The Husband Hour

by Jamie Brenner

  Her eyes filled with tears. “What if something happens to you?”

  “Oh, Lauren. It’s more likely that I’d get another head injury on the ice and be fucked up for life. There’s risk involved, yes. But there’s risk in everything.”

  Lauren put her head in her hands. This couldn’t be happening.

  “We’ll be apart,” she said, unable to look at him. “We’ll be apart for long stretches of time.” Blood pounded in her ears. She could barely hear his response, something affirmative and empathetic and infuriating. She looked up. “You asked me to move here, promising we were starting a life together. We’re not going to have a life together!”

  “I understand what you’re saying. It’s not what you signed on for. And if this changes how you feel about the wedding—”

  She sobbed, pulling away from him when he tried to hold her.

  There was no way out of it. If she called off the engagement, she would be heartbroken and miss him for the rest of her life. If she married him, she would be heartbroken and miss him and worry herself sick while he was gone. There was no path to happiness.

  Lauren turned away from the box, remembering that feeling of hopelessness as if it were yesterday. He’d given her no choice back then, all those years ago. But she had choices now.

  She thought about what Matt had said to her at the restaurant that afternoon. Yes, she knew the real story. And yes, he could help her “get it out there.” The thing was, she didn’t want it out there. But she didn’t want someone else’s version out there either.

  Lauren reached for her phone.

  Matt told himself not to push, not to rush. He let the vodka set the pace. When Stephanie was halfway done, he let himself drink some of his own. And when she was finished, he said, “So, how much, exactly, did Rory like you?”

  “Well, I slept with him. You know that, right?”

  Was she for real? “No. How would I know that? You didn’t mention that in the interview.”

  She shrugged. “Water under the bridge, as they say.”

  “Did Lauren know about it?”

  “It was before they hooked up, and yeah, she knew about it. And she didn’t care. I mean, maybe she cared that I’d slept with him but she didn’t care about my feelings.”

  “You mean she…it was like she stole him from you?”

  “No. It was over before they got together. But still, there’s a code, you know? That’s what I told her when I found out. There’s a sister code. And she just didn’t get it.”

  He nodded. Okay, this was only high-school stuff. Sisterly competition. The significance was nil. He signaled Desiree that he wanted to settle the tab.

  “That’s why,” she said, slurring just a little, “that’s why, when I fucked him again years later, I didn’t feel that bad about it. And no, Lauren does not know about that.” She leaned closer to him. “It can be our little secret.”

  Matt felt like someone had pulled the stool out from under him. He gripped the edge of the bar. And then his phone buzzed with a text. Lauren. I do want to get the real story out there. How’s tomorrow morning?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Lauren crossed her legs and slid back in the chair, uncomfortable with Matt’s nearness as he adjusted her mic.

  She had chosen her clothes carefully for the interview and wore a navy-blue dress with cap sleeves and seed-pearl buttons running down the front. Her hair was loose. She was flushed with anxiety.

  “Are you impatient with me already? We haven’t even started yet,” he said, smiling.

  “No, it’s fine.”

  Matt returned to his seat opposite her, Henny’s living room configured the exact same way it had been the last time.

  “Henny must really like you to let you do this to her furniture. We had a book-club meeting here once, and when Nora tried to move a plant, Henny threw a fit.”

  He stood up and adjusted an LED light and then sat back down in the chair across from her.

  “Henny’s a good sport. I’m lucky I found her. I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways lately.” He smiled.

  Lauren looked around the room, trying not to fidget with the mic wire.

  “When you said, ‘Give me one hour,’ you never really meant just one hour, did you?” she said.

  He leaned forward in his seat. “That’s not enough for me to get everything I need, no. But I hoped that one hour of talking would be enough to convince you that there was a story worth telling here. That even an ugly truth is more valuable than a beautiful lie.”

  They locked eyes for a minute. She searched for something to say, but before she could speak, Matt shifted into interview mode.

  “So let’s get to work,” Matt said. “Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready.” And she was.

  “During Rory’s second season with the Kings, you lived with him in LA, correct?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I spent the summer after my senior year in DC making up some credits—I traveled a lot and had to basically do a ninth semester—and Rory came to see me in August. He asked me to move to LA with him. This was heading into his second season.”

  “Was there talk of getting married?”

  “It was unspoken, but there was the sense that school was behind us, geographical separation was behind us. We felt like, Okay, we can finally do this thing.”

  “So it was a happy time,” Matt said.

  “It was a very happy time.” Except she had walked away from her mentors and a possible job at the Washington Post.

  There were few journalism jobs in Los Angeles. She got an interview at Variety. Excited, she felt confident going into the meeting. But she quickly realized, talking to a guy who spent half the twenty-minute interview checking his phone, that her solid understanding of the Electoral College and global economic and energy crises, as well as her encyclopedic knowledge of nearly every major politician’s position on fracking, meant less than nothing in that town. She hadn’t gone to a movie in years and didn’t know Colin Firth from Colin Farrell.

  By late fall, two months after she moved to LA, she was desperate enough to consider taking a job at an entertainment blog called Cinema Chick that paid so little, it would cost her more in gas to get to and from the office than she would earn.

  “Why are you putting so much pressure on yourself?” Rory asked her.

  “Because I want to be good at something,” she said. “You can’t be the only one who’s good at something.”

  He hugged her. “Where is this coming from?”

  She didn’t know exactly. She was twenty-two years old. Most people her age were moving to new cities with friends, living six people to a divided-up one-bedroom, and landing assistant jobs. Or starting grad school. They were free and it was all about trial and error. For Lauren, she couldn’t afford an error. She already had something to lose—Rory. And maybe herself, a little. She didn’t want her entire identity to revolve around being Rory Kincaid’s girlfriend.

  She cried to him that night. Cried, because she didn’t know what to do about her career.

  “You’re going to be a great journalist someday,” he said, hugging her again. “Come on, Lauren. You know you have to walk before you can run, right?”

  She nodded. “But that’s easy for you to say. You’re running.”

  “But think about it—my starting line was probably the day I first laced up skates fifteen years ago. In fifteen years, you’ll be working at the Washington Post. Or the New York Times.”

  “You think we can move back east some day?”

  “Sure. I won’t be playing hockey forever. Or maybe I’ll get traded to the Capitals.”

  She smiled. “I’ll be old and gray.”

  “And I’ll still be hot for you.”

  They made love. And she took the job at Cinema Chick.

  “Did Rory enjoy living in LA?” Matt asked.

  “He did. We both did. We fell in love with the house we bought. It was this Spanish-style bungalow just a few blocks from the
Beverly Center in West Hollywood. It was so different from the suburbs we’d grown up in.”

  The house was a modest one-story with a clay-tile roof, arched windows and doors, and a galley kitchen. It seemed exotic to both of them. Lauren loved the colorful ceramic tiles in the entrance hall, and Rory was sold as soon as he saw the orange tree out back.

  For two weeks, they scoured flea markets and estate sales for bargains on good solid furniture. Rory hated anything mass-market like Pottery Barn and wanted to leave the rooms bare until they found the right things rather than fill them with “commercial junk,” as he called it. That was fine with Lauren. She kept calling it his house, and he always corrected her. “Our house.”

  The plants in the front lawn amazed her, the spiny Shaw’s agave, the waxy chalk liveforever, and the grasslike giant wild rye. There was a certain smell to the air that permeated the house, their clothes, her skin. The beauty of Southern California was alien and surprising, and she was certain that no matter how long they lived there, she would always feel like a visitor.

  In the early evening, they opened a bottle of wine while they cooked dinner. She was amazed by how easy it was to find fresh fish and organic meat and vegetables. Everything tasted better. She didn’t know if it was the California produce or simply that the food was served under her own roof, but she had never felt such lust for meals.

  Sometimes, they didn’t make it through cooking dinner. Lauren would be stirring pasta, and Rory would sneak up behind her, move the heavy curtain of her hair, and kiss the back of her neck. Always, she tried to keep going, but after a few seconds she would turn and find herself in his arms, and then—barely remembering to turn off the burner—they would head to the half-empty living room to have sex on the rug under the Spanish candelabra left by the previous owners.

  “How did Rory feel, physically and mentally, heading into his second season?” Matt said.

  “He was excited. Determined to start making his mark.”

  If Rory was a little more short-tempered than she remembered, if he failed in his effort to hide his frequent headaches, it was nothing she couldn’t deal with. They were together, that was the important thing.

  But once the season started and she began working, it was challenging for them not to take their frustrations out on each other. While it was clear the Kings were on fire, Rory was riding the bench a lot. And her job at an entertainment blog wasn’t exactly high-level journalism.

  “When I interviewed the coach, he said Rory struggled with insomnia that year.”

  “Well, he was so adrenalized after games, he just couldn’t sleep.” Still, Lauren had been shocked to find a bottle of Ambien in his bedside-table drawer. Rory was anti-drug—even over-the-counter stuff. He’d get on her case for popping Advil when she had her period. When she found the Ambien and asked him about it, he became uncharacteristically angry and defensive. They had a big shouting match, the first of many.

  “Was he experiencing any lingering effects of the head injury? Headaches? Short temper?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Matt glanced at his laptop.

  “When did Rory start thinking about enlisting?”

  “That’s a tough question. It honestly took me by surprise.”

  “So there was no turning point you could identify?”

  She shook her head. “I mean, Rory had a military family. So I guess the idea of it was more in the realm of his thinking than maybe your average person’s. And then everything in the news pushed that nerve.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the Fort Hood shooting had a big effect on him,” she said carefully. The November 2009 attack at the army base in Texas by a radicalized Muslim U.S. Army major who’d killed thirteen soldiers and wounded thirty others. “Rory followed the story obsessively.”

  “He felt like he needed to do something in the wake of this?”

  “No, not exactly. I think it just underscored the divide between what was going on in the world and maybe the insignificance of what he was doing with his life.”

  “He felt playing hockey was insignificant?”

  “He started feeling his role was insignificant. He would have felt better if he were playing and scoring more. He was frustrated sometimes at not being the best for the first time in his life. But everyone told him this was a natural transition from college to pro sports. I mean, he was still an exceptional player. But he was hard on himself. So he would look at those guys fighting in the Middle East and think, They’re doing something great, and I’m not. It was just classic Rory, always wanting to excel.”

  “You said his decision to enlist was a surprise to you?”

  “His decision to enlist was a big surprise to me,” she said.

  By that time, it seemed so many other forces were at play in his life. Some days, she felt she barely knew him anymore. And it scared her.

  Beth beat together creamy peanut butter, heavy cream, and confectioners’ sugar with perhaps more aggression than the task warranted.

  Of all the things Howard had said that infuriated her lately, the crack about her baking with Ethan was the worst. What was this, 1950?

  “When does the jelly part happen?” Ethan asked.

  She had, to his delight, come up with a recipe for peanut butter and jelly doughnuts.

  “We’re going to use raspberry jam, and that part comes later. We’ll fill one of these pastry bags with the peanut butter mixture, one with the jelly, and then we use these plastic tips to squeeze them into the doughnut.”

  His eyes widened. “Cool.”

  “The best part of these doughnuts is that we should eat them right away or else the dough will get soggy. You okay with that?”

  “You mean before lunch?”

  “Before lunch.”

  “What’s before lunch?” Stephanie asked, her voice hoarse. Dressed in leggings and a tank top, her hair loose and knotted, she headed straight for the coffeepot.

  She reeked of alcohol.

  “The doughnuts we’re making! Peanut butter and jelly,” Ethan said.

  “Sounds awesome.” Stephanie tousled his hair. “E., do me a favor and scoot outside onto the deck for a few minutes. I need to talk to Gran.”

  “But no pool,” Beth said.

  Ethan crossed his arms. “I know, Gran, no grown-up, no water,” he said, repeating the number-one rule she’d set at the beginning of the summer. He trotted off, and as soon as he was out the door, Stephanie wilted into a chair at the breakfast table. It was as if it had taken every ounce of her strength just to stand upright and speak to him.

  “I’m so hung over.” She groaned. Before Beth could respond, Stephanie held up her hand as if warding off a physical blow. Then, to Beth’s surprise, she started to cry.

  “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Beth pulled out the chair next to her and hugged her.

  “You were right,” Stephanie said, sobbing in her arms. “Everything you said yesterday.”

  Beth glanced outside, hoping Ethan was occupied, not witnessing his mother’s breakdown. He was on the far side of the deck.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Beth said.

  “I’m drinking too much. My life is a mess…”

  “I’m here,” Beth said. “Let me help you.”

  Stephanie cried harder, pulling away from her and burying her face in her hands. Beth could barely hear the muffled words through her sobs: “You can’t help. It’s too late.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Nora’s annual Fourth of July party was in full swing by the time Lauren corralled her mother, sister, and Ethan and got them into the car to drive over. The delay had been due to the problem of how to transport the absolutely insane amount of doughnuts her mother had baked.

  “Mom, there’s enough for two parties here,” she said, surveying the trays of red, white, and blue–frosted doughnuts, the apple-pie doughnuts, and the pale glazed ones that her mother had identified as margarita doughnuts.

  “Wha
t makes a margarita doughnut?” Lauren had asked.

  “My little secret. But I’ll give you a hint: lime zest and tequila.”

  “Okay, Mom, we don’t need to bring all of these.”

  “Earlier in the week, you said two parties, so that’s what I prepared for.”

  That’s right; Henny, still hurt and angry with Nora, had planned to boycott Nora’s party and have her own. But after much pressure from their shared group of friends—and the realization that Nora’s party was such an institution that no one would show up at Henny’s—she caved and agreed to go to Nora’s after all.

  “Are we taking one car or two?” Stephanie asked. She was dressed in a tank top and Daisy Dukes.

  “We’re taking two cars,” Lauren said. “One for us, and one for Mom’s doughnuts.”

  Stephanie laughed.

  “Okay, very funny. And to answer your question, we can take one car.”

  “And Dad’s not coming back today? I can’t believe he’s blowing off the Fourth,” Stephanie said. It was true; their dad loved the holiday. When they were little, he had been the one to drive them to Narberth Park to see the fireworks if they weren’t at the shore. And when they were at the beach, he would give them turns sitting on his shoulders to watch the display. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re just taking a little time apart,” Beth said. “A little space.”

  “Space?” Stephanie said, incredulous. As confused as if Beth had said outer space.

  “Come on, girls, let’s go. You know I hate being the last one to a party.”

  Nora’s front lawn was festooned with American flags, her trees decorated with red, white, and blue streamers. The front porch welcomed guests with robust bundles of star-spangled balloons. A few people milled around, and the front door was open.

  “Happy Fourth of July!” Nora, dressed in a red, white, and blue patchwork dress, hugged Lauren before bending down to greet Ethan.

  “Thanks for having us,” Beth said, handing Nora the first of five trays of doughnuts.

  “These look fantastic,” Nora said.