We both laughed, and I patted him on the back.
He said, “All right, Car. I’ll see you tomorrow. Let me know when you’re single.” He winked, and we both laughed again, much harder this time.
It wasn’t funny, but somehow it kind of was.
Preston still strapped to my chest, I got out a pan and started making eggs. Vivi walked in behind me, saying nothing. She sat down at the island and opened a textbook.
Grammy was laid up on the couch, waiting semipatiently for her orange juice. Adam was in the den with Grammy watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse—Mom had finally broken down and bought a TV—and Taylor was upstairs with Sloane folding towels. I could hear his sweet giggles drifting down the stairs, a sound much like music, a sound that I knew I would remember well after I was Grammy’s age.
Emerson, the overachiever in the family, was out for a jog, and we had all made a pact that after she returned, we would let the kids run around in the front yard while we attempted to do our Pilates. It would be touch and go, but it would be better than nothing.
We were perhaps more exhausted than even on our hangover morning, because the night before, I had done the unthinkable. With my sisters, I had watched every one of Edie and James’s episodes of Ladies Who Lunch. I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to. I had to have all of the information before I made my decision. I had to know what I was up against. Seeing them together on TV destroyed me. The way they looked at each other, the way they laughed. It was so much worse than I had imagined, and the fact that he had declared his love for me at the end didn’t make up for it.
Vivi disappeared out the back door, and I watched her go into the guesthouse.
I hadn’t seen James yet, and when Sloane walked into the kitchen, she said, “What have you decided about those papers?”
I shrugged. “Is it even a decision? Is there any way we can possibly come back from that? The image of the two of them together will be forever burned in my brain.” I turned to the side and scraped the eggs off the pan with a spatula, keeping the heat as far away as possible from Preston. “I can’t stand the idea of going back to New York, of my friends asking me about it and my fake friends having fake sympathy, people whispering when I walk past about how my husband had the affair with Edie Fitzgerald and I was the idiot who took him back . . .” I trailed off and looked out the window. “I’m hurt, and I’m humiliated. I’m not sure if that will ever heal.”
Vivi walked in through the back door as Emerson jogged in through the front, sweat around her ponytail, the back of her shirt wet.
“Are we ready?” she asked.
I pointed to the stove. “Eggs first.”
Emerson sat down at the island, and I pulled out a big stack of paper plates and started doling out eggs and strawberries.
“Viv,” I said, “could you please take this to Grammy?”
She jumped off the stool.
“What about the papers?” Emerson asked.
“We were just talking about that,” I said. “I don’t think there’s any way I can move on. I think we should make a clean break. It will be easier on everyone that way.”
“You should go to therapy,” Emerson said. “Oh! Oh! You can consciously uncouple like Gwyneth.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not sure I’m the conscious-uncoupling type. I’m more the give-me-half-your-money-you-loser type.”
Vivi came back in, and we buttoned it back up.
“How come Gwammy gets to eat in the wiving woom?” Adam asked.
“Because she has a broken ankle, my love,” Sloane said. “It’s very, very hard for her to walk into the kitchen.”
“And she’s old,” Vivi whispered. We all smiled.
It was a perfect morning, by all accounts. Everything seemed right, despite my bad news. Any decision at all felt like a relief. But we would say later that something was in the air. We were all on edge, for no reason we could discern.
I chalked it up to Mr. Solomon’s death in the house right next door, to the idea and remembrance that our time here wasn’t guaranteed. But in hindsight, I know that it was something more.
I retrieved a Dollar Tree bag from the pantry and doled out the obscene amount of bubbles and sidewalk chalk I’d picked up the day before. It would buy us at least twenty minutes.
I laid out an extra mat for Preston, who cooed and kicked at the air. Mom would be home any minute. We thought about waiting for her, but we decided against it.
If we had waited, we would have had a few more seconds of normal, a few more seconds of that happy, easy morning, with no makeup and plenty of free time, when life felt like those summers when we were children. The worries were few, the cares far between.
My back was turned to the fence, and I was getting everyone stretched out before we started. Which was why I didn’t see what was behind me. But I saw Sloane’s face go white. And I saw Emerson grab her hand.
I turned, and my first instinct was to get Adam, which I did. I scooped him up and ran into the house, putting him on the couch with Grammy. She was snoozing, and his TV channel was still on.
When I saw those uniforms, I knew I didn’t want it to be his first memory. I didn’t want him to look back on his life and know that the very first thing he remembered was those two men telling him what I could only assume would be the worst news of his life, news that would steal his childhood and haunt him forever.
I knew what that was like. We all did.
And I knew this drill. I knew that one of those uniformed men was a soldier, and one was a chaplain. We had been told about this, debriefed. I knew what that meant. Or, at least, I thought I did.
I ran back outside, into that peaceful, sunny day, where Vivi was blowing bubbles and Taylor was giggling, where Preston was lying calmly on his back, discovering his hands. Where my sister was quiet but sitting on the ground, her head in her hands, my other sister wrapped around her.
“We have to pray for the best,” the chaplain said. “We have to know that, either way, this isn’t the end.”
It might not have been the end of the world, but it was the end of Sloane’s world. It was the end of our family’s world. Life was too short, I remembered yet again. Life was too short not to live by your own terms, not to make up your own rules. As the sob came up in my throat so violently it nearly choked me, as I wrapped up my sister on her other side, all at once I knew exactly what to do about those papers.
THIRTY-THREE
tatters
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