Chapter One Hutch and Eva
Friday, June 13
The bad luck started late on a Friday night in June, a week after the Hutchinsons' tenth anniversary. The day had been hot, and the night was hotter. It was going on eleven and as usual Eva and Hutch were getting on each other's nerves. After about fifteen minutes of silent rage, Hutch said aloud the words he'd been thinking for weeks.
"I've got to get out."
"And go where? To the bathroom? To the store?" Eva asked. She was lying across their king-size bed, reading the newspaper and glancing occasionally at ESPN.
"Out of here." Hutch swept his hand dramatically to signify everything around him, including Eva, and then slumped down on the edge of the bed like the breath had been knocked out of him.
"Out of where?" Eva asked again.
"Out of here."
"Out of where? The bed? The room? The country?"
"Here."
"What the hell are you talking about, Hutch?"
"Why are we lying to each other, Eva? Why after all these years can't we just tell each other the truth?"
Eva tossed him a dirty look, and with a loud, exaggerated flourish fanned the newspaper in front of her face and spoke through it.
"Get over it." She lit a cigarette, and the smoke curled around the paper in a hazy, smelly wreath.
"Dammit." Hutch narrowed his eyes as it settled around his face.
"I'm not giving it up, if that's what you're bitching about," Eva said. "You have your dirty little habits, which I know you don't want me going into at this point, and I have mine. So get off my ass about it. Besides eating, it's the only physical pleasure I have left," she added with a pointed, nasty edge.
Hutch glared at her for a moment. "I can't think of any'dirty little habits' I have that are as nasty as that cigarette, and don't blame me. You're the one who never wants to do it."
She hadn't said anything about sex, but Hutch knew that was what she was talking about.
"There's nothing wrong with me. I just get tired of taking the initiative," Eva said.
"What did you say?"
"You heard me."
Hutch got up from the bed, walked to the blue-tiled bathroom that adjoined their white and blue bedroom, peed loudly in the toilet, flushed it and then, leaving the toilet seat up, lumbered into his walk-in closet. Suddenly, like a man gone mad, he went through his clothes: the smart, expensive suits he wore to lure big clients, his everyday workingman's denims, the tux he'd bought at the insistence of his best friend Donald Mason, who swore that every man should own at least two before he turned fifty (Hutch had six years to go), and the various shirts, sweaters, pants, sweat suits, jeans and jackets that marked his ten years with Eva, his second wife.
Silently, Eva watched him pack, then said after a few moments, "Have you lost your mind?"
"No."
"Then what are you doing?"
"I told you."
"What's going on?"
"I'm just tired, Eva."
"Tired?" Eva folded the newspaper down in front of her and watched Hutch grab the oversize gray suitcase she'd bought him last year for his birthday. "Tired of what? I have no idea what you're talking about."
"You know as well as I do." Hutch shifted through his clothes, throwing some into the suitcase at his feet, tossing others back onto the floor of his closet. His pajama bottoms slipped down over his hips, and he gave them an angry yank, pulling them back around his trim waist, catching aglimpse of himself in the mirror.
He would be forty-four next month, and women half his age still flirted with him so boldly it embarrassed him. He took after his father, Lucas Hutchinson, Sr., who, despite the loss of his mind before he died, had the body of a man twenty years his junior. Even now, Hutch could still haul a sack of cement over his head into one of the three trucks that had come to him with his father's small construction firm and outwork most of the men on his crews. Although he had inherited his strength and stamina from his father, he'd gotten his long-lashed eyes and tender nature from his mother. But he'd always hidden that gentle part of himself when he'd been a boy. He was his father's son, a rough and-tumble boy who liked to fight and had won two medals for bravery when he'd been a medic in the last years of the Vietnam War. But it was his mother's nature that nurtured the dying and held the hands of those who writhed in pain. The tough kid won tonight. He slipped out of his pajamas and angrily yanked on his boxer shorts, jeans, and a rumpled sweater.
"I'm sick of all the lies we tell each other, Eva. I'm sick of how empty I feel, how empty we leave each other feeling. There's no joy between us. I just want out." He bent down and opened his suitcase, still wondering if he was doing the right thing.
Eva climbed out of bed and faced him, her anger written in a line across her pursed lips. "What brought all this on?"
A look of defeat settled on Hutch's face. "I don't know."
"You started this mess, getting me out of bed at this time of night with this foolishness, and you're saying you don't know why you're going? Hutch, what in the hell is wrong withyou?" Hutch sank down on the bed beside her; their bodies barely touched, "Is this some kind of male menopause bullshit?"
Hutch studied the dimple on her cheek that deepened whenever she cried or laughed. The first moment he'd seen her, he'd fallen in love with the soft deep indentation ...