The Divorce Party (12 page)

“So,” she says, turning back to Nate. “Do you hate me too?”

Nate looks at her. “No.”

She puts on her apron, reaches under the kitchen sink for her biggest mixing bowl, its matching oversize spoon. “Well, that’s something,” she says.

“Though I just can’t help but think you shouldn’t have let me bring Maggie here for the first time during all of this, Mom. This is a lot for someone to walk into.”

She puts the spoon down. “You knew we were having this party. You even knew how big it was going to be.”

“I wasn’t thinking what that meant.”

“And whose fault is that?”

Nate is quiet. “Maybe mine.”

Gwyn moves the ingredients around the bowl, takes out the ripped, yellowed recipe—marked RED VELV on top in marker— as if she needs the recipe, as if she doesn’t know it by heart. She looks up at her son. “I didn’t want that,” she says.

“Which part?”

“The part that makes you uncomfortable. I don’t want that. You know I don’t.”

He runs his hand through his hair, the way he does when he is trying to make sense of things—seven-year-old Nate, thirty-three-year-old Nate—and then, with a small smile, he gets off the stool and goes to the sink and starts washing his hands. He dries them on his own jeans, turning back toward the countertop, untying the shortening bag. He dumps three cups into the bowl, chef eyes it as close enough, and starts looking for the coconut extract to create the puddle in the middle of it.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“What do you think?”

He is helping her. That’s what she thinks. He is helping her now, and he is always going to help her—seven-year-old Nate, thirty-three-year-old Nate—if she gives him the choice. It warms her, and makes her feel something else too. Something like pride. Who wants to hear about that, though? He doesn’t. He doesn’t want to hear her say any of that right now.

So, instead, she rubs his back, and hands over the black bottle of extract from the spice rack. Its small cap, loose.

“Thank you, baby,” she says, as he takes it.

“Don’t mention it.”

She leans toward him, as he adds the lemon zest, her secret ingredient, the way she showed him a long time ago, the way he has remembered to do.

“And you guys are going to be fine,” she says.

“Me and Georgia?”

“You and Maggie. People don’t break up because someone’s family is a little . . .
messy
. If that were the case, no one would ever get married.” She touches his jaw. “But I am sorry. Have I said that yet? I’m sorry if I caught her off-guard. I’m sorry if I caused any strife.”

He shakes his head, cracks open an egg. “The truth is that I managed to freak her out all by myself about sixty minutes before we came here. I waited until this morning to tell her some things that I should have told her about before now.”

“Like what?”

Nate doesn’t answer at first, reaching forward and plugging in the mixer, holding it over the bowl, slowly running it through the mixture.

“I didn’t tell her much about how I grew up,” he says. “Or, I should say, I didn’t tell her everything. I didn’t really tell her about the finances, for starters.”

Gwyn unplugs it. “One more time?”

“It never seemed like the right time to tell her.” He looks at Gwyn, meets her eyes. “It feels so separate from my life. From
our
life.”

“Nate,
your life
is that you are opening a restaurant together.

And she had a right to know. . . . Not that you were going to take any money for it from us, after last time. You made that much clear. But you should have explained that part to her. My God, she must feel so confused.”

“I can see that now.”

He starts to mix again, but she puts her hands over his, tries to make him listen to her. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t think you do.”

He looks at her. He is silent, as if considering it for a minute, whether to say what she can already see on his face. The worst part.

“The thing is that she doesn’t know about the last time.” Gwyn can feel her jaw drop in disbelief, can feel her disbelief running through her—and something like anger. Because he looks in this moment—she sees it in him—like his father. She usually sees pieces of his grandfather, Champ, in him. But now, it is Thomas she sees. Those sweet but put-upon eyes, that reluctant frown. And now it scares her.

“You haven’t told her, Nate?”

“I wanted to.” He clears his throat. “But she was already so freaked out that I didn’t tell her about the money situation, and then we saw Murph on the bus. I think learning another secret of this magnitude now would be a lot for anyone to take.”

“And what? This morning is the first time the two of you have ever had a conversation?”

“Apparently.”

He pulls the food coloring out of its box, puts several drops into the bowl, stirring it into the mixture. And refusing to do it, refusing to look at her, which tells her more than she wants to know.

She shakes her head. How can she explain it so he will hear her? He needs to tell Maggie
now
. Because if she finds out about Ryan another way, it will make the rest of it, anything else he hasn’t told her, seem bigger, and also pale in comparison.

“I’m going to tell her, Mom. I will. I’ll tell her as soon as we get back to Brooklyn, as soon as this weekend is behind us . . . I’ll tell her the rest of the story.”

It’s not a story,
she wants to tell her son.
It’s your life.

“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 photograph 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.”

Maggie pours some of the thick drink into a shot glass, downs it, pours herself a little more, downs it again.

“There we go!” Georgia says, and starts to applaud.

Maggie’s throat starts burning, her eyes tearing up. “That is strong.”

“Stop trying to make me jealous.”

Maggie looks down at her empty shot glass. When she was searching for this for Nate, a store clerk told her it was banned because it could make you crazy. How long does that take? It is starting to feel like she is going quietly crazy anyway, but it would be nice to have the alcohol to blame it on. She hasn’t eaten yet today, nothing except the popcorn. She is hungry, specifically hungry, wants ginger pancakes. She tries hard to crave something else, knowing that it means she is in trouble. As a little girl, whenever she was about to get sick, or she would sense disaster striking, her craving for them would rise up, like a bright red hazard sign. She thinks it has something to do with one of her clearest memories of her mother—the two of them sitting on Maggie’s bed, early one Saturday morning, eating ginger pancakes and drinking unsweetened iced tea. Listening to the radio. She can still call it up whenever she eats the pancakes. Not just the memory. But the feeling, as if it is happening right now.

“Can I ask you something personal?” Georgia says.

Maggie turns her body so she is completely facing Georgia. “Of course.”

Georgia looks at Maggie, then back up at the ceiling. “I’m having a little girl,” she says. “I found out yesterday.”

“Oh my God, Georgia!” Maggie touches her arm. “That’s amazing.”

Georgia nods. “You’re the only one who knows.” She pauses, rubbing her belly. “You’re the only one that knows, including Denis.”

Which is when Maggie remembers how this started. “And what’s the question?”

“Do I have to tell him?”

“Why wouldn’t you tell him?”

“Denis really wanted a boy. I didn’t care, as long as the baby is healthy, but Denis did, and I found out because I wanted to surprise him, if it were a boy. Now that it’s not, I am worried.”

“Worried about what?”

“That he won’t be happy. That he’ll be disappointed and unable to hide it.”

Maggie looks over at Georgia, trying to think of how to calm her nerves, trying to calm her. “I’m sure he is going to be thrilled. When that baby comes into the world, it will be the only baby he wants.”

“How do you know?”

“I think that’s just the way it works.”

She smiles, uncertain. “In the movies?” she says.

“And television,” Maggie says.

Georgia’s smile gets bigger, starts to light up her face, just as Maggie hears a loud vibrating noise, and Georgia pulls her cell phone out of her jeans pocket. She holds out the phone so Maggie can see DENIS on the caller ID. Then she flips her feet over the side of the bed and sits up, so she can answer.

“Hey, baby,” she says. “Where are you? Please tell me that you are at the airport, getting on the plane.”

From the expression on Georgia’s face, which goes immediately back from happy to far less so, it is clear that, wherever Denis is, it is not at the airport getting on the plane.

Georgia gets up and Maggie thinks she is going to leave the room, but she goes into the closet, closing the door behind her. Maggie looks down at the shot glass in her hand, trying not to listen to Georgia’s voice, which is getting increasingly loud.

And suddenly, the closet door is open and Georgia is standing there, no cell phone in her hand.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

Maggie nods. “Okay.”

She looks pissed and for a second she thinks Georgia is going to take the absinthe bottle and down the whole thing. But she doesn’t. She just gets real close to Maggie.

“Let’s get out of here,” she says.

“Where to?”

“You’ll love it.”

The last thing Maggie wants to do is go anywhere, even somewhere she’ll love. She wants to let the alcohol work its magic. She wants it to make her tired. She wants to sleep. But it makes Georgia look alive, the thought of getting out of here, and Maggie can’t handle stopping that. So she takes a deep breath. “Can I bring the absinthe?”

“I think we can make room.”

She ignores the spinning in her head as she starts to stand. “Then let’s go,” she says.

Gwyn

She is washing the dishes when Thomas comes into the kitchen in his wet suit, his surfboard in his hand. This isn’t an anomaly. It is his pattern: most afternoons, when he gets home from work, he goes for a run along the ocean’s edge, and, depending on the tide, he goes surfing. Sometimes, after, he also goes for a bike ride, even in the rain, even in the snow: anything to get outside for a while, get active. It was years into their marriage before Gwyn accepted that it was impossible to talk with him about important things—about anything, really—before he had that time alone, outside, to decompress. He was in a much better mood afterward, his face more open, accepting. In the space between work and the time he spent outside, she could have the best news in the world for him, and he wasn’t able to engage her, or hear it.