It's Always the Husband

by Michele Campbell

  Griff looked pissed. If he didn’t want Kate walking home alone, he certainly didn’t want her going with that good-looking stranger. The Three Rs started pulling on their coats and hats and shuffling sideways to get out of the booth, taking a long time about it. Eventually, in his drug-addled state, Griff got carried along with the crowd. He waved to Kate wistfully as the door shut behind them.

  Lucas sat down on a stool at the counter, waiting for his order. The townie kid had gone into the back to prepare it. Shecky’s was empty now; the two of them were the only customers in the joint. Kate carried the red plastic basket with her burger and fries over to the counter and sat down on the stool next to Lucas. He was flipping through the leaves of a coin-operated jukebox.

  “So,” she said, barely glancing at him, as if they were continuing a conversation from a moment before. She picked up her Sheckyburger and took a bite. Mmmm. Maybe it was the weed, or the burger, or maybe it was the boy, because in that second, the planet turned on its axis and she felt like she was exactly where she was meant to be.

  Lucas took a quarter from his pocket and put it down on the counter. “You like the Violent Femmes?”

  She dabbed at her lips with a napkin and looked more closely at the writing inside the jukebox.

  “I know that song. ‘Why can’t I get just one fuck,’ right? Is that supposed to be like my theme song?”

  He laughed. “No, I just feel like hearing it. It’s an angry song. I’m an angry guy tonight.”

  “Yeah, I tend to bust an attitude when the going gets tough, too. Makes me feel better,” she said.

  “Exactly.” He looked at her in surprise, nodding. His eyes were beautiful, a rich brown flecked with gold.

  “Anyway, I suppose it’s my own fault if you think I’m an easy lay,” she said.

  “I don’t think that.”

  “No? I took you home like five minutes after we met.”

  He shrugged. “I went, didn’t I?”

  “What, no double standard? Most guys think it’s okay for them to sleep around, but if girls do it, they’re sluts.”

  His food still hadn’t arrived, so he took a French fry from her platter and dipped it in ketchup. “Maybe some girls. Not you.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you why not,” Kate said. “Because normal rules don’t apply to me.”

  Lucas smiled. “You think highly of yourself.”

  “Don’t you think highly of yourself?”

  “Maybe.”

  They gazed at each other, a challenge hanging in the air between them. The kid came out with Lucas’s burger. He stood there, looking from Lucas to Kate and back again, like he wanted to say something.

  “Thanks, Timmy,” Lucas said, grabbing the platter from his hands. It was a dismissal. The kid shrugged and walked away.

  “God, this music,” Kate said, flipping through the jukebox leaves. “Country Western and oldies. Shoot me.”

  “I bet you listen to hip-hop, because you grew up on the streets,” he said.

  She couldn’t decide if he was mocking her or flirting with her, or both, but she liked it.

  “Hip-hop’s great,” she said. “You like Tupac? ‘I’m the rebel, cold as the devil, straight from the underground.’ The guy’s a friggin’ genius if you ask me.”

  “He’s a criminal.”

  “So what, they’re all criminals. Everyone’s a criminal, really. My father’s a criminal when you think about it.”

  “Your father the trustee’s a criminal?”

  “Oh, so you know who my father is?”

  “Don’t act all modest. Everybody knows.”

  “Well, he is. I mean, he breaks laws. I do, too.”

  Lucas laughed. “How could I forget, rules don’t apply to you.”

  “Like you don’t break laws? You never speed, or smoke a little weed on a Saturday night?” She picked up the quarter. “Pick a song, or I will.”

  “All right.”

  Lucas flipped a few more pages, then pressed the old-fashioned buttons, and Elvis Costello started singing “My Funny Valentine.”

  “Good choice. Just right for the dead hour in the middle of the night,” she said.

  “My favorite time of day,” he said.

  “Mine, too.”

  They finished their burgers in silence. By the time the song ended, their food was gone, and crumpled napkins filled the red baskets. The restaurant was quiet except for the buzzing of the fluorescent lights and the whirring of the pie refrigerator. The white noise cast a cloak of intimacy over them. They turned toward each other at the same moment on the rotating stools, and their knees touched. Neither one of them moved away. Kate tossed her head and played with her hair, catching sight of herself in the mirrored backsplash behind the counter. She was flirting shamelessly, and for the first time in a long time, her heart was in it. She had butterflies in her stomach; her armpits were moist.

  “Tell me a thing,” she said.

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Mmm, something I don’t know about you.”

  She looked at him, waiting. He swirled the ice at the bottom of his glass and leaned back, pouring it into his mouth. He had one of those great jock necks, thick as a tree trunk. She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

  “I used to come here all the time in high school,” he said, crunching the ice between his teeth. “After a game especially. Fuel up, you know. This place reminds me of that time. My team, my friends.”

  “You sound nostalgic.”

  “I am.”

  “Aren’t you a little young for that?”

  “Not really,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “See, it turns out I can’t play hockey anymore. I haven’t told anybody yet. I just found out. So, kick me, I’m sad tonight.”

  “Why can’t you play hockey?”

  “I had a lot of concussions. Just got another, and the doc says it’s my last. One more, and my brain might not recover.”

  “So no hockey. Don’t you have other sports?”

  “Yeah, football and lacrosse. I have to give those up, too. But hockey’s the one I care about.”

  “Ah. The old Carlisle hockey obsession.”

  Hockey ruled at Carlisle, which had the strongest team in the Ivies but was outclassed in football and many other sports by bigger schools like Harvard and Princeton.

  “It’s not just Carlisle,” Lucas said. “This is the north country up here. I learned to skate practically before I could walk. People think it’s the violence I like, but it’s the skill. The blade work, the stick work. And the ice. So pure and clean. It’s a thing of beauty.”

  She leaned forward and raised her hand to his forehead, tracing a circle on the smooth skin with her fingertip.

  “Your brain’s beautiful, too. And you can live without hockey, but you can’t live without your brain.”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know if I can live without hockey,” he said.

  She was close enough to drink in the spicy smell of his shampoo, and beneath it, the warm scent of hair and skin. She remembered being in bed with him, feeling the bulk of him on top of her. She wanted to feel it again.

  “You need to find some other source of excitement,” she said, raising an eyebrow suggestively.

  He gave her a slow, dreamy smile. “That could help.”

  It was a new experience for Kate, coming on strong to a guy rather than reacting to his advances, but she liked this one excessively. She’d let him get away the first time because of the complication with Jenny. She’d sensed by Jenny’s reaction when she walked in on the two of them that there was a history. Her suspicion was confirmed not long after, when Kate and Aubrey ran into Lucas on the Quad on the way back from class. The three of them chatted for a few minutes, and the chemistry between Kate and Lucas was so palpable that Aubrey spilled the beans. Jenny had told Aubrey that Lucas was her high school boyfriend, but she’d been too proud to come to Kate and call dib
s.

  “Hey,” Kate said. “Did you used to date my roommate? Jenny Vega?”

  “You could call it that. We hung out. But it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” Lucas said.

  “Wasn’t it just last year?”

  “It was high school. Nobody should be held accountable for what they do in high school.”

  “Would she have a problem if we hung out?”

  “We are hanging out.”

  “Are we? Okay.”

  “Look, Jenny broke up with me. As far as I’m concerned I don’t owe her a thing. But if you’re worried, ask her.”

  “What if she says to keep away from you?”

  “I take it back. Don’t ask her.”

  Kate laughed. Lucas was watching her intently.

  “Forget about Jenny, okay? I promise you, she doesn’t care,” he said, and grabbed Kate’s wrist, turning it over to examine the three small stars tattooed on its underside. “I like your tattoo. Does it mean something?” he asked, touching them.

  “Funny, nobody’s ever asked me that,” she said, and paused, thinking about kissing his beautiful mouth. If Jenny wanted Kate to keep her hands off Lucas, she should’ve said something after she found them half naked together, right? But she didn’t. Kate liked the feel of Lucas’s fingers digging into her wrist enough that she lowered her head until her cheek rested on the back of his hand, rubbing her face against his skin like a cat. She expected that being close to him would make her heart beat faster. Instead her pulse slowed down, and she felt like she breathed easier. He caressed her hair, and she sat up, pointing to the star farthest to the left.

  “This one is for my mom, who died. This one on the left is for my best friend Maggie, who ate a bottle of pills and OD’d when we were in tenth grade. I think of her every single day. And the last one is me.”

  “Why are you there with them? You’re still alive.”

  “For the moment. No promises,” she said, and looked up into his eyes so he felt the full weight of her remark.

  “What, like you’d kill yourself?”

  “Sometimes I get really sad. If I want to, nobody can tell me not to, because I’m the boss of me.”

  He smiled. “Great, just what I need in my darkest hour. A batshit-crazy girl, with a ruby in her belly button and a death wish.”

  Kate laughed. “Don’t knock crazy till you try it, my friend.”

  After that, the conversation got deep fast. As different as they were, they had everything in common. They were born two days apart. Lucas lost his dad at the same age as Kate lost her mom. He hated his stepfather even more than Kate hated Victoria, and had a passel of bratty stepsibs who sucked up attention and food and took all his stuff. They both thought Carlisle was full of shit, and that Carlislers who “bled orange” were losers and fools. Neither one of them could imagine caring about a subject enough to declare a major. And they both cherished a fantasy that they’d never breathed a word of before to anyone: of hitting the road, no money, no destination, no phone. Vagabonding around with nothing but a couple of changes of clothes in a backpack until they got bored of it, which might be never. Maybe they would go away, together, far away, and chop wood and live off the land. They might never come back.

  “Hey, you know what’s on here? You’ll love this,” Lucas said, pulling another quarter from his pocket. He pushed the jukebox buttons from memory, and Roger Miller drifted out, with that sublime finger-snapping.

  “Trailers for sale or rent, rooms to let, fifty cents.”

  “I do love this!” Kate squealed. “I know all the words.”

  “Me, too,” he said, and laughed.

  They started singing along. “‘Third boxcar, midnight train. Destination, Bangor, Maine.’”

  “Ever been to Bangor?” Lucas asked.

  “I’ve been a lot of places, but Bangor, Maine, is not one of them.”

  “It’s like a five-hour drive. I know a great doughnut shop, opens at six. We could get ’em fresh from the deep fry.”

  At that moment, Kate would have gone anywhere with him. She stood up and grabbed her coat. “I’m in.”

  Lucas’s car was a faded old ragtop with bench seats that looked like it was held together with chewing gum and wire. He drove with one hand on the wheel and kept the other arm tight around her. She leaned into him, shivering, as the heater coughed and snorted. Once they hit the interstate, Lucas put his knee to the steering wheel and took Kate’s head in his hands, kissing her deeply, stopping only for occasional peeks at the road. They made out at seventy miles an hour, their tongues intertwined, their hands stealing underneath one another’s clothes, until the median came rushing at them and Lucas had to fight to keep control of the car. He righted it at the last second, and they looked at each other, hearts racing with panic, and burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Let’s go park somewhere before we wipe out for real,” he said. “I know a place.”

  He took the next exit, and got on the main road that ran along the river, heading back toward campus. A few minutes later, they pulled off onto a narrow dirt road that led to a gravel parking lot facing out over the water. A full yellow moon hung low in the sky, throwing off an eerie glow. The river was clogged with giant blocks of ice, bobbing and glinting, silvery in the moonlight.

  “The cops won’t bother us here, not at this hour,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her face.

  “Where are we?”

  “Not too far from school, actually.”

  “You’ve been here before.”

  “A million times. This is the deepest part of the river. We swim here in the summertime. You can’t see it through the trees, but a little ways upriver’s the old railroad bridge. We jump off it and race to the float. It’s like a dare, every year after ice out. First man to the float gets a beer.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “Yeah, people drown sometimes. But kids around here still do it. It’s like a rite of passage.”

  “Cool, I want to try. Not now, obviously. Once it warms up.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  “I’m an ace swimmer. Lifeguard certified, five summers of sailing camp.”

  “It’s not that. A winter like this, ice out isn’t till May. Swim before June, the water’ll paralyze you in minutes, and you’ll sink like a rock. By the time the river’s swimmable, I’m gonna bet you’ll be off on Martha’s Vineyard sipping cocktails.”

  “I don’t have any plans for the summer that I can’t change. Who knows, maybe I’ll stay in Belle River.”

  He laughed. “Right, and hang out with me and my townie friends down by the Dairy Bar.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’d be a sight. I’d like to see it, actually.”

  Their eyes caught and held, and they melted together, kissing until they were both breathless. She started to take off her clothes, but he stopped her.

  “We’ll be more comfortable in the back.”

  He opened his door, smiling, and beckoned her out. The frigid air came as a shock, a faint aroma of skunk adding to its sharpness. They stood together for a moment looking toward the opposite shore, his arms wrapped tightly around her as they listened to the ice grind and crack on the river.

  “That sound,” she said. “It’s like it’s alive.”

  “Oh, the river’s alive. Never doubt it. C’mon,” he said, and opened the back door.

  * * *

  It turned out Jenny did care. Kate had no intention of giving up Lucas at this point. She couldn’t if she wanted to. But she felt bad that she’d thrown her hookup with him in Jenny’s face. And at such a time. With Jenny and Aubrey gone, Kate was lonely and anxious. She wanted to drown her sorrows in sex with Lucas, but since their night by the river (no surprise, they never made it to Bangor), he seemed to be avoiding her. Between Lucas’s disappearing act and her roommates’ absence, Kate didn’t know what to do with herself. She liked an audience; solitude freaked her out. Griff was available to sit with
her nonstop, holding her hand and staring into her eyes if she let him, but that got cloying after about five minutes. He took hanging out way too seriously. Grabbing a milkshake together meant they were getting engaged, as far as Griff was concerned. So two days after her awful fight with Jenny, at her wit’s end, Kate called Aubrey’s mother’s apartment and left a message on the answering machine begging Jenny to call so she could apologize. Later that day the phone rang in suite 402, and it was Jenny calling from Nevada.

  “I’m so sorry, can you forgive me?” Kate cried.

  She paused for breath and then, hearing only the buzz of silence on the line, plowed ahead.

  “After you said I was a bad friend for not helping Aubrey, I felt really small. That’s why I brought up Lucas, to get back at you. That was a shitty thing to do, and I apologize.”

  “Ugh, let’s just forget it, all right?” Jenny said.

  “Yes. Yes, thank you. So you forgive me.”

  “About Lucas? Fine. It’s harder to forgive the timing. Aubrey was suffering, I was trying to help, and you were just so—nasty.”

  “I tried to explain. I’m terrified of hospitals.”

  “We never even went to the hospital. She died before we got there,” Jenny said.

  “She died? Oh, no, I can’t believe it. So fast?”

  “Yes. We ended up going straight from the airport to the funeral home.”

  “Well, I couldn’t have known that, could I? I’m sorry if you think I was heartless. I just got really defensive and lashed out. I care so much about our friendship, Jenny.”

  “Yeah, sure, me, too. Listen, if this is all you’re calling about, I should go. We need to pick out an urn, and order food for the memorial service.”

  Kate felt like she’d been slapped. She didn’t like to grovel. If she made the effort to apologize, she expected a grateful response from Jenny, not a bitchy tone and getting off the phone.

  “I’m very sorry to hear about Aubrey’s mom,” Kate said stiffly. “When is the funeral?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Should I send flowers?”

  Jenny sighed audibly. “Honestly, Kate, do what you want.”

  “Tell Aubrey I’m sorry about her mother,” Kate said, and slammed the receiver down.