Femme Fatale and other stories

eat, wandering around the house in her robe. In that robe. All these clothes, and she spends most of her time in that robe.”
    “Oh.” Terri had grabbed it because the blue flannel looked so ordinary, the antidote to the expensive lingerie she had probably damaged, stretching it to fit her so-very-different proportions. “I’m sorry, I’ll—”
    “It’s okay.” Waving his hands in front of his face, fanning himself, as if it were a summer’s day instead of a late-winter one. “It’s no big deal. You should keep it. She’ll never miss it. Keep it.”
    She knew, from the River Run Self-Esteem Project, that this was how such things began. Men gave you gifts or money, then asked for favors in return. Teachers, coaches, neighbors—the girls at River Run had been taught to assume they were all potential predators, far more sex-crazed than their male peers.
    “I couldn’t possibly,” she demurred.
    “Suit yourself. Put, um, everything back where you found it.”
    And with that, he was gone. Terri listened to him leave the room and walk downstairs, then waited another minute before going into the bedroom to change. She then returned to the closet and made sure everything was where it belonged. She assumed Mr. Delafield would tell Mrs. Delafield what she had done, and she would lose this weekly gig, an easy $25 by anyone’s standards. But losing her job did not bother her as much as the encounter itself. It was not unlike a dream she had from time to time. A man, an older one—one taller and darker than Mr. Delafield—found her alone somewhere and just … took over. It was at once a scary and comforting dream, one that always ended a little too soon. That was what she was feeling now—relieved, yet desirous of knowing what might have happened if Mr. Delafield had kept going. Would he have been more insistent with a different kind of girl—someone truly beautiful, like Katarina Swann, or someone weak and shy, like Bennie Munson? It was Terri’s lot to fall in the middle of that continuum—pretty enough, but not a raving beauty. Nor was she like Bennie, someone who all but begged to be used and abused by the world.
    Mrs. Delafield came home at seven, as always, and seemed indifferent to Terri’s news that Mr. Delafield was in his den, watching television while working out on his elliptical machine. No one, not even Terri, stopped to wonder why he hadn’t sent Terri home and assumed Hugo’s care. For the next six days, Terri waited for Mrs. Delafield to call and say she wouldn’t be needing Terri anymore, but the call never came. She went back at three P.M. the following week and everything was as it always was—the quiet house, the listless baby (who now seemed more precious to Terri because he was doomed), the gun in the lingerie drawer. Caught once, Terri knew she should turn over a new leaf, but she found herself in the walk-in closet within twenty minutes, modeling lingerie and holding the gun. This time she moved on to Mrs. Delafield’s evening dresses, which she had never dared touch before. She listened for the door to beep, refusing to admit to herself that her ears were straining toward that sound because she wanted to hear it. She had started a diet—for senior prom, she assured her mother, who grudgingly allowed it. Terri’s mom hated diets. But it was working already, she could tell. Mrs. Delafield’s things were not so tight in the waist this week.
    Mr. Delafield did not come home early that day, or the next week, or the week after. He never came home early again. In April, he stopped coming home at all. His absence, like most absences, took time to register. First a neighbor realized the Town Car had stopped gliding in and out of the driveway at its usual hours. Then Terri noticed the pile of bundled-up
Wall Street Journals
in the three-car garage, placed in a basket, as if Mr. Delafield might return and want to work through two weeks, three weeks, an entire month of business news. It was only when Mrs. Delafield put out the whole collection for recycling—on the wrong day, in the wicker basket, and still bundled in their plastic wrappers, in violation of every protocol—that Terri realized Mr. Delafield was never coming back. The following Tuesday, Mrs. Delafield paid her $20 instead of the usual $25 and Terri finally understood that the extra five dollars had always been a tip, one Mrs. Delafield had decided she could no longer afford.
    On the third Tuesday in May, Terri