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She smiles, but she doesn’t feel like talking about Champ and Anna. It makes her miss them, makes her wish they were here. If they were, she can’t help but think that Thomas wouldn’t be doing what he is doing. She knows this, at least: he would be doing it differently.
Gwyn motions out the window to where Nate is standing near the edge of the cliff, by the swing, throwing rocks out at the ocean.
“Why don’t you ask him to go with you?” she says, motioning toward their son. “Maggie’s upstairs in his room sleeping. And it will be good for you to talk to him while you have some time alone. It will be good for you to get him to talk.”
“About what?” Thomas looks confused. “About you and me?”
Gwyn gives h
im a look. “About him and Maggie. About why he is choosing not to tell her some very important things.”
“Like what?”
“Like she doesn’t know about his first restaurant.”
“What are you talking about? How can she not know about that? That’s insane.”
Is it? she wants to say. What about all the things you think I don’t know about? Is that insane too?
“What did he say exactly?”
Gwyn takes a breath in, not in the mood to translate, not in the mood to go through it again—the little that Nate told her, the rest that she couldn’t seem to pry from him over one cake-baking session. “Just ask him, Thomas,” she says, her anger rising. “Ask him what he is doing.”
“Okay,” he says, and he picks his surfboard up. “Except Maggie’s not upstairs. She just went out with Georgia a little while ago. I heard the car pull out. They didn’t come in here and tell you?”
“No, I didn’t even hear them leave.” She puts the sponge down. “That’s odd. Well, I’ll let her know. I’ll let her know, and I’ll keep her busy.”
He taps her on the nose, makes a quick circle there. “You doing okay?” he says.
She feels herself cringe at his touch, at how it feels when he moves away. “Sure,” she says. “I’m doing great.”
“Gwyn—”
“Get going. Come on. Before it starts to rain.”
He points at the radio. “It sounds like we have hours before any of that hits us.”
“The one thing we do not have before any of that hits us, Thomas, is hours,” she says and he gives her a look, but he picks up his surfboard and leaves.
Gwyn takes her time. She finishes with the dishes, puts them back in the cupboard, and calmly heads outside herself, but in the opposite way from Nate and Thomas. She heads down her driveway toward their nearest neighbor’s place. It is quiet out here, silent almost, but soon enough, they will be coming to set it up: the barn being transformed in one swoop, candelas covering the now pushed-to-the-side tables. A buffet of food circling the center. The rafters coated with white balloons and glass balls.
Still, she has a little longer to get this last piece together. And she’s come this far, but she’s not nervous now. She’s not. She is just letting herself know what she knows, like a mantra she’s been repeating since all of Thomas’s lies started: More than one thing is never true. People love to say the opposite, love to talk about inner conflict, nuances, levels of complication. But if this last year has taught her anything, it has taught her that people are clearer on what they want than they admit to themselves. They want something, or they don’t. They decide to keep working at a relationship or they give up. They love someone or they love someone else. And if they love someone else, it is often the idea that they love most, especially when they haven’t learned enough to figure out that this new person probably won’t save them either.
Thomas hasn’t learned that yet, which is why he can lie and call the girl religion. And why Gwyn is left to call her new religion the girl. Following the girl. Learning from her. Learning about who her husband has decided he wants to be. Learning about what is coming next for her family.
And here it is. What is coming next.
Here she is.
Sitting on the back steps at the Buckleys’.
Her husband’s mistress. In a large jacket and frayed jeans, two low-flying braids against the side of her head. Her eyes darting back and forth, looking nervous—holding a large silver tray of oversize mushroom caps.
“Eve,” Gwyn says, and moves toward her. “Welcome.”
Maggie
This is what Maggie knew about the lighthouse out on Montauk Point, before she actually went to the lighthouse out on Montauk Point: that it was the oldest lighthouse in America, around for over two hundred years, and still used to help navigate ships in and out on the tip of Long Island, this important port on the edge of the world. What she didn’t know, until today, is that many couples get married here, that it’s booked years in advance, so that on any given weekend, a bride and a groom can say their vows in front of fifty friends, the ocean in the background, the lighthouse up on the hill to the right, like a beacon shining, eternal. Something for the minister to point to as emblematic of the union, of what the couple has to come.
