The Replacement Wife

by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Lotus Design N Print

At Celia’s house, everything is spotless. The sun shines brighter in her living room than it does in yours, and the food tastes better than anything you make. Not a smudge of lipstick smears her perfect white teeth, and her waist is still as trim as yours hasn’t been since freshman year of high school.

The point of the gathering is the silent auction for the local food bank that Celia arranges each year. You live in the same neighborhood and your husbands work together, hers at a slightly higher level than yours, so you go to this party every time. You have to. Year after year, you must return to this spotless living room, the carpet so impossibly plush and white, the windows sparklingly clear, not a speck of dust on the ultra-modern candelabra chandelier — an ornament that would look absurd in your house. Here, it magically unites the elements of the room.

You don’t like Celia. You don’t like how her fingernail polish always matches something she’s wearing, not the most obvious thing, like her shirt, but some subtle shade from her scarf or from the design on her printed skirt. You suspect her wardrobe consists of an array of cross-coordinated hues of floral shirts, patterned scarves, nail polish, and eye shadow, guaranteeing the perfect harmony of any combination she might choose.

You wear the first clothes you had time to grab after your youngest came home sick from kindergarten. Your first outfit, the one you had chosen to wear to Celia’s perfect house, which you’d squeezed into at the end of your workday, is the one your kindergartener threw up on. It wasn’t perfect either, but it was better than the tan chinos and the low-cut yellow blouse that didn’t used to fit so snugly around your hips. You forgot jewelry, except for the pair of earrings you were wearing to match outfit number one, that don’t match outfit number two, but your third grader bought them for you for your birthday, with your husband’s help, so you could excuse the faux pas sentimentally if anyone who notices happens to mention it out loud.

You prefer Celia’s predecessor, Amy Lynn. Amy Lynn was never perfect, never polished her nails, and occasionally belched like a sailor in the backyard to a responding chorus of variously discomfited and amused guffaws. She always drank one too many Bud Lights at parties, so she swayed a little when she walked from room to room in this same house, before it was perfect.

Amy Lynn would have felt physically uncomfortable with the colors Celia chose for the walls: the bright coral of the dining room, the creamy seafoam of the living room, the charcoal gray with brilliant white accents in the kitchen. Every color a tad too forward and surprising for you or Amy Lynn to choose for yourselves, but so perfectly balanced together that you hadn’t noted them individually until after your fourth or fifth visit.

Amy Lynn left the walls the builder’s original simple blond. She wore her slippers even when they entertained. And jeans. She was funny. She told stories that bordered on inappropriate, like the one about the assistant principal who flirted with her on the produce aisle at the grocery store thinking she was someone else. He was wearing flimsy running shorts, and she compared his erection to the banana he was holding in his hand.

If Celia said banana, she would be referring to the shade of your blouse. If she said Bud Light, she would be offering one to you, from the 12-pack your husband brought, while she sipped her single martini with the French olives slowly, pacing her enjoyment across the duration of whatever gathering.

Celia has been holding this silent auction since her first year married to Amy Lynn’s ex. In a matter of a few short months ten years ago, Amy Lynn and Sanders hammered out their divorce; carpenters and contractors deconstructed and reconstructed the house; and Sanders hosted his own second wedding in the very backyard where Amy Lynn had grown tomatoes and okra — that patch having been converted to a most precious archway of trellises now robust with clematis and morning glory.

Celia’s garden is better than Amy Lynn’s had been, and, of course, better than yours.

In the kitchen and out of earshot, you and another of the wives remark on the spinach and chicken tartlets, the tiny flaky crusts, the subtle spicing, the tenderness of the meat. Of course Celia made these herself, along with a half-dozen variations on salad, a platter of petit-fours, a roast turkey, her specialty seven-layer cake.

Sotto voce, you and the other wife suspect that Celia must be compensating for something. Easily a dozen years younger than Amy Lynn was, than you are, Celia’s skin lacks a single blemish. Her body lacks an ounce of fat. Her hair cascades the way only perfect hair can. Why would she need to prepare food so delicately? Why would her house need to be so very clean? Her gardens so resplendent? What is she hiding?

Once Amy Lynn confided that Sanders had a streak in him. He seemed kind, was pleasant enough to look at, but the more success he enjoyed at work, the more he expected from her at home. If he announced a trip to Bermuda, say, he’d dictate a new sexual position in the bedroom. Amy Lynn’s retelling was graphic, but remembering her words in the house the way it is now and with Celia so nearby, you can’t bring yourself to reimagine the visuals. What you do remember are Amy Lynn’s poorly hidden bruises and her sleepless, chased-animal eyes those last months before she finally left.

You never reached out to her, you realize, as you let a second, or fourth, spinach and chicken tartlet melt onto your tongue. You’ve heard other divorced people talk about their friends choosing sides, and no matter which half of the couple mentions it, it’s spoken with sadness and a shock of betrayal that is both unforeseen and typical. You understand now that you chose Sanders, even though you liked Amy Lynn better.

At the time, you believed your snide disregard for Celia somehow honored Amy Lynn, even as you stood in her old garden, witnessing Sanders’ marriage to the replacement wife, too soon after the morning you glimpsed Amy Lynn’s overburdened red Subaru station wagon backing out of their driveway its last time. It was a trash day, the first minutes of dawn, the sky white with dull early light. A lampstand stuck partway out the passenger-side backseat window. Amy Lynn reversed up that driveway at a tear, the wheels squealing against the asphalt. With the car crammed so full, she couldn’t possibly see out the back. You had forgotten until now how you wondered if Amy Lynn might have hoped the garbage truck would come along at the perfect clip to demolish her car, all her things, and herself along with it.

You take one slow sip of the cool golden wine in the glass in your hand, and it blends all the flavors in your mouth, makes them rhyme with each other, while the perfection around you — the luscious food, the gorgeous house, the beautiful, newer wife — sours in your mind.

Celia strides up to you, bearing a clipboard of perfect prizes to silently bid upon. She stretches it out to you, her nails gleaming in the fashionable candelabra’s light. “I hope you’ll find something you like,” she says, and you can feel every scrap of the food you’ve swallowed all these years in her house ball up inside you and rise, jamming at the top of your throat, stoppering your voice.

You traded Amy Lynn for this woman, and you blamed Celia instead of yourself. You meet her eyes for maybe the first time over the clipboard, and you search for the least trace of the perfect happiness you have so long begrudged her. You think even Amy Lynn would feel sorry for how hard she must be trying.

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Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, October 2023), and the forthcoming novel, Without You Here (Flexible Press, September 2024). Her words also appear in Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Writer’s Digest, Electric Literature, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and many other journals. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia; writes and copy edits for Virginia Wine & Country Life and Charlottesville Family Magazine; and serves as assistant fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review.