Perfect Happiness

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  He doesn’t have a personal Facebook page, just a business one that links to his office website, which she clicks through to. She hasn’t looked at this in a while, though she has called it up before. She studies the photo of him next to his bio, remembering what Amanda said the first time they saw it because it is so true. He looks like a soap opera doctor. Dr. McCheaty, they’d called him.

  He’d sent her pleading emails after she moved to DC, begging her to reconsider. She’d kept them for a while, in an email folder marked “Personal” that she finally deleted one day when she was pregnant with Birdie. There would have been all kinds of problems had she gone back to him. They might live next door to Aaron and Amanda, raising their kids alongside each other like they’d always said they would, but she would always worry about him and whether he’d be capable of deceiving her again. God, he’d hurt her.

  On the other hand, it would be an easy life. A simple life. She wouldn’t have the career she has now, that’s for sure, though given what it’s been like lately, that almost sounds like a relief. She and Amanda would go for long walks in the mornings, they’d meet for lunch and mani-pedis and prowl the stores on Broughton Street.

  I should stop, she thinks, staring at his photo. I should go to bed. She knows better than to let her mind wander back to a place that can look idyllic in retrospect, a phantom life that wasn’t meant to be. She doesn’t think so, at least.

  Her daughter is upstairs sleeping. Her husband is upstairs, too. She looks at Reese and she remembers the two of them, moonlight shining, their bare feet side by side on the dock, all of the promises he made to her, all of the ways he said he’d make her happy. She closes the browser and grabs her glass, putting it to her mouth, practically sucking out the last sip, knowing, of course, that it’s empty.

  Upstairs, in the dark bedroom, Jason can’t sleep. He scrolls through links to articles he’s already read: the latest about more wildfires in California, a gruesome news story about more violence in Venezuela. He swipes over to Charlotte’s Instagram account. He doesn’t post any photos himself, but he’d signed up when her book came out, to watch the wave of excitement as it unfolded, to cheer her on from the sidelines, and to follow the zoo’s account, of course.

  At first, it seemed like something she had to do. She had to present a more polished version of herself. Wittier. More together. But now, it pisses him off, because the distance between who she is and who she claims to be has grown. He looks at the time stamp on the photo and sees that she posted it three hours ago, around the time she was done slamming the dishes into the dishwasher, clanking around the first floor angrily, furious at him once again. The photo is of the pile of stuff that Birdie left on the mudroom floor when she came home from school: her tennis racket and duffel bag, a backpack, the purple hoodie she’s been wearing instead of a coat. Life with teenagers, the caption says. I could tell her to pick up her things—what I usually do—or I could remind myself, just this once, that the day will come when the house is too quiet and I will miss this.

  He knows it’s different now, more voyeuristic and duplicitous, checking in to see what his wife is putting up, in this alternate online life that she leads, separate from him and their family. The thing is, it almost always confirms for him what he’s already thinking in his ugliest moments. She is faking it.

  He puts his phone down on his chest, the blue light glowing in the dark, and stares up at the ceiling.

  And then he starts to cry.

  It comes out of nowhere, surprising him like a hiccup, but when it starts, it doesn’t stop. He can’t remember the last time he did this, but it comes like a flood, loose and out of control, all of the frustration and tension that’s been building up, everything not like it should be, the way it is supposed to be, the way he thought it would be.

  He hears Charlotte’s footsteps on the stairs and wipes his face, hurrying to collect himself, his breath shuddering as he turns away from the door, putting his phone facedown on the nightstand. He yanks the comforter up to his chin. He closes his eyes as if he is asleep.

  Charlotte tiptoes past the bed and closes the bathroom door quietly, then flips on the light. While she’s brushing her teeth, she grabs her phone and scrolls through Instagram, not even really thinking about the fact that she’s doing it. She spits into the sink and looks back at her direct messages, the one from @KGpartyof5 looming at her like it’s outlined in neon.

  She taps on it. I’m the kind of person who writes back, she tells herself, even when the feedback is critical. She stumbles a little and leans against the sink. I’m sorry that you feel the way you do about my work, she types. I can assure you that science supports my theories about “acting first, feeling later” but I also totally get your frustration. Yes, compared to bigger challenges like the ones you mention, some of the things I post can seem trivial, but I really only mean to be a help. Trust me, I get it when you say I seem out of touch. I really do. I have my own problems. I doubt myself all the time. I don’t have everything figured out. She pauses, questioning whether she ought to delete this, but then continues on anyway. I apologize if I gave you the impression that I have all the answers, because believe me I don’t. I’m just trying to help. Thanks.

  Six

  The minute Charlotte steps out of her Uber and onto the circular driveway in front of her brother’s house, she can hear her nephew John Martin’s new drum set, which Amanda had warned her about.

  “I cannot tell you how happy I am to see your face!” Amanda wails from the doorway. She is dressed in her usual head-to-toe athleisure—a tight-fitting tank top and a pair of plum-colored leggings with mesh cutouts that crisscross over her thighs. “Please, for the love of all things good and holy, could you bring some estrogen into this place?”

  Charlotte hoists her roller suitcase up the stairs and when she gets to the top, Amanda embraces her tightly. “Your hair’s cute,” Amanda says, tugging at the ends. “Shorter?”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte says.

  “I wish I could do chin length,” Amanda says, wrapping a long ringlet around her finger. “But I don’t have your cheekbones.”

  “Well, I’d rather have your ass,” Charlotte says, slapping her sister-in-law kiddingly as they go inside. “So the music lessons are paying off then?” she jokes, noticing the vanilla Glade plug-ins scent that Amanda has never been able to give up no matter how many times she says it’s probably slowly killing them all.

  “Sixty-dollars an hour and this is what we get,” Amanda says, pointing toward the ceiling. “It’s all your brother’s doing, by the way. Drums! For a boy with a hyperactivity diagnosis!”

  “Actually, now that you say it, maybe it is good for him,” Charlotte says, though the banging is so loud that she can feel it in the soles of her shoes.

  “You sound just like Aaron. We did always say that he wanted one of the boys to be musical. I guess I just hoped for a pianist. A chill acoustic guitar player at the least.”

  “Where are the other two?” Charlotte puts her purse down on the upholstered bench just inside the entryway, trying to remember if it was here when she last visited or if it’s one of her sister-in-law’s latest purchases.

  “Oh, who knows!” Amanda rolls her eyes. “One’s probably sledgehammering the walls while the other stuffs the toilet with his clean laundry. Come on, let’s get you something cold to drink.”

  “The house looks good,” Charlotte says, following behind, reaching out and touching the leaves of an orchid on the round pedestal table in the middle of the bright foyer, where a huge staircase curves around one side of the room to the second floor. “I don’t know how you keep these floors so clean with three boys and two dogs,” she says, noticing the gleaming hardwoods as they walk down the hall to the back of the house.

  “It’s called a housekeeper,” Amanda says. “And also, while you’re out making the world a better place, I’m starring in my own private Swiffer commercial.”

  “Right,” Charlotte mutters, Amanda’s
words stinging despite her good intentions. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” Birdie barely managed a goodbye before she raced out of the house for school, never once making eye contact, and Charlotte was barely able to brush a kiss across her daughter’s cheek before she was gone. Jason, once again, left early for work, taking off without a goodbye while she was in the shower. She follows Amanda into the kitchen, and through the glass wall at the back of the room she notices a stripe of gray storm clouds lining the sky. “It looks like I got here just in time,” she says, looking out on the wide swath of green grass that leads to the Intracoastal Waterway, Aaron’s boat bobbing in the slip next to their dock. She pauses, gazing out at the yard, the tableau of grass and sea and marsh in the distance as much a part of her as her own fingerprints.

  “So what’s happening with you?” Amanda asks. “How’s Jason? Birdie? The boyfriend?”

  Charlotte wrinkles her nose.

  “That good?” Amanda says.

  “I’m just not sure Birdie’s ready for all of this.”

  “Oh, come on,” Amanda says. “She’s in high school now. Get over yourself.”

  Charlotte shrugs. “Everyone seems to be telling me that, but walk a mile in my shoes and then tell me what you think. Is John Martin showing any interest in anyone yet?”

  Amanda bursts out laughing. “Please,” she says. “He’s even more awkward than Aaron was at that age. He’s dating those drums. And his video game console.”

  “Well, just you wait,” Charlotte says, spinning around toward the kitchen. “Honestly, though, let’s change the subject. I could use a break from reality.”

  “Done,” Amanda says. “I’m so glad you got this talk booked down here. Anything to force you back home for a few days.”

  Charlotte raises an eyebrow. “You sound like my mother.”

  Amanda laughs. “True. But I’d still take your crazy one over the one I’ve got.”

  Charlotte reaches across the counter and squeezes Amanda’s arm. “Haven’t heard from her, I assume?”

  Amanda shakes her head. Charlotte and Amanda were born two months apart and spent nearly every moment of their childhood together, even after their mothers fell out when they were just starting elementary school. Amanda’s mother was an alcoholic, though they didn’t have the word for it when they were kids. All they knew was that she often slept past lunchtime and then, when she was awake, they got one of two people: Either she was ranting and raving, her unpredictable anger crackling over some nonsensical thing. Or she was the life of the party, dancing, laughing, yelling at them to turn the stereo louder, no matter that it might be four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and she was the only one up for a good time. Either way, dinner was never made, the mail went unopened, the laundry piled up on the bedroom floors, weeds took over the patchy yard. Her father got fed up and moved out, then moved back in, then moved out; establishing a pattern that would last for the entirety of Amanda’s childhood. Neither of her parents seemed to care what this was doing to their daughter, and she more or less moved in with Charlotte’s family, sleeping over several nights a week, and even spending holidays with them most years. Amanda’s mother never got sober, and is living, last they heard, somewhere in Texas. She’s refused every bit of help that Amanda and her father have tried to offer her, the occasional birthday card that shows up every few years the only acknowledgment that she cares for Amanda at all.

  The life she has now, Charlotte has thought, is Amanda’s direct attempt to right the way her childhood went off course. When they were growing up, Amanda had never so much as breathed in the direction of Charlotte’s brother, Aaron. But then, in their mid-twenties, while Aaron was working on his PhD at Georgia Tech, she started hanging around at his apartment. They were all in Atlanta then—Charlotte and Reese and Aaron all working on graduate degrees, and Amanda floating around, working a so-so marketing job, trying to figure out what to do next. Her mother was at her worst then, and she started spending a lot of time with Aaron, cooking meals for him when he stayed up all night working on his dissertation, doing his laundry. Really, it was her calling; she’d always been a nurturer, and as she and Aaron began to fall in love, she’d say to Charlotte: Do you think it’s awful, if the only thing I really want to do with my life is marry your brother and have some babies? Charlotte thought it actually made perfect sense. Amanda had devoted herself to creating the family home she’d always deserved, and she was really, really good at it.

  Everyone had always assumed that he would end up a professor somewhere, living in some little bungalow, but Aaron had become obsessed with an idea he had for a new kind of dispenser that pharmaceutical companies could use when bottling their medications at the factory stage. Everyone tuned out when he talked about it at Christmas dinner and Easter brunch, nodding absentmindedly while he rattled on about dosages and whatever else, but then he got a patent and started an LLC. It wasn’t long before the big pharma companies came calling, and Aaron’s little invention made him a fortune.

  “Where’s the talk again?” Amanda asks, sitting across the counter from her.

  “Tomorrow morning, downtown at the convention center. The Southern Women’s Show. I have no idea what to expect but hopefully the crowd will be friendly. My guess is that it will be heavy with the over-fifty set.”

  Amanda gives her a deadpan look. “Friendly to you? Don’t be humble. They’ll eat you up.”

  Charlotte reaches for a cracker and drags it through the little bowl of spicy pimento cheese that Amanda always makes for her, knowing it’s her favorite. “This is delicious, as always,” she says, reaching for a second cracker as soon as the first is in her mouth. When she looks up, Amanda is staring at her.

  “What?” she says, wiping cracker crumbs from her bottom lip.

  “You have a funny expression on your face. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she says. “You know . . . just tired from traveling, the end of the school year . . .”

  “Charlotte, come on,” Amanda says, tilting her head. “I can tell when something’s up.”

  She sighs and raps her knuckles on the counter. “Things have just been a little rocky at home. Nothing serious. Nothing . . .” She shakes her head. “It’s nothing. Really.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s fine. Jason and I just seem to be operating on different planes these days. We’ll figure it out.”

  Amanda gives her a concerned look. “Okay,” she says. “But if you need to—”

  “I’m fine, Amanda. Really.”

  “All right.”

  “Just don’t say anything, okay? To Aaron? I know you would never but sometimes he slips to my mother. And you know how Nancy gets.”

  “Oh, I know,” Amanda says, raising an eyebrow.

  “I need to steel myself. I haven’t seen her since Christmas.”

  Amanda laughs. “She says as much every time I see her.”

  Charlotte sucks in her breath. “Does my brother realize how lucky he is, having you to put up with her?”

  Her sister-in-law shrugs. “I know how to deal with her. Don’t forget, she practically raised me.”

  “Didn’t we raise ourselves?”

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” Amanda says. She puts her palms up, lifting them up and down like she’s weighing two options. “Raging alcoholic, raging narcissist . . .”

  Charlotte laughs but that word—alcoholic—makes her think of Jason and his silly accusation the night before. She’d been thinking about it: His own parents were virtual teetotalers, maybe treating themselves to a thimble-size glass of wine at a party or on an anniversary. In contrast, her own father had a cold beer on his boat most Saturday mornings. Charlotte and Jason, she decided, just had different perspectives. He’d never seen a real alcoholic like Amanda’s mother, who was literally falling-down drunk most of her waking hours. He didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Amanda turns to look at the clock on the far wall. “Speaking of your m
other, we’re expected there around six-thirty.”

  “Well, shit, that’s just forty-five minutes,” Charlotte says.

  “Don’t worry,” Amanda says, turning for the refrigerator. “I got your wine open for you already.” She twists the cork off a bottle of sauvignon blanc and pours them each a glass. “If you drink fast enough, you can have two before we go.”

  Charlotte takes the glass and sighs, thinking to herself how nice it is to be there, with somebody who truly understands her. “It’s good to be home,” she says, raising her glass.

  Seven

  Charlotte never in a million years would have thought that her mother would give up the home she was raised in, a grand Low Country–style place on the water that had been in her family for generations, but when she got engaged to Emmett, she did just that, moving into his row house downtown. Charlotte looks up at the chandelier looming over their heads, tiers and tiers of dangling crystals and gold curlicues. Trumpesque, she thinks, a notion that leads her to glance at Emmett, her mother’s husband, who still proudly sports a Lock Her Up bumper sticker on his F-150.

  He catches her looking at him. “So how much do they pay you to give these speeches?” he asks, taking a final forkful of chess pie and washing it down with his bourbon.