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She decided to throw caution to the wind. Worst-case scenario, she wouldn’t get invited to next year’s holiday party. Best-case, she got to see what happened if she brought her fullest, most charismatic game to the project of flirting with one of the hottest people in America.
“Yes, Official Wife, and on her Facebook, she’s got recent pictures with him. Still blond. Same woman. Their kids are thirteen years older. No Brunette in sight.”
Katie looked up at the ceiling. She was thinking. Her leggings had a hole in them by the hipbone. Wil thought it was probably from a cat claw. Up close, she looked a little tired, but her skin was like a fucking Rembrandt. Spilling light.
At some point, someone had fixed the tiny chip in the corner of her front tooth, which was too bad.
Then Katie put the rest of the potato salad on her platter, and sausage, and took the three rolls that Wil handed her, and wrinkled her nose at the cucumbers. “What’s your plan?”
“Don’t have one.” Wil smiled. “We agreed not to investigate on our own. That’s where we left it back then. That’s where it stands today.”
“Make a plan,” Katie said. “I’m here for a month. Though, you know”—Katie stepped into Wil’s undefended personal space—“I was never actually sure if our investigation of Mr. Cook was an investigation so much as it was a way to spice up hanging out in your Bronco.”
Wil grinned, almost laughed. “Did hanging out in my Bronco need to be spicier?”
Katie didn’t answer that question, but she did give Wil a smile not unlike the one Wil had seen on the stage in Chicago. “My original objection still stands.”
“Your original objection being there’s no evidence this is a second family. It could be an affair. Now well into its second decade without being discovered by Official Wife.”
“That’s my position. Although I suppose they could be polyamorous.” Katie put a slice of coconut cake next to the potato salad. Her platter was going to start groaning. “A little unconventional for Green Bay, but we’ve seen more of the world, haven’t we, Wil? So we can come at this from a new angle and apply the benefit of our extensive experience.”
The look she gave Wil very unexpectedly made Wil go hot all over.
But Wil recovered, because she wasWil Greene. “I still have the Bronco.”
Katie’s eyes widened in genuine surprise, forgetting she was cage-match-flirting with Wil. “Like, it runs?”
“Smooth as an old lawnmower, Katie.”
Katie grabbed a fork and looked at the ceiling again, grinning, just like she used to when Wil said something that enormouslypleased her and she had to take a moment to feel her big feeling inside herself. “Pick me up where the driveway goes around to the back at eleven. Bring supplies.”
“Tonight?” But Wil wasn’t seriously incredulous. She was getting what she wanted, what she’d figured out shecouldwant when she made eye contact with Katie at the buffet and they both broke out in smiles.
Katie was home for a month, and Wil was going to make the most of it.
“Time’s a-wasting,” Katie said. “What? We’re going to let this affair go on for another thirteen years without interference or violating an entire family’s privacy?”
“What you mean is, we’re going to find out once and for all that Mr. Cook has two families. Right here in Green Bay. And not in the sister wives way, but in the traveling salesman or sailor way.”
Because this had been the debate. They agreed 100 percent that Mr. Cook was the absolute worst kind of human. Where they differed was on the question of whether they’d inadvertently discovered he was committing straightforward adultery—Katie’s position—or whether he was actually a bigamist.
There had been a fantasy, shared between them, of figuring out the truth so they could tell both women and free them from their disastrous attachment to the terrible human they mutually seemed to love.
“I never bought the two families thing. Still don’t.” Katie took a big bite of potatoes. “Oh my fucking God. No one cooks like my mom.”
“No one does. I would take a bath in the potato salad.”
“Would you?” Katie stabbed a sausage. “Would you actually? Would you fill even an average-sized bathtub up with my mother’s German potato salad and then take off all of your clothes and,like”—Katie mimed,incrediblywell, squishing into a bathtub full of wet potatoes—“into the potato salad?”
“You’ve only made it more attractive.” Wil said this with her best smile, the one she’d been accused of deploying for nefarious purposes, and then watched Katie’s eyes widen a fraction. “Now I’m not going to be able to stop thinking about it. I knew a woman once who’d filled a tub with Doritos. It was a whole thing for her. I can’t say that it sounded bad.”
“German potato salad tubisweirdly hot, now that I really commit,” Katie said. “Like Roman hedonism meets capitalist excess. Midwest German–style.”
Wil gave herself a minute to thoroughly stare at Katie Price.
Katie stared right back at her, spearing her fork into a bite of potato salad and eating it without taking her eyes off Wil.
There was an element here that Wil didn’t understand. An under-the-surface thing coming from Katie, not from her. Wil wasn’t much of an under-the-surface person.