She nodded slowly. And signed the release.
“I have to mic you up,” Matt said. “Normally I have a sound guy, but you threw me a curveball today.” He knelt in front of her chair, leaning close to feed a wire down the front of her shirt. Her pulse raced from his nearness. “Sorry—almost done,” he said. He reached around her to clip a sound pack to the back of her jeans.
She felt relief when he stepped away and looked at her from behind the camera.
“One more thing. I just need to fix this so it’s not visible.” Matt moved back to her and reached around her waist to adjust the sound pack. Then he checked her mic before returning to the chair opposite her, picking up a laptop, and resting it on his knees.
She exhaled.
“You ready to get started?” Matt said.
“Um, yeah.” She was still unnerved by his nearness, the way it had felt to have him invade her personal space.
“Okay, so just look at me. As if we’re having a conversation. Yeah, like that. I know it’s strange, but try to forget about the cameras.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“When I ask you a question, I need you to respond by repeating part of it. So if I say, ‘What is your name?’ you say, ‘My name is Lauren Kincaid.’ All of my questions will be edited out, so for this to make sense, you need to repeat the question.”
Lauren swallowed hard. Behind the cameras, a tall square light beamed down on her.
“So, just to get the ball rolling: Tell me your name and your relationship to Rory Kincaid.”
“My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid is my husband.”
“Lauren, I’m sorry—can you repeat that but using past tense.”
It took her a few seconds to register what he was saying. When she got it, she took a short breath before saying, “My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid was my husband.”
“How did you two meet?”
“We met in high school. I was writing an article for the school paper about the hockey team, and I interviewed him.”
“What was your first impression of Rory?”
“When I met him, I guess you could say the school had put him a little bit on a pedestal. The hockey team was doing great, he was the captain even though he was only a junior, and he was the lead scorer. He was the lead scorer in the entire division.”
“So he was a big deal.”
She nodded. “I interviewed him for the school paper, but the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about him too.”
“What did the Inquirer article say?”
“It was about Philadelphia-area high-school athletes who had the attention of college scouts all over the country. The only one mentioned from Lower Merion School District was Rory. They even ran a photo of him.”
“Do you have a copy of that?”
“Somewhere. I can look for it.”
“That would be great. Okay, so, when did you first go to one of his hockey games?”
“After I interviewed him for the article, I went to his game that Friday night. They played against Radnor and won in a shutout.”
As much as she’d tried to be a neutral observer of the game, reporter-like in her attitude, she couldn’t take her eyes off Rory during the three twenty-minute periods. Even when he was on the bench, she watched him drink from his Gatorade bottle or wipe his brow with one of the white towels the team assistant handed around. He scored a hat trick. After his third goal, the crowd tossed their LM baseball hats and ski hats onto the ice. The energy in the rink was electrifying, and Lauren was hooked—on hockey, and on Rory. “Rory scored all three goals.”
Matt asked if Rory was thinking at that time about a career in the NHL, and she told him that he liked hockey but he was also interested in astronomy.
“Astronomy,” Matt repeated.
“Yes. In high school, he was always reading astronomy books. And he was really gifted in math, so he knew astronomy was something he could get into someday.”
When she’d met him, he had a Rottweiler named Polaris. The North Star, he’d explained to her. The brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor.
Matt nodded, consulting his laptop. “Were you at the game the night the puck hit him in the jaw?”
“Yes. I didn’t see it happen because I was…talking to someone. But I went to the hospital immediately after.”
“Was there any talk at that time that he might have sustained a concussion in addition to injuring his jaw?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
Matt asked more about how Rory had homed in on a hockey career, and she told him about the agents showing up at Harvard by his junior year.
“They threw around such crazy numbers in terms of money,” she said. “Rory’s mom was a widow, and he worried about taking care of her. Once the money became a reality, there was no question he would go into the NHL.”
“And yet he opted to play for only two seasons,” Matt said.
Lauren swallowed hard. “That’s right.”
Matt asked about Rory’s injury in December of 2009, and she repeated what she’d told him off camera: Dean Wade was wrong. Rory hadn’t gotten a concussion. “He was back on the ice the next game.”
“But a few months later—the fight with the Flyers’ Chris Pronger. That was unquestionably a concussion,” he said.
“Yes,” she conceded. “It was. And a fight with the team we’d grown up watching. Talk about insult to injury.”
Rory would be out of play for a few weeks at least. The timing couldn’t have been worse: Rory had been scheduled to represent the United States in the Winter Olympics alongside an LA Kings teammate, goalie Jonathan Quick.
Lauren didn’t rush to buy a plane ticket after that injury, but then his mother called to say she was spending a week with Rory and maybe Lauren could find time to come the following week. With a lump of alarm in her throat, she’d said of course.
She had one day of overlap with Kay. Looking back on it, that was a mistake in planning. Rory’s mother busily cooked for him and fussed around the apartment, making Lauren feel extraneous. Kay talked endlessly about Emerson, who had just announced he was going back to West Point as an instructor.
“Your father would be so proud,” Kay said with a sniff over lasagna that night.
After dinner, Rory retreated to the bedroom. He watched CNN, as he apparently had been doing all day long for the past seven days. He was obsessed with the November shooting at Fort Hood.
“Try to get him out and about,” Kay said on her way to the airport in the morning. “I know you’re not much on cooking, so maybe a restaurant here or there will do him some good.”
Lauren convinced him to walk the few blocks to Hugo’s for dinner that night, but he was sullen and quiet. She’d been told that depression was a side effect of the concussion and tried to reassure herself—and him—that it was temporary.
“What am I doing with my life?” he said, slumped back in his seat at the restaurant, looking out at Santa Monica Boulevard.
“Come on, Rory. This is irrational. You’ll be back on the ice in a few weeks. This happens. It’s part of the deal when you play at this level—you know that.”
“What do you know about it?” he snapped.
“I’m just trying to help!”
“Well, don’t.”
She wanted to say fine, he could wallow in his self-pity by himself. She had exams to take. Instead, Lauren tried turning the conversation to more positive things, like their plans to spend July at the shore house. Her grandmother had died earlier in the year. She’d left the Green Gable to Beth, who told Lauren and Stephanie they could have the house for the summer—it was too soon for her to be there without her mother. A quick negotiation determined that Stephanie would have the house in June, Lauren would take it in July, and they’d split August depending on their schedules.
“It will be good to have some time for just the two of us,” Lauren told Rory. “In the place where it all started. Prom weekend, remember?”
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He grumbled a response.
Later, when he was in the shower, she went outside and, standing among the exotic plants outside the apartment building, called Ashley Wade.
“Don’t take it personally,” Ashley said. “They all get nasty when they hit their heads. Trust me, in two months you’ll tell him, ‘You were a real jerk back then, you said such and such,’ and he’ll laugh and say he doesn’t remember.”
But she would remember. And for the first time in a very long time, her future with him seemed uncertain. He wasn’t the Rory she knew, and this made her nervous.
She called Emerson—a mistake.
“You can’t freak out over every little injury,” he said. “You’re dating a professional athlete.”
Lauren didn’t say any of this aloud to Matt.
And then Matt leaned slightly forward, not glancing at his computer but looking straight at her. He said, “His style of play changed after that. Everything changed after that, didn’t it?”
Lauren stared at him. She began to speak, then stopped. It would be a betrayal of Rory to reveal his weakness to the world; it was the last thing he would have wanted. “I don’t know what you mean by that.” Her hands fluttered to the mic clipped to her shirt. “Your hour is up.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Beth heard a car pull up in front of the house. She was neck-deep in the pool, her hair piled carefully in a clip on top of her head.
Was it that late in the afternoon already? She wasn’t expecting Howard back from Florida until close to dinner. She climbed out of the pool and wrapped herself in a towel, wishing she had time to get herself dried off and pulled together. Yes, she still cared about how she looked when she greeted her husband. It was old-fashioned, she knew. It went back to advice her mother had given her when she was just a teenager: “Always make sure when your husband comes home that the house is in order and you’re dressed and made up. If a man doesn’t like coming home, the day will arrive when he doesn’t.” It was outrageous, of course. Something straight out of a Helen Gurley Brown advice manual. But her mother had seemed to manage her own marriage nearly effortlessly, so what did Beth know? Nothing, she’d come to realize. She certainly never had such easy pearls of wisdom for her own daughters when it came to marriage—or, in Stephanie’s case, to divorce.
Beth’s mother seemed to be in the last of the generations that saw divorce as a disgrace, or, as her mother would mutter in Yiddish, a shonda. Beth couldn’t remember a single one of her parents’ friends getting divorced. Of course, by the time Beth was a teenager, in the seventies, at least half of her own friends were from “broken” homes. Still, divorce was never something she viewed as a viable option, and certainly not, as many of her peers saw it, a likely outcome. No matter how tough the time with Howard, she’d never doubted that they would stick it out.
Not until now.
Lately, things felt different. Was this what marriage came down to? You spend decades doing the best you can, and then in midlife, you tally up the blame?
“Howard?” she called, walking through the kitchen.
“Upstairs,” he said.
His suitcase was open on the bed. He wore a golf shirt and navy pin-striped shorts and was deeply tanned.
“Hi,” she said, trying to remember how their last phone call had ended. When had they last spoken? Two days ago? “How was the flight back?”
“Uneventful. What’s going on around here?” he asked. “Did Cynthia come by?”
“Who’s Cynthia?”
“The real estate agent. She was supposed to take photos.”
She had, in fact, stopped by. Beth had ignored the ringing doorbell until the woman retreated back to her car.
“Nope. Not yet.”
Howard huffed his irritation.
“So how was Florida?”
“Incredible,” he said. “Bill and Lorraine’s place is right on the golf course.”
“Well, I don’t play golf, so that’s not a huge selling point.”
“It’s a nonstarter, anyway. Their place is beyond what we’ll be able to afford even if we sell this place at our full asking price.”
Beth tried not to panic. “It’s not just about money. I can’t ride off into the Florida sunset with you while things are so unsettled. And you’re wrong about this summer not helping things; Neil Hanes was here for dinner last night. I think he’s interested in Lauren. He keeps asking about her.” She conveniently omitted the part about him leaving with Stephanie. And that he was potentially interested in buying the house.
“Okay, but you don’t need to be here micromanaging. Has Lauren started looking at apartments yet?”
No, of course not. Lauren was more in denial about the house sale than Beth.
“I’m not sure.” She felt a flash of irritation. Why did he act like she had to answer to him? He was the one who’d put them in this predicament.
“Hi, Grandpa!” Ethan ran into the room and hugged Howard before turning to Beth and asking if he could have another doughnut.
“Sure. Just make sure to put the plastic wrap back on tight. We want to keep them fresh.”
“We baked,” Ethan told Howard with a grin.
Howard shot Beth a look. “Sounds good, buddy,” he said.
When Ethan was out of the room, Howard said, “You’ve got him baking?”
“It was a nice activity for us to do together.”
“I mean, it’s bad enough the kid doesn’t have a father…”
“Oh, Howard, don’t be ridiculous. Why don’t you do something with him instead of criticizing me?”
“I will,” Howard said, turning back to his suitcase. “I’ll take him to the beach. Just as soon as I unpack and make a few phone calls.”
“Great,” she said, feeling oddly like she’d lost the round. With a deep exhale, she said, “Howard, let’s just slow this thing down. Give some time here a chance.”
He shook his head wistfully, as if she were missing something obvious.
“Time won’t help, Beth. I feel stuck. And I’m trying to find my way out of it. I can’t spend one more goddamn day mired in negativity. Problems with the girls, problems with the business. It’s been going on so long, it’s a habit. Life doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Of course it does! That’s why it’s called life.”
“No, that’s our life. Yours and mine together. You know, Lauren’s husband died four years ago—but yours didn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Howard looked around the room like a trapped animal. “Beth, we need to either reset, or separate. But I’m not spending one more year like I’ve spent the past few.”
She knew she should have felt scared or upset that her husband was talking about leaving, but all she felt was a wave of anger. Then a thought exploded, a thought that maybe had been glimmering, a tiny spark, for weeks now.
“Did you lose our house on purpose?”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. To give yourself an excuse to leave.”
Howard put down the sports jacket he was holding and moved closer to Beth. He took one of her hands and squeezed it.
“I don’t want an excuse to leave. I want an excuse to stay.”
“Your children need you here this summer. Your grandson—”
“Let me rephrase that: I want an excuse to stay in this marriage.”
Beth pulled her hand away. She felt like she’d been slapped. What was he referring to? Their sex life? Okay, things had dwindled the past year or so. But they weren’t teenagers anymore. And the money problems didn’t help. Nor did their tension over the girls. Howard had never agreed with Beth about letting Lauren isolate herself at the shore, and he had also taken Stephanie’s wayward personal life very hard. But none of this was Beth’s fault!
“Well, maybe I don’t have one for you.”
Howard nodded. “Then I’m going back to Florida next week to stay with Bill and Lorraine.”
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Was this how it ended? Thirty years, dismissed with a few words and a half-packed suitcase?
“That’s fine with me, Howard.”
But it wasn’t fine. None of this was fine. Lauren widowed; Stephanie a single mother. Her own marriage disintegrating at middle age. And yet she had no idea how to fix any of it.
The sign, aqua blue with white lettering, read YOU CAN SHAKE THE SAND FROM YOUR SHOES BUT IT NEVER LEAVES YOUR HEART. Matt staged it against a white wall, propped on a table that he kept under the sightline of the camera lens. Then he took another shot of the sign hanging on the wall.
“Which one do you like better?” he asked Henny, showing her the options on the digital screen of his camera.
“I think the hanging version,” she said. “This Etsy thing is complicated!”
“Getting the photos right is the most labor-intensive part,” he said. “Once we have them uploaded, the rest is easy. Did you decide on a name for the store?”
She had told him a few she was thinking of, including Hung by Henny. He had to gently point out the potential sexual connotations with that one; she didn’t believe him until she Googled the old HBO show Hung.
“What do you think of Hen House Designs?” she said.
“I like it.”
“I really appreciate your help with this. I hope you’ll take me up on the offer to stay here a few nights free of charge.”
“Henny, I think I will.”
Ethan turned the page impatiently.
“Do we need to refresh where we were?” Lauren asked.
“No. I remember,” he said, yawning.
“Uh-oh. Are you going to make it through a whole chapter?”
“Two chapters,” he said.
She laughed. “That might be a little ambitious. I don’t know if I can stay awake through two chapters.”
The Husband Hour Page 15