Perfect Happiness

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  “You should have seen my serve today, Dad,” she says, reaching for a plate. He takes a step back, watching her fill it, her head bobbing to some song she’s singing in her head, and that’s what does it. He was disappointed before, but now, seeing the overt duplicity, the fact that she doesn’t seem to care at all that she totally lied to him and Charlotte . . .

  “What?” she says, turning and smiling at Jason. “What is it, Dad?”

  He looks at Charlotte for just a moment, coming around to her point of view more with every second that passes. “Nothing,” he says, pretending to be casual, trying out a strategy that’s just occurred to him.

  Charlotte lifts an eyebrow. He watches as she uses a pair of tongs to grab a chicken breast out of the container, placing it on the plate in Birdie’s hands. She looks at Jason, then back at their daughter. “How’s Tucker?” she says, not a hint of anything sour in her voice.

  “He’s fine,” Birdie says, flopping down in her usual seat at the kitchen table, straightening one of the straw place mats that Charlotte puts on the table in the spring. “All lacrosse, all the time right now.”

  Jason’s eyes meet Charlotte’s again. He remembers something he once heard, on a stand-up special on Netflix or something, about the difference between men and women when it comes to aggression: With men, it’s all physical; you see a guy try to pull one over on you, you want to punch him in the face. But with women, it’s worse: one hundred percent psychological warfare.

  “Is that so?” Charlotte says.

  “Yeah. But, you know, it’s totally fine and everything. I get it,” Birdie says, waving her fork around as she talks. “With me and tennis . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” Jason says. He sits and wipes his palms along his lap.

  “But actually . . .” Birdie raises a finger, pausing to finish a bite of chicken. “I need to ask you guys something.”

  Jason’s eyes meet Charlotte’s across the table.

  “What is it?” he manages, unfolding his napkin on his lap.

  “Tucker’s best friend, Colin, is turning sixteen in a few weeks and Tucker is going to have a pool party for him,” she says, her forehead wrinkling above raised eyebrows, eyes wide in nervous anticipation. “Would it be okay if I go? His parents will be there and everything.”

  Charlotte sits up straight in her chair, resting her elbows on the table, crossing her hands at her chin. She narrows her eyes at Birdie. “Well, I’m pleased that you asked,” she says.

  Jason lowers the drumstick he was about to bite into. “Birdie, we need to talk to you about something,” he says. Her eyes flicker for a split second. Part of him wants to see how long she’s willing to go before she confesses. Whether she’d fess up if they didn’t say anything. Birdie lifts her fork and then puts it back down, then reaches for one of the little plastic containers of mayonnaisey sauce that came with the meal and starts turning it in her hands.

  “What is it?” she says, her eyes darting back and forth between her parents.

  Charlotte reaches for her wineglass.

  Jason clears his throat. “Birdie, we found out something a little troubling today,” he begins, but as Charlotte lowers her glass, it clatters against her plate.

  “Birdie, what on earth were you thinking?” she suddenly says, cutting him off.

  “Wha—” Birdie stumbles, her eyes widening, her cheeks reddening.

  “You and Hannah? Sneaking out of her house? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you? Did you really think we wouldn’t find out?”

  Birdie squeezes her eyes closed, a look on her face like her stomach is cramping, and Jason feels a sudden unexpected pang of sympathy for her. She’s never lied to them, not in any serious way, at least not that he knows of. When he looks over at Charlotte, she’s staring at him, an annoyed, expectant look on her face.

  He clears his throat. So now she wants me to jump in. “We’re really disappointed, Bird,” he tells her. “And your mom’s right, something terrible could have happened.”

  Her hands fly to her face and he can see that they’re shaking. She starts to cry. “We didn’t even do anything!” she suddenly wails.

  “Well, that inspires the question, doesn’t it?” Charlotte begins. “What did you do?”

  “We heard you went to—” Jason starts, but Charlotte puts her hand out.

  “Let her tell us,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest.

  Birdie’s face is deep red now, her eyes filling with tears. “We didn’t do anything, really! Just walked around! Me and Hannah and then some girls who were sleeping over at that other girl Izzy’s house. It was stupid.”

  “Just walked around?” Charlotte says. “Are you sure?”

  Birdie nods. “Yeah, Mom. I’m sure. We just . . .” She pauses, sighs. “We went to the Knights of Columbus playground.” She shrugs. “I don’t know why. It was dumb. I’m so sorry, you guys! I’m so, so sorry!”

  “And that’s it?” Jason says. “Absolutely nothing else you need to say?”

  Birdie’s knitting her fingers together in her lap. She swallows. “Some boys met us. Tucker and some of his friends. I . . .” Tears start rolling down her cheeks. “I’m sorry!” Her face crumples. “I don’t know why we did it. They texted us and we just . . . I’m sorry!”

  Her eyes meet Jason’s, searching, for just a second, to see if she’s been absolved, it seems.

  “You are so incredibly lucky that nothing happened to you,” he says. “That’s the first thing. And neither of us are thrilled about you openly defying Hannah’s mom by sneaking out of her house. But what really bothers me . . .” He looks at Charlotte. “And your mom . . . is that you lied to us, Birdie. You did something you knew you shouldn’t, and then you kept it from us.”

  “Do you know what it was like to learn that from another parent?” Charlotte says.

  “Mom, I—”

  “Was there drinking?” Charlotte asks.

  Birdie’s eyes widen, genuinely stunned. “Drinking? No! Why would—”

  “Birdie, listen,” Jason says. Charlotte seems amped up now and he doesn’t want this to get worse than it needs to. “We know you’re going to test things. We know that being a teenager means that you’re probably going to want to push your limits, and you’re probably going to mess up. But you absolutely cannot lie to us. Under any circumstances.”

  She nods.

  “Your dad’s right,” Charlotte says, looking at him. “We were both teenagers once, believe it or not, and we messed up, too, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to get punished for this. So, no, you absolutely cannot go to the party. That’s the minimum.”

  Birdie starts to cry harder. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

  “In fact, you’re grounded,” Charlotte continues. “For the next few weeks, you will do nothing besides school and tennis. No social plans. No seeing Tucker.”

  “But, Mom!” Birdie suddenly wails. “What am I . . .” She looks back and forth between them. “How long?” she asks, panic in her voice. “If I can’t see him—”

  “What?” Charlotte says. “If you can’t see him what?”

  “Never mind!” she screams, jumping up from her seat. “You guys just—”

  Jason’s heartbeat quickens, little tap-tap-taps. This isn’t his daughter. She is such a good kid. People used to make jokes when she was little. “Watch out when she becomes a teenager,” they’d say. It always pissed him off. Charlotte, too (“What? Little girls aren’t allowed to get angry or act out?” she’d say. “Is that the problem?”). But now . . .

  “Your mom and I will talk about exactly what this grounding is going to look like,” Jason says.

  “I want you to really think about whether Tucker Cunningham is the right boy for you,” Charlotte says, her voice ratcheting up in volume, her priority clearly elsewhere. “If this is the kind of thing he’s encouraging you to do—”

  “Mom!” Birdie says. “He’s not doing anything! This is not his fault! D
on’t blame him!” She flies from her chair and races out of the room. A moment later, her bedroom door slams.

  They sit there, silently for a minute, neither of them saying a word.

  “Well, that went well,” Charlotte finally says. She lifts her fork and then puts it down again. She finishes the last bit of wine in her glass.

  “Yeah” he says, exhaling. He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath.

  “Yeah, what?” she says.

  “I guess we’ll just see how it goes?”

  “Jason, I don’t want her anywhere near that boy.”

  “So you’ve mentioned,” he says.

  “I can’t believe you don’t agree with me.”

  “I agree with you!” he says. “But—” He closes his eyes for a moment, collecting himself. “Listen, I get where you’re coming from,” he whispers. “But we can’t forbid her from seeing someone. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Oh, please.” She stands and goes to the refrigerator. “It’s called parenting, Jason.” He watches as she serves herself another glass of wine.

  He’s not sure why he says it but he does: “Healthy pour.”

  “What?” she says, whipping around.

  “You really need to drink that?” he says.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He shrugs and pushes his plate away. “It’s Monday night,” he says.

  “Exactly,” she says. “And it’s been one hell of a Monday. I think I deserve a little wine.”

  “That’s your third glass,” he says.

  “You’re tracking how much I drink now?” she says.

  “Maybe somebody ought to be,” he mutters. He doesn’t want to hurt her, he really doesn’t, but he’s so tired of this. He’s so sick of her getting home and sinking into a bottle, how she lashes out at him after she’s had a couple of glasses. If she could just—

  “I can’t believe you’re actually going to get on me about the amount of wine I’m drinking right now,” she says. “After I, as usual, did all of the heavy lifting when it came to that conversation with her.”

  “Please, Charlotte,” he says. “Maybe you could try letting me get a word in.”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t deal with you tonight,” she says, walking out of the room with her glass.

  “The feeling is mutual,” he says, knowing how stupid it sounds, how immature, how impotent. He listens for Birdie upstairs, hoping she hasn’t heard them.

  The only other time that Charlotte can remember Birdie overtly lying was four years ago, when she was ten. She’d begged them for a pair of Converse high-tops, and they’d seen an opportunity to teach her a lesson about earning money. One of the things she and Jason talked about often back then, when their financial situation was different—and they actually talked—was how they didn’t want their daughter’s view of the world to be skewed by the overt wealth that she was growing up around. Birdie had plenty—Jason’s and Charlotte’s jobs were good ones—but lots of the kids that Birdie went to school with had their own en suite bathrooms and movie theaters at home. They had second (and sometimes third) homes, passports full of stamps.

  To earn the sneakers, Birdie did chores around the house: feeding the dog, keeping her room tidy, folding clothes with Charlotte and Jason in the family room while they watched America’s Funniest Home Videos. And then after about a month, they all made a special trip to the mall together to get the shoes. She’d chosen a bright turquoise pair, and she was so excited about them that they had the salesperson cut the tags off so that she could wear them out of the store. For the next several weeks, the only places she didn’t wear them were bed, the bath, and her tennis lessons (and that had been a bit of a battle, requiring her coach explaining to her why they weren’t appropriate for the courts).

  And then all of a sudden, she stopped. Charlotte asked her why she wasn’t wearing the shoes and Birdie gave all sorts of excuses: She wasn’t in the mood to wear them, they made her feet hurt, she wanted to wear something other than sneakers on the days she didn’t need to wear them for PE. Charlotte worried that a kid at school had made fun of them, but when she asked, Birdie insisted that wasn’t it.

  One afternoon, she finally, tearfully, came to Charlotte with the shoes behind her back. She confessed that a few weeks earlier, she was messing around and tied the laces of the shoes together while they were on her feet. She tied not just one knot, but a bunch of them, and ended up tying them so tightly that she couldn’t get them undone. She didn’t know why she did it, she just did, and she’d finally had to cut the laces with scissors to get her feet out. When she told Charlotte this, she wouldn’t look her in the eye. She cried, her shoulders shaking, and confessed with a solemnity that would make you think she had done something truly despicable—cheated at school or been cruel to a friend. Charlotte had to fight to keep a straight face and hide her smile as she pulled Birdie in for a hug and assured her it was okay.

  How did they get from there to here, she wonders now, sitting at her desk in the little living room they’d converted into a home office, looking out the window at the dark street. Birdie’s upstairs doing homework, Jason’s upstairs avoiding her. She is attempting to work on her notes for the Montana talk—her usual speech doesn’t feel like enough for this crowd—but all she can think about is her daughter.

  Birdie refused to talk to her after dinner. Charlotte had tried, speaking in a soft voice on the other side of her bedroom door, but Birdie said she wanted to be left alone. She knew it was unrealistic to expect that they’d get through all eighteen years of Birdie’s childhood without a snag, but this was not what she wanted for them. She wasn’t one of those lenient mothers who wanted to be her kid’s best friend—that didn’t seem to benefit anyone—but she’d never wanted to replicate how her own mother had straitjacketed her with antiquated rules about the way girls were supposed to behave. There had been white-gloved cotillion classes, teaching her how to waltz and identify a salad fork. There were strong admonitions about what she was to wear and how she was to speak. And then there were the weigh-ins: From the time Charlotte was ten until she finally started refusing around age sixteen, her mother had made her stand on a scale each morning, then wrapped her shoulders tightly with an Ace bandage before she put on her Savannah Country Day School uniform so that she would learn good posture. Jason had thought she was lying the first time she told him about this little routine. He was sure it was something she had seen in a movie, not her actual life.

  Charlotte didn’t want to be that kind of mother. If anything, she wanted to parent the way her father did. Her sweet daddy had been her mother’s foil: gentle, quick with a joke, a sparkle in his eye. For her and her brother, he had been the benevolent undersecretary who balanced their mother’s dictatorial reign—or, at least, that’s how Charlotte likes to remember him, his flaws buffed out of her memory. She chooses to focus on the good things: how he was in the stands at every single one of her softball games. How he taught her to catch and gut a fish, and how to keep proper score of a baseball game. He’d died her senior year at Emory, from a melanoma tumor on the back of his neck that spread before they could catch it, which was not a surprise at all given how many years he’d spent on his boat in the high Georgia heat without a speck of sunscreen.

  Birdie, she thinks, sipping from her glass. Fuck Jason. Fuck him and his judgment. Who did he think he was? She almost wants to have another glass just to spite him, but that would mean opening another bottle, and there’s a deep down part of her that knows that if he sees an empty bottle in the recycling bin the next morning, and another bottle open in the fridge, it will confirm . . . She twirls the stem of her glass between her fingers. She doesn’t need it anyway. Not with the flight tomorrow, work . . . She feels a sinking sense of dread, her stomach clenching when she thinks of how upside-down it is to be getting on a plane in the morning to speak to a bunch of strangers about happiness when her own daughter is miserable. You’re out of touch, that message said tod
ay. I see you.

  Her eyes well up with tears. She leans down to pet Sylvie, who’s lying on the floor beside her, and the dog starts to stir, yelping in her sleep, dreaming. Charlotte looks at the time on her monitor. It’s nearly 11:30. She scans her professional Facebook page, which she never really wanted to have to manage but which her publisher insisted she use as a “tool to connect with readers.” Earlier in the day, before leaving the office, she had posted a question, a low-effort perennial that her followers loved nevertheless: What do you do to make your Mondays brighter, better, happier?

  She scrolls through the comments—eighty-seven of them, about going to movies, taking bubble baths, going out to dinner, going for a run—and tries to will something witty to type in return, but she just can’t do it. She scrolls through her news feed, looking at the posts—senior prom pictures, requests for donations, sweaty finish line photos, vacation pics—and before she can think it through, she enters Dayna’s name into the search field. In the photo on her profile page, Dayna’s standing between Finch and Tucker on a boat. The photo is old—Tucker barely clears her shoulder—but Dayna looks much the same, though the large sunglasses she’s wearing obscure much of what Charlotte can see. Tucker looks different—a little goofy, neck too long, teeth crooked—the way boys do as they’re heading into puberty. Finch and Dayna are not exactly smiling, instead conveying self-satisfied smugness.

  Before she closes the browser, Charlotte types in another name: Dr. Reese Tierney. She and Amanda, her lifelong best friend and now sister-in-law, had made a joke of it when they learned that Reese was opening his own practice. They wondered whether he would become one of those doctors on the billboards lining the highway that snaked into Savannah, his likeness in scrubs looming next to before and after photos of a woman’s saddlebags. It was an easy thing to latch onto, to make Charlotte feel better about the fact that he had hurt her, even though she knew deep down, from the conversations she’d had with Reese so many years earlier, late at night, that one of the reasons he chose the dermatology specialty he did before he went into plastic surgery was her father’s illness. Reese had been close to him, too, the three of them fishing together, going out on the boat, shooting the breeze in the backyard for hours on end. Reese was the one who comforted her when they learned how extensively her father’s skin cancer had spread. Reese had been the one who cried along with her, his hand linked tightly in hers as her father’s coffin was lowered into the ground.