinking orange juice straight from the carton.

"Glass," I said.

"You're not my mom."

"And yet here I am, asking you to use a glass."

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and put the carton back. He didn't get a glass. He stood there in his school polo, a ketchup stain on the sleeve, and stared at me the way he did when he wanted to see how long I'd hold his gaze before I looked away. I'd learned to look away first. It wasn't surrender. It was strategy.

"Where's Dad?"

"Work."

"He's always at work."

I didn't have anything to say to that, because it was true. Marcus left at six-forty every morning and came home at eight, sometimes nine, sometimes later. He kissed my forehead on the way out and kissed my cheek on the way in, and in between there was a whole day where I lived in his house with his son and tried to figure out how I'd ended up here.

I'm thirty-four years old. I have a master's degree in art history. I used to have a job at a gallery in the city, a small one, the kind that shows local painters and serves cheap wine at openings. I was good at it. I knew the artists by name, knew which canvases would sell before the first guest arrived. Then I married Marcus, and we moved to this town, and now I spend my days smelling perfume that isn't mine and pretending I don't notice.

Ellis had moved to the living room. He was on the couch with the TV remote, flipping through channels with the sound off. I watched him from the doorway. His jaw was set the way his father's got when he was lying about something small, something he thought didn't matter.

"Hey," I said. "Did your dad have someone over this weekend?"

The remote stopped. He didn't look at me.

"What?"

"Someone came by. While I was at my sister's."

"Nobody came by."

"Ellis."

"I said nobody came by." He turned the TV on, loud, some cartoon with bright colors and screaming voices. He pulled his knees up to his chest and made himself small on the couch. That was his tell. When Ellis was lying, he got quiet. When he was scared, he got small.

I went back to the kitchen and opened the drawer where I kept the mail. Under a stack of bills, there was a receipt from the hardware store, dated Saturday, for a can of paint. Eggshell white. Marcus hadn't mentioned painting anything.

The guest room. He'd painted the guest room while I was gone.

I walked back upstairs. The guest room door was closed, which was strange, because we never closed it. I opened it.

The walls were eggshell white, still smelling faintly of chemicals. The furniture was in the same place. The bed was made. But on the nightstand, next to the lamp, there was a small ceramic dish, hand-painted with blue flowers, and inside it a pair of gold hoop earrings.

I knew those earrings. I'd seen them before. They belonged to a woman named Diane, who worked at the bank on Main Street, who had helped me open a checking account two months ago and told me she loved my wedding ring.

I sat down on the edge of the guest bed and stared at the earrings until the light through the window shifted and the room got dim. My hands were shaking. I didn't know why. It wasn't like I hadn't known. You don't smell the same perfume four times without knowing.

But knowing in your body and knowing in your head are different things, and the earrings made it real in a way the perfume hadn't. Perfume could be explained. A woman in the house for a reason. A friend of Marcus's from work, maybe, someone who left a bottle behind. But earrings on a nightstand in a room that had been freshly painted while I was away, that was a story with a different shape.

I picked them up. They were warm from the sun through the glass. I put them in my pocket next to the bottle of perfume, and I went back downstairs.

Ellis was still on the couch, but the TV was off now. He was staring at the wall, at the place where his mother's photograph used to hang before Marcus took it down.

"Stepmom," he said, without looking at me.

"Yeah."

"Is dinner soon?"

"In a minute."

He nodded. He didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't have to. Kids know when the house is holding its breath. They know before anyone tells them anything.

I stood in the kitchen doorway with my hand in my pocket, my fingers curled around the earrings, and I thought about the fact that Marcus would be home in four hours, and that I had a decision to make about what kind of woman I was going to be when he walked through the door.

The phone on the counter buzzed. A text from Marcus. Running late. Don't wait up.

I looked at the message for a long time. Then I typed back, That's fine. Take your time.

And I meant it.