She rolled the window down. “I’m tired of forgiving you,” she said. “Just once I want to be the one in the wrong.” She threw the car in reverse and he stepped away, then followed the car as she backed down the driveway. Zoe stood behind him, framed in the doorway to the house, crying, calling, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, come back,” as her mother drove away.
They were right, the people who talked about her. He did love her. She was always mad at him. She was mean. Time after time a sharp word from her left him quiet and wounded, looking at her with his sorrowful eyes. In those moments she was almost on the side of the people who disliked her for wounding him, and her dislike of herself was one of the many things she’d held against him.
Zoe’s preference for him—that was another one. She’d loved her father—who so openly admired her brains and beauty, who told her about problems at work and listened seriously to her advice, who engaged her in long, confessional discussions of his troubled childhood and her romantic travails—much more than her matter-of-fact mother, who bought her shoes and got her to school on time. It wasn’t just Jennifer’s opinion that Zoe had loved Tommy more. Zoe herself frequently said that. Even before Tommy died Zoe had treated her like an evil stepmother whose only purpose in the story was to cause misery.
If Zoe had known about the affairs, she might not have cared. Maybe no one would have cared, would have cut Jennifer slack for her sharp tongue in the face of Tommy’s charm. It occurs to her now that she’s been telling herself a comforting lie, assuming people didn’t know. Everybody in town knew him. If they weren’t his friend, they wanted to be. Once she’d tracked him down in a bar and asked a bartender to stop serving him, and the woman had said, “I’m not cutting off Tommy Carrasco.”
She had developed a stoic nonreaction to all such commentary, but that night she learned its limits. At the bartender’s defiant defense of the man Jennifer had to live with—the man whose boozy three a.m. entrance would interrupt her sleep, the man whose bleary hangover would keep him from doing the school run in the morning, the man whose devotion to her never stopped him from letting her down—she cracked wide open. All the ugliness rushed out. “I hope you have a head-on!” she screamed at him.
That story got told a lot, later.
But what about the time he’d taken her dancing on her thirty-fifth birthday, and they’d stayed out on the floor all night, swaying, her head on his shoulder, her palm pressed to his chest so she could feel his heartbeat and know by its steady rhythm that it was as much hers as ever, and then at some point he stopped moving and lifted her head and held her face in both hands like he’d done from the beginning of time and said, “I’m so lucky,” and then he kissed her until some drunk buddy poked them, laughing, and said, “You guys are horny as teenagers”? What about that? That was a story no one wanted to tell.
In her commitment to Sebastian’s decompression, Megan has planned a whole day in Chattanooga, and so after the aquarium they walk the pedestrian bridge over the river, the boys exclaiming at the many webs shimmering between the slats of the railing, half-faking terror at the fat spiders. Jennifer’s interest is in the shiny, snaking river, the way it glistens in the bridge’s gaps. Just right there. Just below. Sometimes when she leans over the edge of things it’s hard not to feel how it would be to fall. The rush and whoosh. But no collision, no splash. As if she’d disappear before she landed. Megan has kept up a nonstop chatter, building a wall of talk between now and the mention of Tommy. Megan tries to fix things. She tries to make you feel better. She tries to erase what has been. On the other side of the bridge, in an ice cream place called Clumpies, Jennifer sits studying the T-shirts for sale—would you want to wear a T-shirt over your breasts that said Clumpies?—and waits for Milo and Ben to finish their cups of animal cracker ice cream and for Megan to stop talking. Just. Stop. Talking.
“Do you think we’ve been gone long enough?” Jennifer asks abruptly. Rudely. She is sorry when she sees the insult register on Megan’s face. None of this is Megan’s fault—that Jennifer broke her own rule about Tommy, that Milo was the one who caused her to break it. That Megan believes things can be fixed, while Jennifer believes all you can do is flee the rubble, the survivor’s aftermath. “I just mean, do we still have time to go to the park?”
“Park, park, park!” Ben chants, and Milo joins him. “Park, park, park!”