The Divorce Party (16 page)

“No.”

“Are you a Jehovah’s Witness asking for money?”

“Not the last time I checked.”

“Do you know my mother? Because she is definitely looking for money.”

“None of the above.”

She hands Maggie one of the glasses.
Why is everyone trying to get me drunk today?

“Then I’m Ryan.”

“I’m Maggie.”

“Maggie, everyone who walks through the front door between lunch and dinner gets a shot of gin to make the rest of the day better. That’s the rule.”

“Really?”

“No, but I’m having a pretty crappy day, and I have this self-imposed rule about not drinking alone. Especially gin, which is my weak spot. So you’re going to have to do.”

“Thanks.”

She tilts her glass in Maggie’s direction and opens her throat, swallows it down, fast.

This is Ryan. Drinking gin. With me. I’m drinking gin with her. Ryan with the lovely arms, the pretty tattoos. Nate has seen all of them. Where are the others? There must be others. Nate would know those too. He would know everything.

“So you’re Ryan?” Maggie says.

Ryan puts her glass back on the counter. “Didn’t we just do this?”

“If we could just do it one more time . . .”

Ryan motions to her to have her drink, which she does, closing her eyes against it. Then Ryan pours herself another. “So why are you here again?”

What on earth was she going to say?
I have some questions about my future husband, whom you happened to be married to? I’d like you to explain what happened between you, since apparentlyhe is unable to tell me anything that resembles the truth.

“Wait, did you say your name was . . . Maggie?” Ryan asks.

Maggie nods. “I did.”

“Oh,
Maggie,
I told you I was having a bad day!” she says, but she smiles, a real smile, when she says it. And Maggie can see it, can feel it: how intoxicating it can be to get this woman’s approval.

“I’m lost,” Maggie says.

“You’re early. I don’t need you for another hour. Did Lev tell you to get here this early?” She looks down at her watch, turns it over. “I thought Lev said that your name was Molly. I’m terrible with names, so it is probably my fault. Man, I appreciate you covering for Lev tonight. I know she feels bad about being sick again. But when you’re pregnant, food is complicated. We all know what that’s like, right?”

Maggie feels her eyes open wide. “Have you been pregnant?”

“Excuse me?”

Ryan shoots her a confused look, and Maggie tries to figure out a way to cover. Before she even has to, Ryan starts walking to the kitchen, assuming that Maggie will follow her, which she does.

"So the rest of the staff will get here at about four-thirty P.M., but as long as you’re around we can get started prepping the first course. We only have the eight o’clock seating tonight, so I’m trying a new fig reduction on the duck. Did Lev forward you tonight’s menu?”

“Probably, but my e-mail is down,” she says. “So maybe you can fill me in as we go.”

It is scaring her. It is scaring her how easy she is finding it to lie.

Ryan swings open the glass door to the kitchen where the food for that night is lined up on the countertop. Fresh parsley leaves and smoked mozzarella, loose peppermint and loaves of grain bread.

She hands Maggie a bowl of fresh tomatoes, all business. “We’re making a spaghetti squash salad, so I’ll need these boiled for about a minute, seeded, and cut up with some olive oil and fresh basil for the dressing.”

She lost her at boiled.

“Easy enough . . .” Maggie says, and goes to the stovetop, takes out a small pot and gets ready to fill it with water.

Meanwhile, Ryan is standing at the countertop pulling on some figs, or doing something to them that Maggie doesn’t understand. “So,” she says, looking up at her. “How long have you been at the Maidstone?”

“The Maidstone?”

And Maggie realizes this must be the restaurant where the other person works. The actual person who is supposed to be helping. Maggie can’t swallow. This isn’t a game. This is a person standing before her. A person who was married to Nate. How incredibly insane that she is here talking to her. And yet she can’t imagine getting herself to leave. At least not yet.

“Six months?” she says, like a question. And she tries to change the subject, move it closer to a subject that will lead them toward it, the reason she is here. “Did I notice on the sign outside that you’ve been in business since the early nineties? That’s quite an accomplishment. It must have been hard to get the money together, especially starting out so young.” She clears her throat. “How did you do it?”

“I had a partner at first. His family had plenty of money. And they helped us out
a lot
.” She looks up at Maggie. “Too much, really. Could you hand me the olive oil?”

Maggie hands the bottle over, trying to busy her hands, trying to at least make them look busy. Her heart is threatening to beat out of her chest.
She had a partner. His family helped a lot
. Helped as in paid for the whole thing?

That would explain why, now, Nate doesn’t want to take a penny from them. For the restaurant. It would explain something about being worried about making the same mistake.

“Who was he?” she asks. “Your partner?”

Ryan looks up at her, meets her eyes with something like a warning. “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?” she says.

“I’m sorry. I’m nosy sometimes. Particularly now. I do that. I didn’t . . .” She looks at Ryan, and almost tells the truth, tells something—at least—a little like it. “I am in the process of deciding whether to open a restaurant with my husband, and it just seems like it could cause so many complications.”

“It definitely can.”

“Did it for you? I mean, was your partner your husband?”

Ryan nods. “Yes.”

Maggie can’t swallow.

“But, you know, this time around, it hasn’t been complicated,” she says. “So I guess it depends on the two people.”

“So you’re remarried?”

“Lev didn’t tell you? She always tells me we have the best relationship she’s seen, but I guess she wouldn’t pass that on to you . . .”

She shakes her head. What would Lev have told her? Apparently that Ryan is very happily married. Is she married to someone who came shortly after Nate? She feels herself about to cry, cry because she is here, and because she has no idea what she is trying to find out from being here.

“Wow. I’m an asshole. You look so upset. God, I’m sorry. Don’t tell Lev. Lev told me not to make you cry.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t even think I did anything yet. I think I’m missing the gentle gene or something.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Maggie says.

“So what’s wrong?”

“I’m not telling the truth,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“You were married to Nate Huntington, right? He was your husband at some point . . .”

She stares at Maggie with a look that could go right through her, but doesn’t answer. And for a blessed second, she can still say no. Until she doesn’t.

“Yes. I was married to Nate.”

Maggie nods. “I know his sister pretty well. Georgia? And I just remembered that I knew already. I remembered something she had said once, offhandedly. Anyway . . . I realized that I knew that. I realized I already had the answer to my own question. You were married to Nate. And now you’re not. And I apparently like the sound of my own voice . . .”

Ryan nods, looking back down at the food in front of her, going back to work. “How is Georgia?”

“Pregnant.”

She smiles. “Good for her. Congratulate her for me. Not that she’ll want to hear it, necessarily. But . . . and how’s Nate doing? Do you know?”

Maybe, maybe not. What is the right answer?

Maggie picks up some more tomatoes. What she is doing with them is unclear to anyone. “He’s doing well. He’s opening a restaurant in Brooklyn, actually. In this area called Red Hook near the pier.”

“I thought I heard something about that. That’s great for him. That’s a great thing . . . I didn’t exactly handle things well with him, but you live and learn I guess, right? That’s the problem. Sometimes you do it at someone’s expense.”

And this is her chance. Ryan will tell her now whatever it is she came here to find out—exactly what happened between them. Only why does she want to find that out? So she can know why Nate’s past fell apart? It feels more merciful than that, this mission, even in its chaos. It feels to Maggie like she wants Ryan to say something—the one thing—that will make Maggie understand not why Nate’s past fell apart, but why Nate has kept it hidden. What she can do so he doesn’t want to hide anything else.

Only looking at Ryan—who in the twenty minutes since Maggie met her has seemed like an array of contradictions: tough and kind, sweet and biting—she wonders if maybe Nate doesn’t understand himself what happened. Maybe he doesn’t understand what happened, and because of that, he couldn’t imagine a way to explain it to someone else.

But then the opportunity to ask Ryan anything, to test out any theory, is gone. The kitchen door swings open. And a woman in overalls walks in. A woman in overalls with brown hair, wide cheeks, and a friendly smile. One of the friendliest smiles Maggie has ever seen. And she is carrying produce. She is carrying a huge basket of fresh corn, needing to be shucked, beautiful broccoli, beets, radishes and cucumbers.

“Hey there, darling,” she says to Ryan. “Sorry it took me so freaking long to get here.”

“You should be,” Ryan says.

Then she leans in, this woman does, and kisses Ryan on the lips, long and full. The basket of produce still in her hands, Ryan’s hand reaching around to hold the back of her head.

Which is when Maggie drops it, the tomato in her hand, and it splatters on the floor. Splatters right in front of her.

“Gosh, I’m sorry,” she says, and leans down to pick it up, sopping up the juice with her apron.

“Who is this?” the woman says, looking down at her.

“This is Maggie. Maggie, this is Alisa Barrett. My partner.”

Here in the restaurant, here in life?
But Maggie knows the answer. This is the person whom Ryan left Nate for. Maggie knows it. Does it make it harder or easier that it is a woman as opposed to a man? Probably both harder and easier. And, in the end, it comes down to the same thing, anyway: this is the person whom Ryan is with now, the person she has chosen. This is the person who, unlike Maggie, knew of the first marriage— knew about Ryan’s past—and therefore got to keep it as the past. Because she was given the chance to understand it. Because it wasn’t kept secret, and given the power that a secret gets when it finally emerges. Stinging us with its history, with its preserved weight.

“Maggie is covering for Lev tonight,” Ryan says.

“Not very well,” Maggie says, holding up the broken tomato as proof.

Alisa Barrett laughs. She has a nice laugh, rich and full and bold, and it makes Maggie like her. It also makes her want to get out of their kitchen immediately.

“You know,” Maggie clears her throat, “I’ll be right back. I’ll be back in, you know, no time at all.”

Ryan looks over at her. “Where are you going?”

Maggie points loosely in the direction of the front room, loosely in the direction of where she imagines is a bathroom, or a car, or somewhere else that she logically needs to be. Then she is walking quickly, so quickly—through the kitchen door, back through the restaurant—that she doesn’t see her until it is too late, that she runs headfirst into a girl with cropped, bleached-blond hair on her way in.

And falls.

“Whoa! Collision time.” The girl pulls Maggie up to standing. “Are you okay?”

Maggie nods. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I shouldn’t have snuck up on you. Are you Ryan?”

“No. I am definitely not Ryan.” She pauses, looks at the girl, who is looking back at her confused, holding an apron in her hands—an apron she brought from somewhere else, the word
Maid
vaguely visible. “You’re the one covering for Lev tonight?”

“I’m Molly Barton.” She smiles, and holds out her hand.

She unties her apron, and hands it to her, starts to walk away. “It’s nice to meet you, Molly,” she says.

“Thanks, wait . . .” Molly calls after her. “Are you coming back?”

“Not if I can help it,” she says.

And she doesn’t turn around. She is going to walk out this door, and say good-bye to Georgia and find a bus stop. She is going to go anywhere but here. Only when she steps back outside, she sees him standing there, his arms crossed, waiting for her, or just waiting. In a wet suit, a UVA sweat shirt thrown over it. That dark hair on top of his head.

“Nate,” she says. She says it out loud, in spite of herself.

“I thought you could use a ride.”

Gwyn

They are setting up.

Trucks and florists and chair-rental people and alcohol suppliers and waitstaff, piling into her driveway, parking diagonally, parking straight, making a mess of everything. Some of them are already in uniform, most in T-shirts and jeans, moving tables and lanterns and vases and linens and cases of alcohol and cases of wooden candlestick holders into the center of the barn, working hard to get everything party ready against the brewing wind.

If Gwyn chose to hire a full-service caterer, one company could have handled all of this business. There would be a supervisor. And it wouldn’t be so scattered, so able to fall short in one arena, so overwhelming in another. And yet that wasn’t an option. Or at least, not the most important one for Gwyn to take.

So here she sits in the nook of the wraparound veranda porch, watching as too many people from Doug’s Alcohol and Spirits, Island Florists, Sanford’s Rentals, and Hamptons Staffing make their way across the door walk—that small space of land between the house and the barn—trying to go over her list for the evening of everything that needs to be handled.

Their guests will start arriving around eight for an elongated cocktail hour, complete with heavy hors d’oeuvres, good vodka, too much talk about too many things that don’t matter. She wishes instantly that Jillian would be among them, wishes she hadn’t asked her not to come.