Half of What You Hear

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  “Earth to Warners, I asked you a question,” I say. “How was your day?”

  “Fine,” they both respond, with the enthusiasm of toll collectors.

  “Wow,” I say, sliding into the banquette beside the breakfast table in the corner of the room. “Just fine?” Max walks over and reaches for Bradley’s old copy of The Hobbit, which he was reading before school this morning. “Don’t get any of that radioactive nacho dust on your grandfather’s book,” I joke, noticing his bright-orange fingers.

  “I won’t,” he singsongs, walking out of the room, the bag of chips tucked under one arm.

  “So, Liv,” I say, watching her spoon pasta into a bowl. “I noticed your backpack. Where are all your keychains?”

  “Oh,” she says. “Just not into it anymore.”

  “Oh,” I say, frowning at her.

  “What?” she says. “It’s not a big deal, Mom.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, caught off guard by my own sentimentality over such a tiny thing. “I know. So . . .” I clear my throat. “How are the girls at school?”

  She shrugs, her sharp shoulder blades rising and falling under her uniform shirt like little bird wings.

  “Have things been better?”

  “I guess.” She sighs, and then, to my delight, pulls out the chair across from me and sits down. I watch her eat for a minute, shoveling pasta into her mouth in big forkfuls. “Brittany,” she says, through a mouthful of food. “She did something today that was pretty rude . . .” She pauses to swallow. “But in character, I guess. Now that I’m getting to know her.”

  “What was it?” I say.

  “Well, she’s been nicer to me, sort of. Saying hi or whatever. But then today, totally out of the blue, she came up to me at lunch, while I was throwing out my stuff. First . . .” She raises her fork in the air. “She told me that Dad and her mom used to be boyfriend and girlfriend, which I knew, of course, but . . . gross.”

  “Agreed,” I joke, picturing Eva telling her daughter some old story about Cole, her eyes all gaga the way Susannah’s look when she talks about Bradley.

  “Then she invited me to sit with her and Ainsley and the rest of her crowd.”

  “Well, that was nice.”

  “Yeah, but she said, ‘Don’t bring her,’ and motioned back to Lauren.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I see what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t know . . .” She shifts in her seat. “I kind of want to sit with Brittany and her friends. A couple of them actually seem cool. But Lauren . . .”

  “That’s tough,” I say. “Could you just take Lauren with you? See what happens? If the other girls are truly good people, they’d probably be welcoming, wouldn’t they?”

  She drops her fork to her bowl. “Mother,” she says, giving me a deadpan look.

  “Never mind,” I say, putting out my hands. (Mother?) “Well, if they’re not nice, you probably don’t want to be friends with them anyway,” I say, knowing that this is at least the four thousandth time she’s heard this from me. “But if they’re the kind of quality people you want in your life, they won’t care.”

  “Yup.” She stands, and I feel a yearning come over me, not wanting our conversation to be over just yet. She takes her bowl to the sink and I watch her face, looking for signs that something I’ve said registered. At this stage more than ever, motherhood is starting to feel like throwing darts in the dark.

  “I know you’ll figure it out, Liv. You’re a smart kid. Just spend time with people who see you for everything you are.” The moment the words are out of my mouth, I realize that as much as I’d like to believe it’s that easy, I know better. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, people only see what they want to.

  “Thanks,” she says, the corner of her mouth turning up just slightly before she walks out of the room.

  Is she okay? It takes all my willpower to stop myself from following her. She’s not even a teenager yet. She’s still here, just down the hall, and already, somehow, I miss her so much.

  Fifteen

  A couple of days later, on Friday afternoon, Max and I are lying on either end of the couch, watching American Ninja Warrior and sharing a bowl of popcorn that I have doused in copious amounts of Old Bay, when Cole arrives home and announces that he’s taking me out to dinner.

  “Is it our anniversary?” I say in a dopey, joking voice, feigning shock. “My birthday?”

  “Oh, geez, Mom.” Max tosses a throw pillow at me, hitting me right in the face. I throw it back and it bounces off his chest and onto the floor.

  “Really, what’s the occasion?” I say, twisting my body to face Cole, stretching my arms over my head and moaning like a dog lying in the sun. I actually know exactly why he’s doing this. It’s his mea culpa for his behavior at the inn, when he didn’t back me up in front of his mother.

  “No occasion, just go get dressed,” he says. “Or don’t. But let’s go soon, I’m starving.” He starts loosening his tie as he walks out of the room. Bradley keeps trying to tell him he doesn’t have to wear one anymore. Gotta purge that lawyer out, son, he keeps joking.

  “What about the kids?” I nudge Max with my foot and he nudges back.

  “Mom said she’d keep an eye on them,” he yells from the foyer. I look at Max to see what he thinks of this, but he’s turned his attention back to the TV, where a highly sculpted twenty-something in a sports bra is straddling a swinging, padded tube over a pool of water. Great.

  “Okay!” I yell to Cole, hoisting myself off the couch. “Max, time to turn the TV off.”

  * * *

  The Herringbone is a little brick house across from the Greyhill Inn that looks like it belongs on the cover of a children’s book. Ivy winds up the facade, window boxes spill over with flowers and foliage, and the bright-blue front door matches the shutters. Just inside the entry, in the vestibule that separates the front door from the rest of the restaurant, there is a framed black-and-white photograph of its first incarnation: a tack shop, with piles of horse blankets and saddles lining the walls, a man with a bristle-brush mustache standing in the threshold. As I stand in what looks like the very same spot, Cole holding the door open behind me, a grid of horseshoes on the far wall—iron, gold, and silver—catches my eye. There is a fire roaring in the fireplace, and the room smells like heaven, assuming heaven is bathed in butter and garlic. This is my very favorite restaurant in all of town, infinitely better than the dining room in the inn my husband and I now happen to own across the street, and there’s no way we’ll ever compete if Diane holds fast to the same dusty decor and menu they’ve been churning out for decades. I start to say something to Cole about it but then stop myself. We need a break. Not tonight.

  We take a seat at the bar and order our drinks—a manhattan for Cole, a glass of pinot noir for me—and have just opened our menus when I hear a voice calling our names behind me.

  “Happy Fri-day!” Whitney says, her hand on her belly as she squeezes into the narrow space behind our stools.

  “Whitney!” I say, turning over the paper menu on the bar. “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know,” she says, looking down at herself. “Counting the minutes now! Isn’t it cozy in here?” She hunches her shoulders up. “I love coming here in the fall.”

  “It is cozy,” I say, glancing around the room to see if I recognize anyone else. Sure enough, two of the mothers I’ve seen at pickup are sitting in the corner.

  “Cole, I haven’t seen you in forever,” she says. “How are you? How are things at the inn?”

  “Good,” he says. “Getting busy. I thought I knew the business, having grown up around it, but running the show’s a little different.”

  Whitney makes a sympathetic face. “Well, I’m glad you’re stealing a little time away together. So important, isn’t it? Jeff and I are doing the same.” She turns and points to a table by the window, where her husband is cutting into a steak with the cautious deliberation of a surgeon. Whitney waves her hand, trying to get h
is attention.

  “Jeff!” Cole calls out, one hand cupped to his mouth like we’re standing on a football field. The other diners look up from their tables, and I slap his leg. It’s not particularly quiet in here, but it isn’t a sports bar, either. Jeff starts to stand, resting his napkin on the side of his plate as he rises, but Whitney waves him off with her hand.

  “Sit and eat!” Cole stage-whispers to him.

  He nods, sitting and raising his steak knife toward us. He looks relieved not to have to come over.

  After she’s walked away, I turn back toward the bar. “I win,” I say, tapping his glass with my own.

  “But we didn’t bet on anything.” He laughs.

  “I still win.” We’d joked in the car about whether it was actually possible to spend an evening together within the city limits of Greyhill without running into anyone, and made predictions about how long it would take to see someone we knew. Cole had said twenty minutes and I had guessed five, just to make a point. I didn’t think I’d actually hit the nail on the head.

  “Fair enough,” he says.

  Our bartender walks down the bar to check on us—he’s about our age, nice-looking in a rugged way—and I wonder, as I often do around town, about who he is and where he’s from. I know I’m not the only nonnative here—Diane herself grew up in Richmond—but it feels like it a lot of the time. I’m certainly the only person from the Northeast. After we order our dinner—a bacon cheeseburger for Cole, crab cakes for me—I ask Cole whether he knows him. Cole squints at him, watching him pull a tap behind the bar, and decides that he doesn’t. “If he grew up around here, he might have gone to the other high school,” he says, referencing the public one, and I think again about the kids—especially Livvie—and whether we made the right decision sending them to Draper.

  “You didn’t socialize with the kids at the public school at all?” I ask, although I know I’ve asked it before.

  “Nope,” he says. “Not really.”

  “Hmm,” I say.

  “Hmm what?” he says.

  “Nothing.” But why? I wonder. I take a sip of my wine and look over at the bartender, thinking about how his experience of this town might be entirely different from Cole’s, and then peek over my shoulder at Whitney, who’s bopped over to another table. I think I’d assumed that when you move to such a tiny place, everyone’s just lumped in together, swimming in the same pond, but really, I’m starting to see, it can be as segregated and stratified as anywhere else.

  “So this is nice,” Cole says, interrupting my train of thought. “Besides the Barkers’ party, I can’t remember the last time we had a night out.”

  “I know,” I say, thinking that I wouldn’t exactly call our night at the Barkers’ a date, given that we barely spent any time together. “I can’t, either. When you were growing up here, where did people go on dates?”

  “Dates?” he says, making a perplexed face like I’ve just asked him where he used to go in town to shoot heroin.

  “Yeah, dates,” I say.

  “I don’t know,” he says, looking up at the beams crossing the ceiling like they might provide him with a clue. “I guess we went to William’s occasionally, though it wasn’t William’s back then, it was his grandmother’s place.

  “And we went to the inn, but only before a special occasion, like prom or something. We had to drive all the way to Culpeper to go to the movies, so that didn’t happen very often.” The bartender arrives with our plates and I move our drinks out of the way, making room. “Honestly, I think we mostly all just hung around the fountain in town square, or at people’s houses, or, of course, the Cliffs.”

  “Oh right, the Cliffs.” I roll my eyes.

  He smiles. “You wanna go later?” he says, elbowing me.

  “Is that it?” I laugh. “Was that your move?”

  “Very funny.”

  “But speaking of the Cliffs,” I say, “I can’t stop thinking about how I never heard about Henrietta Martin before I moved here.”

  Cole shakes a bottle of ketchup over his plate. “I don’t know,” he says. “It just never came up, I guess.”

  “Do you think Susannah Lane had anything to do with Henrietta’s death?” I ask.

  He picks up his burger and takes a bite. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess she could have.”

  “Your parents never talked about it growing up?”

  “No,” he says, the corner of his lip turning up. “Why would they have?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Your mother has an opinion on everything else. . . .”

  He makes a face like he’s conceding my point. “But why does it matter?”

  “I don’t know, it just bothers me,” I say. “I just want to know if my first profile for the Washington Post is of a murderess, and if I should be pitching her story to Dateline.”

  A confused expression materializes on my husband’s face, and I start to laugh. “I’m kidding, Cole!”

  “Obviously.” He smirks at me.

  “But I do want to understand her, you know?”

  “I get it.”

  “I asked your dad the other day, when we left the inn. He said it was just a rumor. I mean, he would know.” I turn my glass by the stem, thinking about it.

  “He would,” Cole says. “But why don’t you just ask her?”

  “Susannah?” I say, giving him a look. “Really? Did you murder your best friend when you were a teenager and have to leave town? I’m sure that would go over well.”

  “All right, all right,” he says. “By the way, I meant to tell you: we had a guest at the inn last night who was here to look at her land.”

  “Really?”

  He nods. “Lisa . . . you know, who manages the dining room?”

  I nod, though the truth is I can’t picture her.

  “She said she thought he was from Silicon Valley. Some tech guy wanting to build a farm on the East Coast.”

  “Oh, great,” I say. “People will love that.”

  “Tell me about it. But it did make me think that we really ought to start working on our plans for the inn. If that’s the kind of clientele we might be looking at hosting. . . .”

  I put down my fork. “I’m pretty sure . . . ,” I say, closing my eyes and tapping my fingers on my forehead as if I’m trying to remember something, “that someone might have said something like that the other day when we were talking to your parents. . . .”

  “I know,” he says, threading his arm into the space between my shoulders and my chair so that he can give me a conciliatory pat on the back. “I’m sorry about that. I really am. I just didn’t want to get into a whole thing with her.”

  “So you let me take the fall?” I say, stealing a potato chip off his plate.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “It shouldn’t have happened, and I won’t make a habit of it, I promise.”

  “Okay,” I say, not wanting to spend any more of our evening on Diane. I feel myself start to relax, enjoying the comfortable ambience of the room, the soft jazz playing in the background. I watch a couple in the antique mirror over the bar; they’re a little younger than us, I’d guess, holding hands while they talk. “So get this,” I say. “The other day, Livvie called me Mother.”

  Cole laughs. “Mother?”

  “Yeah,” I say, sticking out my bottom lip. “I wish I was still Mommy.”

  “They’re growing up fast,” he says.

  “Too fast,” I say.

  Before I can continue, I hear the telltale rasp of a voice behind me. Fuck. It can’t be . . . I glance quickly over my shoulder. “Are you kidding me?” I murmur to Cole.

  “Well, look who it isssss!” she slurs, wedging herself between our stools and slinging an arm around my husband. She is swaying like a tree in the wind.

  “Hi, Eva,” he says, a little too happy to see her, if you ask me. I stare at him, wanting to make eye contact so I can maritally transmit how annoying this is, but his focus has shifted to Mindy, the perpetual s
idekick, it seems, who has just appeared behind me. Both women have had a bit to drink. Or a lot to drink. If I’d known these two were going to show up, I would have agreed to go sit at the bar at Dahlia’s, like Cole wanted to.

  “Our newest residents!” Mindy says, hip-checking Eva farther toward Cole so she can throw her arms around the backs of our chairs like we’re all old friends.

  “Ooh, Bess,” Eva says, looking down at my nearly empty plate. “I see you liked your meal!”

  I smile at her, if only to keep myself from lunging at her with my knife. “I did, Eva.”

  “Lucky you,” she says, in a way that is clearly meant to be poking fun. “If I ate a big dinner like that, I would hardly be able to move for the rest of the night!” She pats her middle.

  “Yes, you strike me as quite delicate,” I say. I hate this woman. I hate her. I hate her. I hate her.

  She smiles at me, but I see right through it. I can tell by the eyes, gleaming with the haughty scorn I’m beginning to expect from her.

  “So what are you two up to tonight?” Cole says, shifting in his seat to face the women.

  Ugh!

  “Oh, Greg’s out of town,” Mindy says, her breath a putrid mix of alcoholic berry something or other. “He took the kids down to Blacksburg for the game tomorrow with his parents. Eva came over to keep me company, but we got bored sitting at home.” She giggles.

  “So we thought we’d come be bored here,” Eva says, leaning her elbow on the back of Cole’s chair in a proprietary way that I swear, from the way she’s looking at me, feels like a challenge. I look around the room, wanting to see if anyone’s noticed that the mayor’s wife is buzzed out of her mind, but sadly, I appear to be the only one who’s offended by her presence.

  “Sounds like fun,” Cole says, and then, like watching an accident in slow motion, I see him put his finger up to signal to the bartender for another drink. I want to strangle him.

  “You should join us next time, Bess!” Mindy says.

  “You should,” Eva says. “You really must be bored to death since you moved here. Your lives must have been much more exciting back in the city. The museums, the restaurants . . .”