He began to slowly ease the car forward, all the while saying soothing things through the crack in the window. Izzy wasn’t having any of it. She started banging on the hood with the wine bottles. They were thick, though, and didn’t break.
As he finally managed to pull away, Owen yelled out the window, “I’m just letting you calm down! We’ll talk about this later, I promise.”
She launched one of the wine bottles, and it bounced off the hood of his car, denting it pretty bad.
Owen drove around the back roads of Beekman for a while, collecting his thoughts. He wasn’t going to go home or to work, because he was afraid Izzy would track him down and go at him with the wine bottles again. Lucy was in the city seeing Dr. Hubble, their dentist, and Wyatt was with the afternoon sitter, so Owen was free and clear. He’d blocked out the afternoon for Madison, anyway.
He finally parked his car on a small private dirt road that bisected a bigger dirt road, the main dirt road, the historic one that the local dirt-road wingnuts were always going on and on about preserving. Beekman was overrun with dirt roads, and every last one of them was a money pit. Every year, potholes the size of kiddie pools materialized, and tax dollars were siphoned off to fill them in, smooth things down, regrade, and sprinkle them with nonpotable water in order to keep the dust down in the summer. It was a huge waste of money, Owen thought, but that was a position he did not mention in polite company. It was impossible to figure out who was on what side of the big dirt-road fight, and Owen found it was wisest to keep his mouth shut. It was one of those local battles with no end in sight, like the war over the occupancy permit for the Zalinskys’ garden shed–turned–home office, which, depending on whom you believed, either did or did not extend two feet over the original footprint.
He stared out his window at some rolling farmland dotted with white houses with screened porches. The leaves had all turned, but he’d been so preoccupied lately he’d barely noticed. It was clear to him he had made a fundamental mistake along the way, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He really didn’t believe Izzy was in love with him. Up until today’s wine-bottle-chucking fiasco, she certainly hadn’t acted like a woman in love. It’s possible he had underestimated his importance to her, but it was just as likely that what her ex-husband Christopher had said to him outside Izzy’s house that evening not long ago was true: she was five kinds of crazy. Maybe it was as simple as that.
Should he tell Lucy about it? Did he have a responsibility to let her know what was going on, the turn things had recently taken? He didn’t think he did, but he didn’t want Lucy to be blindsided by some nutjob either.
Contain it, he thought. Talk to Izzy, calm her down, figure it out.
*
“God, I miss takeout,” said Lucy.
She was sitting up in bed with Ben, sharing green chicken curry and pad see ew. It was Monday, and she and Ben were having a late lunch. When Ben texted that he had the afternoon free, Lucy arranged for an after-school babysitter and told Owen she was going to the dentist.
“They don’t have takeout in Beekman?” Ben asked.
“They don’t deliver. Owen and I fight over who has to go pick it up, and by the time we start to eat, it’s cold and we’re mad at each other.”
“Why do you live there?”
“I forget. The air smells good?”
“You’ve got too much nature up there. It’s not healthy.”
“I saw a rat on the subway tracks in Grand Central on my way here,” said Lucy. “It was as big as a rabbit.”
“Yeah, see, that’s just the right amount of nature,” said Ben.
“I miss eating takeout in bed,” said Lucy. “I miss having sex, ordering food, and eating it naked in bed. And drinking out of real wineglasses.”
“I’ll buy you some wineglasses,” said Ben. “That much we can fix.”
“We don’t use any glass in our house.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when my son was about two, he would pick up a glass and ask, ‘That’s glass?’ and if you said yes, he would hurl it to the floor and watch it shatter. He found it unbelievably exciting. Finally I got rid of all of our glasses and replaced them with plastic.”
“Would he still do that?”
“Who knows? Probably not. I guess I just haven’t been in the mood to find out,” said Lucy. “Now he does this thing where whenever he spots a knife on the kitchen counter he picks it up and yells, ‘It’s knife time!’”
“Oh my God.”
“Then, if you make the mistake of showing any reaction whatsoever, he runs away from you, brandishing the knife. I almost had a heart attack the first time it happened. He had a twelve-inch chef’s knife in his hand and wouldn’t stop running around the dining-room table.”
“So what do you do?”
“I act like it’s no big deal. I get completely relaxed and move super-slowly and say things like ‘Wyatt, give Mommy the knife’ until I can disarm him. I’d say I’m about two weeks away from throwing away all of our knives,” said Lucy. “I’ll just stick to soft foods for the next ten years. Plastic wineglasses and soft foods.”
After they ate, they made love again, and then Lucy got up and started to get dressed.
“I don’t want you to leave.”
Lucy was buttoning her blouse, and Ben was in bed, looking at her. “I don’t want to leave either. I’m not even supposed to be here today. I told Owen I was going to the dentist.”
“I mean I don’t want you to leave ever,” Ben said. And then he smiled a smile Lucy felt like she would remember for the rest of her life.
The next morning it was raining, and the wind was blowing very hard. The tree branches were whipping around frantically, dropping their leaves the way they did some years, more or less all in a single day. Lucy was packing Wyatt’s lunch, daydreaming about Ben, and wondering if the storm meant they would lose power.
“Any cavities?” Owen asked. He was at the table drinking coffee, scrolling through things on his phone.
“What?”
“At the dentist. Yesterday in the city. I thought you went to see Dr. Hubble.”
“Yes, actually,” said Lucy. She thought fast. “Three. I have to go in next week to get the top two filled, and then the week after for the bottom one.”
More Ben, Lucy thought. I just figured out how to get more Ben.
“You never get cavities.”
“I know. Hubble wanted to know if our water out here has fluoride in it,” said Lucy. “Does it?”
“I don’t see how it could,” said Owen. “It’s from the well.”
“He said we should get fluoride drops for Wyatt,” said Lucy. My goodness, I’ve become a good liar. “Otherwise he’s going to end up with a million cavities.”
“Isn’t fluoride supposed to be bad for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean bad for you. Like microwave ovens and high-voltage power lines.”
Lucy looked at her husband and said, “Are you channeling Susan Howard now?”
“Is Susan into that?” asked Owen.
“Yeah. Susan goes nuts about microwaves. She once saw Claire put Tupperware into a microwave and she lectured us about breast cancer for two hours,” said Lucy. “And that’s when Susan stopped being invited to ladies’ night.”