The Pocket Wife by Susan Crawford

the clever friend, the unfettered lover, the ideal companion. For a brief, bright clot of time, she shines, making deep but fleeting connections with people she meets in line at the post office or waiting for a tune-up in town. When days later she finds these papers, these cell-phone numbers and e-mail addresses, she often doesn’t even remember the faces connected to them.
    She assumes that not all the invitees will come. Twelve, she figures. Fourteen tops. She isn’t even sure she wants the neighbors chatting with one another, possibly mentioning that Peter’s never home or that they’d seen him sneaking through the back door of the victim’s house. Still, she invites them all; she’ll cast the deck and let the cards fall as they may.
    She polishes the dustless wooden bottoms of her chairs and thumbs through Brunches for Bunches, a cookbook she discovered on a yard-sale jaunt with Celia several months before. On the way to the grocery store, she stops at a bakery and picks up some croissants and cinnamon rolls and then, on impulse, a few raspberry crullers. She’ll make scrambled eggs, she decides, and maybe fry some bacon. Do her neighbors eat bacon? She opts for veggie sausage and turkey-bacon strips, orange juice and the pastries she’s brought from the bakery. It’s not, after all, about the food. It’s about transparency. Clarity.
    Ronald is the first to arrive. Peter shakes his hand and settles him on the living-room sofa while Dana putters in the kitchen, scramblingeggs and popping croissants into the toaster oven. Orange juice sits ready in a cut-glass pitcher on the dining table beside a large bouquet of daisies.
    â€œHi, Ronald!” She stands in the kitchen doorway. Sweat sticks tiny curls of hair to her forehead; the air conditioner drones gamely.
    â€œDana,” he says, but he seems reluctant to take his eyes off Peter.
    â€œSo you two meet at last,” she says.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Peter cups his hand around his ear as if he hasn’t heard a thing, and the gesture is an unpleasant reminder of their trip from Boston, of his white hand locked around his phone. Around the Tart. Around the lilting voice that titillates and lures.
    â€œRonald asked about you the other day at the Root Seller. I thought I told you. Anyway, he’s been very anxious to meet you.”
    â€œAnd now it seems you have,” Peter says in a jovial, neighborly voice, but even from the kitchen Dana notices the slight tremor in his hand as he bends to line up the pillows on the sofa.
    â€œYes.” Ronald draws himself up straighter. He stares at Peter’s face, his eyes small and dark, like raisins stuck in dough. “I’ve seen you before,” he says. His voice is low and tight, a bit menacing.
    â€œOh,” Peter says. “Probably in the hood.” Again he uses this strangely jolly voice that Dana doesn’t recognize.
    â€œI don’t think so.” Ronald squints at Peter. “No. It was somewhere else,” he says as Peter walks over to the door where Wanda and her two boys are visible through the screen.
    â€œHey,” he says, a little of the jolliness gone from his voice. “Good to see you, Wendy.”
    â€œWanda,” she says. She slides past him and waves at Dana in the kitchen doorway.
    Lon Nguyen is the next to arrive, with his wife, who speaks no English, and the two of them debate at length in Vietnamese before Lon takes one of the cinnamon buns and sticks it on a plate. He’s wearing flip-flops as usual. Dana hasn’t seen thesebefore, and she wonders if he has a pair for whatever occasion may arise—if so, these would be the brunching flip-flops, a tad festive with a sky blue thong. She scrambles another batch of eggs and pours them into the frying pan as the front door opens again.
    â€œHello,” she calls. People bubble through the front door, and Peter stands back. He bows, makes a sweeping,