She can see Megan considering whether to ask another question. She thinks for a wild moment about telling Megan the story about Tommy. All of it. How they’d started out so much in love, and how things had slowly gone wrong, and how she’d tried, she’d tried, she’d tried. How whenever she resolved to leave Tommy she’d succumb to sorrow and nostalgia, yes, but mostly she could just never resist her stupid, primal attraction to him, and one of those times they’d conceived Milo. How things had gotten better for a while, because Tommy took such good care of her while she was pregnant, and then was so good with the baby. What went wrong after that. If she told Megan all of it, all of it, would she understand? Would she still be her friend? Who in the world will still want you, once they know everything you have to tell?
Jennifer says, “We’d better go after them,” and Megan obligingly drops the subject. She calls, “Boys!” again, and breaks into a light jog. Jennifer stands there. She just needs a second. Just a second, and then she’ll be fine. She puts her hand against the glass, and the fish flee from it. She parts and scatters them with her terrifying hand. Because she is the bad guy. She is the bad guy, of course. Even if Megan imagines differently, she is not the tragic figure. Tommy is. Tommy always was. Nobody saw the tragedy in being the practical one. He was the one who fell painfully short of his potential, the one who, even as he let his business flounder and drank too much and showed up late, continued to be thought of as a really great guy. And he was a really great guy. He’d never changed. He still felt things deeply and struggled not to show it, and he still lost that struggle, and rewarded your comforting charms with an irresistible outpouring of emotional truth. He still drank so much you worried about him, but held his liquor well enough to escape pity or scorn. He could still charm. He could still treat all his mistakes like the inevitable result of his own sad-fuckup nature, his bad choices beyond help and therefore beyond judgment. He was still sweet. He still looked at her like she was the only thing in the world.
And other people saw that, the way he looked at her and all those other things. And so she was the villain. She was the one who didn’t laugh at his joke, or who looked pained when he gave in to the call to stay for another. She was the one who wanted to leave the party; he was the one who kept it going. The one who wants to leave the party is never the favored one. People thought she didn’t know how good she had it. People thought she was mean. No one ever said that directly, of course. Instead, if she complained, their responses started with “at least” or “come on.” Come on, he’s so sweet. At least he’s still into you. Come on, you’re so lucky. At least he’s hot. Once a close friend had said, “Well, you know, you’re always mad at him—you’re probably not the easiest person to live with.” Even her friends liked him better. They might not have, if she’d told them about the affairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell, because that would expose her weakness as well as his.
The third—or fourth?—time she found out that Tommy had slept with another woman, he’d left his email open on their shared desktop—something he never did—and curiosity had made her read it. It was curiosity of the kind that comes with a shiver of nausea, because you know you don’t want to know what you’re about to find out. She printed the email out, as calm as a secretary. When he got home that night—late, he’d had drinks after work, of course he had—she was sitting at the dining room table waiting with the email in front of her. He said, “Hey, babe,” and bent to offer her a kiss that was sharp with whiskey, and she pushed the email over so he could read it. “What the fuck, Tommy,” she said. “What the fuck.” It was all she could think of to say, so she kept saying it, a hundred times, slamming down the word that described both her outrage and the thing he’d done. She went around the house saying it, picking up his things and throwing them, while he followed, alternately pleading and shouting at her to stop. Finally he grabbed her hands, and she threw him off with such force that he stumbled backward, and she took a step in his direction and hit him as hard as she could in the face.
“Stop it!” Zoe screamed. She was eleven, or twelve. She was supposed to be in bed, but she’d come downstairs, and they hadn’t seen her. Before her guilt rushed in, Jennifer felt a flash of anger toward Zoe, her daddy’s girl of a daughter, who couldn’t even allow her the fleeting triumph of hitting him, the satisfying pain of their failures colliding.
“It’s okay,” Tommy said to Zoe, who had her arms around him, who was trembling, who glared at her mother like she wanted to do her harm. “It’s okay, honey. I deserved it.”
“Oh God,” Jennifer said. She was moving toward the garage door before she knew her own intent. “Can’t you let me have anything?”
Tommy followed her into the garage. She wrenched the car door open. “What do you mean?” he said as she slammed it shut. He rapped on the window, the garage door slowly opening at her back. She could hear him through the glass. “What do you want me to let you have? Whatever it is you can have it.”