Perfect Happiness

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

Stephanie raises her eyebrows. “I heard that she found out he was a frequent customer at some quote-unquote spa in McLean.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Charlotte says, waving and smiling at a mom she remembers from Birdie’s elementary school years.

  “He’s disgusting,” Stephanie says, and takes a big swig of her drink. Charlotte watches, wanting her own, and crosses her arms over her chest. She takes a deep breath, and then another.

  “Is Dayna here?” she asks, thinking of Birdie and what she’d told her, how Dayna didn’t want Tucker seeing her because of Charlotte.

  “Oh, yeah,” Joe says. “Over there.” He points his chin toward the banquet tables, where Charlotte sees her, dressed to the nines in a tight silver sheath, hunched over one of the silent auction tables.

  “Of course my husband noticed her,” Stephanie jokes, but Charlotte’s eyes are back on Jason, whose expression is serious, matching Finch’s. They almost look like they’re arguing, and Charlotte feels a hitch in her chest. Finch takes a step toward Jason, a step that looks aggressive. And then Jason does something he never ever does; it is so unlike him that it almost doesn’t seem as if it could be him, but he takes his own step forward, closing the distance between them.

  “Uh-oh,” Stephanie mutters, leaning into Charlotte’s side, their shoulders brushing against each other’s. “What’s—”

  “I’m going to go find out,” Charlotte says, her nervousness over seeing Jason now replaced with a fear that her husband is about to make a scene. The people around them start to notice, how one of Finch’s friends pats his shoulder, easing him away, and then Jason turns, and he’s staring right at her. She starts toward him.

  “What was that about?” she says under her breath, smiling like everything’s fine so that people won’t be compelled to keep watching as they meet beside the parquet wood dance floor.

  “Never mind,” he says.

  “Jason—” She waves at another familiar face.

  “He was just being an asshole,” he says. “Said something about you bothering Tucker.”

  Charlotte looks down at her feet.

  “It’s not important,” he says. “Forget it.”

  They stand there, pretending that this is normal, the two of them together, and Charlotte thinks to herself that it’s like that odd pressure when you try to push the wrong sides of magnets together, each side repelling the other. The closer she stands to him, the stranger it feels.

  “Do you want to—?” Jason points to the banquet tables, arranged in a U-shape, where the silent auction items are displayed.

  “Sure,” she says, and they wander over. As they browse the offerings, Charlotte finds herself thinking of every prize description as a reminder of their uncertain future. With whom would she use a gift certificate to the Inn at Little Washington? Season tickets, right on the ice, to the Capitals? A Fourth of July fireworks viewing party on a yacht in the Potomac?

  “I’m going to get a beer,” he finally says. “Can I get you something?”

  “No,” she says.

  His eyebrow twitches, almost imperceptibly, but she notices.

  “I’m really trying—” she starts, but he cuts her off. He shakes his head, and then he turns like he’s about to walk away, but then he stops himself and faces her.

  “I kissed Jamie,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I did,” he says, his eyes cast downward, the saddest expression on his face. “I didn’t mean to,” he says, almost like a boy confessing that he broke a window with a baseball. “It was this past week, at work.”

  “Jason—” she starts, feeling dizzy. “I don’t—”

  “I wasn’t lying to you,” he says. “There’s never been anything between us before, but I did it. I’m the one who kissed her. I wanted to do it.”

  Charlotte takes a step toward him, not wanting anyone to overhear. “I don’t understand.”

  “I read your email,” he says.

  “Oh.” It’s just one syllable but she can barely choke it out, realizing what he’s saying.

  “Why is it easier for you to talk to your ex than it is to talk to your own husband?”

  “Jason, I—” She looks at him and then around the room.

  “I’m not trying to be argumentative,” he says, leaning in and whispering. “I really want to know. Is he who you want? Is that what you want?”

  “No,” she says, and she knows it’s true, every part of her knows. “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why?” he says, but before she can answer the lights begin to flicker and the band stops. An emcee appears on the stage, and he introduces himself over the static-filled microphone as a trigonometry teacher at the school, then announces that the live auction is beginning.

  A sizzle of excitement moves like a wave over the crowd and one of the dads, already too many drinks in, whoops like he’s on a spring break booze cruise. Laughter and groans ripple through the room, and the crowd feels like it tightens around Charlotte, everybody wanting to inch closer to the stage as the emcee explains that the silver stars scattered on the tables throughout will serve as bidding markers. She feels woozy and wishes she could escape, but it’s too late now.

  The emcee begins with a private tour of the National Gallery of Art, which goes quickly and without incident to a couple Charlotte knows from a drama camp that Birdie used to attend every summer. Next, Nationals box seats for a game over Memorial Day weekend, and the bidding goes on longer than Charlotte would have expected, with four groups of people vying for them before they go for just over three thousand dollars. Charlotte glances at Jason once, yearning to feel some connection with him, but his eyes are locked on the stage, his expression hard.

  “Okay, this next one is a biggie,” the emcee begins.

  He pulls an index card off of the podium beside him and holds it in front of his face, twirling it between his fingers. “Are you ready?” He’s met with more whooping and applauding.

  “We have . . .” he starts. “A weekend for two at the Ritz-Carlton in Lake Tahoe, California.” He clears his throat and continues reading. “Your weekend features your own private suite with spectacular lake views, round-the-clock butler service, full access to all of the resort’s facilities and award-winning spa, plus more.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “The bidding starts at one thousand dollars.”

  Instantly, several hands shoot up. “Fifteen hundred!” someone shouts.

  “Eighteen hundred!” another exclaims. Within seconds, the price is up to $2200, and Charlotte wonders, watching the crowd, if these people are so hot to outbid each other because they actually want the prize or because they want to show they can afford it. And then suddenly, a familiar voice yells out, “Five thousand dollars!” silencing the room.

  Charlotte turns to see. It’s Dayna, waving her spindly arm above her head, her bracelets jingling on her wrist.

  “Five thou—” The emcee barely gets it out before a hand shoots up on the other side of the ballroom.

  “Six thousand.”

  Somebody shrieks, but then the crowd falls deadly quiet. Charlotte cranes her neck. Finch.

  “Ten thousand!” Dayna’s voice rings out over the crowd.

  The emcee’s mouth falls open.

  “Ten five,” Finch barks.

  Every head in the room whips in unison to Dayna, who throws her head back and laughs. “Fifteen,” she says and turns to glare at Finch. Out of the corner of her eye, Charlotte sees someone lift a phone and when she turns back, she sees it’s one of the tennis moms she recognizes from practice, actually recording this marital breakdown.

  “Okay,” the emcee starts, his eyes darting back and forth, his voice a little less certain since he picked up on the fact that this isn’t just friendly competition. “Fifteen thousand. That’s fifteen . . .” He pauses. “Fifteen thousand, going once . . .”

  “Dammit!” Finch yelps. “Okay, sixteen!” he yells.

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” Dayna exclaims
before the emcee can continue, her voice clear and proud.

  The crowd erupts with some laughing, some gasping, but above it all, there is the sound of Finch bellowing.

  “Goddammit, Dayna!” he yells. “What the hell are you doing? You know this is my money either way! Just give it up! Stop!”

  She doesn’t even look in his direction.

  “That’s twenty thousand,” the emcee begins. “Twenty thousand going once . . .” The crowd falls silent, all eyes on Finch, waiting to see what he’ll do. “Twenty thousand going twice . . .”

  “Argh!” His strangled groan fills the room. “Jesus, twenty-five!”

  “Sir, is that twenty thousand, and five hundred, dollars?” the emcee says, an impish grin appearing on his face. “Or twenty-five thousand?”

  Before he has a chance to answer, Dayna’s voice calls out: “Thirty thousand dollars!”

  “Oh my God,” the emcee says, echoing the crowd’s thoughts. “Okay! Thirty. Thousand. Dollars.” He pauses. “Going once.” He turns to Finch, holding the microphone away from his mouth, waiting for him to make a move. “Thirty thousand going twice . . .”

  Charlotte looks around the room at the sea of wide-eyed spectators, some of them familiar but most of them not. They’re like the fans at a bloody bullfight, their mouths gaping. Another phone goes up, and then another. It’s easy to just watch, isn’t it? she thinks. She looks at Jason, whose expression is so agonized he looks like he’s in physical pain.

  “Sold!” the emcee screams, pointing in Dayna’s direction. “To the woman in the silver dress.”

  “You bitch!” Finch yells, sputtering and screaming like a dying motor, veins popping from his head, his buddies reaching for him, trying to calm him down. The crowd erupts, drowning out the sound of his outburst.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Charlotte sees her husband’s head dip down. She brushes her hand against his, and their fingers interlace, finding each other for the first time in what seems like forever. He squeezes his hand around hers, and it’s only a few seconds before he lets go again. “I have to get out of here,” he says.

  “Okay, I’ll come—” she says.

  The band starts up again.

  “No,” he says. “I have to go. I can’t—” He starts to walk away.

  “Jason, please!” she says, but he doesn’t turn back. She watches as he disappears through the double doors beneath a glowing red exit sign.

  She lies to Stephanie, saying that Jason isn’t feeling well, and when she gets outside, she searches the sidewalk for him, but he’s gone.

  He kissed Jamie.

  He’s gone.

  She walks for a while, even though her car is parked in the garage down the block. She needs the activity, the feel of the cool fresh air on her face. She passes apartment buildings where people are heading out for the night, and bars and restaurants from which music is spilling, the sounds of laughter and clinking glasses and celebration. She wants a drink. Her phone buzzes in her bag and she fumbles to get to it before the call goes to voicemail, hoping it’s Jason.

  It’s Reese. She waits a moment, the phone buzzing in her hand. She’s standing just outside a restaurant, twinkling candles on the tables, crisp white tablecloths. Through the glass, she can see a young couple having a drink at the bar, the woman twirling the stem of her glass between her fingertips. It is clear through their body language—the way he looks at her, the way she’s angled toward him—that it’s a date, maybe a new relationship. She turns away just as the woman’s eyes meet hers, and she presses the play button on her voicemail.

  Reese’s voice in her ear: “Hey, stranger,” he says, sounding hopeful, a little shaky. “It’s been a few days. Miss talking to you. Wondering if you’re still headed this way. I’d love to see you.” She thinks of Jason then, the look on his face a little while ago, confessing to her, and then she thinks of Birdie, and then of Dayna and Finch, the people watching them tear each other apart in that ballroom, the delight in their eyes, watching them battle, their truth laid bare.

  She thinks of the people who come to hear her talk and their searching faces, of her students, their fingers poised over the keyboards of their laptops, hanging on her every word. She tells them not to feel, to push through, and there is validity in that, she still believes it, but she also knows that there is a big difference between faking a good mood, a good day, a good attitude until it comes to be like conjuring a spell, and pushing through because you’re too scared of what lies beneath. Numbing with wine. Numbing with work. Numbing with the distraction of what might have been instead of facing what’s right in front of you and has been all along.

  She looks back at the woman through the window, how she tilts her head and takes a sip of her drink, and then another, and then Charlotte notices her own reflection in the glass, the straight slit of her mouth, the exhaustion, now unmistakable. She is so, so tired.

  She pulls out her phone and taps a message. Reese, I’m sorry, she says. I can’t see you. She turns away and heads toward home.

  Twenty-Two

  Jason looks up from his bowl of mint chocolate chip when he hears the sound of the garage door opening.

  Birdie, next to him on the couch, slides her spoon from her mouth. “I guess Mom thought the auction was boring, too,” she says.

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you want me to go upstairs?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Dad?” she says, the question in her voice making her sound younger than she is. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I know,” he says. “I don’t want to go either.”

  “You don’t?”

  He shakes his head. “No,” he says, reaching an arm around her. “I don’t.”

  He had left the auction rattled and frustrated, and driven back to his parents’ house, but as soon as he pulled the car into the driveway, he knew it wasn’t where he was supposed to be. This place of limbo he had put himself in, he realized, was what hurt most of all. He needed to go home.

  When he walked in the front door of his house, the wellspring of every defining moment of the last fifteen years, every joy and sorrow, the place where he slept on the left side of the bed, and opened presents on Christmas morning, and had a thick stack of old Father’s Day cards tucked in his nightstand, he found Birdie in the family room, watching a Netflix rom-com. The delight in her eyes when she saw him nearly brought him to his knees.

  He hears Charlotte come into the house, the door closing behind her. “Hello?” she calls from the hallway. “Birdie?”

  “In here,” Birdie says.

  “Hi,” Charlotte says, surprise on her face when she enters the room, her heels in her hand. “I didn’t expect to—” She points a thumb back behind her. “I saw your car in the garage.”

  “I’m sorry I left you there,” he says.

  “Dad said it was lame,” Birdie interjects, and the faintest hint of a smile appears on Charlotte’s lips.

  “Yes,” she says, looking at him with a tenderness that she hasn’t felt in some time. “It was.” Birdie must sense something passing between them because she puts her bowl down and rises from the couch, hitching up her oversized sweatpants after she stands, and says she’s going to go upstairs for a while. Just before she does, she leans down and hugs Jason.

  “See you in the morning, right?” she says.

  He looks at Charlotte. “See you in the morning.”

  Charlotte sits in the chair across from him, the TV flickering shadows between them.

  “I’m sorry I left,” he says again. “I couldn’t be there. That whole scene with Finch and Dayna . . . I couldn’t . . . I don’t want to be like them, Charlotte. I don’t want to end up like that.”

  “I don’t either,” she says, relief in her voice like she’s been holding her breath.

  “I just need to know what you want,” he says.

  “You,” she says. “I want you.”

  “Are you sure?” he says.

 
She starts to cry. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I am, too,” he says, and sighs. “We really fucked things up.”

  “Yes,” she says. “We have a lot of work to do.”

  “But I think . . . if we try . . .”

  “I think so, too.”

  “I want to come home,” he says.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She nods. “Stay.”

  Twenty-Three

  Charlotte is sitting on the dock behind her brother’s house. It’s over ninety degrees, and it’s barely eight o’clock in the morning. Her mother has already texted her twice to remind her that the last-minute dress she found for Birdie might need to be steamed one more time, and that Jason must wear a tie.

  Inside, Birdie is still sleeping. Jason, too. Charlotte stretches her arms over her head, yawning wide, and looks down at her journal, open on the dock in front of her. She’s been writing every day, the words coming out in a flood now that she’s stopped smudging her thoughts out with wine. She looks down at the gratitude list she wrote this morning, marked with her bulleted ballpoint stars:

  Waking up to see the sunrise after a solid night of sleep

  My family here with me

  Starting to nail down exactly what to say in the next book

  She bends her head from side to side, working out the kinks in her neck from the long drive the day before. The plane tickets they looked at for Jason and Birdie were astronomically priced at such short notice so they drove instead, just like they used to, years ago, when they couldn’t afford to fly. A crash on I-95 meant that it took them thirteen hours instead of the usual nine, and they got off the highway three different times, trying the back roads. It was frustrating, testing all of their patience, and it felt like they were barely moving at some points. Around dusk, they stopped at a gas station somewhere in South Carolina, a little dusty side-of-the-road place. While Jason was outside filling the tank, and Birdie had her eyes closed, listening to something through her headphones, Charlotte snapped a photo of the rearview mirror just outside her window. Sometimes to look forward, we have to look back, she wrote in the caption before she posted it. Sometimes we’re doing so much, trying to get to the next thing, that we forget why we’re doing it in the first place. I’ve spent a lot of time charging ahead this year, and for all of my talk of action, there is something to be said for presence, for paying attention, something that’s hard to achieve when you’re doing life with a phone in your hand, or a glass of wine, or whatever it is you use to escape into. I am trying instead to opt for the slow road. To take my time and pay attention. It isn’t easy. It’s testing every bit of my patience. But I have a feeling it will be worth it, so I’m going to take a break from this for a while. Reflexively, she swiped down on the screen, watching the likes rack up once again, the comments peppered with hearts and smiley faces, praying hand emojis, thumbs-up. She glanced out the window, then back down at the screen. She read her post one last time, and then she closed out the app and deleted it from her phone.