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“She probably wants him to go meet her and Maggie, wherever they are. That’s fine. The fewer people around here while everyone is setting up, the better.”
Thomas turns and looks at the woodwork in the nook, running his hand along the fractures. “This needs fixing still. I’m sorry I haven’t done it. I meant to do it before I left for California. You wrote me that note asking me to, didn’t you? I’ll get around to it, now, in the next day or two. . . .”
Would he really, though? They’ve discussed this already. They’ve discussed his taking care of this for months and months. Is he going to get to it now? Right before he leaves here, and her? Why now? It exhausts her to consider it, what she is starting to understand. That, in fact, this may be the time when someone is most able to fix something. Right at the moment it counts least.
“So did you speak to the caterer?” he asks.
“What?” She looks at Thomas, and sees that his question is innocent. Or seemingly innocent. He isn’t particularly interested in her answer. “Why?”
“It’s just that you were worried this morning, weren’t you? And I haven’t seen anyone milling around the kitchen. I’ve seen every other truck in the world, but none that has caterer written on it.”
Gwyn smiles. “No, it’s fine. Since the rest of the staff is setting up here, I asked her to go next door to the Buckleys’. I thought she’d have more space that way. To finish with preparations.”
“So it’s a split-level operation,” he says.
“Kind of. You could say.”
He nods, interested. “Why did you do it that way? Doesn’t it make more work for you?”
“It made sense at the time.”
“And now?”
“And now it’s made more work for me.”
She meets his eyes, really meets them, which is her mistake. Because he smiles, and the rest of it disappears. For a minute, it disappears. The anger, the confusion. It is someone else who caused all of this. Not this guy next to her. He is just her husband sitting on her porch with her, drinking afternoon lemonade, and waiting to see what the rest of the day will bring to them.
“Thomas,” she says, and clears her throat. “You should know something. You should know this.”
“Okay.” He waits.
And she starts to tell him what she has been planning for tonight. But then one of the bartenders—a petite brunette in a black cap—walks by, and Thomas looks at her. He looks at her like he is trying to decide if she is pretty beneath that cap. It is a subtle look, and beside the point. This girl with her black cap isn’t the problem. And the only reason that Gwyn notices is that she is looking too, wondering too. Still, the spell is broken, and Gwyn changes her mind. She changes her mind about changing anything.
Anyone who says it doesn’t all come down to one moment is lying. This is it. It comes down to this for them. If she told him the truth—that she knew his truth, that she was plotting something for this evening—their lives would have moved in a different direction. A better one, a worse one? Who is she to judge? All she knows is that she sees the other life’s possibility—and then, in her silence, she sees that life disappear.
“What, Gwyn?”
She leans toward her husband, running her hand through his hair. “Nothing,” she says. “I just love you.”
He is silent. It has been a long time since she’s said that to him, and something settles over Thomas’s face. At first she thinks it is guilt. But then it seems to be something else beneath that, something like regret. Because these words—I love you— have power in their absence. Almost like sex: you forget its power when it is readily available, but when it is gone for a while, it gets a chance to make itself new, to make itself mean something all over again.
So he reaches for her. He reaches for her, like he means it, because he does mean it, and in one motion, he is pulling her deeper into the nook, where someone can see them if they are looking hard, from the north, and from a distance, but where they’d have to be looking that hard. From the right angle, at the right moment: Gwyn tight against the wall, Thomas blocking her, and blocking her in.
“I love you too,” he says, real low.
Then his arms are around her back, pulling up her dress from behind, his face locked in tight to her face, eyes open, not kissing, as she rips at his shorts, pulling them all the way off of him, and leaving him vulnerable like that, open, right from the beginning, forcing him to go quickly, as though they might get caught, and they might get caught, by their children, their impending guests, each other.
He pushes himself into her. And the world stops. Thomas stops moving quickly, his lips finding her neck, biting, Gwyn bearing down with her lower body, hard, adding pressure. Her eyes closed. She is still holding the lemonade, tight, which she doesn’t realize until she does. Which is when she drops it, the glass shattering into a thousand small pieces as she reaches for her husband’s back, his shoulders, and holds on.
Maggie
Maggie walks toward him, holding her left shoulder with her right hand, as if protecting herself. From him? From what’s coming? He is leaning against The House sign, his arms folded across his chest. He looks upset—more distraught, though, than angry— but even so, she realizes that he may be equally mad that she has come here as she is humiliated that she felt the need to.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” He motions in the direction of the restaurant. “How did that work out for you?” he asks.
“Pretty good. We sat down, made some excellent mint juleps, and talked about old times. She showed me your wedding album. Very lovely.” She points toward where she left Ryan. “You want to go in and say hello for a couple of minutes? I’m sure she’d be glad to see you.”
