The Husband Hour

by Jamie Brenner

  “My father mentioned that you’re selling,” Neil said.

  Beth looked at him, surprised. Well, she supposed people did talk.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you waiting until after the summer?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. It’s a fairly recent decision.”

  “Well, I’d be interested.”

  “You want to buy this house? You’re able to buy this house? How old are you, Neil? Thirty?”

  He laughed. “Sad to say, I’m turning thirty-one in the fall. But I’m about to sell a big script, and aside from that, my father would always float me.”

  “Well, let’s put this conversation on hold for the moment. I’m not in a rush, though my husband feels differently on the matter. He’s in Florida right now.”

  “My parents love it there. They haven’t seen an East Coast winter in ten years.”

  Neil walked to the mantel and looked at photos of Lauren and Stephanie.

  “These are great,” he said, turning to her. “Is Lauren around?”

  Beth smiled. “She’s at work. But why don’t you come by later? Have dinner with us. I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

  “I feel ambushed,” Lauren whispered to her mother, though Neil Hanes couldn’t possibly overhear their conversation. They were in the kitchen and he sat outside at the table set for the dinner.

  “That’s a bit dramatic,” Beth said, opening the bottle of wine. “And there’s plenty of time before the food is ready. Maybe go change out of your shorts and sneakers?”

  Lauren glanced uneasily at the deck. What could she do? Flee and hide from visitors in her own home? She was exhausted after a nonstop day at the restaurant.

  The front door opened and closed.

  “Who else did you invite?” Lauren said. “Is this dinner going to be like an episode of The Bachelorette?”

  Beth looked in the direction of the hallway. “I didn’t invite anyone else.”

  Stephanie, with Ethan in tow, walked into the kitchen dragging a large suitcase.

  “What are you doing back?” Beth said. “I thought you were in Philly until the middle of next week.”

  “Yeah, well, plans changed,” Stephanie said. Ethan ran over to Beth and hugged her, then made his way to Lauren.

  “Hey, cutie,” she said.

  “E., run upstairs and put your stuff in your room. I need to talk to Gran for a sec.” Ethan dutifully scooted off. Stephanie pulled a bottle of wine from the refrigerator.

  “Doesn’t he still have school?” Beth said.

  “So he’ll miss the last few days. He’s six. I think Harvard will overlook it.”

  “I don’t appreciate the sarcasm,” Beth said.

  “Brett reneged on letting me stay at the house for the rest of the month, okay? I just had to get out of there.”

  “Nice guy,” Lauren muttered.

  “This is just so unfair to Ethan,” said Beth.

  “He’ll be fine. Kids are resilient,” Stephanie said. She peeked into the pot on the stove. “Smells good, Mom.”

  Beth glanced nervously outside. Stephanie, following her gaze, realized they had company.

  “Who’s here?”

  “No one,” said Beth.

  “Neil Hanes,” said Lauren.

  “Oh, shit. Did I just walk in on a date?” Stephanie laughed.

  “Don’t be an ass,” Lauren said. “In fact, I’m leaving.”

  She brushed past Stephanie, ignoring her mother’s protests.

  Outside, the sun was not close to setting. Lauren wished for a blanket of darkness for her run to the boardwalk. She didn’t know what was worse: her mother’s not-so-subtle attempt to fix her up or the fact that it was understandable. She was twenty-nine years old, a widow for four years. She was the one who was abnormal, not the people who expected her to someday have a life again.

  The problem was, from the time she was fifteen, she’d known she was meant to be with Rory, and only Rory. Even while they were broken up, she knew it. During their first split, when he was a freshman at Harvard and she still had a year left in high school, everyone told her to hook up with other guys, that it was the only way to get over him. But Lauren knew better; she knew that to spend time with any other boy would make the loss of Rory Kincaid only that much more unbearable. No one could compare.

  The boardwalk was too crowded for a good run. She stopped and rested on the rail facing the beach. She leaned over, and the heart pendant of her necklace clanged against the metal. Lauren wrapped it in her hand, closing her eyes.

  She could see the Kincaid family living room, the house on Conway crowded with guests, a towering Christmas tree in the center of it all.

  “Come with me for a sec,” Rory said, taking her by the hand.

  “Where are we going?” she asked after he pulled their coats from the closet.

  “I want to give you your gift in private,” he said.

  “Oh. Well, should I get yours? It’s under the tree.” She tried not to think about the card. She’d agonized about how to sign it. Love, Lauren seemed to say too much. But she felt that and more and so she wrote it.

  “You can give it to me after,” he said, leading her to the garage.

  “Did you get me a car?” she joked.

  “This is the only place without a million people. I didn’t want my family to see us going upstairs. They’d get the wrong idea.”

  The cold garage smelled of rubber and gasoline. She stumbled over a rake, and he caught her. “Careful,” he said. “Here—sit on this.” He opened two lawn chairs and brushed off the dried leaves. They sat hidden behind his mother’s Buick, the single lightbulb in the ceiling bathing everything in yellow.

  Rory pulled a small box out of his coat pocket. It was robin’s-egg blue and tied with a white ribbon.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “What did you do?” He handed it to her with the shyest smile she’d ever seen on his face. Hands shaking, she untied the ribbon and lifted the lid to find the iconic silver Tiffany Open Heart necklace.

  She’d signed her card exactly right after all.

  Now, as much as Lauren longed for the pure happiness she’d had as a teenager, she also felt sorry for that clueless fifteen-year-old self. It was human nature to open yourself up to love, to seek it and give it. But losing it was so painful. She’d read once that the opposite of love wasn’t hate, it was indifference. She’d told that to Rory, and he’d said that love, like energy, “can neither be created nor destroyed.” It was a conversation under the stars, sitting on a metal bench in Narberth Park.

  Another lesson about love happened in that park, a lesson about its flip side.

  It was August, the summer before her senior year. He would be leaving soon for Boston. Every minute felt delicate and precious. They planned to drive to the shore for a night at the Green Gable. She picked him up that morning, car windows down, sunroof open, “Hollaback Girl” playing on the radio.

  It was only after she parked the car that she noticed his text. Today’s not going to work.

  She hurried up the sidewalk to his house. Rory was standing out front watering the lawn with Emerson, who was visiting for two weeks.

  “Oh—hey,” he said when he spotted her. “Didn’t you get my text?”

  She looked at her phone. “Yeah. Like, two seconds ago. Hi, Emerson.” Emerson gave her a distracted wave.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  Rory seemed stressed. She touched his arm. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes,” he said, annoyed.

  “What is it, then?”

  He glanced back at the house. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Her stomach knotted, but she followed him to the park. They found a shady spot on the bleachers near the basketball court. Even under the trees, the metal was hot, and she slid forward so her bare legs weren’t touching it. Rory stared into the distance, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.

  “Rory, you’re scaring me,” she said.

>   He looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Sorry. I don’t mean to upset you. But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’m leaving in a week, and you know I won’t be back until Thanksgiving.”

  Lauren clutched the edge of the bench. “I know. But I’ll come see you. We’ve talked through all of this.”

  Rory shook his head. “I feel like we’re not being realistic about this whole thing.”

  What? “Is this coming from you? Or from Emerson?”

  He finally turned to her. “Come on, Lauren. I mean, yes, Emerson went to West Point. He knows what it’s like to be in an environment where you’re challenged every day, where you have to keep your self-motivation sharp. I can’t have distractions right now. Between hockey and academics, I won’t have time for a long-distance relationship.”

  She felt like she’d been slapped. “Wow. How convenient. I bet you’ll find time for a short-distance relationship, though, won’t you.”

  “That’s not what this is about.”

  He reached for her hand, but she snatched it away. “Don’t touch me.” She stood up, the sunlight blindingly bright against the metal as she climbed down the bleachers. She broke into a run as she headed back to her car, and it wasn’t lost on her that their relationship had begun with her running through that very park.

  At the time, Lauren had thought that it was the worst pain she would ever feel. Her young self could never have imagined that one day she would be standing alone at the beach, alone in the world, looking back on that argument with nostalgia.

  Her mother assumed that the key to her happiness would be finding love again.

  Lauren never wanted to feel that way again. Alone, she was safe. Alone, she was in control.

  She wouldn’t let anything get in the way of that.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Matt plugged in his headphones. Outside, the sun began to set on another perfect June beach day. For all Matt cared, it might as well have been snowing.

  Downstairs, Henny hosted her friends for dinner and a book club. She’d warned him earlier in the day. “Hope we don’t disturb you! Come down and say hi. I’m sure the ladies would love to meet you.”

  He unpaused the section of the video he’d been watching.

  “We really started talking about CTE vis-à-vis sports in 2002,” said Dr. William Massey. He’d let Matt film him in his office at Mount Sinai Hospital.

  “And can you tell me again what exactly CTE is?”

  “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. In 2002, we saw it in the brain of football player Mike Webster. Since then, dozens and dozens of cases have been identified.”

  “All in older players?”

  “Not at all. Some of the guys are as young as seventeen.”

  “And can you explain exactly what CTE does to the brain?”

  “In CTE, a protein called tau builds up around the blood vessels of the brain, interrupting normal function and eventually killing nerve cells. The disease evolves in stages. In stage one, tau is present near the frontal lobe but there are no symptoms. In stage two, as the protein becomes more widespread, you start to see the patient exhibit rage, impulsivity. He most likely will suffer depression.”

  The doctor pulled up a slide showing a normal brain next to a brain afflicted with stage 2 CTE, images from an autopsy. “See those darkened spots? Okay, then here in stage three—” He pulled up new slides. “We see progression to the temporal section of the brain. By now, the patient suffers confusion and memory loss. Then we get to stage four.”

  Matt’s camera guy zoomed in on the slide of a healthy brain next to one with stage 4 CTE.

  “That’s significantly smaller than the healthy brain,” Matt said.

  “Half the size,” said Dr. Massey. “The brain is now deformed, brittle. The cognitive function of the patient is severely limited.”

  Matt’s phone rang. Craig.

  “Hey, man,” he said, pausing the video. Painfully aware of the footage he did not have a week after telling Craig that Lauren had agreed to an interview.

  “Just checking in,” said Craig. “How’s it going?”

  “Good, good. Making progress.”

  “When you have a minute, send me your interviews with Lauren Kincaid. I know you haven’t had time to edit. I just want to get a sense of where we’re at.”

  Matt closed his eyes. “Craig, I’m really close.”

  “Close to what?”

  “To interviewing her.”

  “Last week you said she agreed to talk to you. Did she change her mind?”

  “No. It’s just…a process.”

  “So you lied to me.”

  “It’s a process,” Matt repeated. “I really am making progress. This is delicate work, Craig. You gotta trust me. I just need a little more time.”

  In the silence that followed, Matt wanted to say something but kept quiet. The project spoke for itself. It was important. Craig knew it—Matt was certain of that.

  “It’s not the fact that you don’t have the interview yet,” Craig said. “It’s that you lied to me. Andrew Dobson warned me that you were unreliable, and now I have to believe him. I’m sorry, Matt. I’m out.”

  Lauren couldn’t tell if her mother and sister were still entertaining Neil Hanes on the back deck, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She slipped in quietly through the front door and carried her takeout from Sack O’ Subs upstairs.

  The upstairs hallway was dark, but behind the door of the guest room, Ethan’s light was on. All she wanted to do was close herself in the privacy of her room, but she felt bad for the kid.

  She knocked once lightly on the door and opened it. Ethan, wearing short-sleeved Spider-Man pajamas, sat on his bed playing with some sort of robot action figure.

  “Hey there,” she said from the doorway. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay,” he said, looking up. “Aunt Lauren, did you read the Harry Potter books?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “When you were my age?”

  She shook her head, moving into the room. “I was a little older than you. The first book didn’t come out until I was in fifth grade.”

  He looked at her in amazement. She was older than the Harry Potter books. Great. Because I don’t feel ancient enough already.

  “I got a copy for my birthday and my mom said she’d read it to me but she hasn’t yet.”

  “Oh,” Lauren said. How ironic that Stephanie had a kid who loved books. Stephanie once told Lauren that the act of reading was like trying to eat through a straw shoved up her nose “except more painful.”

  “Do you want to see it?” he asked, already scrambling off the bed. Before she could answer, he’d unearthed the thick paperback from a pile of books next to his unpacked suitcase.

  “Very cool,” she said when he handed it to her. And then, ignoring the call of her cheesesteak growing cold in the plastic bag, she said, “I could start reading it to you. If you’re not too tired.”

  “I’m not tired,” he said, stifling a yawn.

  “Okay.” She laughed. “So…I’m ready when you are.”

  She sat on the edge of his bed, feeling awkward. She wasn’t used to being around children. Clearly, they had a very different sense of personal space than adults, because he wriggled right up next to her.

  “Is the author a boy or girl?” he asked.

  “She’s a girl. A woman.”

  Ethan looked disappointed.

  “But there are lots of great men writers,” she added.

  “Like the man who wrote Star Wars?”

  “Yeah, well, Star Wars is a movie, not a book.”

  “Harry Potter is a movie.”

  “True. But it was a book first.”

  “What’s harder, writing a book or writing a movie?”

  “Um, I don’t know. Probably writing a book. Why?”

  He shrugged. “My mom said you were a writer.”

  “She did?” It was strange to imagine Stephanie talking about her or
even thinking about her at all. “Well, I wanted to be a writer. But articles in the newspaper, not books.”

  “And you don’t want to be one anymore?”

  Oh God. “Well, I got really sad for a while and it’s been hard to think about writing or a lot of the things I used to do.”

  “Why were you sad?”

  She hesitated, but then, why not? It was the truth.

  “My husband died. You don’t remember him but, well, that’s why I’ve been sad.”

  “My mom says when I’m sad I need to think about things that make me happy and then I won’t be sad anymore.”

  Lauren nodded. “That’s good advice. I guess I should try that sometime.”

  “I’m ready,” he said, touching the book with reverence.

  She opened to the first page. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much’…”

  Ethan’s eyes locked on the page, and he read along as best he could. She put her arm around him, falling into the rhythm of the words, feeling a strange sensation. If she had to pinpoint what it was, she would have to say she was almost…content.

  Matt elbowed his way to the bar and flagged Desiree for a beer and a shot of Tito’s. The guy next to him nodded at Matt in recognition. Matt wondered how many more nights of complete obliteration would be necessary before he counted as a regular.

  Game six of the Stanley Cup finals played out on the two screens on opposite ends of the bar. He watched one of the centers fly down the ice and imagined how it would feel to be knocked into the boards at that speed.

  “Hey,” someone said, tugging on his T-shirt, barely audible over the music and the crowd. He turned around. Stephanie, holding a beer, smiling drunkenly.

  “It’s your unlucky night,” she said.

  “I don’t need you to tell me that.”

  “I’m here with someone,” she said conspiratorially.

  He looked around. “Well, good for you.”

  “He’s in the bathroom.”

  “More information than I need, but okay.” He turned back to the game.