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But the thing was, I wasn’t exactly finding endless cohorts among the wives either. While a lot of them didn’t like the separation from their husbands, many of them didn’t necessarily talk about feeling abandoned or left behind, either. Maybe that was part of my documentary trouble. I wanted to hear that everyone did feel so badly, too. So I wouldn’t feel as badly feeling that way myself. The more time that went by, though, the less I could deny it. As much as I was trying to make the wives fit the pattern I had set up for them—as much as I was projecting my issues onto them—the less I was seeing what they might really be able to teach me. Just the week before I’d asked Kate #2 what she did when her husband was away. “What do you mean, what do I do?” she said. “I feed the cat, I watch television, I put less sauce in the saucepan.” The lesson there seemed to be something I wasn’t letting myself do. Something about getting on with it already.
“Anyway,” Josh said. “I don’t see how this documentary is really your story to tell. How is at all related to what you really wanted to do? You know, finding an uplifting outcome. A happy ending. Isn’t that your thing?”
“I don’t have a thing,” I said, even though that wasn’t entirely true. One of the reasons I’d gotten interested in the idea of making documentaries in the first place was because I was intrigued by the idea of the “Hollywood ending,” people always associating the term with meaning a happy ending, when in reality it seemed to me that the truly classic Hollywood films—like Casablanca, The Graduate, Chinatown—often had endings that were, at the very least, more uncertain than happy. More mixed than any one way. I had always been interested in the idea of trying to make documentary films, chasing around real-life stories, that would have the happy ending I couldn’t seem to find anywhere else. I wasn’t about to admit that now.
“Besides,” he said, “I’m not only talking about this project. I’m talking about how you used to be funny. Funny and real and tough.”
“I’m tougher now than I was.”
“Not even a little,” he said.
We were all the way in the right lane. If Josh didn’t get over right now, he was going to miss the fork for the interstate. We’d have to turn around at the next exit and circle back. We’d lose a half hour or twenty minutes, at least.
I started to tell him, but he interrupted me. “It’s like you’re waiting for Matt or something,” he said. “It’s like you’re just staying there because you’re waiting for him to come back and get you.”
I felt something tighten in my throat, hard and round, numbing me from the inside out, making it very hard to swallow. Making it hard to do much of anything. I didn’t know how to explain it to Josh without sounding crazy that I did, for a while, have this recurring fantasy of opening the front door and seeing Matt standing there, his hands down deep in his pockets, looking back at me. Us picking up—not where we left off, but a little before that. When things were still good between us.
Did it matter that Josh used to like Matt? I felt like reminding him of that, but I knew Josh didn’t want a catalog of days Matt had spent with our family: the basketball league they had been in together, the time we all ran a half-marathon, the Chicago trip Matt came on to celebrate my mom’s birthday. Josh only cared that Matt wasn’t a part of our family now—only cared about my accepting that, once and for all.
“I don’t get it, Emmy,” Josh said. “You’re the one that left him, remember? Even if you didn’t get too far afterward.”
I wanted to fight back and ask him exactly how far he had gotten since things had ended with Elizabeth. It couldn’t be that far if, the day before his wedding, he was still going to see her now.
I felt like I was about to cry. Josh was right. I wasn’t tough, not anymore. You said a few words to me—a few things that hit wrong—and I was a wimpy ball of emotions. Someone tapped on me, and there I’d go, bouncing.
Josh looked my way, and even though I was averting my eyes, he must have realized he had gone too far because I saw his shoulders slump, and he quickly changed his tone.
“Look,” he said. “I’m not trying to be a jerk here. I just don’t like you being at this standstill. You could do a hundred different things. Go back to film school, or move to London for a while. You used to love London, remember? Why don’t you try to get a job there? Or move somewhere else, and actually get a real job. I’m just saying . . . there’s not only one way to go.”
I made myself swallow, clearing my throat. “Well, I’m glad to hear that, Josh,” I said. “Because you just missed the exit.”
A little after nine, we pulled off into a truck stop for breakfast and coffee. We were only about fifteen minutes south of Narragansett, less than sixty miles from Pascoag. But I wanted to stop then, as opposed to any closer to where I lived. Or exactly where I lived. It would be too much to take Josh to the one dinerlike place in Narragansett, Dad’s Breakfast Shop, which was a small single-room restaurant just down the street from my house: bright flower paintings, long countertop, regulars who came in every morning and ordered the exact same thing—a #1 (two pancakes, three eggs, and juice), or #2 (corned beef hash and onions, large coffee), or #3 (banana waffles and whipped cream, apple-sauce on the side).
I could just picture Josh staring at Dad’s front door—simultaneously hoping and not hoping that someone would walk through it that I would say hi to, someone that would signal I had something of a situation there resembling a life. Either way, it was inevitable that both of us would have been disappointed.
But this anonymous truck stop was packed with people I wasn’t supposed to know. We sat in the corner booth, and Josh ordered a platter of eggs and turkey bacon. I said I wasn’t really hungry, but then I ate half of his and got my own order of mini-pancakes and raspberries. I had eaten the night before right before the fireworks. And then at the fireworks, I had eaten that hot dog. And, still, it all felt like a very long time ago.
Right after my food showed up, the cell phone rang. MOM came up flashing on the caller ID screen. I held up the phone so that Josh could see it for himself. We were in trouble. I knew it. I knew she knew that something was going on.
“Pick it up,” he said.
“You pick it up,” I said, trying to hand him the phone.
“No way.” He pushed the phone back toward me. “Don’t be paranoid. Pick up the phone and find out what she wants. She probably just wants to tell you something about the caterer being late, or last-minute guests canceling. Or how messy you left your room.”
It was ring four. He didn’t say anything else, but he kept looking at me, waiting for me to do what he said. I gave him a dirty look, but then I picked up the phone anyway.
Our mom was midway through a sentence before I even said hello. She was whispering. “ . . . The Moynihan-Richardses are broiling chicken. On the caterer’s grill in the backyard. I’m watching through the kitchen window.”
I tried to picture her huddled into the corner, leaning up against the window frame—incognito in her green sweat suit—the curtain pulled back just enough so she could get a solid peek.
“You’re lying,” I said.
“Would I lie about something like that? And can you tell me, please, where did they even get the chicken? Not from me.”
I didn’t know what to say to her.
“Who eats chicken? For breakfast?”
