“Didn’t we talk about making this really happen?”
Jess was silent. He had raised the idea of her moving in with them, but in the same conversation he’d also asked if she had a divorce lawyer in mind, because if she didn’t he had a few names. They were standing in the vestibule of a crowded restaurant downtown the first time he said the word—“divorce”—so she turned away, pretended to read the menu, asked the host how long it would be until their table was ready. Later, after their meal, he called her on it, said she was avoiding the issue. But it was her issue to avoid.
“I said I’d stay for the weekend. I never said I’d stay longer than that. I have to go to my mom’s. I have to figure it all out from there. I have to see Malcolm and face the music. It’s different for you. I have to do this right.”
“Now you have to do this right?” he said.
She was tempted to get out of the car right then.
“Sorry,” he said, reaching for her. “Sorry. I’m just tired. And impatient, I guess. The minute you make this decision, our lives will be better. We can stop hiding. My girls have questions, I know they do. I’d love for you to meet my parents. But I can’t introduce you if you’re still married. Once you have everything squared away, we can make this really happen. We can be a family.”
A messy family, not exactly the one she always wanted but pretty close. She thought of Malcolm, his leisurely Sunday mornings, how they used to pack sandwiches and go on long hikes together before he headed over to check on the bar.
Not for the first time, Jess wondered why Neil and his wife had really broken up. It was as he described, no doubt, but his side of the story was surely just one layer in a multilayered plot. Once in a while, when she was sprawled out on Cobie’s enormous beanbag chair with her boys, watching the baking show they loved, she forgot her resolution to only take life day by day and accidentally thought about waking up next to Neil in the middle of the night, his bedside water bottle, his contact lens solution on the bathroom vanity, his reading glasses folded on the table when she went downstairs in the morning. How long until the little items that made up his life seemed familiar to her, part of the backdrop of her day? Where do you put your recycling? she’d ask upon moving in, and then, after being told just once, that’s where she’d put her recycling for the rest of her days.
“It’s being here,” she said. “You know that. If you lived anywhere else, it would be different. You have to understand the position I’m in. I’m from here. Even if we face this, it’s not as if we’ll be going out to dinner in Gillam. It’s not as if we’ll do our grocery shopping at Food King. I can’t stand the idea of people talking about us.”
“Well,” he said, and she decided if he said she should have thought of that sooner, she’d open the door and walk away from him forever.
“If I lived anywhere else, we never would have met.”
He looked at her, and whatever she was about to say next fell away. The road ahead of them curved gently to the left, and after that, she knew, a stop sign would appear. After the stop sign would come a bump that made her stomach drop when the car rose and fell. She knew every inch of the town, knew it in her blood and her bones. She wondered for the hundredth time what she was doing.
Her mother had made a little comment last time they spoke, that Gail Gephardt seemed confused lately. Gail had called Maureen Ryan when she couldn’t get hold of anyone else because she kept hearing a sound in her basement and was convinced it was a raccoon. “What a panic,” Jess’s mother reported. “What about her friend Artie Sheridan? What about one of Malcolm’s buddies if she couldn’t get hold of her boy? What about animal control? But no, she called me and expected me to hop to it. What am I going to do if I come face-to-face with a raccoon? Anyway. When I went down there I didn’t see anything.”
“Does Malcolm know that?” Jess asked.
“And there she is at the top of the stairs waiting for me to report back.”
“Mom.”
“Did she even go down there herself? No clue. But she sure thought I should go down there. Like I don’t have my own problems.”
“Mom. Hello?”
“Does Malcolm know?” her mother echoed. “I’m not Malcolm’s wife. You are. You’d better call him and tell him his mother needs him.”
Shortly before Jess left, Gail Gephardt had been on her way to the same hairdresser she’d been seeing for twenty years when she got confused by a detour and called Malcolm from the side of the road. Nothing looked familiar, she insisted. She kept turning like the signs said but then there were no more signs and she didn’t know where she was. Malcolm tried to talk her through how to drop a pin on her phone’s map but she just shouted, “Malcolm!” So he told her to drive until she found a place to buy a cup of coffee, ask the exact address, and then call him back. He told her to sit in her car and enjoy her coffee while she waited, he’d be there before she knew it. It turned out she was less than a mile from her hairdresser, so he led her there at twenty-five miles an hour. When she got out of her car, he could see the fear was gone. She said now that she knew where she was she’d be fine, but he knew she’d encounter the same closed road on her way home, so he bought a paper and waited.
“Look at you,” the stylist said when he came in to check how much longer she’d be. “Haven’t seen you since you were in college.”
And from under her crown of foils Gail said, “That didn’t last long.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she said to Neil as the memory faded. “I’m just nervous.”
“It’s going to get better.”
I doubt it, she wanted to say, but instead she said, “I hope so.”
* * *
She was still living with Malcolm the first time she saw Neil’s house. His kids were at their grandparents’ for the night, and Jess felt like she was back in high school, sneaking into a place she shouldn’t be. She couldn’t stay there, no way. She imagined people looking in the windows. She imagined a parent he might know through his girls dropping something off unannounced and spotting her there. It was insane that she had even come as far as his driveway. She ducked down in the passenger seat like a criminal. Jess planned on telling Malcolm that she was going to dinner in White Plains with a college friend and didn’t want to drive home late so she’d crash on her friend’s couch, but he never asked. He had live music at the bar all weekend, was hoping for a solid crowd. She and Neil were headed to dinner an hour north, near Cold Spring. She only agreed to come inside his house because it was dark out, and being inside seemed less risky than waiting in his car. As she waited for him to get whatever he’d forgotten—his wallet or his phone or what?—she took in the tray ceilings, the large, curtainless windows. She’d imagined a masculine space, something modern and sophisticated, something that looked like an extension of the way he dressed, but instead the house seemed like the waiting room of a dentist’s office. In the front room were two ugly, overstuffed couches in mismatched florals pushed up against the walls. A few dark wood tables placed here and there.
“Walk me through your thinking here.”
“My mother’s,” Neil said. “Stop making that face. I wasn’t going to fight with Christine over couches.”
“I wasn’t making a face.”
“The funny thing is I only noticed how bad it was once I started picturing you here, making that face.”
“I’m not,” she said.