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“You need to promise me. Not that I’m the person you need to be promising, but I’m going to have to do—”
“I will, I am planning to, as soon as she can hear it,” he says, wiping his hands on a dishtowel, as if that solves it. “But while we are being all honest here, then let me ask you something.”
She turns on the oven, letting it heat. “Shoot,” she says.
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
She feels herself go stiff. “The party or the divorce?”
“Either, both. I know I’m probably supposed to have my own reaction to it, but the reaction I’m honestly having now is that it’s okay with me. If it’s really what you want.”
She meets his eyes, holds them, making herself believe it so she can say it. “Yes, this is really what I want.”
“Then why are you still making his favorite cake?”
She looks down at the now-messy countertop, the dirtied dishes and bowls and spoons in the kitchen sink. She wipes her fingers on her apron, the fronts of them, then the back.
“I don’t know,” she says.
He nods. “Because truthfully, Mom, Maggie thinks there is something else going on. And normally I would argue, but I don’t know . . .” He pauses. “You just don’t seem like yourself.”
Then, as if the conversation is over—and she guesses it is, for now—he turns away from her to get the ingredients for the frosting. And she begins to pour the cake into its container. Where it will bake. Where it will complete itself.
“Now that is the nicest thing anyone has said to me all day,” she says.
Maggie
It’s not that she is convinced she would have fallen asleep, but she was close to it, closer than she’s been in a few days: lying on top of Nate’s bed, her eyes closing, her mind in that silent place right before sleep. She wishes she had gotten there from a place of relaxation, but this is more from the opposite. It is more from not wanting to acknowledge what she is feeling in her stomach, what she worries is going on around her.
Then Georgia knocks on the door. The first time, jarring Maggie. The second time, giving her no choice but to respond.
“Maggie! Can I come in?” Georgia says, as she opens the door, answers her own question with a yes. “Were you sleeping?”
“Not exactly,” she says.
Georgia enters: a book under her arm, holding a bottle of absinthe, a thin shot glass. She gets on the bed, lying down. Then she hands Maggie the absinthe and the glass.
“I brought you a snack,” she says.
Maggie looks at her, then down at the bottle, unscrewing the cap. The pungent smell that comes out is a mix of apples and cherries and licorice and wood. Maggie remembers trying to buy a bottle of this for Nate out in San Francisco the day he gave notice at the restaurant and they decided for certain to open their own place in New York. He had told her that he loved absinthe, but she went to every liquor store she could think of and could only find imitations, the real version illegal and unavailable anywhere in the continental United States.
“It’s the real absinthe?” she asks Georgia now.
Georgia nods. “Denis smuggled it in from Canada.”
“Is absinthe legal in Canada?”
“Oh, how should I know?”
She opens the book, which Maggie recognizes from Gwyn’s pile downstairs—Graceful Divorce is written on the cover, above a purposely blurry photograp
h of two hands, separating from each other. Georgia flips through pages until she stops on one, her fingers skimming a passage. “Listen to this,” she says, and begins to read:
The purpose of the parting ritual is to replace animosity with harmony. It is a message that closing the door on marriagedoes not mean closing the door on the love you feel for each other. It is a message that wherever your lives may take the two of you from this point forward, you will remain connectedin your hearts. . . .
“Gross,” Maggie says. “What is that?”
“Apparently, what we have to look forward to tonight.” She pauses. “Set to orchestra music.”
