Something Came Up

Six years is three hundred and twelve Tuesdays.

Clara had not worked it out straight away. She worked it out one evening in February, sitting at the kitchen table in front of a plate going cold, waiting for a man who would come home at a quarter past eleven and apologise.

Three hundred and twelve Tuesdays.

The excuses had evolved over time, which was information in itself. The first years: a client, a case, a missed train. Then, around the third year, they had simplified. Something came up. Three words. He no longer bothered to make anything up.

What should have alerted her much earlier is that he did not lie badly.

He did not lie at all.

— Are you home late on Tuesday?

— Yes.

— What are you doing?

A pause. Not a hesitation — a pause.

— I can't tell you.

That had been the answer for six years. Not “nothing”, not “I'm seeing a client”. I can't tell you.

And the worst part is the look that went with it. Thomas looked her straight in the face when he said it. A liar looks away. He did not.

Tuesday is like any other day until six in the evening.

Clara gets up at a quarter past six. For eleven years she has worked at the Verzelles dairy cooperative, in quality control: she receives the analyses, tracks the readings, decides whether a batch goes out or does not. She likes this work for a reason she has never told anybody: at the end of the day a thing is true or it is not, and a figure does not argue.

At five she collects Alix from after-school club, seven years old, who always has a drawing to show in the car and shows it upside down.

Jonas is ten and has been coming home alone since Easter, which took three months to negotiate.

On Tuesdays they eat early. Clara lays the table for three and puts out the fourth plate anyway, out of habit, and generally takes it away around eight when she tidies up.

The children no longer ask.

That is what hurt most, in February, when she did the arithmetic. Jonas was four when the Tuesdays began. He has never known anything else. For him, a father is somebody who is away on Tuesdays, the way it rains in November.

Her sister had an opinion, of course.

— Clara. Six years. Every Tuesday. Do you want me to draw you a picture?

— He comes home. He always comes home.

— They always come home, you poor darling.

They were in the car, parked outside the school, waiting for the children to come out. Nadège smokes in her car with the window down four centimetres, which fools nobody and least of all her daughters.

— And he has no hidden phone, said Clara. I looked.

— You looked.

— Twice. I was ashamed both times. There's nothing. No messages, no photographs, no calls on Tuesdays. Nothing. His phone is the most boring phone in the world.

— The bank statement?

— Nothing there either. He fills up on Tuesday evening, always at the same petrol station, at ten-something. That's all.

Nadège drew on her cigarette.

— He fills up every Tuesday?

— Every two weeks.

— So he's driving.

Clara said nothing, because she had thought of it, and because thinking it out loud with her sister made it official.

— Either he's a criminal mastermind, said Nadège, sounding her horn gently at somebody parking badly, or you're not looking in the right place.

What has to be understood, and it took Clara six years to put into words, is that Thomas has never been absent.

He is there on Wednesday morning to take Alix to swimming. He knows the teacher's name, the speech therapist's name, the name of the boy who bothers Jonas on the bus. He spent two nights at the hospital when Alix had bronchiolitis. He mends things on Saturdays and mends them badly, which has become a family joke.

In twelve years of marriage he has never forgotten a birthday, never shouted, never slammed a door.

There is just this hole.

A hole of five hours a week, from six on Tuesday evening to eleven at night, which Clara is not allowed to enter and which is not explained.

And one day you realise you have spent more time imagining that hole than living the rest.

The following Tuesday, Clara left the children at her mother's.

She said she had a late meeting. She lied looking her mother in the face, and realised, with a small unpleasant shock, that it was far easier than she had thought.

Danièle said: “Take your time.” And then, as Clara was closing the car door: “You know you can tell me, don't you.”

Clara pretended not to hear.

She parked two hundred metres from her husband's practice, engine off, and waited.

She had brought a book she did not open.

At twenty to seven, the grey Volvo came out of the car park.

It did not turn towards home.