by Laura Dave
“What’s in there?” she asks.
“Your favorite.”
“My favorite?” she says, peeking inside.
But she knows what it is, before she even looks. Nate has made her his famous peanut butter popcorn concoction: popcorn with homemade peanut butter sauce and a variety of salty and sweet herbs. It may sound disgusting, especially in the morning, but it is Maggie’s ultimate comfort food. And, with all the fancy, wonderful things Nate can cook so well, she still loves this the most.
“When did you have time to do this?”
He leans over and kisses her on the cheek. “It’s amazing what I can get done when you refuse to speak to me.”
Maggie smiles. “Ha ha,” she says, and takes a bite, then another bite, breathing in the secret ingredient (coconut) and starting to feel better. Immediately and completely better.
This is going to be fine. All of it will be fine. The reason he didn’t tell her until now about the money is that it wasn’t important to him. It wasn’t a part of him, and therefore of them either. It had nothing to do with them. Nothing is different. They will go see his parents, like they planned, go to their bizarre party, and head back to New York, to their restaurant at the tip of Brooklyn. Twenty-four hours from now, and this will be behind them.
“Good?” he says.
“Very good,” she says. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She brushes his hair off of his face, moves closer to him, which is when she gets her next surprise. The model-like woman from the front of the bus is standing there. She is wearing a tiny green dress, bug-shaped glasses, and looks better from this angle—the thin turning into sculpted, the strikingly gaunt turning into simply striking—as if this were the angle, from below her, you’re actually supposed to be watching her from.
“Nate Huntington,” she says. “I thought it was you.”
Nate looks flummoxed for a minute, and—as his eyes register the woman, he looks more flummoxed, as if he has just been caught in something. And from the way he is looking back and forth between Maggie and whoever this is, Maggie wonders what he thinks he is being caught for.
“Murphy . . .” Nate says, standing up and giving her a hug. “What a small world.”
When Nate pulls back, Murphy—Murphy? really?—keeps her arms wrapped around his neck in a familiar way.
“Not that small, mon ami. Or it wouldn’t have been so long since I last laid eyes on you.”
Maggie puts her paper bag of popcorn down, trying to sit up taller at the same time, which makes the popcorn spill all over her lap and the seat. The good and bad news is that Nate and Murphy are talking so intensely, Maggie is able to brush it off before they notice.
“Murphy Buckley, this is Maggie Mackenzie. Maggie, this is Murphy, an old friend of mine from growing up.”
“You can call me Murph,” she says to Maggie, holding out her hand. “It’s good to meet you. I saw you get on the bus. I noticed your shoes.”
Does that mean she liked my shoes? Maggie looks down at her worn, gold ballet slippers and sincerely doubts it. Maggie instinctively tucks her legs beneath herself, and pulls her hair behind her ears. It is something she does when she is feeling nervous, tugging on her best feature, or what she thinks is her best feature—her long, dark hair—and really, combined with her dark eyes and skin, someone could make the argument that she, Maggie, is pretty. But, Maggie knows, someone could make the other argument too. Not like Murph. There is only one argument to make about her.
“Maggie and I are getting married,” Nate says.
“Seriously? I don’t believe it!” Murph says. “You are engaged? I didn’t think that day would come. No judgment or anything. I keep saying I’m not done with marriage, and I’ve been married two and a half times at this point, but . . .”
Nate interrupts her—in a very un-Nate-like moment, as he doesn’t usually interrupt people. It may be the first time, or at least the first time she remembers, that she has heard him interrupt anyone. But she can see something in his eyes when he does it—the defensiveness—that kicks up in Nate so rarely that it surprises her, unnerves her, to see it now.
“Murph and I grew up down the road from each other,” he says. “Really next door to each other . . .” He makes a triangle sign with his hands, as if to show the location points of each of their houses—Murph at the thumbs, Nate at the index fingers. “We went to high school together.”
“If you can call it high school,” she says. “It wasn’t exactly chock-full of homecoming dances or pep rallies. More like eleven of us sitting in my parents’ living room every day with a private tutor because our parents deemed East Hampton High unworthy.” She shines her shiny teeth at Maggie. “Not exactly hard to win most popular when my kitchen supplied the Diet Coke.”
Maggie tries to catch Nate’s eyes. Is that how half billionaires are educated?
“Maggie loves Diet Coke,” Nate says.
Maggie nods, because she knows this is his way of trying to include her, which ends up making her feel worse. That this is the best way he found: utilizing a soft drink.
“Who doesn’t?” Murph says.
“Probably the people who make Diet Pepsi,” Maggie says. She is surprised by the anger in her own voice, the edge beneath the joke, but Murph doesn’t notice. Or at least Murph pretends not to notice, laughing loudly instead, her head flying back.
People are scrambling to pass her in the aisles, which makes Maggie hope that maybe Murph will just go back to her own seat, already. But she doesn’t seem to notice the people who need to get by. Or maybe she just doesn’t care.
“So I have a bone to pick with you, by the way . . .”
Guess not.
“How could you just skip out on our reunion? Leave me alone with all those lunatics when you know it is the end of me?”
“I’m sorry about that. We were still out in California, and trying to get it together to move here.”
“Excuses, excuses! We all had dinner at Soho House. Gray-son came in from Boston and Lis and Marlo flew in from Dubai. And Bedlan Blumberg hosted the whole thing because, you know, he’s so over trying to impress anyone. Yeah, right. Anyway . . . we drank like nine magnums of Veuve. I swear, I nearly passed out at the table. And, at three A.M., we are all totally hammered, and Buddy rises up to make a toast, and tells us that he has an announcement to make, and the announcement is that he is gay. We were like, Buddy, no fucking kidding. We’ve only known this our entire lives. But thanks for the tip, Jackass.”
She pauses, breathes in. “It was a blast.”
Nate starts to laugh, a little too loudly, and Maggie wonders if she missed something. It’s possible. What had she and Nate discussed about their high schools? She can’t remember now. Could it be so little that she has somehow assumed that Nate’s high school looked something like hers? One with a big gym and bad cafeteria food and an even worse football team? Or did he say something that made her think those things? She looks at him more carefully. What else did she assume that maybe she should remember to ask him about now? What else about the way he grew up is going to come into focus in the next twenty-four hours?
Murph is holding her hand over Nate’s chest, over his heart. “So have I been hearing right? You are back from San Fran, for good, and opening this very big-deal restaurant?”
“I wouldn’t jump to calling it a big deal, but, yes, we’re opening a restaurant out in Brooklyn, Red Hook, actually,” Nate says. And, thankfully, he steps back, so Murph has no choice but to let his chest go.
He shrugs at Maggie, as if to say, I’m sorry.
She shrugs back, as if to say, it’s okay. But truthfully—if she’s allowed to be truthful with herself—it doesn’t feel okay, or at least, not exactly.
“Red Hook, huh?” Murph says. “I didn’t know that anyone actually lived there. Wow! It’s like you’re an explorer.”
“Something like that,” Nate says.
“When is opening day?”
>
“Our soft opening is Halloween weekend. And, if all goes as planned, we want to be up and running in time for the holidays.”
“That’s exciting.”
The person behind Murph in the aisle clears his throat loudly. Murph moves over, a drop, so he can almost squeeze past. When he waits for her to really move out of the way, when he gingerly coughs again so she will, she gives him a look as if to say, up yours.
“Well, I better head back up front. If I have to sit back here with you two, I’ll get seasick, Captain.”
Captain?
“We should hook up this weekend. Maybe get everyone together and head up to the Liars Saloon. Do a little drinking. Have a little fun. Old-school style. Wouldn’t that be the greatest?”
Nate nods. “If we can get away. It’s kind of a crazy weekend, and we’re actually only here because . . .”
“Oh that’s right! How could I forget? I heard that Gwyn and Thomas are having a divorce party tonight. I was surprised to hear they were splitting up, to tell you the truth. It’s temporary, I’m sure, I’m sure . . . I’d be willing to bet you that it is.” Then Murph turns toward Maggie. “Don’t you just love Gwyn and Thomas? I mean, just look at them! Who is beautiful enough for either of them except the other?”
Maggie shakes her head. “I haven’t met them yet actually. I’ve spoken to them on the phone many times, but this is the first time we’ll be meeting in person.” She can’t stop talking, apparently. “Face to face . . . because we were in California, and they were here, and we’ve been setting up the restaurant . . . and they’ve been going through . . .”
Murph raises her eyebrows, as if to say, who are you talking to, me or yourself? And Maggie wishes she had a good answer, but the truth is she has been telling herself too loudly all the reasons Nate hasn’t introduced her yet to his family. But now, she is wondering if she knows the real one.
“Well, anyway, you will love them,” Murph says. “I remember every time I was over there, they would sit so near to each other on the couch, sharing a plate of cheese or a glass of bourbon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my parents sit in the same room unless other people were there too. They are the ones who should be getting divorced, but I think my mother is too tired to house hunt.” She pauses, shaking her head. “But Gwyn and Thomas were, year after year, connected at the knees. It makes it all quite shocking, really. Because they say that determines it, you know.”
“Determines what?” Nate says.
“How happy you’ll be in your own marriage. However happy your parents were in theirs, you tend to match it, or something like it. You tend to emulate whatever you saw in your house.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Maggie says.
They both turn to stare at her. She feels her face flush red. She wasn’t planning on saying that out loud, wasn’t planning on saying anything out loud, but she just wants Murph to go away. Now.
Maggie clears her throat. “I just mean that lots of people can end up in happy marriages, even if they had a rough start of things. Even if they aren’t sure they have the best model.”
“Your parents suck too, then?” Murph says.
“Excuse me?”
But then instead of answering, she turns to Nate. “So I’ll probably be coming by. You know how Louis and Marsha love to party . . . and I can’t disappoint the parents.”
“Good, we’d like that.”
She gives them both a small wave and heads back to the front, as the bus kicks into motion, pulling them down Forty-first Street toward the highway, as the ticket agent comes down the aisle, handing each passenger a small pack of pretzels, a container of water. Collecting fifty-one dollars for their roundtrip rides.
Once she is gone, Nate leans in close to her, wraps his arm around the back of Maggie’s shoulders.
“She’s okay, Maggie. Once you get to know her a little better. She’s not a bad person.”
“I believe it. That was nice of her to give you two bags of pretzels. I think most people got one.”
“Maggie,” Nate says. “I’m talking about Murph.”
“I know who you are talking about.”
“I’m sorry she made you uncomfortable.”
Maggie shakes her head. “She didn’t,” she says. You did. “But what was she talking about with the marriage stuff?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when you told her that we were engaged? Why was she saying that she was surprised you’d get married? It’s not like you’re twenty or something. You’re thirty-three. Why would that be surprising?”
“I don’t remember her saying that,” he says. And he gets a look across his face, a look that Maggie doesn’t recognize.
“Nate . . .”
“What?”
“You’re lying to me now?”
“No, I’m not.”
But she knows he is. She knows it, in her gut. And yet she is too tired to guess why. It’s still the morning. They still have the entire day ahead of them. She’d rather just believe him.
“You know what?” she says. “Let’s just not talk about it right now. Let’s listen to some music for a while, okay? I can get some sleep, maybe.”
He smiles, relieved, which has the opposite effect on Maggie. “Okay.”
He pulls out the iPod. They have a splitter, so they can listen to the same song. And when she guesses which song he is going to pick, that feels like something too. “Moving Pictures, Silent Films,” by Great Lake Swimmers. He played it for her, for the first time, a month after they started dating, when they took a weekend road trip to Wyoming. They were driving the back roads into Cody—through all of that gorgeous orange rock, more like outer space than anything she’d ever encountered on this earth—and Nate put on this song. I think you’ll like this, he said. And she fell in love with it. And with him.
“Pause it for just a sec,” she says now. And she squeezes his shoulder, walks over him to the bathroom, to splash some water on her face, hoping to feel better, shake off the malaise settling over her.
But there, as if waiting for her—and not just waiting for the bathroom also—is Murph.
“We meet again.”
Maggie tries to smile. “We do.”
“Have you used one of these jitney bathrooms before? If not, I should warn you. It’s complicated.”
“Is it?”
Murph nods. “You need to angle yourself in there just right, or the door slams on your cold, bare ass just as your hand gets stuck in the toilet. Whatever you do, angle left.”
“Good tip,” Maggie says.
“You will see just how good, especially if you don’t follow it. Trust me on that . . .”
Maggie laughs. Maybe Murph isn’t the enemy here. Or, really, who cares? Murph, or no Murph. Isn’t it beside the point? Maggie is just tired, too tired to be rational. But here is her attempt: she is just going to calm down, to stop thinking about Nate’s confession this morning, to stop worrying about the details of his past he left out, to stop letting their immediate future—this divorce party weirdness—stand for more than it is worth.
“Nate is a great guy. You know that, right? Probably better than me. You don’t need me to tell you. But everyone’s always thought that. He was always the most popular guy in school.”
“The most popular out of eleven?”
“Exactly.” She pushes her hair out of her face, smiles at Maggie. “Anyway, I’m just really excited for you. It’s a nightmare to try to find a good guy. Most guys today, they think if they show up, that’s enough. They think if they put a hand on the small of your back, they deserve some sort of award. You know what I mean?”
Maggie smiles. “Kind of,” she says.
“We used to always have sex in my parents’ bathroom. Nate and I. They have this enormous bathtub with this crazy padding. God, we had no idea what we were doing. Like the first fifty times, we just had no idea.”
Maggie falls silent.
She almost falls.
�
�But whatever. Practice makes perfect, right? You can thank me later that he is such a good kisser.”
This is when the bathroom door opens, an old guy steps out, zipping his fly, and Murph steps inside, left side first.
Then Murph winks at Maggie, closes the door, and is gone.
Gwyn
It comes from being a minister’s daughter, she thinks. She’s not good at anger. Not built to hold a grudge. From the time she was old enough to remember, she was taught again and again that anger—or giving in to it, at least—was wrong. Whenever anyone was cruel to her, she was told to forgive. As if it were that easy. In her house, it was supposed to be.
There was that time when Gwyn was eight, and Mia Robin-sky from her second-grade class announced that cool girls had curly hair, and the best way to get it was to use peanut butter. She handed Gwyn a jar of peanut butter. And Gwyn used the entire thing, covering her clean blond locks from top to bottom with curlerlike knots of the chunky, sticky mess. Until it hardened. Like Mia directed.
It was her father who washed Gwyn’s hair out in the kitchen sink—using a mix of ketchup and vinegar—while Gwyn screamed from the burning and the tearing, more strands coming out than staying in. Even then—in the face of his daughter’s hysterics—her father was unflappable.
“Gwyn, love,” he said. “Mia is a work in progress. She is just learning how to be.”
“How to be? How to be what? A bitch!”
Her father slapped her. Not exactly hard, but there it was. A slap across the bottom of her face, across her jawline. This was one of only two times he was physical with her during her childhood—the other was when she got into her mother’s makeup bag and almost cut her thumb off with a pair of scissors she found in there. He had hit her hand where she cut herself. To warn her away from hurting herself. Being angry at others, apparently, not offering them constant compassion, was equally injurious.
This was a lesson she relearned every time a church congregant would come by the house with pain, or with a grievance. It didn’t seem to matter what the specifics were. They blur together now: the man hysterical about his pregnant wife leaving him; the woman whose dying mother refused to talk to her; the husband whose ex-wife lost their life savings in a pyramid scheme. The worst stories anyone could imagine. And always her father’s voice rang out with its same, gentle mantra: We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job.
