But over time, she came to miss even the ubiquitous sound of the game, whichever one he happened to be watching. The apartment felt empty without him. Ruby seemed so forlorn about his departure. And Karen felt so helpless in the face of her daughter’s melancholy. If only for Ruby’s sake, Karen wanted them to be a happy family again—or at least happy enough, the way they’d once been. Karen also found she missed having someone to talk to about her day and discuss Ruby with and also complain about her friends and job to. She even found herself pining for Matt’s bad puns. And divorce loomed in the back of her mind as, above all, a financial disaster. Plus, the thought of dating again filled her with dread.
Karen reached out to Matt and suggested couples counseling as a precondition to any separation agreement. At first, he refused to go, claiming to find the very concept onerously “middle class,” as he put it, in its treatment of relationships as skills that, like tennis or cooking, could be improved. But eventually she talked him into a few sessions. It was there—on the beige, wool-bouclé sofa of a certain Dr. Krantz—that he’d confessed to a platonic flirtation he’d been carrying on with a college intern named Kiley who’d been hired to help with Poor-coran. This, it turned out, partly explained his long workdays the year before. Though as he was fond of pointing out, unlike Karen, he hadn’t acted on the attraction. Nonetheless, Karen had been disappointed to hear that, in the end, her tirelessly upstanding, ethical-to-a-fault husband was just another middle-aged cliché. But, really, what right did she have to object? At least everything was out in the open now—or at least, almost everything.
Karen still hadn’t told Matt how relieved she’d been to see a telltale dumpster outside Miguel’s apartment a few months before.
But she’d told Matt that she wished he’d come back—it was true, more or less—and he’d finally admitted that he missed her too. Slowly, he began to transfer himself and then his possessions back to Macaroni-Land. And now Karen and Matt were officially trying to make it work again. With the encouragement of Dr. Krantz, they’d also decided to take a proper family vacation for the first time in five years. Karen had found a package deal on the Internet to a boutique resort on a relatively undeveloped part of the Dominican Republic. The only question was how to pay for it. Their savings had taken a serious hit after Karen repaid the Mather PTA, and the one-way tickets back from Mustique hadn’t helped. Their checking account was lower than ever. And the cost of therapy was only adding to the problem. Karen had only 50 percent reimbursement after a high deductible.
And then, one day at work, while searching for paper clips in the top drawer of her desk, Karen came across the diamond studs that Clay had given her at the beginning of their affair. Realizing she’d never feel right about wearing them and also suspecting that their worth would more than equal the cost of a vacation, she slipped them in her purse and, on her lunch hour, took them to a diamond dealer near her office. The dealer’s first offer was on the low side. But when Karen began to walk away, he raised it by two grand. Having now learned the game, she balked again. The dealer’s third and final offer was one she felt she couldn’t refuse.
Back at the office, she bought the vacation with her new points card, then e-mailed Matt to tell him the good news. She explained that she’d sold a piece of jewelry she’d never liked, so it hadn’t really cost them anything. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t a lie either, she reasoned.
Cool, Matt wrote back. For her chronically underemotive husband, Karen had learned, that qualified as a ringing endorsement.
Ruby was especially excited when she heard that there was not one, not two, but three swimming pools at the resort. She was even more thrilled to learn that they were all going together—all three of them—which, in turn, thrilled Karen. She only hoped the weather was good. In the weeks leading up to their vacation, Karen began to obsessively check the forecast in Las Terrenas, each time praying for a little army of sun icons to appear in a row on the screen.
In other news, Karen had just about finished her op-ed about nutrition, poverty, and educational outcomes. Though over time the essay had become less about nutrition and more about inequality. Lately, she’d begun to entertain the radical notion that, as long as there was enough to eat, it didn’t matter all that much what you ate. Or rather, it mattered—but only to a point. Having a loving and supportive family mattered more. Now she just had to get up the confidence to send it out.
As for Karen’s friends…April finally finished her dissertation, Lou began selling her hand-knit ponchos at a local boutique, and Allison decided to take a leave of absence from her magazine and devote herself full-time to raising her kids after her thirteen-year-old son, Lucien, was caught shoplifting earbuds and selling Adderall to his friends. The police had let him go with a warning, but Allison had gotten scared. Five years after that, he was recruited for squash at Princeton. But that’s another story.
As for Jayyden…Karen never heard another word about what happened to him after he was sent upstate. At one point when Ruby was in fourth grade, Karen thought of asking Regina Chambers if she knew anything. But she couldn’t think of a pretext for doing so and feared she would only come off sounding like one of those well-meaning, college-educated white liberals who fetishize the deprivations of the underclass.
At another point—years later—Karen tried Googling his name, thinking that the distinct spelling of Jayyden might yield results. But nothing came up—no evidence of his life, but no evidence of his death either. By then, true to Matt’s prediction, Ruby was attending a selective public high school filled with kids from backgrounds similar to her own. One day, out of the blue, while they were shopping for back-to-school outfits, Karen asked her if she remembered Jayyden—“the kid who punched out your friend Maeve for calling his firehouse stupid,” as Karen put it—but Ruby seemed barely to recall either one of them. It was like he’d never existed.
Except Karen could never get him out of her head.