The Divorce Party (17 page)

But why not? I want to be there,
Jillian said on the phone.

Because if you’re there,
Gwyn said,
it’s real.

And if I’m not?
Jillian asked.

Maybe it’s something else.

It
could
be something else, could just be an anniversary party that Gwyn is watching come together—that Gwyn would assume she is watching come together if she didn’t know the rest of the story. If she didn’t know that, at 9:30, instead of toasting their future, she and Thomas would toast their past, cut their cake, and go their own ways. Marriage over, integrity intact. Like the books suggest. Good for the family unit, good for closure. And simple. Right? If only Gwyn was feeling simple, if only that still seemed possible. A simple ending. A new beginning.

She hears someone coming up behind her, and turns to see Thomas standing above her, wearing khaki shorts and no shirt, just out of the shower. His hair wet. A glass of lemonade in his hand.

“You’re back?” she says.

“I’m back.”

“I didn’t hear you come back.”

She looks up at him, reaching for the lemonade. He hands it to her, and sits down next to her, and they watch together. She isn’t particularly in the mood to talk to him, or be with him, even, but she doesn’t want him to go over toward the Buckleys’ place. Not that he would. Why would he? But still. It would be bad for him to go anywhere near the house and find Eve’s van in the garage, Eve working inside. There is something exhilarating, though, at the possibility he might. There is something exhilarating to Gwyn in that for once she is standing between the two of them, she is the one in control.

She takes a long sip of the lemonade, the cool drink reminding her how thirsty she is, the last of the pot just now leaving her body. “Where’s Nate?” she asks. “Inside somewhere?”

Thomas shakes his head, putting his hands on his knees. “I’m not sure. The phone rang. And he ran to get it. I think it was Georgia. He went out front to talk to her, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying.”

“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.”

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he says.

“No kidding,” she says. She looks out behind him, the wind kicking up, the clouds covering up what was left of the sun. “Where’s the car?”

“Across the street, by the dunes. I worried that you would need to make a quick getaway.”

“And?”

“And I decided not to let you.”

She looks at Nate, meeting his eyes, and has to bite her lip hard, to stay composed. Because now it is real. He is standing before her, and they are standing here in front of the restaurant, and she can’t ever go back to not knowing the things she knows now. She can’t go back to that complacent feeling she had that things were simple between them, or one way. That illusion, in all its glory, ends here.

Staring back in the direction of the restaurant, she realizes there is a more pressing issue. The real kitchen sub has probably introduced herself by now, and Ryan or Alisa, or both, will want some answers.

“You know, in about five more seconds, someone is going to come out here trying to figure out who I really am. So unless you want a less-than-happy reunion, we should probably walk.”

“Okay.” He nods, and points in the direction of the ocean, and they start walking that way. She doesn’t know exactly where they are going, but she keeps up with him—keeps a few feet away, but keeps up with him—until they cross the road and head down the small hill, the small houses dotting it, past the green sign that says PRIVATE BEACH.

And then the Volvo is there—the one that Eve hit this morning—in a small, otherwise empty parking lot. But instead of getting in the wagon, Nate walks past it, over the rocks, toward the beach itself.

Maggie stops on the rocks, holds her ground. “I don’t want to sit down on the beach, Nate. I don’t want to pretend everything’s okay.”

He turns back to look at her, his hands shoved into his sweat-shirt’s pocket. “And if we’re standing here, things are less okay?”

“Yes.”

He nods, but she can see him starting to crack a little, getting defensive. “So we’ll stand here, if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t want
any
of this,” she says. “You were married? How is that possible? How is it possible that you didn’t feel a need to mention that any time over the last eighteen months?”

“It’s not that simple,” Nate says.

“It’s also not that complicated.”

He is silent, looking away from her. This is his worst nightmare, this kind of confrontation, and it almost makes her feel bad for him. If she weren’t feeling so bad for herself, she’d stop this.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Maggie.”

“How about you’re sorry?”

“I am sorry.”

“For not telling me, or that I found out?”

“Both.”

“Not good enough,” she says. And suddenly she realizes nothing is going to make this good enough.

“Okay, let’s start easier,
Champ
. What have you told me that’s right? Because apparently I know nothing about your past. Not the type of high school you went to, or your family’s situation, or your most significant relationship before me. Don’t you think any of that information would have told me something about you?”

“It doesn’t.”

“It doesn’t?”

He shakes his head. “The information that is relevant about me is that I left here, and went to school and moved to California and fell in love with you. All the rest of it is . . . prologue.”

She shakes her head, thinking of the messiness of her parents’ split, of growing up on her own without a mother, of all the things she disclosed to Nate late at night, that were hard for her, hard to acknowledge as having to do with herself—the pieces of herself she’d like to be less true.

“I feel cheated,” she says.

“Why?”

“All this time, and you didn’t even show me yourself. These things . . . they are who you are.”

“No, they are who I was.”

“No, they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn’t give me a chance to understand that even the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something that I could accept.”

“You believe that? Can you try for a second to understand that maybe my decision to leave this all behind has nothing to do with you?” His voice is tightening, as if he is failing to keep a lid on it, his own growing anger, which instead of making Maggie step back fuels hers. “It was a decision I made long before I ever met you, Maggie.”

“What decision is that? To just pretend that everything is okay, even when it’s not? You couldn’t hear your mother tell you what was really going on with the party tonight. You couldn’t hear me ask you to be real with me about your childhood here. You think if you don’t talk about it, you can just pretend everything is all right? Everything is not all right. Not with us, not with your parents, not with anything today. And if you let yourself go anywhere real with it, you have to acknowledge it.”

“Which part?”

“That I had a right to know. I had a right to know that the person I was marrying had been married before. I had a right to know why it didn’t work out between you. For goodness’ sake, doesn’t that make sense? I had a right to know more about you than a stranger might.”

“You do.”

Do I?
She doesn’t know if that’s true. She doesn’t know what she believes. How do you ever know anyone, at the end of the day? Does it matter if they leave out who they used to be? Does it matter if they are never going to become who you thought they were?

She starts to walk away, back toward the car. She can’t think about it now, she can’t think until she has some distance. Until she has some time when she isn’t looking at him, and letting what she feels for him obscure what she needs to be remembering right now.

“I don’t think she ever loved me.”

She turns back around, because she hears the anger drop out of him, hears something much worse beneath it. “Excuse me?”

“We met and it all happened so fast. We met two months before I graduated from high school, and were married six weeks after. I had never known anyone like her. That sure of herself, that fearless about everything. She always knew exactly what she wanted. She knew exactly how she felt about everything that came her way.” He paused. “It is a dangerous reason to love someone.”