The Husband Hour

by Jamie Brenner

  “My parents were married for twenty-two years,” Emerson said. “Till death did they part, as promised in their vows.”

  Lauren nodded, not sure where this was going.

  “Now is the time to ask yourself if you are really prepared to make the same commitment,” he said.

  “What? Of course.”

  “Lauren, let’s be honest. You can barely handle being a hockey girlfriend. How will you be able to endure being a military wife?”

  Lauren, floored, couldn’t think of a thing to say. At that point, Emerson was the only person other than Lauren and Rory who knew that Rory was planning to enlist. Lauren had made Rory promise not to tell anyone else until after their wedding. She didn’t want to worry her parents, didn’t want the specter of it hanging over the day. Lauren hated herself for her weakness, but a part of her wished Rory had also spared her the news until after the wedding. But that didn’t make her a bad person or a bad wife-to-be.

  “I know you see yourself as some sort of surrogate father to Rory,” Lauren said, shaking. “But you’re not his father. And I’m going to be his wife. So don’t ever talk to me like that again.”

  Emerson shook his head. “Fine. Have it your way. But next time there’s a problem—and we both know there will be—don’t come crying to me.”

  Oh, how the damning judgment of Rory’s revered older brother had stung. Maybe on some level, she had taken it to heart. Maybe she hadn’t told Rory about the conversation because she’d been afraid Emerson was right.

  Lauren shoved the box deeper in her closet and closed the door. He wasn’t right. Was he? It was so jumbled in her mind, what had happened versus her feelings about what had happened. All these years later, she still couldn’t make sense of it.

  Matt Brio wanted the truth about Rory’s life and death. If Lauren was being honest with herself, so did she.

  Had he spoken to Emerson? If so, what had her former brother-in-law said?

  She paced back and forth, then finally reached for her phone and left Nora a message that she’d be late to work tomorrow.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Matt woke to a loud mechanical grinding sound.

  He groaned, regretting the last two—make it three—shots at Robert’s. And he hadn’t even managed to see Stephanie. All of the hangover, none of the payoff.

  What the hell was that racket? He stumbled out of bed and looked outside. Henny was on the back deck, cutting wood planks with an electric saw. Not an ideal wake-up call, but he was overdue to talk to her anyway. She probably thought he was packing to leave or already gone.

  Sure enough, when he unlatched the gate and walked out onto the deck, she was surprised.

  “Oh! I thought you’d checked out. I didn’t see your car…”

  “A hazard of a night out at Robert’s Place,” he said. “I probably have a hell of a ticket on my car over on Atlantic Avenue.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “You’d best be getting yourself over there. Do you need a ride?”

  “Thanks but I’ll walk over. I could use the exercise.” As his disastrous run yesterday morning had made more than clear. “Oh—I wanted to ask if I could extend my stay if I need to.”

  She smiled. “I’d be happy to have you stay longer. It saves me from having to go back on that website. I do hate dealing with the Internet. Facebook? I just don’t get the appeal. Why would I talk to Nora on a website when I can just hop on over to her place?”

  “I hear you,” Matt said, looking around at Henny’s work space. She had a professional-looking sander, a table covered with half a dozen paint containers, stencils, and sponges, and a smaller table holding piles of uniformly sized, smooth wooden planks. “So, do you sell these or what?”

  “I do,” Henny said, smiling. “Have you been to Nora’s Café? I sell them there. You can buy ’em right off the wall.”

  He nodded. “I liked the one about bacon.”

  She laughed. “That was just something I said to myself in the kitchen one day. Ain’t no problem bacon can’t cure. That was before I started making the signs. After my husband passed, I was really feeling down. The only time I felt okay was when I went to church and the pastor would say something positive and I’d try to hold on to it. But a day or two later, I was back in a funk. So I started thinking of my own positive messages for myself. I’d write them on Post-its and leave them around the house. And it helped. So I wanted the messages to be more permanent and decorative. That’s when I started making these.”

  “Well, they’re great. I might just have to buy one before I leave.”

  “Sounds good to me! But don’t rush to go. Like I said, makes my life easier not having to fill the room again.”

  Well, at least one person was happy to have him around.

  “Oh, we have a visitor,” Henny said, waving to someone. He turned to see Lauren opening the gate.

  A surge of hope broke through his hangover. Had something he said yesterday actually gotten through to her?

  “I tried calling but you didn’t answer,” Lauren said to Henny. “Sorry to just show up like this. I was hoping to catch Matt before he left.”

  “You two know each other?” Henny said, turning to him.

  “Sort of,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Did you drive over?” Henny said to Lauren. “He needs a ride to pick up his car.”

  Lauren looked at him quizzically, but he waved off the comment, saying, “It’s all good, Henny. I’ll take care of it later. And thanks again.”

  Lauren didn’t say a word until they walked to the side of the house, out of Henny’s earshot. Standing at the base of the stairs, he said, “This is a surprise.”

  “You said I could look at your interviews and correct any misinformation.”

  He tried to appear casual, as if she hadn’t just given him the first shred of hope in the past twenty-four hours.

  “I did.”

  “Okay, let’s do it,” she said.

  Now? He thought of the disarray in his room, the aftermath of manic hours of working followed by a sleepless post-binge-drinking night. Mostly, he thought of the notecards all over the floor spelling out the trajectory of her husband’s doomed life.

  “I’m all for it, but I need a few minutes to charge my computer and get things together,” he said.

  She looked impatient.

  “Five minutes,” Matt said. He’d throw a sheet over the notecards. And do them both a favor by taking a quick shower.

  “I hate being late for work,” Lauren said, mostly to herself. “This is crazy.”

  Henny looked up from the can of paint she was opening and smiled.

  “You know what they say about all work and no play,” she said. “Sometimes you need a day off. And he really is a handsome fella.”

  Lauren’s jaw dropped. “Henny, no. That is not what this is.”

  “I’m ready when you are,” Matt called from the gate. He had changed clothes, wearing jeans and an NYC T-shirt. His hair was wet. Had he showered?

  “Well,” Henny said, looking at him. “From one widow to another, may I just say, that is a mighty shame.”

  Matt pulled a bench in front of his desk. Lauren sat on the end of it, as far away from him as possible. Clicking his keyboard, eyes on the screen, he said, “I don’t bite, you know.”

  She said nothing. The screen filled with an image of Rory, young Rory, wearing his LM hockey uniform. She recognized the Havertown Skatium. He raced down the ice, and she could imagine the intense look of concentration on his face even though the camera didn’t capture that view. He raised his stick and launched the puck in the air; it landed just beyond the goal line. Rory pulled his left arm sharply in, bent at the elbow, his fist tight. The familiar gesture brought tears to her eyes.

  “I could show you the Dean Wade interview,” Matt said.

  “Actually,” she said, feeling nervous, wondering if now that she wanted something from him, he might turn her down, “I was wondering if you int
erviewed Emerson Kincaid.”

  Just saying his name felt taboo, as if, like in the film Beetlejuice, the mere act of uttering it would conjure him.

  “The older brother?” Matt said casually, as if he were, in fact, a movie character, not someone real, not Lauren’s former brother-in-law, not someone who had the power to cut her down or even change her world with a few choice words.

  “Yes. Did you talk to him?”

  Matt shook his head. “I tried to. The only response I got was a legal letter threatening to sue me if the film exploited or misrepresented Rory, the Kincaid family, or the U.S. military. If I remember correctly.” He smiled wryly.

  Yeah, that sounded like Emerson.

  “Oh,” she said. She didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed.

  Matt clicked around his keyboard, and a still frame of Dean Wade, Rory’s former NHL teammate, filled the screen. Dean had the all-American good looks of a Midwestern farm boy, though he was actually from Vancouver. The sight of his face brought Lauren back to a different life. She could imagine sitting across the table from him and his wife, Ashley, at their favorite Mexican place in West Hollywood. She could hear Dean calling her “the missus,” something he did even before she was married to Rory.

  Everywhere they went, she could feel the eyes of envious women. Lauren would talk about it with Ashley, how it felt to be the recipient of glares like daggers. They were the lucky ones, the chosen, and she could hear the unspoken words: Why her?

  Matt played the video. He asked Dean questions off camera, general stuff about the team, when he’d started, how the other guys felt about Rory joining the Kings. How he felt about Rory personally.

  The last time she’d seen Dean in person had been the day of Rory’s memorial service, and it was jarring now to hear his voice. She tuned in and out, half listening to Dean talk about Rory’s first season with the Kings, half fighting off a flood of memories.

  “So that hit he took in December, the game against the Blackhawks. That seemed pretty bad but they said it wasn’t a concussion, am I getting that right?” Matt asked him.

  Lauren focused intently on his answer.

  Dean nodded. “You’re right—that was the party line. But I’ll tell you, he got his bell rung that time. I know what the doc said, but I was with Rory that whole night. He was out of it. I mean, he was a tough guy, but none of us can shake off a hit like that.”

  Matt asked him another question, about how Rory had played the next game. Lauren interrupted the video.

  “He’s wrong,” Lauren said. “I flew to LA that night and Rory was fine. The doctors said he was fine.”

  Actually, he hadn’t been fine. But Rory didn’t want to admit he was injured. And now Lauren felt obligated to portray the incident as he would have wanted.

  “Did you go to a lot of games his first season?” Matt asked.

  “I saw him play whenever he was in DC or Philly, and I flew to LA for a few home games.”

  Watching him play at the Staples Center, surrounded by eighteen thousand rabid fans, was surreal and thrilling. When he skated onto the ice just before the national anthem, his signature number 89 on his back, it brought tears to her eyes.

  The Kings had retired his number three years ago. She’d declined to attend the ceremony.

  The truth was that the NHL had been an adjustment for him. For as long as she’d watched him play, he’d always been one of the top players on the ice at any given moment. But things were different in the NHL; he was competing with guys who had all been the best where they came from. Sometimes Rory rode the bench, and this bothered him deeply. But Rory was Rory, and he figured out how to get more ice time by simply throwing his size around.

  Lauren read every article written about the games, had every mention of him memorized. He gained a reputation as a double threat, a player who could score but could also fight. Still, it was never easy seeing him get into fights. Or, like that night in 2009, seeing him on the receiving end of a bad hit. It was all part of the game, and certainly part of the game at the pro level. Still, whenever anyone touched him, she felt a burst of indignant fury, even though he was always okay. That night, in the seconds between his contact with the boards and him hitting the ice, she told herself it was okay—it always was. But that time was different because he didn’t get up.

  “Like I said,” she told Matt, “I flew out there the night he took that hit from the Blackhawks. And he was fine.”

  Watching from her Georgetown apartment, she’d panicked when he didn’t stand up from the ice. The TV broadcast cut to commercial. Frantic, Lauren called Ashley Wade. Ashley was from Canada and, like Lauren, had been with her husband since high school. Except Rory wasn’t even Lauren’s husband at that point. Which was why she knew she wouldn’t get a call, would be in a complete information blackout.

  When Ashley’s phone went straight to voice mail, Lauren called the airline and booked the next flight out of Dulles.

  Landing in LA, she found out that Dean had stayed the night at Rory’s. The team doctor didn’t think it was a concussion, but Dean wanted to be on the safe side.

  “I’m fine,” Rory assured her in his bedroom with the shades pulled down, not watching TV or anything, just sitting there. “But I’m happy you’re here.”

  He didn’t seem fine. He was cranky, wouldn’t let her put on any lights, and asked her to check his phone when it buzzed with messages because the glare of the screen bothered him.

  “Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?” she asked.

  “Jesus, Lauren. Now you’re a doctor?” he snapped.

  She wasn’t a doctor, but it didn’t take a doctor to know that something was seriously wrong. But the team clearly didn’t want to sideline him, and Rory didn’t want to be sidelined.

  Now, she knew Rory wouldn’t want to be remembered as someone who had been weakened or diminished in any way.

  “He was okay,” she insisted.

  “You and Dean Wade see things differently.”

  “I think I knew Rory better than Dean Wade,” she snapped.

  “Of course you did. But Wade’s in the film and you’re not.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to be in this film. I’m just telling you that you’re getting it wrong.” Her instinct to stay on the surface of everything that had happened, not to dig too deep, was as much for her own sanity as it was to protect Rory’s reputation.

  “I don’t think I am,” he said calmly. Confidently. “But I’m offering you the chance to tell your view of events.”

  Her view of events? As if the past were purely open to individual interpretation.

  “It’s not my view of events. I know what happened.”

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that you do,” he said, locking eyes with her.

  “I’m late for work,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Beth wiped her hands on her apron. It was new, a gift to herself. A token to remind herself that she had been good at something once.

  The kitchen counter was covered with packages and jars and containers: confectioners’ sugar, vanilla extract, milk, eggs, salt, vegetable oil, and shortening. The kitchen island held two other gifts to herself: a brand-new deep fryer and a stand mixer. For the first time in years—certainly since the girls had grown up and left the house—she was making doughnuts.

  She didn’t know how to do leisure. After thirty years of spending nearly every day at the clothing store, the sudden stretch of endless free time was more than unwelcome. It felt hostile, as if the universe were telling her in no uncertain terms that she was obsolete. Even work for the Polaris Foundation quieted during the month of August.

  The past week, with Howard in Florida, Stephanie and Ethan back in Philly, and Lauren at the café every day, she had no idea what to do with herself. She could spend only so many hours clearing out the attic before becoming overwhelmed with a crushing sense of failure. The end of Adelman’s, losing the house the girls had grown
up in, and now facing the sale of her parents’ house.

  And Howard was clearly running away from it all.

  The doorbell rang. Beth had forgotten the sound of the Green Gable doorbell, the gentle melodic pinging of a chime that her mother had custom-ordered. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had used it.

  “Damn it,” she muttered, the sugary glaze not budging from her hands as she rubbed them against the apron. She ran them under the faucet.

  The doorbell pinged again.

  Well, the yeast, milk, and flour paste had to rest for a half an hour anyway. She covered the bowl with plastic wrap, walked to the front door, and peeked out the window, fortifying herself to make excuses to get rid of the real estate agent. She found herself smiling instead.

  “Neil! How are you? Come on in.”

  He was a good-looking young man. Not devastatingly handsome like her son-in-law had been, but Rory’s type of charisma was always a double-edged sword. Neil Hanes was the kind of man she had imagined one of her daughters ending up with, ambitious but grounded, from a good family. And, well, yes, Jewish. Not that she minded that Rory had been Catholic. The truth was, she had adored Rory. They had all fallen in love with him.

  “This really is a nice surprise,” Beth said, steering Neil into the living room. They sat on the couch and he eyed her mother’s vintage suitcases with obvious appreciation.

  “I’m sorry to come by without calling but I was just a few doors away, at the Kleins. They built where the red-brick house used to be up the block?”

  “Yes, yes—it’s amazing, what they’ve done. I mean, that modern architecture isn’t for me but I can understand the appeal.”

  “Well, this place is a classic. They don’t make them like this anymore.”

  Beth looked around with a sigh. “It was my parents’ house, you know. I grew up coming here for the summers.”