And Izzy. Well, Izzy had turned out to be a bit of a wild card, but, and this was the important part, he had handled it. He had let her vent at the motel, he’d let her fly her crazy flag with her twelve hundred texts—most of them were just long strings of threatening emoticons, bombs and knives and shotguns and dead people—and then he’d let her connect and feel understood and cared for over tea at her house. Just talking to Izzy honestly about her fears about aging was probably more of a genuine connection than she’d had with anyone in years. That, plus being calm and cool when she showed up at the motel, using his Wyatt-whispering skills, the blanket of otherworldly calm that he wrapped around himself whenever Wyatt launched into one of his freak-outs—the combination of the two were like cutting just the right wire in a mixed-up jumble and managing to defuse a nuclear bomb. If he had met Izzy when he was twenty-five, God knows what would have happened. He’d be either dead or married to her.
But with age came wisdom. He was much more able to negotiate the female psyche at this point, undoubtedly because he’d been with Lucy for so long. And all of Izzy’s dire warnings—that this was just a divorce in slow motion—had turned out not to be true. In fact, he could feel that he was going to be more, well, present in his marriage from here on out.
And, in the end, what was so wrong about discovering an unconventional way to realize that you really, really love your wife? Wouldn’t a lot of women, if they knew that this would be the outcome, be willing to go ahead and loosen the shackles on their husbands for a few short months? Owen was pretty sure they would.
He was proud of himself. He was proud of himself, and proud of Lucy, and proud of their marriage.
He decided he would bring up the subject with Lucy when he got home from work. Tell her he wanted to wrap it up, shut it down, pull the plug. The Arrangement had worked, better, really, than he’d expected, but Owen was ready to call it a day.
*
“I have to bring Fang to church on Sunday,” said Rocco.
“And why is that?” asked Gordon. He was reading Drudge on his iPad, something damning about Chelsea Clinton’s little kid.
“Everyone is supposed to bring their pets to church. They’re going to walk down the aisle. There’s going to be horses and donkeys and a real live camel.”
“What for?” asked Kelly.
“To be baptized by the priest,” said Rocco.
“They’re baptizing animals now?” Gordon turned to Kelly and asked, “Is that some sort of Catholic thing?”
“How should I know?” said Kelly.
“I thought you were raised Catholic.”
Kelly froze, and then a look of complete disgust came over her face. “Are you being freakin’-the-freak serious right now, Gordon?”
Gordon realized he was in trouble. He did appreciate Kelly’s use of the freaks in front of Rocco. He knew that took restraint on her part. Considerable restraint.
“Do you pay any attention to anything I say?” she asked him. “Anything? Ever?”
“Honestly, Kelly, I thought you said that once,” said Gordon. “I have a lot of things I have to keep track of.”
“I know, I know,” said Kelly. “You’re a very important man.”
Rocco just watched as his parents talked, his head moving like he was at a tennis match, and when he found his opening he said, “We all have to go to church together, as a family, and we have to bring a pet.”
“I can’t go to church, Rocco,” said Gordon. “I’ve got too much work to do.”
“Maria can take you like she usually does, sweetie,” said Kelly. “I have too much to do around here.”
“Can I bring Fang?”
“Of course,” said Gordon, going back to the baby Clinton story. “Just make sure to keep him on the leash.”
*
Owen didn’t have a chance to talk to Lucy until they were getting into bed.
“I’ve been thinking,” he started.
Lucy didn’t say anything; she just reached for the tube of hand cream on her nightstand and squirted some into her hand.
“I think I’d like to stop it. The thing. The Arrangement thing.”
“Really,” said Lucy. “What brought this on?”
“Nothing. Just, you know.” He pulled off his T-shirt and threw it across the room, missing the hamper. “Quit while we’re ahead.”
“This is what we agreed we wouldn’t do,” said Lucy. She started rubbing lotion onto her elbows in a matter-of-fact, wifely way. “This is why we made the rules, Owen, so we wouldn’t have to have conversations like this.”
“I know, but I thought you might want to know that I’m ready to stop it.”
“Well, I think we should stick to what we agreed to. Six months. That was pretty much the point of this whole thing.”
Lucy wiped the lotion off her palms and popped open her laptop. She started clicking around the way she did every night, searching for a podcast that would lull her to sleep.
Owen got into bed and rolled onto his side and stared at the gray wall next to the bed.
What the hell? he thought. What the fucking hell just happened?
Eighteen
It’s like my favorite T-shirt says: “No mud, no lotus.”
—Constance Waverly
WaverlyRadio podcast #11
See that little kid right there?”
Sunny Bang gestured toward a little boy who was walking across the church parking lot toting a guinea pig in a plastic cage.
“Yeah?” said Lucy.
“Dick.”
Sunny and Lucy were standing outside St. Andrews, watching as a few cars pulled in from the main road. The bulk of the traffic was being diverted to the school parking lot across the street by a local cop who was dressed for church except for a reflective orange vest. It was the Blessing of the Animals day, and it was starting to look like just about all of the good people of Beekman were going to show up for it.
“Total dick,” Sunny said again.
“Sunny,” said Lucy. “He’s, like, four.”
“You can tell by four,” said Sunny.
The cop waved Edmund Chase’s pickup truck into the church parking lot, undoubtedly because it was towing a horse trailer. Apparently, Claire had tracked down something big.
Lucy and Sunny watched as Edmund started to open the back of the trailer. A scraggly brown llama poked its head out the window and made a series of frantic, disturbing, high-pitched squawks, like a bagful of turkeys being hit with a baseball bat.
“Don’t worry,” Claire called out to nobody in particular. “The farmer told me he just does that when he’s nervous.”
Claire tried to coax the llama out of the trailer and down the ramp, finally pulling hard on a rope attached to its harness. Just then, the Mulligan boys walked by, all three of them wearing identical button-down white oxford shirts over what had to be some of Louisa Chase’s surplus white ballet tights.
Sunny Bang took in the scene and then said to Lucy in that way of hers, that way that sounded like she was taking a long, weary drag on her fourth cigarette of the hour, “Oh, this I can’t miss.”
*
Lucy’s Sunday morning had not started out well.
“I want to bring the chickens,” said Wyatt.
“We’re bringing Goldie,” said Lucy. Wyatt had won Goldie at the Dutchess County fair. Lucy had expected it to die in two days, which was about the amount of bandwidth she had available for a fish at the time. It was two years later, and Goldie was still alive, swimming around in a murky old ten-gallon fish tank that was cleaned basically never. “Goldie wants to come. You can carry the bag.”
“I want to bring the chickens!”
“We can’t bring the chickens, Wyatt.”
“I want to bring the chickens!” He slumped to the ground and butted his head against the bottom step of the staircase as hard as he could. Lucy grabbed him and wrapped her arms around him and held him to keep him from hitting his head again. He started to writhe, trying to get free.
“I want to bring the chickens!”
“We can’t bring the chickens,” said Lucy. “We’ve got too many chickens.”