“Sure,” said Liz. “So long as you don’t want to know if I’m excited to have another baby.”
“I promise not to go there,” said Karen. “I’m just wondering: Has anyone on the PTA ever thought about—how do I put this?—throwing a little extra cash at one of the schools in the area that can’t afford to fund-raise? By which I mean, donating some of the donations?”
“Are you kidding?” Liz said drily. “Parents at this school would go ape shit if they thought a dime of their money was going someplace else. Sad to say, but they only care about their own kids getting ahead. And I’m probably no better. Or maybe I’m worse. I wish I gave more of a fuck about my kids getting ahead. As it is, all I seem to care about these days is canned pineapple and not missing True Detective. Meanwhile, my kids’ screen-time allocations are up to six hours a day.”
“Hey, you’re forty weeks pregnant, you get a pass,” said Karen.
“It’s actually been forty-one. They’re inducing me on Saturday if nothing happens before.”
“Oh my God! Good luck.”
“Thanks—also for taking the shit job no one on the PTA wanted. I got suckered into it the first half of the year. And now I’m sorry to say it’s your turn. When I’m recovered from Newborn-Land, let’s go out to lunch and charge it to the PTA as compensation for our hardship. What do you say?”
“It’s a deal,” said Karen, who felt strangely gratified by the encounter—was it possible that she, too, was starting to make friends at Ruby’s new school?—even as she continued to feel horrified by the money hoarding she’d seen on display.
Karen was horrified at the state of her marriage as well. She and Matt were down to about ten words a day, and Karen was at a loss as to how to up the number even to twenty. It was as if they were strangers all over again or, worse, roommates who had found each other on some bulletin board—the kind who respectfully kept their milk and cottage cheese on different sides of the fridge. Sitting alone on her bed that night, staring at the familiar scenery—the unread novels on her side table, the wedding photo on her dresser in its fancy sterling-silver frame, the Roman shade with its now-tedious brown-and-purple-chevron stripes that had seemed so chic at the time she’d bought it—she felt as if she were not in a marriage so much as in a museum of one.
And so, despite still being angry about things that Matt had said, and having too much pride, and dreading conflict, and continuing to fantasize about Clay and checking her phone every five minutes just in case he’d texted, she walked into the living room, where her husband sat simultaneously typing on his laptop and watching some game—there was always one on—and forced herself to say, “Do you want to talk?”
“Not really,” he answered with a glance in her direction. “But I will.”
“We can’t go on like this forever,” said Karen.
“No, we can’t,” said Matt. But he didn’t offer any solutions.
“Well, maybe we should book a date night,” said Karen. “Try to have fun or something. I don’t know.”
“Sure,” he said.
“All right, well, would you want to see a movie?”
“What is there to see?”
“I don’t know—there’s always something.”
Matt paused, grimaced. Then he blurted out, “It still bugs me that Ruby is going to that school under false pretenses and because you decided it was better. Every day she goes there, I’m reminded of that. Maybe I’m having trouble moving on. It still just feels really wrong to me.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say except I’m sorry, and I’ve already said that,” said Karen.
“Well, thanks for saying it again, but—”
“But you’re never going to get over it?”
“I didn’t say that, but I’m not over it yet,” said Matt. “And I guess I need to know that, in the future, you’re going to include me in decisions that affect our family.”
“I promise to include you,” she told him.
“But it’s also—I don’t know—you seem so secretive these days. You’re always huddled over your phone, and you’re so vague about everything.”
Karen felt her chest tightening. “I could say the same for you. Half the time, I don’t even know where you are. And it’s kind of hard to include you in my life when you’re not here to tell stuff to.”
“I know, and I’m sorry I’ve been working so much,” said Matt. “It’s just been crunch time with Poor-coran, as you like to call it. But starting tomorrow, I’m going to try and get home earlier in the evenings. And maybe we can do more stuff together as a family on the weekend.”
“Great—organize it,” said Karen, encouraged.
“You’re better at that stuff.”
“I’m not better. I’m just a woman. And women are expected to manage everything on the home front. But once in a while, it would be great if you could organize something. Maybe we could go play miniature golf some weekend. Or maybe you could look into summer vacations. I think we could all use a vacation.”
“I agree,” said Matt.
Karen felt even more sanguine when, the next day, Matt surprised her by researching beach rentals, then e-mailing her the top contenders with the subject heading These Ones Look Decent.
She e-mailed him back immediately. Number two looks nice. Want to find out if it’s available the third or fourth week of August?
But in the back of her mind she was wondering if Clay was still planning to invite her to his beach house one of those same weeks, like he’d promised to do—and, if so, how she’d respond.
Meanwhile, to Karen’s relief, Ruby seemed to be further settling into Mather. And Karen had received promising signs from several family foundations that, with any luck, might be persuaded to make up at least part of the funds that could no longer be expected from Jesse James. In her few spare hours, and despite the nagging sensation that her expertise was better utilized elsewhere, Karen helped plan the Mather PTA Fund in the Sun picnic at a local park. In the plus column, her volunteer efforts at the school made her feel less paranoid. In the minus one, she was filled with a particular kind of self-loathing.
It was around the same time that Karen’s dreams of her dead mother returned on a near-nightly basis. They were always variations on the same melody, and they were simultaneously welcome and unwelcome. Mom! What are you doing here? Karen would ask as Ruth Kipple appeared at the top of the stairs in her favorite light blue polyester nightgown and said, What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. Her mother was always exaggerating, Karen would think. But she was waiting—night after night after night—until Karen woke up, and Ruth Kipple wouldn’t be there after all, causing Karen to feel both exasperated and bereft. It was just like her mother to keep guilting her, even from the grave, Karen thought. Yet it was clearly Karen who had summoned her. So, really, what right did she have to complain—about any of it? Karen was one of the lucky ones on this earth.
If only it felt that way.