by Laura Dave
And this is her chance. Ryan will tell her now whatever it is she came here to find out—exactly what happened between them. Only why does she want to find that out? So she can know why Nate’s past fell apart? It feels more merciful than that, this mission, even in its chaos. It feels to Maggie like she wants Ryan to say something—the one thing—that will make Maggie understand not why Nate’s past fell apart, but why Nate has kept it hidden. What she can do so he doesn’t want to hide anything else.
Only looking at Ryan—who in the twenty minutes since Maggie met her has seemed like an array of contradictions: tough and kind, sweet and biting—she wonders if maybe Nate doesn’t understand himself what happened. Maybe he doesn’t understand what happened, and because of that, he couldn’t imagine a way to explain it to someone else.
But then the opportunity to ask Ryan anything, to test out any theory, is gone. The kitchen door swings open. And a woman in overalls walks in. A woman in overalls with brown hair, wide cheeks, and a friendly smile. One of the friendliest smiles Maggie has ever seen. And she is carrying produce. She is carrying a huge basket of fresh corn, needing to be shucked, beautiful broccoli, beets, radishes and cucumbers.
“Hey there, darling,” she says to Ryan. “Sorry it took me so freaking long to get here.”
“You should be,” Ryan says.
Then she leans in, this woman does, and kisses Ryan on the lips, long and full. The basket of produce still in her hands, Ryan’s hand reaching around to hold the back of her head.
Which is when Maggie drops it, the tomato in her hand, and it splatters on the floor. Splatters right in front of her.
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” she says, and leans down to pick it up, sopping up the juice with her apron.
“Who is this?” the woman says, looking down at her.
“This is Maggie. Maggie, this is Alisa Barrett. My partner.”
Here in the restaurant, here in life? But Maggie knows the answer. This is the person whom Ryan left Nate for. Maggie knows it. Does it make it harder or easier that it is a woman as opposed to a man? Probably both harder and easier. And, in the end, it comes down to the same thing, anyway: this is the person whom Ryan is with now, the person she has chosen. This is the person who, unlike Maggie, knew of the first marriage— knew about Ryan’s past—and therefore got to keep it as the past. Because she was given the chance to understand it. Because it wasn’t kept secret, and given the power that a secret gets when it finally emerges. Stinging us with its history, with its preserved weight.
“Maggie is covering for Lev tonight,” Ryan says.
“Not very well,” Maggie says, holding up the broken tomato as proof.
Alisa Barrett laughs. She has a nice laugh, rich and full and bold, and it makes Maggie like her. It also makes her want to get out of their kitchen immediately.
“You know,” Maggie clears her throat, “I’ll be right back. I’ll be back in, you know, no time at all.”
Ryan looks over at her. “Where are you going?”
Maggie points loosely in the direction of the front room, loosely in the direction of where she imagines is a bathroom, or a car, or somewhere else that she logically needs to be. Then she is walking quickly, so quickly—through the kitchen door, back through the restaurant—that she doesn’t see her until it is too late, that she runs headfirst into a girl with cropped, bleached-blond hair on her way in.
And falls.
“Whoa! Collision time.” The girl pulls Maggie up to standing. “Are you okay?”
Maggie nods. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I shouldn’t have snuck up on you. Are you Ryan?”
“No. I am definitely not Ryan.” She pauses, looks at the girl, who is looking back at her confused, holding an apron in her hands—an apron she brought from somewhere else, the word Maid vaguely visible. “You’re the one covering for Lev tonight?”
“I’m Molly Barton.” She smiles, and holds out her hand.
She unties her apron, and hands it to her, starts to walk away. “It’s nice to meet you, Molly,” she says.
“Thanks, wait . . .” Molly calls after her. “Are you coming back?”
“Not if I can help it,” she says.
And she doesn’t turn around. She is going to walk out this door, and say good-bye to Georgia and find a bus stop. She is going to go anywhere but here. Only when she steps back outside, she sees him standing there, his arms crossed, waiting for her, or just waiting. In a wet suit, a UVA sweat shirt thrown over it. That dark hair on top of his head.
“Nate,” she says. She says it out loud, in spite of herself.
“I thought you could use a ride.”
Gwyn
They are setting up.
Trucks and florists and chair-rental people and alcohol suppliers and waitstaff, piling into her driveway, parking diagonally, parking straight, making a mess of everything. Some of them are already in uniform, most in T-shirts and jeans, moving tables and lanterns and vases and linens and cases of alcohol and cases of wooden candlestick holders into the center of the barn, working hard to get everything party ready against the brewing wind.
If Gwyn chose to hire a full-service caterer, one company could have handled all of this business. There would be a supervisor. And it wouldn’t be so scattered, so able to fall short in one arena, so overwhelming in another. And yet that wasn’t an option. Or at least, not the most important one for Gwyn to take.
So here she sits in the nook of the wraparound veranda porch, watching as too many people from Doug’s Alcohol and Spirits, Island Florists, Sanford’s Rentals, and Hamptons Staffing make their way across the door walk—that small space of land between the house and the barn—trying to go over her list for the evening of everything that needs to be handled.
Their guests will start arriving around eight for an elongated cocktail hour, complete with heavy hors d’oeuvres, good vodka, too much talk about too many things that don’t matter. She wishes instantly that Jillian would be among them, wishes she hadn’t asked her not to come.
But why not? I want to be there, Jillian said on the phone.
Because if you’re there, Gwyn said, it’s real.
And if I’m not? Jillian asked.
Maybe it’s something else.
It could be something else, could just be an anniversary party that Gwyn is watching come together—that Gwyn would assume she is watching come together if she didn’t know the rest of the story. If she didn’t know that, at 9:30, instead of toasting their future, she and Thomas would toast their past, cut their cake, and go their own ways. Marriage over, integrity intact. Like the books suggest. Good for the family unit, good for closure. And simple. Right? If only Gwyn was feeling simple, if only that still seemed possible. A simple ending. A new beginning.
She hears someone coming up behind her, and turns to see Thomas standing above her, wearing khaki shorts and no shirt, just out of the shower. His hair wet. A glass of lemonade in his hand.
“You’re back?” she says.
“I’m back.”
“I didn’t hear you come back.”
She looks up at him, reaching for the lemonade. He hands it to her, and sits down next to her, and they watch together. She isn’t particularly in the mood to talk to him, or be with him, even, but she doesn’t want him to go over toward the Buckleys’ place. Not that he would. Why would he? But still. It would be bad for him to go anywhere near the house and find Eve’s van in the garage, Eve working inside. There is something exhilarating, though, at the possibility he might. There is something exhilarating to Gwyn in that for once she is standing between the two of them, she is the one in control.
She takes a long sip of the lemonade, the cool drink reminding her how thirsty she is, the last of the pot just now leaving her body. “Where’s Nate?” she asks. “Inside somewhere?”
Thomas shakes his head, putting his hands on his knees. “I’m not sure. The phone rang. And he ran to get it. I think it was Georgia. He went out front
to talk to her, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying.”
“She probably wants him to go meet her and Maggie, wherever they are. That’s fine. The fewer people around here while everyone is setting up, the better.”
Thomas turns and looks at the woodwork in the nook, running his hand along the fractures. “This needs fixing still. I’m sorry I haven’t done it. I meant to do it before I left for California. You wrote me that note asking me to, didn’t you? I’ll get around to it, now, in the next day or two. . . .”
Would he really, though? They’ve discussed this already. They’ve discussed his taking care of this for months and months. Is he going to get to it now? Right before he leaves here, and her? Why now? It exhausts her to consider it, what she is starting to understand. That, in fact, this may be the time when someone is most able to fix something. Right at the moment it counts least.
“So did you speak to the caterer?” he asks.
“What?” She looks at Thomas, and sees that his question is innocent. Or seemingly innocent. He isn’t particularly interested in her answer. “Why?”
“It’s just that you were worried this morning, weren’t you? And I haven’t seen anyone milling around the kitchen. I’ve seen every other truck in the world, but none that has caterer written on it.”
Gwyn smiles. “No, it’s fine. Since the rest of the staff is setting up here, I asked her to go next door to the Buckleys’. I thought she’d have more space that way. To finish with preparations.”
“So it’s a split-level operation,” he says.
“Kind of. You could say.”
He nods, interested. “Why did you do it that way? Doesn’t it make more work for you?”
“It made sense at the time.”
“And now?”
“And now it’s made more work for me.”
She meets his eyes, really meets them, which is her mistake. Because he smiles, and the rest of it disappears. For a minute, it disappears. The anger, the confusion. It is someone else who caused all of this. Not this guy next to her. He is just her husband sitting on her porch with her, drinking afternoon lemonade, and waiting to see what the rest of the day will bring to them.
“Thomas,” she says, and clears her throat. “You should know something. You should know this.”
“Okay.” He waits.
And she starts to tell him what she has been planning for tonight. But then one of the bartenders—a petite brunette in a black cap—walks by, and Thomas looks at her. He looks at her like he is trying to decide if she is pretty beneath that cap. It is a subtle look, and beside the point. This girl with her black cap isn’t the problem. And the only reason that Gwyn notices is that she is looking too, wondering too. Still, the spell is broken, and Gwyn changes her mind. She changes her mind about changing anything.
Anyone who says it doesn’t all come down to one moment is lying. This is it. It comes down to this for them. If she told him the truth—that she knew his truth, that she was plotting something for this evening—their lives would have moved in a different direction. A better one, a worse one? Who is she to judge? All she knows is that she sees the other life’s possibility—and then, in her silence, she sees that life disappear.
“What, Gwyn?”
She leans toward her husband, running her hand through his hair. “Nothing,” she says. “I just love you.”
He is silent. It has been a long time since she’s said that to him, and something settles over Thomas’s face. At first she thinks it is guilt. But then it seems to be something else beneath that, something like regret. Because these words—I love you— have power in their absence. Almost like sex: you forget its power when it is readily available, but when it is gone for a while, it gets a chance to make itself new, to make itself mean something all over again.
So he reaches for her. He reaches for her, like he means it, because he does mean it, and in one motion, he is pulling her deeper into the nook, where someone can see them if they are looking hard, from the north, and from a distance, but where they’d have to be looking that hard. From the right angle, at the right moment: Gwyn tight against the wall, Thomas blocking her, and blocking her in.
“I love you too,” he says, real low.
Then his arms are around her back, pulling up her dress from behind, his face locked in tight to her face, eyes open, not kissing, as she rips at his shorts, pulling them all the way off of him, and leaving him vulnerable like that, open, right from the beginning, forcing him to go quickly, as though they might get caught, and they might get caught, by their children, their impending guests, each other.
He pushes himself into her. And the world stops. Thomas stops moving quickly, his lips finding her neck, biting, Gwyn bearing down with her lower body, hard, adding pressure. Her eyes closed. She is still holding the lemonade, tight, which she doesn’t realize until she does. Which is when she drops it, the glass shattering into a thousand small pieces as she reaches for her husband’s back, his shoulders, and holds on.
Maggie
Maggie walks toward him, holding her left shoulder with her right hand, as if protecting herself. From him? From what’s coming? He is leaning against The House sign, his arms folded across his chest. He looks upset—more distraught, though, than angry— but even so, she realizes that he may be equally mad that she has come here as she is humiliated that she felt the need to.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” He motions in the direction of the restaurant. “How did that work out for you?” he asks.
“Pretty good. We sat down, made some excellent mint juleps, and talked about old times. She showed me your wedding album. Very lovely.” She points toward where she left Ryan. “You want to go in and say hello for a couple of minutes? I’m sure she’d be glad to see you.”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he says.
“No kidding,” she says. She looks out behind him, the wind kicking up, the clouds covering up what was left of the sun. “Where’s the car?”
“Across the street, by the dunes. I worried that you would need to make a quick getaway.”
“And?”
“And I decided not to let you.”
She looks at Nate, meeting his eyes, and has to bite her lip hard, to stay composed. Because now it is real. He is standing before her, and they are standing here in front of the restaurant, and she can’t ever go back to not knowing the things she knows now. She can’t go back to that complacent feeling she had that things were simple between them, or one way. That illusion, in all its glory, ends here.
Staring back in the direction of the restaurant, she realizes there is a more pressing issue. The real kitchen sub has probably introduced herself by now, and Ryan or Alisa, or both, will want some answers.
“You know, in about five more seconds, someone is going to come out here trying to figure out who I really am. So unless you want a less-than-happy reunion, we should probably walk.”
“Okay.” He nods, and points in the direction of the ocean, and they start walking that way. She doesn’t know exactly where they are going, but she keeps up with him—keeps a few feet away, but keeps up with him—until they cross the road and head down the small hill, the small houses dotting it, past the green sign that says PRIVATE BEACH.
And then the Volvo is there—the one that Eve hit this morning—in a small, otherwise empty parking lot. But instead of getting in the wagon, Nate walks past it, over the rocks, toward the beach itself.
Maggie stops on the rocks, holds her ground. “I don’t want to sit down on the beach, Nate. I don’t want to pretend everything’s okay.”
He turns back to look at her, his hands shoved into his sweat-shirt’s pocket. “And if we’re standing here, things are less okay?”
“Yes.”
He nods, but she can see him starting to crack a little, getting defensive. “So we’ll stand here, if that’s what you want.”
“I don’t want any of this,” she says. “You were married? How is th
at possible? How is it possible that you didn’t feel a need to mention that any time over the last eighteen months?”
“It’s not that simple,” Nate says.
“It’s also not that complicated.”
He is silent, looking away from her. This is his worst nightmare, this kind of confrontation, and it almost makes her feel bad for him. If she weren’t feeling so bad for herself, she’d stop this.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Maggie.”
“How about you’re sorry?”
“I am sorry.”
“For not telling me, or that I found out?”
“Both.”
“Not good enough,” she says. And suddenly she realizes nothing is going to make this good enough.
“Okay, let’s start easier, Champ. What have you told me that’s right? Because apparently I know nothing about your past. Not the type of high school you went to, or your family’s situation, or your most significant relationship before me. Don’t you think any of that information would have told me something about you?”
“It doesn’t.”
“It doesn’t?”
He shakes his head. “The information that is relevant about me is that I left here, and went to school and moved to California and fell in love with you. All the rest of it is . . . prologue.”
She shakes her head, thinking of the messiness of her parents’ split, of growing up on her own without a mother, of all the things she disclosed to Nate late at night, that were hard for her, hard to acknowledge as having to do with herself—the pieces of herself she’d like to be less true.
“I feel cheated,” she says.
“Why?”
“All this time, and you didn’t even show me yourself. These things . . . they are who you are.”
“No, they are who I was.”
“No, they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn’t give me a chance to understand that even the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something that I could accept.”
