The Resident (part twenty-nine)

Chapter Four

An Odd Man Out

(part twenty-nine)

“I did agree, I know. I’m not a hugely disciplined person. And I have John.”

Their phone was on the kitchen wall. He was in the shower, using a credit card, reconstituting a bar of soap with each scraping added to the dish.

This might be a brilliant idea…

Then his wife, and her affair with someone she’d met at Oathbreach, stilled his hand.

Then he began to scrape furiously.

“Gemma, I know. I’ll sound awful to you, but they can’t undo it, can they? They’re stuck with me whether I survey for them or not. Anyway, they have plenty of… Okay, that. I would never tell him.”

A long pause. A different pause, somehow, than waiting for the other person to stop talking.

A lower voice: “Okay, yes, he is in the apartment. Um…bathroom? That doesn’t mean he’s hearing me.”

John emptied the card, looked up to meet Claudie’s eyes. She had the phone cord pulled all the way to the bathroom. “Can you hear what I’m saying to my friend?”

“No.”

“I’m always careful. I’m always trying.” Her voice faded on the way back.

Gemma was a girl’s name, though. He felt he’d never heard it, but felt again that on PBS, the British shows his mother watched in the 70s…

He could almost believe in a Fawlty Towers actress, or a Poldark one, a subsumed Gemma.

At a later point, when you could look up every idle question’s answer on the internet, he would have tidied the loose thread and put Gemma away. First, before confronting that his wife was not dating a classmate.

He took his soapy MasterCard to the kitchen sink.

“Why doesn’t the shower clean itself?” Claudie asked. “That is actually strange.”

“It’s like lard. Soap. What’s left after the suds is waterproof.”

“I guess that’s not one hundred percent true,” he added, to her disbelief. “It dissolves in water, but it takes extra time.”

She went off, returned, after he’d heard the shower running. “But why?”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Oh, she’s Aura’s… Mostly, she’s Aura’s friend.”

A bent of John’s, a product of the Grey, was allowing the energy drain of pursuit to rear and overpower him. He knew Claudie’s dismissal didn’t mesh. The friend of a casual friend doesn’t call to scold you.

“I see you get broody,” she said, on an appropriate fall day. In the little woods around their new home, the morning’s sun gone. A frost warning for the night. Green ferns through fallen maple leaves, the gold. They had Aura’s house…for a retribution?

No, she was innocent. She and her daughter, Teconieshe had said, were having an apartment made at Oathbreach. They wouldn’t want the house after all.

42

An Odd Man Out

The Resident (part thirty)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)