“Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow.”
Sitting cross-legged directly in front of Owen and diagonally from me is the Wife. I’ve never had such a close-up chance to examine the woman who dethroned me. I take this Christian moment to do so. She is pretty in the classic sense. She has a very good colorist, and her shoulder-length hair has four varying shades of blond, equally striped. She looks as though she could use a good meal, though her perky, large breasts defy the smallness of the rest of her frame. She wears the obligatory low-riders and a thong peeks out the top of her jeans, perhaps sending a message of hidden vixen to us sitting behind her. I want to make a judgment call here but refrain, as she is, in fact, cross-legged, which does pull one’s pants lower. I have my arm around Owen. Usually he is rapt, hanging on the storyteller’s every word, but today he is engrossed with something else. He has his gaze too low to be paying attention. In fact, it is squarely on Henry’s wife’s ass.
The song continues, “All it takes is a rake and a hoe, and a piece of fertile ground.”
Inexplicably, Owen reaches out and begins stroking Wife’s soft, tight sweater. The woman who stole Henry from me is getting stroked by my two-year-old. I grab his hand maybe harder than I intended.
“Ow!” he yells.
Wife turns and says, “It’s okay,” and gives Owen a gentle stroke on his face before turning back. He reaches out again but not before I intercept.
“OWWWW!” This time the entire front row turns to look at us and I’m glad for the loud music.
I whisper in Owen’s ear, “We aren’t allowed to touch strangers.”
There is such a force in my voice that my rambunctious boy, the one who most loves confrontation, improbably sits back on his faded Gap overalls while I caress his back. The story of reaping and sowing goes on and on. The anger he feels radiates as heat coming from the hand I hold.
It happens the millisecond I adjust my grip. Owen senses this is his moment. He reaches forward fast. I swing out instinctively and catch air. It’s too late.
With the small motor skills of someone beyond his years, Owen grabs the thong. He wraps his little fingers around that top strap, the one that’s been peeking out at him for the past half hour. It was too difficult to resist in its lacy pinkness. He grabs the thong and pulls it toward him, where it seems to stretch beyond possibility. And it is only when Wife yelps “OWW!” that he releases it with an impressive Snap! That was not cheap elastic.
Wife turns to me and I’m expecting I don’t know what. I mean Wife is one of the most beloved mothers in the school. She runs the library, she heads the benefit committee, and she has just had her thong snapped in front of all her PA friends. She is probably about to snarl at me but I can’t tell for she has no lines, no movement in her face, which has been Botoxed into submission. I anticipate the scolding I deserve but instead see her blank look turn into a stiff smile.
“It’s okay, big guy,” she says sweetly. She drips honey packed sweetness onto Owen as he attaches himself to my lower leg and she pats his head before turning to talk to someone else. Chapel has abruptly ended. Henry looks not at me but at the floor surrounding me—my slightly rumpled suit, my practical gray everything, and my giant sack of work with assorted technology spilling out. He says nothing but I can see what he’s thinking.
All these years without Henry, all this time apart from someone I thought I would never be apart from, I found comfort in the fact that he ended up with this woman. It’s not that I didn’t like her, despite her seducing my then boyfriend, it’s that I knew what Henry liked and she was not that. I had secretly reveled in the fact he married someone who, despite being rich and connected, had never had a grown-up job, who I’m told spent all her time fixing and refixing their apartment and country house, and managing an army of household staff.
Henry was too smart to stay interested in someone like her. I’d given their union one year of success, the sex year, before deep down I was certain he’d be suffering without having someone like me to keep him grounded, to sharpen his mind, to crack him up. But no, watching his eyes now I could see everything I had assumed was wrong. His face bore no recognition of the girl I had been. He simply looked incredulous. It was then that I knew what he knew.
Henry had picked the right girl.
CHAPTER 9
On the Floor