“I wasn’t the one up there hammering away at it with a broom,” she said. She felt sort of sick at the thought of anything costing that much.
“That doesn’t even include the interior work. I don’t have that kind of money to spend; I need an influx of income right now.”
“You got a bookie to pay off?” She liked this joke, the one about him living a secret, illicit life.
“Divorce lawyers, I guess, are kind of like bookies,” Tom said. “Just a shade above breaking fingers.”
She had been fearing this, she and Libby had been theorizing. She could recognize the signs, when love stops, or when it stops being enough.
“Well, fuck.” She stood there a moment, both surprised and not. “Being a divorced man just isn’t as sexy as being a divorced woman, you know? I wonder why that is?”
“Thanks, G. Very nice.”
She sat down on the rail beside him, rubbed her fingers as clean as she could get them on her shorts, and put her arm around him. He was taller than she was, and it was uncomfortable to sit that way, but she didn’t move. He slumped down a bit, maybe to make it easier for her, maybe because he could either sit up straight or not cry, but she could tell he couldn’t manage both.
“Sometimes getting divorced is what you’ve gotta do. You know I love Melissa,” said Gwen.
At this he sniffed, almost harrumphed—ever his father’s son. She was amazed he hadn’t already made a break for the Whaler.
“But I love you more.”
He nodded, leaned into her a bit. Then waved his hand at the house. A question.
“This place,” she said, “is ours. It brings us all together, Tom. That’s not something I’m looking to get rid of, okay?”
“But we’ll always be together. You three are my best friends.”
Gwen blanched at this. Blanched at the sad idea that this was his notion of friendship, of closeness. What must life be like for poor Melissa in the vacuum of his heart?
“Funny that we both end up divorced, when Scarlet and Dad somehow magically made it through,” said Gwen. “I’m convinced they must’ve been sacrificing goats or babies.”
“Yeah, well, it’s easy to stay married if you don’t care how you make the other person feel. Lies are a hell of a lot easier than the truth.”
She assumed he was talking about himself. So much bitterness; she had no idea it had gotten so bad.
But then he went on. “What was so twisted is they knew the truth and still believed the lie. How does that even work?”
“Which lies?”
“Their split.”
“Their relationship was shit before that,” said Gwen. “God knows, but I don’t think there was much lying going on. Sometimes I think if Scarlet had just not told him about being pregnant and jumped right into therapy he would’ve never had his lost weekend. You know, like John and Yoko.”
Tom looked confused.
“They split for a year, and when they were back together they referred to their break as John’s ‘lost weekend.’”
This was how Gwen had always explained it to herself. The baby, their unplanned little Danny, heralded the split, which was like a log jammed against a rock in a river. The waters rose, hiding their love under feet of water, making it appear gone. But then the log broke; their father missed her, wanted to be the husband he hadn’t been, the father too. And so he came back. The waters lowered, and there, revealed in the shallow depths: their love.
“Anyway, Dan was a surprise; you don’t think they planned that, do you? And Dad didn’t want to go through the whole rigmarole again, he wanted it”—she used a low voice here—“taken care of.” Then back to her normal voice. “Scarlet told him to get on his stupid boat and fuck off.”
“Why do you think he came back?” Tom asked.
“He’s a sucker for her. Once he really thought about her having another Willoughby without him, my bet is, he lost it. Or maybe he just got a taste of life without her. Why do you think he came back?”
“I think he didn’t want to give her the house,” Tom said.
“Wow, man.” She took her arm back. “You’re going through a divorce. I think that may be coloring your views a mite cynical.”
He sat up straight now and looked at her.
“You don’t know,” he said.
Gwen was pretty sure she knew most things.
He continued. “It wasn’t the fucking baby, Gwen.” His swearing made her nervous, made her feel like maybe he might break a window. She had only heard him swear twice before, once when he was rear-ended in a mall parking lot, and once, under his breath, after the doctor told them Scarlet’s prognosis.
“All those trips he took, all that cruising without us? He wasn’t alone.”
“Really? I always figured if one of them cheated it would be Scarlet.”
“Yeah, well, there was another man . . . so you were half right.”
Gwen gave him an incredulous look. She didn’t appreciate his pulling her leg like that, even if he was depressed and on the verge of divorce.
“I saw them, G. Scarlet caught them together on the sloop, and the guy just dove overboard naked. He was young, like twenty—looked like Luke Duke. I had a front-row seat.” He motioned to the front porch. “He walked right past me, left footprints on the porch, he didn’t even see me sitting there. Then Mom and Dad each rowed in from the boat. It was in fucking slow motion.”
Tom’s voice got louder now, the words coming faster. “Scarlet came up the path ahead of Dad and yanked me over here”—he pointed to the stone arch and rubbed his wrist as if she had just let go—“like she was trying to hide me from him, already protecting him.”
Gwen watched Tom’s trapezius twitch. He held the edge of the railing and drummed it with his fingers. She was sweating, the south porch always a bit hotter, always in the sun and out of the wind. She wished a cloud would pass over the sun.
“What did she say?” Gwen asked.
Tom made a guttural scoff, a noise she heard regularly when they were teenagers. He was stretching taller, straining toward the sky, toward the water, like he wanted to run but was tied to the railing.
“She said, ‘Your father is like the ocean in a storm. It changes with the weather, but is always the same underneath. He’s the same man, same as yesterday, the same tomorrow.’ Only he wasn’t really a man at all, was he?”
“He was gone so much anyway, and then that trip. But I never thought . . . Was that why he left? Because he’d been caught? Have you told—”
“Who can I tell?” he said quietly. Not a question at all.
He looked her in the eyes, and she knew there was no one. Maybe Melissa, but not anymore.
“So this house? I don’t want this place. I don’t want to run into that guy at Schooners. Fucking Jeremy. I can’t.” Here he deflated, his shoulders dropped. He hunched over slightly, as if examining his knees. She understood. The house didn’t hold the mending of his parents, that taming of the river—it had happened after he left for college. He only ever knew them as some couple that crushed down secrets and desires for the good of the children. He knew them as liars.