The tot park was one of the things real estate agents made a point of showing to prospective home buyers on sunny days, when it was filled with nice-seeming moms chatting on park benches while their toddlers poured sand out of plastic dump trucks and took turns swinging on the swings. A lot of moms in Beekman spent a lot of hours at the tot park. Each spring it was replenished with a batch of new mommies, exhausted and half brain-dead, wondering what their lives had become.
Lucy and Sunny Bang were sitting next to each other on a park bench in the sun.
“I feel so bad for Arlen,” said Sunny Bang.
“Who’s Arlen?” Lucy asked.
“Eric Lowell’s wife,” said Sunny. “I wonder how she’s handling all this. She’s had a really hard life.”
“Hard how?”
“One of her parents murdered her sister.”
“What?”
“It was a long time ago. Her sister disappeared and the whole town looked for her for days and then they found her body in this pond behind their house. Apparently everybody knew it was one of the parents but nobody could prove anything.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I know, right? And Arlen and Eric still live in the house she grew up in. Can you imagine? She looks out on that pond every day. And now her husband is turning into a woman. I’d be like, Are you fucking kidding me, God?”
“Why didn’t they search the pond right away?” asked Lucy. “I mean, isn’t that the first place you’d look?”
Lucy had to run across the tot park to wrangle Wyatt away from a scooter that had caught his eye while another kid was riding on it. After about ten minutes of redirection, she got him settled on an empty swing. She walked back to the bench. Sunny eyed her intensely as she approached.
“Why are you so skinny?” Sunny Bang asked.
“I’m not skinny,” said Lucy, sitting back down next to her.
Sunny Bang squinted. “You’ve lost like, what, eight pounds?”
“Eleven,” said Lucy, “but who’s counting.”
“How? I need to know.”
“I have no idea,” said Lucy. “I haven’t been hungry so I haven’t been eating.”
“I don’t believe you,” Sunny Bang said. “If it’s pills, I demand some.”
“I haven’t been hungry lately. I can’t explain it.”
“Maybe you have a tapeworm,” said Sunny Bang. “I know this guy who went to Africa, and he got these parasites in his skin, and they put slabs of bacon all over him and the worms came out and ate the bacon and then they ripped the bacon off like a Band-Aid. And the worms got pulled out of him like strands of spaghetti.”
“You know this person?”
“Friend of a friend,” said Sunny Bang. “You ruin all my stories. TOBIAS, GIVE LOUISA A TURN ON THE SPRINGY ZEBRA. YOU’VE BEEN ON LONG ENOUGH. Maybe you have cancer.”
“Thanks, Sunny. Thanks for that.”
“Sudden unexplained weight loss. It’s a symptom. TOBIAS, GET OFF THE ZEBRA RIGHT THIS SECOND! OFF! NOW!”
“I cut out carbs,” Lucy said. “Carbs and sugar. All the whites.”
“You are lying to your friend,” Sunny Bang pronounced. “You are a lying woman talking!”
“I’m not,” said Lucy.
Sunny Bang narrowed her already narrow Korean eyes.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe it,” said Sunny Bang.
“What?”
“I know what’s going on with you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do not tell me what I’m thinking right now is true.”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, Sunny.”
“You know exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Do I look like I’m having sex with strange men?”
“Yes, actually, you do. You got super-skinny quickly and you’re wearing lip gloss.”
“This is Carmex.”
Lucy had to tell someone. Otherwise she was going to explode. It had been just over a month since the Conversation and Lucy hadn’t said a word to anybody. (Lucy found herself thinking about all of this in formal, capitalized phrases: the Dinner Party, the Conversation, the Arrangement, the Rules.) And Sunny Bang was a lot of things—unapologetic discipliner of other people’s children, wearer of kneesocks when kneesocks were not called for—but she was trustworthy. And she was fiercely loyal. She was Lucy’s best friend in Beekman. And she could keep her mouth shut.
“Can you keep a secret?” Lucy asked.
“You know I can.”
“You can’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you. Anyone.”
“I swear I won’t. Not even Jake.”
“Normally I would let you tell Jake, but you can’t on this one, you have to promise.”
“I promise. I swear.”
“We are,” Lucy said. She lowered her voice as low as it could go. “Doing it. The thing.”
Sunny Bang stared at Lucy for a second and then bent down and put her head between her knees like a passenger waiting for the airplane to crash. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
“Sunny,” Lucy said through a forced smile, “the ladies are watching you.”
“This is nuts! You guys are crazy!”
“Sit up, Sunny,” said Lucy, still smiling. “People are staring.”
“It’s easy to lose weight because you get to have sex with strangers. It’s the best diet ever.”
“I’m not having sex with strangers. I haven’t done anything.”
“But you can,” said Sunny Bang. “That’s enough motivation. I haven’t even shaved my legs since my sister-in-law’s wedding, and that was in April.”
“That can’t be true,” said Lucy. “You’ve been to the pool.”
“I don’t shave for that pool. TOBIAS, STOP THROWING SAND OR WE ARE GOING HOME RIGHT THIS SECOND.
“Is Owen sleeping with anyone?” Sunny asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Yes, you do,” said Sunny. “You do have an idea.”
“We agreed not to talk about it.”
“Even if you aren’t talking about it, you must have an inkling.”
Lucy did, in fact, have an inkling.
Lucy had been cooking dinner, a real dinner, which happened less often than she’d have liked. Wyatt ate his five foods and his five foods only, and as he got older Lucy found it depressing to cook entire meals she knew he wouldn’t even try, and she didn’t attempt recipes that might smell up the house in a strange way and set him off on a sensory panic attack. But this was Marcella Hazan’s lemon-up-the-butt chicken, the easiest and tastiest roast chicken in the world, and she’d made it before and Wyatt didn’t mind the smell.
Owen came home early, and Lucy’s hand was, in fact, up the chicken’s butt trying to wedge the second of the two “rather small” lemons Marcella insisted you could fit up there, the one that always rolled out whenever Lucy tried, when Owen gave her a kiss. Her hands were chickeny so she just stood there, motionless, arms stiff and a little out to the sides, and felt the kiss. It was a real kiss.
“I can’t touch you,” said Lucy. “I’m all chickeny.”
“I don’t care. Rub me with salmonella.”
“Tempting,” said Lucy, “but I can’t take any more people in this house throwing up.”
“I love you,” said Owen.