“Do you think your mom made the right decision?”
“I do. He made a mistake and regretted it. She’s happier with him than without him. In some ways they are nicer to each other now than they were when I was little. It’s like they realized that they have a choice, and they are choosing to be married.”
“But did people know about the affair? Like your grandparents, or your mom’s friends?” Augusta was trying to fish the lost drawstring out of the waistband of Charlie’s shorts.
“Sure.” Zoey wiped olive juice off her hands. “But it’s none of their business. It’s just about my mom and my dad.”
Augusta wanted to say more, but maybe Zoey had a point. If every marriage was different, maybe every betrayal was as well. It was just all tangled up. Her brother. The secret. The magazine. She was so used to understanding herself, so used to knowing why she felt happy or unhappy, but pinpointing her own feelings about this whole Colin thing was tricky. She wanted to make neat little piles of her outrage, to measure them up against one another. This many grains of fury for being with her own brother. This many for keeping a secret locked away. This many for making her look stupid in front of the outside world. But, Augusta reflected, maybe that third pile was just vanity. Maybe she could decide to stop caring so much about her image, her reputation. If she could let go of the little grains in that pile, how much anger would she have left?
“So, who is that guy you had over?” asked Zoey.
Stavros. Augusta hadn’t said anything about him to Zoey but every time she thought about what she had seen—Augusta slurring, stumbling in with Stavros from the bar—she died of humiliation. “No, he’s a friend. I was pretty drunk and it was stupid.”
“We’ve all been there.” Zoey grinned.
“What?” Augusta laughed, surprised. “Please don’t tell me you’ve had a regrettable drunken hookup!”
“Well, I don’t drink, so it was sober. Maybe that’s worse?” Zoey was blushing furiously.
“Oh my God, what happened?”
“There was this girl from my farming project at Appleton. I don’teven think she’s beautiful. But there’s just something weirdly attractive about her?”
“Like the Frenchjolie-laidething. I get it.”
“YES. We ended up making out behind a tractor.” Zoey groaned.
Augusta screamed with glee. “Now THAT is what you’re supposed to be doing as a teenager!”
“That guy you brought home was definitely ‘jolie-laide.’ ” Zoey raised her eyebrows and smirked. It was true. Stavros had thick caterpillar eyebrows and hands like shovels, but was somehow still sexy.
“I knowwwww.” Augusta buried her face in a handful of clean laundry. She had seen Stavros at her kids’ camp the week before. He jogged across the parking lot to give her a hug and they made awkward small talk about the tyranny of the camp counselors, college drama majors drunk on power and charging parents twenty-five dollars a pop for tie-dye camp T-shirts that would inevitably ruin a load of laundry. They weren’t flirting. They weren’t talking about that night. They were both just doing damage control, making sure their secret was safe.
When Zoey left to go home, Augusta put her children to bed and then sat out on the back porch, listening to the crickets, wishing Colin were next to her. It was weird she’d been attracted to Stavros. But sexual attraction was a wild card. You could love how someone looked on paper but then feel nothing in person. You could think a guy was dumb as rocks, hate his clothes, and still want to jump his bones. This was why sex was the messy magic at the center of life. It didn’t always make sense, but the power was undeniable.
When she wasa seniorin college, Augusta had slept with a caveman. It was a relationship too confusing for her to even make sense of now, but she’d developed a fierce sexual attraction to a football playernamed Robbie O’Keefe who was objectively ugly, unkempt, and strange. It started one night at a bar, both of them a little drunk, making out in a dark corner. The next morning Augusta’s friends teased her about it at breakfast. “Did he taste like Doritos and weed?” “Did he make grunting noises while he groped your rack?” “You didn’t want to go back to his cave and braid his back hair?” It was mortifying. But still, the next weekend Augusta found herself looking for him, hoping they might cross paths at one of the campus bars. Of course, they did, and she ended up bringing him back to her room, where she took off her shirt and made out with him until sunrise.
They didn’t tell anyone about their late-night visits, Augusta because it was too weird to explain, and Robbie because, well, she supposed he didn’t talk to his football friends about much aside from beer pong. There were things about him that grossed her out—the little hairs of his mustache curled over his lip, piles of red Solo cups littered his dorm room floor, and she once made him stop kissing her and chew a piece of gum because he tasted like an Italian sub. But still, they slept together every weekend for two months until it stopped as suddenly as it started. He began dating a girl from home, or she went away for spring break and broke the magnetic pull of weird attraction—she didn’t even remember or care what actually happened, the main point was that she never told anyone about it, she was too puzzled by the whole thing, confused about the ways in which sexual attraction defied her normal tastes.
She knew that wasn’t what had happened between Colin and Eben—it wasn’t a sexual infatuation as inconsequential as the caveman—but sexual desire was layered. Maybe he was as confused by himself as Augusta had been. Or maybe not. Maybe he knew himself and Augusta had just been too closed off to let him tell her. She knew she could be judgmental, she knew she could be rigid about certain things.Was Colin afraid she wouldn’t love him if she knew he was bisexual? Had she made him feel that her love was, in some way, conditional? If so, that was her fault, and the idea of it made her hot with shame.
On Saturday Augusta dressed the children for a day at the beach with Colin. She packed a bag of dry clothes and underwear, hats and sunblock, a cooler with Beatrix’s milk, and four different kinds of granola bars. What did children eat before granola bars? They made up such a huge portion of her children’s diet it was impossible to imagine.
Augusta was filling their water bottles at the sink when Jane came in, her flip-flops slapping the kitchen floor. “Mom, my ear is really itchy.”
“Your ear? Is it from the pool at camp?” Augusta had swimmer’s ear as a child. She remembered lying on the couch as her mother put in cold drops.
“I don’t know.” Jane tilted her head to the side so Augusta could look at her ear. It looked normal, but the skin behind it was red.
“Have you been scratching?” Augusta held Jane’s chin in her hand and pushed her hair back around her neck. As she did, a bug fell out. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Hold still.” Augusta carefully lifted the hair around Jane’s ear. Another bug. And another. They were huge, like big pieces of rice, their legs translucent white.
“What is it, Mom? Is it from swimming?”
“No. It’s lice.”
