She stepped into the shower and when she came out, Malcolm was awake. “Hey,” he said, and tugged at the edge of her towel until finally she let it fall. As they moved around each other, she tried to decide what was different, what he was holding back from her now that he’d never held back before, but there didn’t seem to be anything except maybe a new seriousness, a sense that they’d come very, very close to losing each other, and also, underneath all of that, a sense that they still might, nothing was guaranteed.
Once they were dressed, they wandered until they found a restaurant that had a good vibe, as Malcolm put it, and as usual he chatted up the bartender. A band started playing almost as soon as they sat, so they didn’t have to talk. After dinner they walked back to the hotel, watched a movie, slept. The next day, she spent the long drive home trying to convince him that it was a win. He’d had a job for twenty-six years, and now he was stepping away from that job, and that was it. A lot of people stepped away from their jobs after twenty-six years with nothing of the place where they’d worked all that time. He’d get something else. Without that massive pressure on them, they could pay down their debt with the clinic, their credit cards, Jess’s student loans.
“We could sell our house,” Malcolm said. “If you really want to talk about starting over. Hugh isn’t wrong. It’s worth something.”
The same thought had occurred to Jess.
* * *
The paperwork was waiting for them, as promised. When Malcolm told his staff at the Half Moon that Hugh was taking over again, that the place would likely close for a while, he thought they’d be angry with him, but instead they wanted to comfort him. They all told him to let them know if he ended up opening a new place. Malcolm took a few of the framed photos that meant something to him. He told the rest of them to take what they wanted.
“What are you going to do?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know,” Malcolm said.
* * *
The snow melted, though enormous dirt-encased hills lasted in parking lots until late April, taking up crucial spaces at Food King, at the mall. His mother told him more of the story when he got back from South Carolina. “You were still in a playpen,” she said. Gail remembered him pressing his fat cheek against the netting while Darren told her what a dumb loudmouth Hugh was and how he’d gotten himself into a situation. According to Gail, Hugh had never liked Darren and for some reason always acted like he had something to prove when he was around him.
“And did Dad like Hugh? I mean before this dumb bet?”
“Honestly, I don’t think he thought anything about him at all.”
* * *
Malcolm avoided driving down Seneca, but one morning he turned out of habit. Already the building was under construction—a major renovation from the looks of it—a chain-link fence circling the lot. He thought signing the place over would feel like amputating a limb, but all it had taken were five minutes and a few signatures. The land was a bit more complicated. Darren’s next of kin was Gail, so it was Gail who had to sign it over. When Malcolm apologized, said he’d make it up to her, she shushed him, said if he’d only told her how he’d been struggling, she might have thought of it much sooner.
Now, several weeks after the paperwork was finalized, he pulled over to look more closely, and without realizing he was doing so, he clutched the steering wheel. He was still there, and he was still Malcolm, no matter what was becoming of the Half Moon. How had Hugh gotten plans drawn up so quickly? He made himself think of the dozen mousetraps in the basement—the ones that smelled of rotted flesh if he didn’t find them right away, and the mice that shrieked for hours until they died—and he then made himself find some gratitude that he’d never have to deal with them again.
Siobhán said to each of them separately that she was glad they’d worked it out. She said it to them together, too, one night when they were hanging out in Jess and Malcolm’s backyard. A test run, as Jess described it, to see how their friends would be. She ran into a few of her other girlfriends, and most seemed a mix of nervous and sympathetic. She went for a run one morning, and a couple she knew crossed the street when they saw her, pretended to be examining a tree so they wouldn’t have to look her way. On the night that Siobhán and Patrick came over, they left their kids at home with instructions that if there was an emergency to just run over to Malcolm and Jess’s. Siobhán joked that there was probably already blood on the walls. Jess made stuffed jalape?os and bacon-wrapped dates, and kept jumping up to refresh drinks. They talked. They laughed. But Patrick never addressed Jess directly.
“He won’t even look at me,” she said to Malcolm when they passed in the kitchen.
“Well,” Malcolm said, and raised his shoulders as if to ask if she could blame him.
“You said you wouldn’t do that.”
“Sorry. It’s hard.”
Later, they cleaned the dishes side by side at the sink. They’d had a nice enough time with their old friends, had a few laughs, but Jess felt grief hanging in the air among the four of them. Malcolm insisted their larger circle would come around eventually, but Jess wasn’t so sure. Some friends—two to be exact—reached out to say they hoped she was okay and if she ever wanted to talk. Jenny, whose birthday Jess had been celebrating the night she and Malcolm met all those years ago, was one of them. She was divorced now, living in Toms River, and emailed to say that people having opinions about what happened even though they didn’t have the first clue would be the hardest part, but that Jess should just remember that they don’t know anything, it was no one’s business but hers.
“Jenny,” Jess whispered aloud when she read that, and it stopped her breath to think what she must have gone through to have gained that wisdom. And where had Jess been for her? Nowhere. Jenny had gotten pregnant so young. They’d drifted apart.
When they finished drying the dishes after Siobhán and Patrick left, Malcolm leaned back against the counter and looked at her. They were paying more attention to each other lately, as if all past assumptions were open to question.
“What?” she asked. It had been six weeks since she moved back in, six weeks since their trip down to South Carolina.
Malcolm’s phone rang, and he glanced at the number quickly before declining.
“Who’s that? Kinda late.”
“Do you remember Adrian? He’s called a few times.”
“What does he want?”
“To catch up, I’m sure. He has a place down in St. John. Apparently it’s doing pretty well.”
Jess tilted her head, looked off like she did when she was thinking.
“You know?” she said. “You should call him back.”
* * *
Malcolm shaped for per diem work with the sandhogs. He was a little on the old side, but he had a hook, and he appreciated the money. He liked the chumminess between the guys, but it was so vastly different from the work he was used to. There was no performance to it. No electric energy. It was just getting to the end of eight hours and then doing it again the next day. Owners of other bars who knew he was free called and offered him shifts, but he couldn’t face it yet, slinging drinks in a place that wasn’t his, taking his cut of the tips again like he hadn’t ever held his dream in his hand. On days he didn’t get work he went to the gym, got his paper and coffee, and then drove over to the Half Moon, to see how the renovation was progressing. Emma worked at a place in upper Manhattan and was dating a sommelier. André had been hired as sous chef at a place much nicer than the Half Moon. No one had heard from Roddy, and Malcolm decided no news was good news.
Sometimes, out of nowhere, he thought of Patrick’s question and the astonishment in his voice when Malcolm told him that Jess had moved back in, that they were staying together: Why?