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“Yes, but . . .” He wipes something off her face, maybe newspaper markings, maybe ink or dirt. “Hopefully someone who is actually getting somewhere with it.”
Maggie looks away from him, tries to stop her face from turning red. He isn’t making fun of her—or he is, but only because he wants her to make fun of herself. She can’t, though, not exactly. She still harbors this idea, in the small place inside of herself that justifies her Real Simple subscription and the $250.00-plus tax she paid for her Bissel Healthy Home super-vacuum, that one day she will become the type of woman who is good at making things neat, beautiful, brand new.
She is good at other things—has already organized the entire computer and accounting system for the restaurant; feels more than confident about her ability to manage the front room once they open, her ability to run the bar.
But as fate would have it, she is marrying a man who has in him more of the woman she wants to be than she ever will. Nate is the best cook she has ever known, a natural cleaner, a builder. He keeps jars of fresh herbs on the kitchen counter. He carved their ratty rafters into a dining room table. He makes everything he touches beautiful. Even—though Maggie never imagined she’d feel this way—her.
She moves onto Nate’s lap, wrapping her legs around his waist, her hand reaching around to rub his back. He is sticky, sticky from sleep and last night’s sweat. She doesn’t care. She could live like this. She smiles, and kisses him—his soft bottom lip, meeting hers, holding her there.
“What were you thinking about that you couldn’t sleep?” she asks him. “How you don’t want to marry me because I can’t clean?”
“I want to marry you more because you can’t clean.”
“Terrible liar,” she says.
“Terrible cleaner,” he says.
He buries into her neck until she feels his smile press against her, his hands making his way under her panties—which is when she looks down at the floor, and her eyes catch them again. The pile of CITIGROUP SMITH BARNEY envelopes. The ones addressed to Champ Nathaniel Huntington.
“Hey, Nate,” she says, over his shoulder. “Who is Champ Huntington, by the way?”
As soon as the words are out, she feels his body stiffen. And when he pulls back from her, slightly, she sees a bad look—one she doesn’t recognize—come over his face.
“What did you just ask me?”
She reaches for the envelopes and hands them to him. “I just found these. Are they yours? Are they bank statements or something? I didn’t know we had a bank account there. Do we?”
He looks down at the envelopes, flips them over in his hand, and nods. “Kind of.”
This makes sense to her. They have “kind of” accounts open all over the city now, different accounts from many different institutions—lending them too little money at too high interest, all for the restaurant. Eight out of ten restaurants fail within the first year. Six out of ten marriages fail sometime after that. They are playing with some dangerous odds, if she lets herself think of any of this as playing. She tries not to.
“But who’s Champ?”
He looks from the envelopes, up at Maggie’s face. “I am,” he says.
She starts to laugh, assuming that he is kidding. “Okay. Something you forgot to tell me about, Sport? I mean Champ?”
He smiles, but it is a nervous smile, and he doesn’t say anything. He puts the envelopes down.
“Wait, you’re serious? Your name is Champ?”
“No, my grandfather’s name is Champ. Or was Champ. And I was named after him, but I’ve never used his name a day in my life. No one’s ever called me Champ, but it is my official birth name. Champ Nathaniel Huntington.”
Maggie knew that Nate was named after his grandfather, the one on his father’s side, but she assumed that his name was Nate. She assumed it because Nate never told her otherwise.
“How have you never mentioned that?” she asks.
He shrugs. “Would you want to mention that?”
It isn’t a bad point. But, inadvertently, she must make a face because Nate looks pretty nervous.
“Wow,” he says, “you’re never going to have sex with me again, are you? Who would? Who would have sex with someone named Champ?”
She starts to laugh, and grabs the back of his neck, holds him. He is blushing—Nate, Champ, whoever—really blushing. And it makes Maggie feel bad that she mentioned the envelopes.
“It has nothing to do with you. I just don’t think it was very nice of your parents, that’s all,” she says, making him meet her eyes. “Or your grandfather’s parents . . .”
Nate nods, putting the envelopes down. “No kidding,” he says. He looks at Maggie in a way she does recognize—in a way that tells her he needs to say something that is hard for him to say. “But I think that’s why I couldn’t really sleep.”
