The Husband Hour

by Jamie Brenner

  “Baldwin Academy is so much calmer. More intimate. It’s a better fit for you,” her mother had argued. This was a time when Lauren was struggling a bit with her weight. The public-school kids could be cruel. Of course, private-school girls were no better. But when parents pay twenty grand a year, the administration has an incentive to enforce some semblance of decorum. Lauren didn’t care; she was going to school with her big sister.

  She was less confident that she’d made the right decision when high school loomed. By that time, Lauren had grown to her full height, five foot six. Her high cheekbones and brown eyes had won her comparisons to the lead actress on her favorite show, Alias. She was finally pretty. Nowhere near Stephanie’s loud, flagrant beauty, but pretty enough. Still, starting high school was scary, and starting high school at a big place like Lower Merion was terrifying. So many things could go wrong. You could end up anonymous—a loser. You could end up harassed—tormented on the notorious Freshman Day, the first Friday the thirteenth of the school year. Rumor had it that some girls got their entire ponytails cut off, and some boys were stuffed into lockers.

  On the first day, some of Lauren’s friends’ older siblings pretended they didn’t know the younger ones, warned them not to even acknowledge them in the halls. But the scheduling gods had smiled on Lauren and given her the same lunch period as Stephanie. Stephanie, her long blond hair loose and lustrous, her perfect body poured into jeans and a ribbed tank top from a recent shopping spree at Urban Outfitters, had put her arm around Lauren and taken her from table to table.

  “This is my baby sister,” Steph had said, first to the sophomores, then to a few tables of juniors. “Don’t fuck with her.”

  “Hey, baby sister,” a few boys had said mockingly.

  But no one fucked with her. Not once; not ever.

  As teenagers, the sisters never had a reason to be competitive. They didn’t want the same things.

  At least, not until Rory.

  Now, Stephanie pushed her chair away from the table.

  “Where are you going?” her mother said.

  “Out.”

  Stephanie stormed off. Lauren sighed. Drama queen.

  “Aunt Lauren?” Ethan said, appearing in the doorway of the dining room. He had a bottle of water in one hand and the package of cinnamon buns from Casel’s in the other. “Can we open these now?”

  “We’re still eating dinner, hon,” Beth said.

  Ethan looked around the table. “Where’s Mom?”

  Lauren and her mother exchanged a look.

  “Sure,” Lauren said. “We can open that now.”

  Matt slipped into a seat near the back of the NYU auditorium. There were a few open spots closer to the front of the room, but Matt always felt more comfortable near an exit route. Maybe this was a result of his early years working in undesirable locations, or maybe it was just a by-product of his natural impatience.

  “Our thinking on head injury is evolving, and the way we research these injuries is changing.”

  The irony was not lost on Matt that after avoiding science as much as possible for his entire academic life (there had been one particularly miserable eight weeks of summer-school chemistry), he now spent his free time sitting in dark lecture halls learning about it. His e-mail in-box was filled with event alerts for brain-injury panels the way it had once been stuffed with announcements of Red Hot Chili Peppers tour dates.

  “Today, we’re challenging two core beliefs: First, that brain disease is caused by only those severe hits that result in concussions and, second, that brain injury is due to blows that cause the brain to bounce around inside the skull. That theory is incomplete.”

  He’d been looking forward to this talk, a public lecture given by a visiting professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, for weeks. He’d requested an interview, but no luck. And considering the way things had gone with Craig Mason last week, it was just as well. American Hero was on pause. Maybe permanently this time.

  “We believe long-term brain damage can result from the accumulation of minor blows. And we believe the real damage happens deeper inside the brain than previously thought and that this is a result of fibers within the white matter twisting after impact. Given these two things, sports helmets as they are currently designed do not protect players from concussions and the resulting long-term brain disease.”

  The doctor introduced a bioengineer from the Camarillo Lab at Stanford. He’d developed a mouth guard that helped track the force of injury in football players.

  “If you look at this screen, you’ll see the g-forces of ten hits,” the bioengineer said. Matt hated charts. He glanced down at the program he’d been handed at the entrance and flipped to the back. The Stanford study thanked a list of donors. Matt recognized many of the names, all the usual suspects in the arena of traumatic brain injury. The few he didn’t recognize, he circled now with a Sharpie. He never knew where he’d find an important lead. At one name toward the bottom, his hand froze. The Polaris Foundation.

  He named him Polaris. What kind of name is that for a dog from a six-year-old boy? But he loved the stars.

  Could it be a coincidence?

  Matt slipped from the auditorium. The sunlight outside was blinding after the half hour he’d spent in darkness. Matt rushed into a coffee shop and pulled his laptop from his messenger bag while standing in line to buy the coffee that would rent him table space.

  Squeezing into the corner of a long wooden communal table, Matt gave a cursory nod to the pretty blonde who smiled at him. Then he put on his headphones to discourage conversation and did a quick search for the Polaris Foundation. He wasn’t surprised to come up empty. A lot of public foundations didn’t have websites. Next, he tried the foundation-center database. He hadn’t used the site in a long time, not since the early days when he’d searched for any type of Rory Kincaid foundation. At the time, he’d had no doubt someone in Rory’s family would start a foundation in his name, and he’d been right: his brother Emerson had started the Rory Kincaid Scholarship Foundation for student athletes. But that had proved a dead end because Emerson wouldn’t speak to him and Lauren Kincaid wasn’t involved.

  Matt’s login failed. His subscription had run out, and the credit card he originally used had been maxed out long ago. Without hesitating, he pulled out his debit card and used it for the subscription. This is how one slides into bankruptcy, he thought. But it was a fleeting concern, because within thirty seconds he had a name attached to the Polaris Foundation: Lauren Adelman.

  Heart pounding, he dug deeper, searching for the Polaris Foundation’s IRS form 990-PF.

  The address was in Longport, New Jersey.

  Chapter Seven

  The boardwalk had seemed to stretch to infinity when Lauren was a kid. It was her very own yellow brick road, with the ocean on one side and beachfront homes on the other. Her grandmother, dressed in a velour sweat suit with her hair and makeup perfectly done, took her for a walk every morning. She had seemed so old to Lauren, even though now, doing the math, Lauren realized she had probably been only in her early sixties.

  Lauren looked down at Ethan and wondered if she seemed very old to him. She wondered, too, if he shared her joy at the boardwalk or if he was just going along because she’d invited him and he was a polite kid.

  “Your mom and I came here every weekend in the summer when we were your age. And in August we’d stay for two weeks and my dad—your grandpa—would come on the weekends when he wasn’t working.”

  “I don’t have a dad,” Ethan said.

  Oh, good Lord. Quick—subject change!

  “Um, your mom said you’re going to play soccer in the fall?”

  “Yeah. I did it last fall too.”

  “Is this with school?”

  He shook his head. “Lower Merion Soccer Club.”

  “What position do you play?”

  He squinted up at her. “I don’t know. We change around a lot.”

  “Okay, well
, that makes sense. I guess it’s a little early to lock in on something. Do you watch sports on TV? Football? Hockey?”

  “Sometimes. Brett watches a lot of hockey.” Oh, yes. Stepdad Brett.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry Brett isn’t around this summer. Are you upset about that?”

  Ethan shrugged. “Not really. He wasn’t around that much anyway.”

  Lauren, at a loss for what else to say on the matter, suggested they turn around and head back.

  “Aunt Lauren?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you mad at my mom?”

  “What? Oh, no. Why do you ask?”

  “You yelled at her at dinner.”

  True. She did.

  “Well, sisters argue sometimes. It doesn’t mean anything, really.”

  “Do you like my mom?” he asked. Lauren started to respond and found herself feeling choked up.

  “Of course,” she said. “She’s my sister.”

  Maybe it was time they both started acting like it.

  There was a bar like Robert’s Place in every town. At least, in every town Matt could spend any amount of time in. In Longport, New Jersey, it took him about thirty seconds of asking passersby on the street for a “good place to drink” before he was steered to Atlantic Avenue and North Essex Street. He needed to be good and loaded to fall asleep in his car now, unlike the old days, when he could crash anywhere. That was the difference between a twenty-four-year-old news correspondent and a thirty-four-year-old filmmaker.

  Inside, he was greeted by a Bruce Springsteen song playing on the jukebox, the smell of old beer, and a framed poster of the 1974 Flyers Stanley Cup championship team.

  It was early enough to get a seat at the scarred wooden bar under a ceiling covered with Phillies 2008 World Series championship pennants and Budweiser posters. The walls were lined with awards and commemorative plaques. And there, propped against the back of the bar, next to a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, was a framed photo of Rory Kincaid in his U.S. Rangers uniform.

  It was a good omen. He was in the right place, the right town. He was going to get this film finished.

  “What are you having, doll?” The bartender had heavily bleached blond hair and a raspy voice. She might have been thirty or sixty. It was tough to tell.

  “A shot of Tito’s, thanks.”

  He glanced around the room, the filmmaker in him taking in the scene. He made a mental note to come back with a camera and get a picture of the bar with Rory’s photo.

  The bartender slid his shot over to him. Matt asked her name.

  “Desiree,” she said with a smile. Definitely closer to sixty.

  “I’m Matt,” he said, raising his glass.

  “Nice meeting you, Matt,” she said. “You here for the summer?”

  “Just a week or so. Visiting.”

  A bearded man two seats away in a trucker hat glanced at Matt contemptuously and raised his empty beer bottle at Desiree. She left Matt with his vodka, and by the time she drifted back, he had summoned the nerve to ask:

  “Desiree, do you know a woman named Lauren Kincaid?”

  “No,” she said quickly. Too quickly.

  Damn, he’d blown it. He’d rushed into it. Pace yourself.

  Worst-case scenario, he could simply go to Lauren’s house and knock on the door. But it would seem predatory—which was not the way he wanted to meet her. The optimal thing would be to know where she shopped, where she worked, where she drank, so he could approach her in a casual environment.

  He did another shot. Pink Floyd filled the room. God, he hated Pink Floyd.

  “Pink Floyd shouldn’t be allowed in a bar,” he muttered.

  There’d been a place like this in Queens when he was growing up—many places like this. But one of them had hired a friend’s older brother to bounce, and the lax door policy was his gateway to long nights of drinking against the background sound of the Steve Miller Band.

  Matt pulled a few singles from his wallet, ordered a beer, then made his way to the back of the bar to the source of the offending music. He loaded two dollars into the machine and flipped through the song library.

  “Don’t bother,” said a blonde at the end of the bar. “Everything on that thing is from, like, the Stone Age.”

  He barely glanced at her. The last thing he needed was a hookup.

  “I guess I’m from the Stone Age,” he said, programming in “Fly Like an Eagle” and “Take the Money and Run.”

  “Then you look pretty good for your age,” she said, a comment that got him to give her a quick glance, if just for her cheekiness. He guessed she was in her late twenties. Maybe thirty. She was…

  She was Stephanie Adelman.

  He could barely believe it. If he’d had a few more shots, he’d think he was hallucinating. But no; he recognized her from Facebook.

  The photo of Rory behind the bar was a sign! All he had to do was keep pushing forward. The universe was finally meeting him halfway.

  “I’m Matt,” he said.

  “Stephanie.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Yes, Matt, you can.”

  He slid onto the stool next to her.

  For sisters, Stephanie and Lauren didn’t look very much alike. Then again, he hadn’t seen a recent photo of Lauren. Her social media was frozen in time circa 2012, but back then, when she was the young wife of a former NHL player, she had worn her hair in a simple, shoulder-skimming bob. She had high cheekbones and exuded a gentleness and shyness that was evident even in photos. Rory was a guy who could have been banging any and every hottie in the country, and Matt thought it spoke highly of him that he had committed himself at such a young age to Lauren.

  “What are you having?” he asked.

  “A margarita,” she said. “With salt.”

  He summoned Desiree with a wave. She took the order but not before asking, “You know this guy, Steph?”

  “Oh, yeah. Matt and I are old pals.” She turned to Matt. “Desiree and I are old pals too. She used to bust me when I snuck in here during high school. I was a wild child.”

  Still are, Matt thought. Lucky for me.

  When Desiree was out of earshot, Stephanie leaned closer to him. “You here for the summer?”

  “Just passing through,” he said.

  “How mysterious.”

  “Not really.”

  Desiree slid him his beer and handed Stephanie her cocktail. He waited until she was a safe distance down the bar and said, “What about you? Here for the summer?”

  “Maybe. Things are a little up in the air at the moment. Cheers.”

  “Cheers. You have a house here?”

  “My family does. My sister lives here year-round.”

  Matt’s heart beat just a little faster. “Really? I can’t imagine being here in the winter. What is there to do?”

  Stephanie shrugged. “For normal people? Not much.”

  “Your sister isn’t normal?”

  “Depends on who you ask. My mother thinks she’s perfect.”

  The last few syllables of that sentence were mush. Clearly, Stephanie was a few drinks in.

  “And what does she think of you?”

  “What do you think of me?” she asked, her hand on his thigh. Her eyes were glassy. Okay, he had to work fast. She was going to suggest they get out of there, he would have to say no, and that would be the end of that.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “I think that you’re very beautiful. And I am going to tell your mother, and your sister, that I think so.”

  “You should,” she said, slurring. “You should tell them! I dare you.”

  “Dare accepted. I am going to tell them right now.”

  She laughed. “You can’t tell them right now.”

  “You’re right. Okay, I will tell them tomorrow. Where can I go to tell that sister of yours that you are the one who is perfect?”

  “Well, that depends,” she said. “Are we having breakfast together?”

 
“I don’t eat breakfast,” he said.

  “Too bad. She works at a breakfast place.”

  “Maybe I’ll make an exception. What breakfast place?”

  “Nora’s.” She finished her drink and set it down heavily. “Want to get out of here?”

  “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why can’t you?”

  “I’m working,” he said. And sleeping in my car.

  She stepped shakily off her stool. “Your loss.”

  “Agreed. Do you need a cab?”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  Chapter Eight

  The café expanded by ten tables every summer when Nora opened the outside seating. These were the days when the waitstaff would increase by three or four college kids, and Nora might find things so busy that she herself jumped behind the griddle. Lauren always felt off-kilter during the first “outdoor day,” as they called them.

  She stuck to her usual section, front of the house, near the windows. Nora seated a thirty-something man, tall and good-looking enough to turn a few heads, alone at a two-top.

  Lauren handed him a menu.

  “Need a minute?” she asked, shaking her pen and realizing it was out of ink. She patted down her apron for another. The customer hadn’t answered her question; she glanced up at him. He was looking at her in a way that once would have made her uncomfortable. When she’d first started working at the café, men would sometimes stare at her from across the room or let their gaze linger a little too long when she took their orders. She thought they recognized her from the news but soon realized that, no, that was just how men acted around a twenty-something-year-old woman.

  The man smiled and turned to the menu—but not before noting the wedding band on her left ring finger. She saw him register the ring, and he knew she saw him looking.

  “What would you recommend?” he said.

  “You really can’t go wrong with anything.” She pointed at the specials board.

  “That actually makes the decision harder.” He smiled. Lauren wanted to put a quick end to the exchange. She didn’t do banter.