“I don’t think she ever really changed her mind,” said Ben. “I won’t say she had the girls against her will, but if you got her drunk enough, she might say it.”
“Is she sad she had the girls? What are their names?”
“Eliza and Peggy. And no, I don’t think she’s sad she had them. That’s not quite it.”
“Send me a picture of them. Text it to me.”
“Okay.”
“They’re adorable,” Lucy said when the picture came through. “Which one is which?”
“Eliza is the oldest, with the freckles. She’s twelve. Peggy is ten.”
“Does your wife have freckles?”
“Ex-wife,” said Ben. “And yes, she does.”
“Like, freckles all over? Like Julianne Moore freckles?”
“I guess you could say she has Julianne Moore freckles.”
“Interesting.”
“Why is that interesting?”
“Actually, it’s not interesting,” said Lucy. “Sometimes I say interesting when things aren’t in fact interesting. You should know that about me.”
“Interesting,” said Ben.
“Ha.”
“She has one of those jobs that is all-consuming, and she loves it. She’s one of the best heart surgeons in the country. In the world, actually. Heads of state fly in to be operated on by her.”
“Well, now you’re just making me feel bad about myself and my lack of personal achievement.”
“You wanted to talk about this.”
“I know,” said Lucy. “Keep going.”
“What else can I say? She loves her job, she’s great at it, and it eats up all she has to give. And she left her husband unattended.”
“That means you cheated on her,” said Lucy.
“We cheated on each other.”
“Who first?”
“I honestly don’t know. I guess I assume it was me. But there was no ‘catching anyone’ or anything. She finally told me she was in love with some guy she met at the hospital and she wanted a divorce. His name was Grant. I remember I kept saying, ‘Grant?’ over and over again when she finally told me.”
“Are they still together?”
“Who?”
“Deborah and Grant?”
“No,” said Ben. “Grant is long gone. I met him once, when I dropped off the girls. He had long gray hair, pulled back in a low ponytail, and I couldn’t stop thinking, She left me for that?”
“Was he a doctor?”
“No,” said Ben. “He’s a social worker in the cardiology unit. I picture him lurking around, offering solace to dying people’s families and hitting on my wife.”
“What happened to them?”
“I have no idea,” said Ben. “I think he was just the fuse she needed to light to explode our life. In my experience, it’s pretty hard to end a marriage without a third party involved. Whether the third party decides to stick around is another question entirely.”
“Is she with someone now?”
“Nope. She’s single, which is probably the way she wants it. She dates a bit, I think. I assume so, at least.”
“Are you guys close?”
“We co-parent the girls without much disagreement,” said Ben. “But other than that, no.”
“Do you do holidays together?”
“No. Never. We trade off,” said Ben. “It makes for some lonely Christmas mornings.”
“Yeah.”
“I probably would have stuck it out for the girls. I really didn’t want them to go through this. I like to think I would have done that fine old-fashioned thing and waited until our youngest went off to college.”
“I’m not sure that’s always the best plan,” said Lucy. “For the woman, at least. Deborah probably didn’t want to wait that long.”
Deborah the freckled, brainy, child-hating cardiothoracic surgeon. Deborah, the woman who left her husband unattended, like a bomb in a backpack in a subway station.
“The stars keep moving,” said Lucy.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been watching them this entire time,” she said. “They move faster than you’d think.”
It was well past three in the morning by the time Lucy and Ben stopped talking and she finally slipped into bed.
Owen was lying on his left side with pillows and bolsters arranged carefully around him, like a woman in her ninth month. He’d smeared himself from head to toe with a tube of Ben-Gay his mother had left behind years ago, back when they’d first moved into the house, during her one and only visit. The room smelled disgusting, a combination of Ben-Gay and bourbon and unbrushed teeth.
“Who were you talking to out there for so long?” Owen asked sleepily.
Lucy paused for a long moment and then said flatly, “My sister.”
“How’s she doing?” Owen mumbled.
“Fine,” said Lucy. “She’s doing fine.”
Owen adjusted one of his pillows and winced in pain. And then he was snoring again, faster than Lucy thought humanly possible, a man completely dead to the world.
He has no fucking clue, Lucy thought. It’s now officially weird.
And, Lucy thought, it’s becoming insulting.
Fifteen
Have you ever known a middle-aged man who’s fallen head over heels in love with a woman who’s not his wife? They’re pretty goddamn happy. And a brand-new one walks into my office just about every other day.
—Constance Waverly
Huffington Post
Rowan Howard was a hopeless romantic who was convinced he had married the wrong woman, which was why, periodically and yet pretty consistently throughout his marriage to Susan, he had had love affairs.
And they were love affairs, emphasis on the love, long-drawn-out illicit courtships, emotionally intimate, all-consuming, can’t-think-about-anything-else love affairs. Most recently, Rowan had been entangled with Juliette, a married woman who’d been seated next to him at a farm-to-table fund-raising event at their local CSA. They’d both felt it immediately, an electrical current that ran between them when Rowan accidentally on purpose brushed his hand against her knee under the table, which was heaped with warty heirloom turnips and stringy grass-fed beef.