The Full Moon Never Stays

Chapter 2 The Cleaner

The first thing I did was call Marisol.

She had been cleaning our apartment every Thursday for four years. She knew where we kept the spare key and where Daniel hid the good scotch and which drawer in the bathroom held the medications he did not want anyone to know about. She never asked questions and she never, not once, made me feel like the woman who had failed to notice her own husband slipping away.

I met her at a diner on Amsterdam Avenue at 9:00 on a Thursday, which was not a Thursday she was supposed to work.

"You look different," she said, sliding into the booth across from me. She had ordered coffee before she sat down, and the waitress brought it in a chipped white mug.

"Different how?"

"Like someone who finally got the test results."

I laughed. It was a real laugh, the first one in weeks. "I need to ask you something. And I need you to be honest with me, even if it's bad."

Marisol wrapped her hands around the mug. "I have been waiting for you to ask for a long time."

"Since when?"

"Since last summer. The blonde with the perfume." She said it without malice. She said it the way you would report a leak in the ceiling.

"Did she come to the apartment?"

"Once. In August. He said she was a colleague from work. She sat on the sofa and drank the orange juice you bought for the mornings when your stomach was bad. She left a pair of earrings on the coffee table. I put them in the junk drawer."

I had found those earrings in November and assumed they were mine.

"Thank you," I said.

"You are not going to ask me how I knew?"

"I don't need to know how. I need to know what."

Marisol took a sip of her coffee. "What do you want me to do?"

I pulled a folder out of my bag. It was not a very thick folder, because it did not need to be. It contained printouts of the transfer records I had pulled from the joint account, the flight itineraries I had found in the recycling, and a photograph I had taken of the two of them outside a hotel on West 44th that I had been walking past by pure accident, on a day I was supposed to be at a site visit.

"I want you to keep working there," I said. "But I want you to work for me."

Her eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch.

"I'll pay you double," I said. "You keep your schedule. You keep doing your job. But when you see something, you write it down. When the earrings change, when the sheets change, when he leaves in the middle of the night. You tell me."

Marisol looked at me for a long moment. Outside the window, a man walked past with a stroller and a toddler asleep against his chest. She watched them until they turned the corner.

"When my husband left me," she said, "I had two children and no papers and no money. I scrubbed floors in a hotel in Queens for eight years. And when I finally left him, I had saved eleven thousand dollars in a coffee can in the back of my closet. He never found it. He never even looked."

She looked at me. "You should have a coffee can."

"I have something better," I said.

I did. I had four years of savings in a brokerage account Daniel did not know about, because he had never asked. He had opened the account with me when we got married and then forgotten about it, the way he forgot about everything that did not directly affect him. And I had been contributing to it, quietly, every month, the way other people contribute to a church.

I was not rich. But I was no longer poor, and that had turned me into a different kind of woman.

"Okay," Marisol said. "I'll do it."

"I need to ask you one more thing."

"Ask."

"Was there ever anyone else? Before her?"

She looked at her coffee. "There was a woman in the fall. A different one. She came to the Christmas party, the one at the restaurant, and she spent the whole night laughing at his jokes. She had red hair. I don't think you noticed."

I had noticed. I had noticed and I had told myself I was being paranoid, that I was the wife who saw enemies in every pretty face. I had apologized to Daniel for being jealous. He had said, You have nothing to worry about.

"My mother used to tell me," Marisol said, "that a man who can look at you and lie is a man who rehearsed it before he met you."

"Your mother sounds like she knew things."

"She buried two husbands and a brother. She knew everything."

I paid for the coffee. I walked out into the gray November afternoon and I felt something I had not felt in years.

I felt awake.