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But just as they are lying back, there is a knock on the door. “Nate!” It’s Georgia. She’s knocking more while she’s talking.
“Can you come downstairs with me for a minute? I need to talk to you. And don’t pretend you can’t hear me. I’ll bust this door down and make you hear me.”
“I need a minute, Georgia.”
“No.” She knocks again. “Now.”
Maggie touches his knee, shrugs. “Go. It’s fine. I’ll sleep for a little while. It will be good. You can talk to your family without worrying about me.”
He turns back toward Maggie, putting his forehead against hers—holding it there, closing his eyes.
“I’ll be back.”
“I’ll be here.”
He nods, pulling back, and kissing her on top of her head, which she imagines is supposed to bring her calm, but has the opposite effect. Because it feels nothing like him.
Maggie listens to the door click shut, and looks back over at the bulletin board, at the red ribbons in the middle, and the newspaper clippings again, and the empty tacks. There are no photos up there anymore. But she thinks of the last one on the staircase: the one of Gwyn and Thomas in the pickup truck. They look in love in that picture. They look very much in love. How do you get from there to here? Does it start with one lie, one small omission? One conversation that you need to have, and can’t seem to?
Which is when the door opens again. It’s Nate.
“Can I tell you something I’ve never told you before?” he says. And he looks at her, really looks at her, until she holds his gaze for a second, sees him. “I like you more than anyone,” he says.
She smiles at him. “I like you more than anyone,” she says.
But then—just when she needs him to stay most, and can ask for it least—he is gone again.
Gwyn
She started to get to this earlier: the billion-dollar industries. The ones that survive based on the faulty idea that women like her have, the idea that if you keep yourself beautiful, that if you keep yourself looking a certain way, you are safe. In your life, in your marriage, in yourself. How many times has she heard a friend talking about someone leaving his wife and saying, well, she really let herself go? The implication being that it is less his fault than hers, that he can’t be expected to stay for someone who is less than perfect.
Only, what if you stay perfect? And he leaves you anyway? Who are you going to blame it on, then? Especially when this other person, the one he is leaving for, isn’t beautiful? When she isn’t anything like the person you’re supposed to try hard—try with everything you have—to keep being?
This is the worst position of all, Gwyn thinks. She has stayed beautiful, and it hasn’t saved her from anything. In fact, it may have left her more vulnerable, because it allowed her to get complacent. Thomas still stared at her as she walked into a room, touched the small of her back, still told her she had the most perfect hips and shoulders and breasts he’d ever seen. She let those things mean something. She let them stand in place of the things he rarely said enough, like: I want you, and I always have.
She straightens her dress out, leaves the bathroom, and heads down the stairs toward the kitchen. If she can spend some time in the kitchen without being harassed, without seeing anyone, it will be no small miracle. She wants to start baking the cake. She wants to be left alone.
But she turns on the kitchen light and it reveals both of her children, sitting in the dark, just where she guessed she’d find them: Nate sitting on a stool by the counter, Georgia leaning against the countertop itself. The ingredients for the cake are pushed to the side. Shortening and cocoa and sugar. Beets and fresh buttermilk, too many eggs. Gwyn closes her eyes, opens them, hoping to see something else. They could be ten or fifteen as easily as the grown people that are sitting in front of her now: Nate bending into his shoulders, Georgia leaning backward on her tiny elbows. Anyone who says people change should ask a mother. She can tell you that her children—in the ways that seem to count most—are exactly as they’ve always been.
“You’re going to have to move,” she says, tapping Georgia on her cheek.
Georgia stays where she is. “We’ve been talking about it, Mom,” she says, “and if this divorce party is some twisted attempt to make us feel better, then we feel fine, okay? We’ll feel a lot better without it.”
Gwyn reaches around Georgia for the eggs, the butter. She reaches around her daughter, and starts to get organized. “It’s too late to cancel. Everyone has been invited.”
“Everyone has been invited? You sound British,” Georgia says.
She looks at her daughter disapprovingly.
“Do they even know what they’ve been invited to?” she asks. “Do they even know what tonight is really about?”
How can Gwyn answer that? She nods, because yes is the closest thing to the correct answer. Her friends do know they’ve been invited to a divorce party, and they do know the gist of the rest of it: that she and Thomas are splitting. They don’t know there is another woman, though. They probably wouldn’t believe it if Gwyn told them, wouldn’t want to believe it, which is really beside the point. Because she can’t tell them anyway. She can’t bear to hear them say what they’ll inevitably say—Thomas is goingto come running back to you. She can’t hear them say it, then have to find out how wrong they are about that too.
“So just that we are clear,” Georgia says, folding her arms across her chest, “parading our family’s demise in front of everyone we know is the healthiest way to go. What kind of parenting is that? Do you know what my therapist is going to say?”
She squeezes Georgia’s elbow. “You can tell your therapist that your father and I decided together, with our therapist, that celebrating our family in front of everyone we know, one last time, is the healthiest way to go.”
“You guys have a therapist?”
