“We did not kiss,” the woman said, urging Hazel down into the car parked out front. “Byron will be in touch.” And he was.
The Hub later came to seem like more of an allegation than a residence to Hazel. Not because they didn’t spend a lot of time there—they did. Hazel hardly ever left, in fact, and though Byron spent most of his days a few minutes away at the central office, he equated travel with risk and kept his off-premises trips limited. He came home to sleep every night around ten with the regularity of a programmed machine.
But even on that first visit, “living” felt like a generous term for what happened inside The Hub. Yes, it was an impressive, sprawling structure. It was sleek and spotless and clinical; every wall of every room was sentient with touch and recognition technology. It didn’t seem real to her then, and never started to. One of Hazel’s only hobbies in their marriage was walking through the house very open-eyed and just slightly openmouthed. She was a little convinced that The Hub was a holding tank for death, an exact replica of the place where souls go immediately after departure. She never mailed a physical letter during the tenure of their marriage, but if she had, in the space reserved for a return address she would’ve written something to the effect of, “Where I live is where the deceased go to cool down to the afterlife’s new room temperature.”
SIX MONTHS LATER TO THE DAY, BYRON PROPOSED AND HAZEL’S mother was dead. Most of Hazel’s ideas of marriage had more or less imploded on her last visit home prior to her mother’s passing. “Where’s Mom?” she’d asked her father, not expecting his answer to be traumatic.
“She’s at Bernie’s,” he’d said. Bernie was one of her parents’ widower friends who lived nearby. “She’s been sleeping with him for a couple of weeks now. It’s one of the things she wanted to do before dying. A few rolls in the hay with other partners. We were virgins when we married, you know.”
Hazel did not know, and thinking about her mother having sex was like thinking about a refrigerator having sex, or a stove. It seemed to Hazel that beneath her clothing, her mother didn’t have genitals so much as a central heating coil or an evaporator fan.
“She’s having an affair?”
Her father propped his glasses a centimeter more upright on his nose, turned the page of his newspaper, resumed his wince. He couldn’t read anything without making a severe cringing expression that implied he was bracing for impact, like a driver about to have a deer come through the windshield of his pickup. “Don’t be silly. It’s just intercourse. This is bucket-list stuff.”
“But doesn’t that bother you?” Hazel paused, unsure of how far to take the conversation. She supposed, though, that she wanted to have some idea of just how weird things were getting. Was it time to cut off all contact? “Are you . . . taking on other partners too?” She steadied herself against the countertop, held her stomach. Her parents’ prudishness was like a natural law she’d taken to be a fundamental aspect of existence, one of the cohesive forces of the universe. Now Hazel felt the curtain of order slipping, primal chaos beginning to rumble forward. “Are you swingers?”
“Jesus, Hazel.” Her father put the paper down, sipped his coffee. “I’m not a communist. No, there’s no reason for me to fool around now. I’m not in any hurry. Plenty of time to sleep with other women once she dies.”
Hazel took a seat at the table. “It doesn’t seem like a betrayal?” She opened up a package of cookies and started stress eating then realized they were shortbread laxative biscuits. Laxatives and extramarital sex—that was the summary of what was going on with her parents.
“Eh, she feels shortchanged by the cancer thing. If it softens the blow, so be it. It’s free and doesn’t put a single demand on my time. Honestly, I feel lucky that her final wishes have been so cheap. When Jim’s wife got cancer, he had to take her on a European cruise. I could tell you stories all day about friends’ wives who turned into greedy leprechauns when they began dying. Suddenly they’re obsessed with gold! They want gold this and gold that. Caleb’s late wife, after her first round of chemo, she couldn’t get enough gold. Then she wrote into her will that she wanted to be buried wearing all her jewelry. He couldn’t pawn a single piece of it after she croaked.”
Hazel’s bowels gurgled. “Are you sad Mom’s dying?” she asked.
Her father nodded. “You know I don’t like change.”
IN HINDSIGHT, OF COURSE HER COURTSHIP AND UNION WITH BYRON was suspect. Now she could admit she knew on some level that she shouldn’t have gone along with Byron’s proposal and acted like she wanted to marry him. He was just so successful, though. And he found Hazel to be such a pleasant curiosity. At least the Hazel she pretended to be with him—universally cheerful, up for anything, with no preferences of her own. It was easy to get along with him because she acted like a mood ring, always agreeing with what he found great and what he found intolerable.