“Bless their hearts,” Lynne says, waving off my offer of the cookie plate. She’s eaten small, rational portions of everything, praised all the deliciousness, and deftly skipped any second helpings. It seems so controlled, and, to be honest, I feel bad for her, that she can’t just let go, let herself overindulge, embrace abundance.
I, on the other hand, have had seconds of everything, and thirds of stuffing. It’s been lovely, if a bit quiet. Lynne and my mom got caught up, chatting about the old days, while Claire helped me in the kitchen, and we’ve talked politics and television, and all of the surface, small-talk things that one covers in casual conversation.
I keep checking my watch, which sometimes seems to have gone backward since last I looked, and sometimes seems to have leapt forward in a shocking manner. I know I’m preoccupied. I’m supposed to text Shawn when I’m gearing up to head home—he’s requested that he be able to join Simca and me for our evening walk. They met last weekend when he dropped me off, and when I say that it was an instantaneous love match, I’m not exaggerating. He picked her up and she licked his entire head like he was a naughty puppy, and he spoke to her in some gibberish language and she yipped happily in reply.
“I always wanted a dog, but my ex patently refused, and they don’t allow them in my building unless they are under twenty-five pounds,” he said wistfully.
“I can’t exactly picture you with a little purse dog,” I said, imagining him with some Yorkie or Chihuahua.
“Well, I never would have thought about a smaller dog—I always wanted a mastiff or a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog or something manly. But this sweet girl could make me change my mind, yes, she could!” He snuggled into Simca’s neck. “She smells like graham crackers!”
“She’s a taut and trim twenty-four pounds, right under the wire,” I said, and then stopped when I realized it might sound like I was moving my dog, and by proxy myself, into his condo.
“Well, then, she can come visit me anytime, can’t you?”
We took her for a walk around the neighborhood, and she trotted proudly at his side and he even insisted on doing blue bag duty, which alone would be enough to fall for him.
“So, Lynne, you’re happy to be back in Chicago?” Aunt Claire asks, sticking a finger in the whipped cream bowl.
“Well, I’m very happy with the job change. I realized in L.A., there was just too much dealing with the hot new thing. They are all magpies, anything new and shiny can distract them, so I had to spend almost more time coddling existing clients so that they felt appropriately attended to than I spent actually doing my job. They all want to think that you are personally handling every piece of their business, when actually your time would be better served handing off most of it to underlings. It was fine when I was younger, but I wanted to work with grown-ups, and stop being everyone’s dancing monkey. Plus, the firm I was with had a daughter coming up through the ranks, the heiress apparent, so I knew there was a limit to how far I could go there. Here I can focus on landing the big clients, and they all seem to understand that there is a team approach to execution, so I can be more of a manager and less of a worker bee.” I wish there were slightly less imperiousness in her voice.
“I can’t imagine you being a worker bee,” my mom says. “You were always much more of a leader, as I recall.” She isn’t wrong there. If Lynne joined a club, they made her president almost immediately. When she joined cheerleading, they made her captain. As a sophomore. She was class president for all four years of college, something that hadn’t been done since the university’s inception.
“Yeah, it’s not really my nature.” Lynne laughs. “I miss the L.A. weather, as you can imagine, and the social scene was easier for me there, but I finally decided that if I was going to be a focused career woman, and the career had more potential here, then it was okay to come back.”
“Well, it would probably be good to have some balance. All work and no play, and all that jazz.” Claire pauses. “We were sorry to hear about your divorce; that must have been tough.”
Lynne makes a face. “Mr. So-Very-Wrong? It was fine. Not a big deal really. Sort of a momentary complication.” She pauses in a way that makes me think it was much more than that. She shrugs. “We had a good thing for a minute, but ultimately I think sometimes when you are dating someone they only show you the person they think you most want and need, and then once you are locked in, they relax into being who they really are, and sometimes that just doesn’t fly. Mine was a classic case of good on paper, bad in practice. I don’t know if we were really aligned on the big stuff in the beginning or if he was just pretending to be aligned because he knew it was what I wanted. But everyone ends up being themselves in the end. And if you tell them you need them to be the person they promised you in the beginning and they don’t want to be that guy, you have to just move them along.”
My mom and Claire both look a little taken aback. There is a coldness in Lynne’s tone that doesn’t belie hurt or a broken heart or betrayal. She is essentially talking about her marriage like it was a car she leased that didn’t have the gas mileage they claimed in the commercials.
“How long were you together?” Mom asks.
Lynne thinks. “Two years, married for one and a half.”
“Well, at least it sounds like it was somewhat amicable,” Claire says.
“It never got ugly, not in the ways it could have been. We had a prenup; he owned the house; we hadn’t really done much in terms of joint investments or anything. He wanted to go to counseling, but I knew we were done, so I kept it simple, moved out while he was out of town for a conference, and got the paperwork all organized. He wasn’t happy, but he didn’t fight it.”
This gives me shivers. She just moved out while he was out of town? He wanted to go to counseling to try to save the marriage and she didn’t want to bother? I love my friend Lynne, but at the moment, I’m finding it hard to like her very much. And I can’t stop myself from asking.
“Why wouldn’t you want to try counseling? I mean, you must have really loved him—you married him. It seems like if things got off track maybe something could have been fixed.”
“Now, Eloise, how long have you known me? How good a problem solver am I? When I tell you that it wasn’t fixable, trust me, it wasn’t fixable. We didn’t want the same things out of life, we didn’t have the same priorities, and I had been clear about mine from the beginning, so when his changed, he really couldn’t expect that I should change mine just because he did, could he?”
“I suppose not,” I say. “I guess, not if they were fundamental.”
“Trust me, girlfriend, they could not have been more fundamental.”
My mom and Claire get up and start clearing dishes. “You girls sit,” Mom says. “Eloise has worked enough for one day. We have cleanup covered. Lynne, would you like coffee or tea or something?”
“Tea, but only if you are making for yourself,” Lynne says.
“Absolutely. How about you, muffin?”
“Sure, Mom, thanks. Yell if you guys want help.”