“Okay,” said Owen. “Do you want me to…” Owen gestured toward the restroom.
“Follow me into the bathroom?” Cassie laughed at him, a little meanly. “No. I’ve gotta pee.”
Owen had been thinking about Cassie Lambert for years and years, idly, not obsessing really but occasionally brightening his day by remembering the way she managed to press her boobs up against him any chance she got. Any time he saw her someplace socially—at a party, or a lecture, or out for drinks—she always gave him a kiss on the lips and a double-boob hug. A real two-boober, as Owen and his friend Scott liked to call it. Those hugs that make married men think about their friends’ boobs. And their friends’ wives’ boobs. And then there was that night at a Christmas party that Lucy had been too tired to attend, long before they were even engaged, when Owen had gotten so hopelessly drunk he had to sleep it off on a couch in the host’s study. He had a vague, fuzzy memory of following Cassie down a long narrow hallway and into the laundry room and kissing her. He’d snapped out of it before things progressed too far, his muddled head filled with thoughts of Lucy. “God, I’d kill my own mother for this laundry room,” Owen remembered Cassie saying at one point during the proceedings, so it’s possible she hadn’t been as enraptured as he’d thought.
Cassie came back from the restroom and slid into her chair. “I thought about it, and my answer is no.”
“Fair enough,” said Owen. He took a big sip of his bourbon. “Can I ask why?”
“No good can come of it,” said Cassie. “And the bad parts won’t be that interesting.”
“Well, I have to disagree with you on that,” Owen said. He felt ridiculous the moment the words were out of his mouth. He used to be smoother than this.
“Besides,” Cassie said, “I’ve got a boyfriend.”
“You do?” Owen said. He was surprised. Cassie Lambert was famous for never, ever having a boyfriend. This state of affairs had persisted for so long that Owen, like every other person in Cassie’s life, figured something pretty major was wrong with her, something was broken deep, deep down inside, in a secret place unreachable by traditional psychotherapy.
“I do,” Cassie said. She took a smug sip of her wine. “His name is Philip, and he’s perfect.”
Owen was not what you would consider a goal-oriented person, but he did have one overarching aim in life. He did not want to be like his father.
Owen’s father was a real bastard, that was the truth, a drunk and a gambler and most likely a cheater, although Owen never knew that for a fact.
“He goes to Vegas, without his wife, for five days every month,” Lucy would point out. Owen’s stock response—“He likes to gamble”—sounded more and more lame each time he said it.
Healy McIntire owned a small manufacturing company, Healy’s Safes, which had been started by Owen’s grandfather. Healy sat in a small, windowless office with fake wood paneling behind a metal desk with a fifth of rye and a pistol in a drawer, across from a tattered green velour couch “for my VIP clients.” They made safes—home safes, gun safes, and jewelry safes. (“So your wife won’t lose sleep and you won’t lose your shirt!”) It was a job a drunk could do.
In the mid-1980s they made the leap into home vaults (though never bomb shelters, which Owen and his two brothers regretted). It turned out that the same people willing to pay upwards of five thousand dollars for a safe also wanted to buy American, which minimized competition from cheap foreign knockoffs. The company was steadily profitable, but when Healy announced his retirement—the cake at his party was in the shape of a safe—Owen was secretly thrilled that his brothers stepped in to run the business. He could continue nurturing his big-city dreams. He wasn’t like his father. Or his mother, for that matter.
Back when Owen was in high school he fell in love with Valium. One day after track practice he went home to find the house unoccupied. He nonchalantly climbed the stairs, swung open the medicine cabinet in his parents’ bathroom—noting, for the first time, the strangeness of the two sinks, side by side, as if his miserable parents would enjoy brushing their teeth together—and opened the bottle of Valium as gingerly as if he’d been defusing a bomb. The pill was blue. He popped it onto his tongue, cupped his hands under the icy water, and within minutes—safely in his room, on his bed—he was under the spell of a floaty bliss that spiraled into a nap that pulled him down with soft hands; it was like the entire universe was giving him a hug.
He managed to steal about twelve more before the bottle of pills disappeared from the medicine cabinet. He searched for it too. But the theft of the blue pills, and then the vanishing of the blue-pill bottle, was never discussed. Over the years, whenever he came home to visit, Owen would check the medicine cabinet. There were always pills—blood pressure pills, unused antibiotics, blood thinners, the growing cache of small orange pill bottles that are part of the aging American’s arsenal—but never again anything like Valium. Had she stopped taking them? Or was it possible his mother was hiding her downers from her youngest son twenty-five years after he’d stolen his last little blue pill?
It’s possible the pills explained everything. The fuzzy, there-but-not-there feeling Owen associated with his mother. His midnight thoughts of Why does she put up with him? and Why doesn’t this all come crashing down? His dad, drunk, selling safes. His mother perpetually tranquilized. His father was a problem, for sure, but his mother never even knew who Owen was.
That was one of the things he loved about Lucy from the beginning. She saw him. She wanted to know every part of him. She was naturally curious and loved to talk and she asked him question after question. They’d been seeing each other for just two weeks when they spent their first weekend in bed, talking and watching old movies and having sex again and again and again. They were near the end of North by Northwest when it hit them: If we don’t see Mount Rushmore now, when will we ever see it? Not until we’re seventy!
They rented a car the following Friday and headed west, laughing and talking the entire way. They pitched a tent in hidden spots to save money on hotels and were woken up, twice, by nice farmers offering them breakfast and warm showers.
“I was a little worried it would be disappointing,” Lucy had said when they were finally staring up at the looming stone faces.
“Me too.”
“But,” she’d said, turning to him and smiling a big smile, “it’s so much fucking cooler than I ever expected.”
When Owen found himself thinking about the early days with Lucy, the early years with Lucy, one thing stood out above all others: They had been really in love.
*