George crawled toward Caitlin and collapsed at her feet into a heap of exaggerated defeat. “They got me,” he gasped, looking up at Caitlin, and though she was in no mood, she appreciated that he was trying to include her in the fun.
“Bravo, buckaroos,” she said halfheartedly. “You slew the dragon!”
George laughed and raised his head. “Boys, that’s called a mixed metaphor,” he said.
“Mefador,” Leo agreed solemnly.
“He was a TIGER!” Gus informed her, in his bossiest voice.
“Do you know what tiger-dragon-horsies eat?” George asked the boys, leaning closer to them. “They’re very particular creatures. And they only have ice cream sundaes!”
“Sundaes!” the boys yelled in unison, and ran ahead of George into the kitchen.
Caitlin bit her tongue. When George was out of town for a week or two at a time, she’d spend her evenings outnumbered, struggling alone to coerce the boys into eating anything remotely healthy as they’d inexplicably shun things they’d just days before been content to eat—suddenly spaghetti was “too wiggly wobbly,” meat loaf subject to the dissection of the minuscule translucent onion squares inside, and yogurt acceptable only if it was blue. Then George would swoop back in on a Friday night with an assortment of candy from the airport concessions. It drove her mad. He knew that treats were allowed only once in a while, but he didn’t seem to realize that his splurges meant that the goodies always came from him. Just once, she wanted to be the fun one. But it hardly seemed fair to ask him to stop when he spent so much time away.
“Ice cream, sweetie?” He laid his fingertips briefly on her shoulder as he followed the boys into the kitchen.
Caitlin gestured to her wineglass, only half empty. “No, thanks.”
Over the excited chatter behind her she heard the unfamiliar ring of the house phone. She and George used their cell phones almost exclusively. No one ever called but telemarketers, and each time the landline rang—inevitably during dinner or naptime—she was tempted to have the thing disconnected. But then she’d imagine some emergency. One of the twins taking a tumble down the stairs, or—oh God, she could barely bring herself to think about it—out through the screen of a second-story window, having defeated one of the safety latches she’d installed on every glass panel in the house. There the little crumpled body would lie, crying for her or, worse, completely motionless, and instead of holding him, soothing him, helping him, keeping him calm while she dialed 911, she’d be running around trying to figure out where she’d put her damn cell phone.
“Honey? Violet’s on the phone.”
Caitlin couldn’t remember having given Violet the number. Then, all at once, she did—when the two of them were on their maternity leaves together and one of them would get no answer on the other’s cell, they had a code to call each other’s landlines, let it ring exactly once, and then hang up. This would signify that the caller really needed an extra set of hands to run next door if at all possible. Potential causes included explosive diapers that had leaked all over the person changing them, conference calls that needed to be taken without a crying baby in the background, and once, an overflowing washing machine in Violet’s basement.
Caitlin had never wanted to imagine a day without Violet right next door. And now she didn’t even know how she would face her on the phone, with hundreds of miles between them.
Maybe Finn had had a change of heart after leaving here. Maybe talking with Caitlin had made him realize the depth of the trouble he was in, or of the pain he had caused Violet, or of the horrible position he was backing Caitlin into, or of the hypocrisy and audacity he’d had to drag George’s family into this.
She took the phone from George’s outstretched hand, trying to imitate the eagerness with which she would have run toward such a call anytime before roughly ten thirty this morning.
“Vi? Any news?”
“No, no. I’m sorry for heckling you at home. I couldn’t get through on your cell, and I just … I just had to talk to someone.”
“Did Gram leave you alone?” Gram had basically moved from her senior community into Violet’s little rented house as soon as Violet had returned from Sunny Isles. She’d barely left her side the entire time Caitlin had been there.
“I made her go to the pottery workshop at the center—she’s been looking forward to it forever. Only now, I can’t stand being in this house alone. It’s just so quiet. It’s so quiet, it’s loud—like a deafening roar of quiet. It almost makes me feel like I’m going crazy.”
Caitlin thought of George’s primal growls as the children had giggled and clung to his back, and her heart ached. What would it be like for all that noise, all that life here, to just … disappear?
Violet sighed. “Anyway, it’s not just that I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted to talk to someone who would let me be angry. Everyone here is so at one with the mountains, you know? I mean, I love it, right up until I don’t.”
Caitlin knew what she meant. Asheville was so full of free spirits it was almost impossible for them not to rub off on you. This past year, Gram had transformed into some Zen-like, earth-mother version of herself, trading in her leather purses for hand-sewn patchwork satchels, letting her bob grow out, and giving up her blond hair dye. Finn had stopped shaving as regularly and traded in his sleek road bike for a heavy mountain version that all but came covered in mud. Now that Caitlin thought about it, the only one who seemed unchanged by the family’s move was Violet.
“That’s fair,” she said. “You have a right not to feel at one with anything at the moment.”
“I think I’m officially moving from the confused stage to the pissed-off stage,” Violet said. “I mean, how can Finn do this to me? How can he do this?”
Caitlin’s eyes fell on the kitchen island where she’d faced off with Finn earlier. The boys were squirting Reddi-wip into their bowls, and little bits of whipped cream were flying everywhere. She’d be finding dried white splotches on cupboard doors for weeks, but George, in the custom of his forefathers, was oblivious. He lifted his eyes to meet hers and raised his eyebrows in married couple language for Any news? Caitlin shook her head. He adjusted his expression into one that said Unbelievable. George seemed as genuinely surprised as Caitlin and Violet were by Finn’s disappearance, a fact that Caitlin found comforting. She loathed the idea of the two women in the room being baffled to tears and then her husband, Finn’s golf buddy, swaggering in and saying, “Oh, he finally made a run for it, did he?” as if the wives, being typical wives, had been duped all along. Caitlin and Violet weren’t like those women who pretend not to know what nefarious activities their husbands are up to, or who are oblivious of behavior that doesn’t fit with their ideas of a perfect marriage. And George and Finn weren’t like those husbands who wait for any chance to escape the nags they married.