Perfect Happiness

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  He moves to the dresser, thinking maybe Charlotte washed it and put it away, and combs his fingers through the rumpled T-shirts from tennis camp and the pool and the surf shop down on the Outer Banks. Nothing. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, getting ready to dial Charlotte, but then realizes, looking at the time, that she’s in class. Probably better anyway, he thinks to himself, knowing how annoyed she gets when he asks her where something is, as if he’s supposed to intuit where she wants everything to go.

  He opens the bottom drawer of the dresser and files through a stack of exercise shorts and leggings, his hopefulness waning, when something scratches against his finger. He pushes the pile aside and sees the corner of a piece of paper, tucked underneath a tie-dye shirt that Birdie made at the art camp where she worked as an assistant teacher last summer.

  Oh my God. His chest seizes up, all of the air leaving his lungs as he pulls out the pamphlet and sees the words on the front of it. How could it—

  Everything You Need to Know About Birth Control, it reads in mauve block letters. A thousand thoughts zip through his mind all at once, like he’s traveling in one of those cartoon vortexes in an animated movie: Where did she get this? Why does she need this? Did she seek it out because she needs this? Did a friend give it to her? Did Tucker give it to her? Did Charlotte give it to her? Did she just get it in health class? He remembers now, vaguely, a conversation with Charlotte a long while back, toward the end of elementary school (or was it middle school?) about the sex ed unit they’d do in health class. Maybe this is all this is. Maybe there’s a high school version they take now? And she got it there? And she tucked it away for later—much later . . . much, much later—until she needs it. Birth control. Everything you need to know.

  What a stupid phrase. He shoves it back in its spot, telling himself that the smart thing to do now is to not freak out over this. He goes on autopilot: Just find the shirt, get to the tennis match. Find the shirt. Find the shirt. He leaves Birdie’s room (flees it, really) and hustles downstairs to the basement laundry room. Everything you need to know. It isn’t everything you need to know, he thinks, it isn’t even half of it. How could you fit everything a kid needs to know about sex into a three-page pamphlet like the flimsy mailers advertising window replacements and lawn care? How? How? How? He remembers when Birdie was in fourth grade and she asked Charlotte how babies were made. The three of them sat down together—Charlotte always stressed how important it was for him to be involved, how research shows it is the girls whose dads made sex seem like a weird thing who end up weird about sex themselves—and told Birdie how it happens, and she immediately fell back on her pillows in a fit of hysterical laughter, shocked and grossed out in equal measure, the way he guesses he hoped she would always be about the subject.

  The shirt is folded on top of a stack of laundry next to the washing machine. He grabs it and races back up the stairs, poor Sylvie jogging beside him, looking up at him expectantly, the tags on her collar jangling, wanting to understand why the hurry, and then flies out the door, slamming it behind him.

  The drive is a blur. He’s at the high school in five minutes. Birdie sees him and races toward him, snatching the jersey from his hand, hardly breaking her stride as she runs toward the doorway that leads to the locker room, calling out that he’s a lifesaver, that she’ll be right out, to go find a seat. Thank you, Dad!

  His chest is heaving. He hunches over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, as she disappears behind the heavy metal door, her ponytail swinging behind her.

  The match is good. Birdie is playing at her very best, the proof of her skill evident in how easily she is beating her opponent, a junior whom somebody down the bleachers says is a potential recruit for Georgia, the number one women’s team in the country last year. Jason tries to concentrate but it’s difficult. His mind keeps snagging on the question of what he’s going to do about the pamphlet. She won’t get a tennis scholarship anywhere if she’s a teen mom, he thinks, irrationally, then shakes the thought away.

  It could be nothing. After all, he kept condoms hidden between his mattress and his box spring for years before he even came close to learning how to unlatch a bra, the contraband courtesy of his buddy’s older brother’s stash, which they found in the compartment between the seats of his car. Then he thinks of Tucker. What does he have hidden?

  That little piece of shit. He’d been defending the kid to Charlotte for so long now, and for what? He supposes he wanted to believe that Birdie would never date anyone who didn’t meet his own high standards for her, and that they should let go of the leash and let her figure things out, but now he feels like an idiot.

  He knew Charlotte was right: He really had kissed Finch Cunningham’s ass at their house that night, and what the fuck for? What had he been trying to prove? How was he just now really considering the connection between the Finch Cunningham he’d known in high school and Tucker Cunningham, whom his daughter was now dating?

  He claps as Birdie hits an ace.

  Finch Cunningham had been a dick in high school. Not the worst of the worst—that title went to Josh Lerner, a guy who’d terrorized Tate, Jason’s older brother, almost as much as he harassed their female classmates—but Finch had still been plenty bad, the kind of guy who might not be the first to broadcast his conquests but always chimed in to try to one-up whatever story someone was spinning. Would Tucker be like that? And could the subject be his daughter?

  He’d scanned the bleachers for Tucker as soon as he arrived, but then remembered that this morning, when Charlotte had asked Birdie if he was coming to the match, she’d said that he had a lacrosse game himself, out in Sterling.

  He thinks of the drive home after the match, wonders how the hell he’ll act normally, if he should say something or wait for Charlotte. Surely, Birdie would rather talk to her mother about this. He knew logically that the day would come, of course, when he’d have to reckon with the fact that his daughter was sexually active, but he’d assumed it would be later, much later. Someday, when he got gray and needed hearing aids and Birdie was married, she would announce that they were going to be grandparents, and they could just sweep the rest of it under the rug.

  The match ends, Birdie winning easily. He stands with the rest of the parents on the bleachers and claps, noticing how a few of them look back at him, and he feels a surge of pride when he sees a woman a couple rows beneath him wolf-whistle and throw her fist into the air. Birdie shakes her opponent’s hand. She walks toward her teammates (all of them clapping for her, he notices), grabs a towel from the stack just off the court and wipes the back of her neck, and looks up and scans the crowd for him. She waves, smiling mostly with her eyes, not wanting to seem too boastful, he knows, even though she smeared that other kid.

  He gives her a quick thumbs-up, forgetting, for the briefest moment, about the pamphlet. She is such a good kid, such a humble kid. He really—he knows this in his heart—has nothing to worry about.

  There’s another match Birdie needs to stay and watch before they can head home, so while Birdie convenes with her teammates, Jason hops down from the bleachers and walks over to the patch of grass just beyond the courts.

  He calls Charlotte, not sure exactly what he’s going to say but needing to unload, and gets her voicemail almost immediately. He tries her again, and then again, but each time it goes to voicemail. She must be talking to someone as she drives home—Stephanie, her mother, Amanda. He looks back to the court, to where Birdie and her teammates are standing in a circle, singing out a cheer. Y-O-R-K . . .

  He looks back down at his phone, turning it in his hand, worrying over the car ride home again, and then tonight at the dinner table . . . He wants to talk to Charlotte before he has to be alone with Birdie, to figure out what to do. He nibbles at the inside of his lip, wondering who else to call. He could try Tate? His brother would surely tell him to laugh this off and say that it’s a good thing that Birdie is educating herself, but as reasonable as that is
, it’s not what he wants to hear, even if he doesn’t know what it is exactly that he does want to hear.

  He looks back down at his phone. He paces a few steps through the grass and dials.

  “Hi!” Jamie says, a cheery brightness in her voice.

  “When do kids start having sex these days?”

  He hears the sound of her gasp, and then her laugh. A mellifluous wave, like the sound that a xylophone makes when you run a mallet across it.

  “Sor . . . sorry,” he says, stuttering. “Sorry. I . . .” He sighs. “I found something.”

  “Hold up,” she says, still laughing. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Sorry. I found something in Birdie’s room. I was looking for her tennis shirt and I found a pamphlet about birth control.”

  “A pamphlet?” she says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you didn’t find any actual birth control?” she says, obviously amused.

  He feels his face redden. “Right.”

  “Oh, Jason,” she coos. “Jason, Jason, Jason.”

  “What? It wouldn’t freak you out?”

  “No, no, I get it,” she says. “I totally get it.”

  “I just thought you might have some insights.”

  “I . . . Well . . . Hmm,” she starts. “This is giving me pause, actually.” He hears clanking in the background, the comforting sounds of pots and pans and making dinner. “Warren and I talked to the boys, of course, did the whole birds-and-bees thing, but that’s it. They’re just twelve. Maybe I’m naive, though . . .”

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Sorry to bother you,” he says, feeling embarrassed. “I couldn’t reach Charlotte so I thought you . . .” His voice trails off, thinking of Charlotte’s accusation from the night before.

  “Don’t be sorry!” she says. “It would rattle any parent, but I don’t think it’s anything to be alarmed about if that’s the only evidence. I mean, I’d talk to her, obviously.”

  “Of course,” he says. “I mean, obviously.”

  “I think . . . hmm . . .” she says, and he can picture her, thinking it over, squeezing her bottom lip between her thumb and the knuckle of her forefinger in the way she does when she’s puzzling something out at work. “I’d just try to be as normal as you can about it. Talk to her calmly, without freaking out. That’s the best thing you can do, I think, because if you make it weird, or blame her, God forbid, she’ll never talk to you about this stuff again, and that’s the last thing you want.”

  “Right,” he says. “That’s good advice.”

  She sighs. “I don’t envy you.”

  He groans. “Why do they have to grow up?”

  “I know,” she says. “It’s the worst. It really is.”

  He laughs, feeling his tension loosen just a touch, a spring uncoiling. He hears water running, a hollow knocking. “Are you making dinner?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “The world’s most thankless task. Well, that’s not true. The laundry might be worse. Scratch that—bathrooms. You haven’t lived until you’ve cleaned a bathroom shared by preteen boys, no offense.”

  “None taken,” he says. “What are you making?”

  “Two pounds of spaghetti and sauce from a jar. Très gourmet.”

  He laughs. “Did you say two pounds? Are you having people over?” A guy, he wonders, remembering the dating app from the other day.

  “Oh, no,” she says. “It’s just the three of us. And when two are these boys, and one of them runs cross-country . . . Honestly, I’m not sure if this will go far enough. I just pulled a second loaf of garlic bread from the freezer.”

  Jason pictures the steam rising from a silver pot, the comforting smell of butter and garlic wafting through the air, this morning’s newspaper on the kitchen table, the sound of a basketball dribbling in the background. Jamie sipping from her water bottle on the counter, happily humming to herself.

  “You going to be okay?” she says, snapping him back to the present. He immediately feels guilty, thinking about Charlotte’s face last night. But he knows he downplayed what she saw, too, because if the shoe was on the other foot, if he saw some coworker of hers touch her like Jamie’s always touching him lately, it would freak him out. He supposes he could ask Jamie to stop, but . . . well, that would be weird, he tells himself. She’d probably think he was going to report her to HR or something, and he doesn’t want to overplay it, he thinks, ignoring the other thought lurking in the back of his mind: that he doesn’t want it to stop because he likes it.

  Also, maybe he liked that Charlotte acted the way she did last night, as fucked up as that is. “Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he says. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. Get back to your evening.”

  “Jason, no, don’t apologize. I’m glad you called. I really am. Anytime. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” he says, swallowing. “Uh-huh. Thanks.”

  “I owed you one anyway, for your help last night at work.”

  “Of course,” he says. “I’m glad it all worked out. Was everything okay today?”

  “Oh yeah, she’s fine.”

  “Good,” he says, turning back to the court. “Well, I should go.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, and there’s something about the lilt in her voice that makes the back of his neck tingle.

  “Thanks again,” he says, ending the call quickly.

  He starts walking back toward the court, feeling better, though it troubles him to think about the reason why.

  Twelve

  Charlotte returns to her office after class, tailed by a student who wants to borrow a book that came up during her lecture. Her phone buzzes with a new text, and she fumbles to look at it, assuming it’s Jason, who’d called during class but hadn’t left a voicemail. It’s a local number she doesn’t recognize. She slips the phone into her bag, telling herself she’ll look at it later, and fishes out her keys.

  She unlocks the door and flips on the light. The student, Valeria, steps in behind her, and runs her finger along the spines of the books in her bookcase. “Ah, here it is!” Charlotte says, coaxing out the copy of Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert’s bestseller. She hands it to the girl, who immediately flips it over to read the description on the back cover, and Charlotte watches her for a moment, thinking how lucky she is to be so young, the endless options she has in front of her. Valeria is as stunningly beautiful as she is sharp, and one of the thousands of international students that make up a chunk of Georgetown’s student body.

  “Are you headed back to Madrid right after finals?” Charlotte asks, walking to her desk and glancing at the time, noting to herself that Birdie’s match must be over by now.

  “No,” she says. “First to Barbados.”

  “Barbados?”

  She nods, the corner of her mouth turning up. “My boyfriend’s family has a place there.”

  “Boyfriend?” Charlotte asks, imagining a tall, dark Dolce & Gabbana model type.

  She shrugs. “For now.”

  “That’s the right attitude,” Charlotte says, shuffling the papers on her desk into a neat stack. “Don’t pin yourself down.”

  Valeria hugs the book to her chest. “How long have you been married?” she asks, a question that would probably strike another professor as too forward, particularly in this post-#MeToo era, when everyone’s especially careful not to cross a line. But after teaching the happiness class for so many years now, Charlotte’s grown accustomed to a certain familiarity between herself and the students, many of whom talk openly during their class discussions about their overbearing parents, their antianxiety medications, even, a few times, their suicide attempts. More than once, Charlotte has called the campus’s mental health services on behalf of somebody.

  “Too long,” Charlotte spits out, realizing her mistake when she sees the shocked expression on Valeria’s face. “It’s a joke!” she says. “We’ve been married fifteen years. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering,” her student
says. “I don’t know if I want to get married.”

  “Then you shouldn’t,” she says. “Unless you’re absolutely sure. It’s not something you can feel wishy-washy about. But you’ve got all the time in the world.”

  Valeria nods.

  “Are your parents married?” Charlotte asks.

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “But they shouldn’t be.”

  “What?” Charlotte says, taken aback. “Why?”

  Valeria flips her long black hair over her shoulder. “Did you know that Spain has the highest divorce rate of anywhere in Europe? The government enacted this ‘express divorce’ law a while back, and now three out of every four marriages end in divorce.”

  “You know a lot about this,” Charlotte says.

  “I’ve researched it. On my mother’s behalf.” She frowns. “My father has always had girlfriends, for as long as I can remember.”

  “Really?” Charlotte says. “How does that even work?”

  “My mother is . . . what can I say? She’s a devout Catholic. She gets up and makes him breakfast every morning. Irons his shirts. Cleans up after him, literally and figuratively. They just celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary. There was a big party, and he made a big speech.” She rolls her eyes. “Two of the ex-girlfriends were there.”

  “It doesn’t bother her?”

  “I guess you just get used to what you’re used to. It’s strange, I know, but it’s their arrangement. Anyway, I’m sure that’s why I feel the way I do about marriage.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “How about you?” she asks. “What was your family like? Were your parents always together?”

  “They were,” Charlotte says. “My dad passed away many years ago, but yes, they were married for a long time.”

  “Were they happy?” Valeria asks.

  Charlotte turns and picks up a pen off her desk, remembering how she’d lie in bed at night, Aaron sometimes crawling in beside her, and they’d hide under the covers while their parents raged at each other downstairs. “No,” she says. “Not really at all.”