“Hi!” the younger girl said. Ethan raised his arms for his daddy.
The babysitter, Jess noticed, did not meet her eyes when she passed by on her way out, and Jess saw the first five minutes of the woman’s drive home unfold in her imagination like a scene in a movie. By the time she got to the red light on Main, she’d have texted her eight best friends to let them know that Malcolm Gephardt’s wife just walked into Neil Bratton’s house with the obvious intention of staying. Five of them would text back to say they’d heard something about that, hadn’t Malcolm and his wife broken up back in the fall? One would ask whether Malcolm was the hot bartender at the Half Moon, or was she thinking of someone else? That’s him, six out of eight would reply, and then each would follow up with a flames emoji. One would say that he and his wife always seemed like a mismatch, hotness-wise. One would ask the babysitter-friend to please snap a good pic of Neil next time she was there. He didn’t have much of a social media presence, and they’d like to discuss how he stacked up against Malcolm.
“From there the whole town will know,” Jess said, once the sitter was gone and she shared her worry.
“And?” Neil had asked. “Who cares?”
Jess tried it on for size. Who cared?
Well, she did.
For four months she’d been trying to make herself scarce in Cobie’s guest bedroom, hovering like a satellite at the edge of their endless family discussions of who’d take whom to soccer, who’d take whom to chorus, believing when the time came to make a decision it would be obvious what she should do. And then, out of nowhere, Neil spilled everything to Patrick. He and Patrick went to some ski shop up in Warwick that was liquidating. Patrick was the one who heard about it—crazy deals—and roped Neil into going along. They each bought new skis, boots, bags, and then they went out all afternoon. After Neil confessed, his misgivings were enough to sober him up, to prompt him to call Jess from outside the bar. For some reason she pictured him wearing ski boots. “Three Manhattans and it just came out” was how he put it, and didn’t seem all that remorseful.
Malcolm could drink twenty Manhattans and still remain a vault. That’s why people told him things.
“Wait, what?” Jess asked, pressing the phone to her ear, as if that would help. It was windy wherever he was standing. It sounded as if he were yelling at her from across a field.
“Patrick was pretty shocked,” Neil said, shouting over the wind.
“What did he say?”
“He said you guys have had a really tough few years. He said maybe he should have seen it coming.”
“He did?” Jess said, and felt defensive, wondered what Patrick would have seen if he’d looked.
“Where’s he right now? Can he hear you?”
“No he’s inside. He’s hitting the head and then getting us another round.”
“Another round? He’s not mad at you?”
“Mad at me?”
“Well. Yes.”
“He’s surprised. He doesn’t approve, obviously. But no, he didn’t storm out or anything.”
Jess felt a dull ache spread from her center. She felt like she might get sick.
“I told him that I know he’s a good friend of Malcolm’s. I told him I knew it put him in a bad spot.”
Good friends? They’d been best friends since they were six years old. Patrick used to be afraid of the wind, and Malcolm would hold his hand as they ran across the school parking lot to their bus. When Malcolm’s father died out of the clear blue, Patrick slept on Malcolm’s bedroom floor for a week. But Neil didn’t know any of that. As Neil was talking, Jess’s phone started lighting up. A text from Patrick, asking her to call him, followed by a call, which she declined. Then a call from Siobhán. Then twenty texts in approximately fifteen seconds, all from Siobhán.
Holy shit
Jess what’s going on
Call me
Or Call P
Are you okay?
What’s going on w you Jessie?
You said you needed space
That’s what you said so I figured everything you’ve been thru
Here’s me and P feeling so bad for you!
And thinking M might be to blame
With everything, you know
He can be so M and not exactly a talker etc
Neil told P
What in the world?
now I hear it’s been going on for ages? W the actual F
Jess!
I’m not judging would just love to talk
Could be a little thing that got carried away, right?
Considering everything
Just call me asap
Neil called again from the Uber he and Patrick shared to get back to Gillam, once Patrick got dropped off. Patrick left his car and their skis behind for pickup the next day.
“I think we’ll both feel better when everyone knows, don’t you?”
“No,” Jess said. “I don’t feel that way at all.”
“Jess,” he said simply. “You were going to tell Malcolm soon, right? I mean, it’s long past time.”
He repeated the thought the next day, when he surprised her at her office and asked her to lunch. He apologized, said if it made her feel any better, he had the most ferocious hangover of his life. He seemed less put together than usual, and halfway down Fifty-Ninth Street he stopped walking, said he actually wasn’t sorry. That she was stalling was something they were both smart enough to understand, and it was time to acknowledge it because otherwise it would just go on and on and on. Did she want to make a go of it or not? Because he did. He wanted a family. A complete family. Not the lopsided thing he’d been living inside since his divorce. And he wanted her, specifically. How many people did he meet that day at Patrick’s Memorial Day barbeque? How many women crossed his path every single day? But it was Jess his mind snagged on. Jess that he couldn’t stop thinking about in the days after.
“So you took matters into your own hands,” Jess said.
“Yes,” Neil said, and shrugged. “It’s my life, too.”
That Patrick hadn’t seemed angry with Neil kept Jess up all night. She didn’t want anyone to be angry at anyone. She wanted everyone to take it in and try to understand. And yet. She had two missed calls from Patrick before eight o’clock that morning. Plus Toby, who was not a texter, wrote to say he thought she was disgusting and to never show her face in his house again. Who told him? Jess wondered. Patrick or Siobhán? Had they called him late the night before or first thing in the morning and either way: Why? Had they called Malcolm, too? It wasn’t Toby’s business. Disgusting. She never even liked Toby and long wondered why in the world Malcolm and Patrick let him tag along with them their entire lives. All he did was steal their jokes and brag about his job, as far as she could tell. She kept looking at his text to confirm that’s what he’d written. She’d been heading into a meeting when it popped up. Working to keep her face a blank, she left her files on the conference room table, closed her laptop, silenced her phone, and went into the ladies’ room to stand in a stall for two minutes with her forehead pressed against the faux wood wall.
* * *
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said on the day she left, as she began transferring the piles of clothes to her suitcase. She had an ache at the back of her neck, and her head was splitting.
“You’re leaving,” Malcolm said, and just stood there, watching, his thick shoulders hunched, and for one split second it crossed her mind that he might punch a wall or something. It was in there somewhere, that possibility, but he kept all extreme emotions neatly in line, and he’d sooner pretend it didn’t matter to him at all than to make a scene, even when there was no one around to see it but her. She thought about pointing out that it was the first time in a long time that he’d paid attention to a single thing she did, but she knew she’d sound like a petulant, attention-seeking child, so she swallowed it back. She wasn’t looking for a fight.
“I’m not leaving leaving.” She paused what she was doing but didn’t look at him. “We just need a break.”