Perfect Happiness

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  Charlotte turns to look down the table at her mother, waiting for her to admonish Emmett for asking a question so gauche, a word that might be the crowning jewel of Nancy Dalton’s predictable vocabulary. Unlike her husband, she fancies herself the picture of propriety, a beacon of traditional good taste in a coarse, crass world. “Miss Manners,” Jason called her. Behind her back, of course, because he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  Nancy, who has dressed herself in a coral raw silk sheath dress with lipstick to match, smiles at Charlotte, waiting for her to say something. The narrow slice of pie in front of her (served on her spring china, ringed with little blue and yellow flowers, and only in service, as she would say, from Easter through Labor Day) sits untouched, save for the single indentation she has made at the tip of the slice with the tines of her fork. This is as close as she will come to indulging.

  “It’s enough to make it worth the trip,” Charlotte says, reaching for the wine bottle in the center of the table.

  “Aw, come on, you can tell me. We’re family!” Emmett says, licking his full lips. Charlotte peers at him—the gin blossom nose, the beady alligator eyes, and wonders for the millionth time why her mother has anything to do with this man.

  She knows her brother, sitting across from her, is thinking the same thing. Her mother started dating Emmett barely a year after they’d sprinkled her father’s ashes on the Wilmington River. She is a product of the time and place in which she’d been raised, and still believes, Charlotte is certain, that marriage is what makes a woman. She’s also sure that Nancy chose Emmett Dalton not because she fell in love with him, but because he was the only eligible bachelor in her social circle. Nancy and Emmett, like everyone else in Savannah, had known each other forever, and Emmett’s wife, who was on the flower committee at First Baptist with Nancy, had succumbed to a lung cancer diagnosis the year before they got together. Emmett’s line of work only sweetened the deal. The Dalton Jewelry chain has been a local fixture for generations, with a big, three-story shop that takes up a city block on Broughton Street, and Charlotte’s mother, now perpetually draped in diamonds, is a walking advertisement for the business. Aaron jokes that she ought to have armed guards with her whenever she leaves the house.

  “It’s a shame, given that they fly you down here and all, that Jason can’t join you,” Emmett says, his eyebrows creeping up into his forehead as he looks at her over the top of his glass.

  Charlotte feels a sudden rage, a fluttering in her chest that he has the unique ability to conjure. He just can’t help himself, she thinks, knowing that he only brought it up to be hostile. This is precisely why she would never mention that life is anything less than perfect at home. Nancy and Emmett are vultures, especially on the topic of her husband, and it would be like handing them a side of raw meat.

  For many, many years, Jason had ingratiated himself to her mother. He brought her gifts—boxes of chocolate, a patterned scarf that Charlotte helped him pick out, hand-painted note cards—like he was making an offering to the Gods, and still, she froze him out. She should have been pleased that Charlotte had a doting husband (doting at the time, at least), but Jason wasn’t good enough for her. He wasn’t, as she finally put it, during one of the many arguments leading up to Charlotte and Jason’s wedding, the proper match. Charlotte knew what she meant without her having to say anything, because she had alluded to the specifics dozens of times. Jason wasn’t southern. His career didn’t have the kind of earning potential that Nancy would prefer. And on and on. In short, he wasn’t Reese Tierney.

  “Jason can’t travel with me because he can’t take the time off work,” Charlotte says, steeling herself for the inevitable comeback.

  “Oh, of course,” her mother says, a thin smile spreading across her face. “Of course he has to work.”

  “Does he come home smelling of the animals?” Emmett says, glancing at Nancy before his eyes find Charlotte’s, his gaze like a housefly landing on her skin. This isn’t the first time he’s asked this question.

  “Of course not,” she says.

  “And how are his pandas?” her mother says, smirking at Emmett.

  “Fine,” Charlotte says, taking another gulp of her wine.

  “Oh, well, good,” her mother says. “How delightful.”

  Charlotte squeezes the linen napkin in her lap, which has been starched so severely that it feels like construction paper in her hands, and tells herself that at least Jason isn’t here to witness this. It used to bother her at first, how he complained about coming down here, how even though she understood, how even though he tried, for years, to let her mother’s commentary roll off his back (Nancy must have asked him ten times in their first year together why he couldn’t have at least considered veterinary school), he still let it get the best of him. No matter how many times she told him she was on his side—she’d been raised by the woman, after all—he still made Charlotte feel like it was her fault. Like there was something she could do to stop it. But of course her mother is unstoppable. Charlotte’s told him all of the horrible stories from her childhood. He knew that the reason her handwriting was so perfect was because her mother made her practice traditional cursive until her fingers ached from the effort. He knew why her posture was flawless. He knew why she never let her smile fade in social situations, always striving to make other people comfortable. He knew.

  “Well,” her mother says, lifting her chin, gazing around the table. “Hopefully Jason will be able to make it down at the end of the month. Do you think he can get the time off?”

  “The end of the month?” Charlotte asks. Is there something the end of the month? Amanda kicks her under the table, and when Charlotte looks at her, she sees the expression on her face, the wide-eyed I’m sorry I forgot to mention this.

  “Emmett and I are throwing a party. I wanted to tell you in person.”

  “A party?” Charlotte asks.

  “To celebrate the best ten years of my life,” Emmett says, tipping his glass toward Nancy.

  Charlotte’s heart sinks.

  “We’ve decided to have an anniversary party!” her mother says, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight. “A ten-year-anniversary gala!”

  Charlotte feels like she might be sick. An anniversary party. For her mother and Emmett. A familiar sensation falls over her, the one she feels so often lately, like an invisible weight is being plunked on her back. With everything she has going on right now, this is the last thing she needs.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Nancy says.

  “Momma, did you say a gala?” Aaron coughs out, and with good reason. Whatever Emmett doesn’t agree to cost-wise, she’ll just guilt Aaron into covering, the same way she did with the Jaguar convertible in the alleyway behind the row house.

  “Well, you know, just a big party,” their mother says, sliding the yellow diamond pendant back and forth along one of the chains draping her neck. “We’ve already booked the club.”

  Emmett snaps his fingers. “Nance, I just had the best idea! How about a vow renewal, too?”

  Oh, Jesus, Charlotte thinks. She looks at Amanda across the table. Simultaneously, they raise their glasses, both to drink and to hide their expressions of horror, but Nancy misreads it.

  “Oh, yes!” she says, putting her hand to her chest. “Let’s have a toast, everyone!”

  Emmett stands slowly, holding on to the edge of the table as he raises himself up. “To my bride!” he says.

  “Oh, Emmett! How romantic!” Nancy says.

  Charlotte drains her glass. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her brother squirm in his seat.

  “Charlotte!” Nancy says.

  Her head snaps toward her mother. “Yes?”

  “I know! You can help me write my vows. That is . . .” She pauses for emphasis. “Assuming you can make it.”

  “Of course, Momma,” she says, kicking Amanda this time, the way she has so many times over the years. “Of course, we’ll be there.”

  Later, in the co
coon of Aaron and Amanda’s guest suite, Charlotte climbs up onto the four-poster bed, remembering how Amanda commissioned it from a craftsman in Asheville after falling in love with a similar one on their honeymoon in Indonesia. It occurs to her that if almost anyone else—say, Dayna Cunningham, the most obvious example—told her about doing such a thing, it would make her want to throw up, but Amanda’s extravagances never bother her. Perhaps because she knows how much Amanda deserves and appreciates the nice life she has now.

  She pushes her laptop aside for a moment, not quite ready to go over her notes for tomorrow’s talk, and lies back on the pillows, grateful for the four-hundred-count Egyptian cotton sheets, the locally made Lake pajamas that Amanda had waiting for her on the settee, and the soundproofing that her brother put in around the guest room. After they got home from dinner, she’d spent an hour catching up with her nephews, meaning that she sat beside them while they played Fortnite, and the electronic beeps and dings are still pinging in her head.

  As usual after an evening with her mother, she’s exhausted. On the drive home, while they rehashed the dinner and their mother’s insufferability and Emmett’s overall horridness (he was exactly the kind of guy who’d get caught in a prostitution ring, Amanda joked), she came precariously close to telling them more about Jason and how this rut between them felt different, like something they might possibly not make their way out of. There was a part of her that wanted to unload everything—about Jason, about Birdie, about her own constant exhaustion and stress, how some days the simplest chores—putting dishes in the sink, making a phone call—felt insurmountable. But then she heard the familiar refrain in her head, her own voice sounding so much like her mother’s: What do you have to complain about? Fake it till you make it. Action first. Smile your way through it. She flicked away a tear in the dark backseat.

  They came to a stoplight and she noticed how pretty the Spanish moss hanging from an old oak in someone’s front yard looked, a silhouette against the navy sky, and she gave in to the distraction. She snapped a quick picture while Aaron prattled on about Emmett’s shortcomings (his pinkie ring, his bourbon breath) and uploaded it to her Instagram. Spanish moss, still taking my breath away forty-four years later, she typed. Love being back in my hometown. #savannah #georgia #georgiaonmymind #family #nofilter.

  She reaches for her phone on the nightstand and notices that there’s a missed call from Jason, who must have tried her while she was in the bathroom getting ready for bed. She looks at the time—nearly midnight—and dials him back.

  “Hey.” He answers immediately.

  “Is everything okay?” she says.

  “Uh,” he says. “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “What?” Her stomach drops. “Jason, what’s going on?”

  “I just got a weird email about an hour ago. From Birdie’s coach. Did you see it?”

  “Birdie’s coach?” she says, feeling a tingling in her fingers. “What did it say?” She lunges across the bed for her laptop, cradling her phone between her chin and her shoulder while she hurries to log in to her email account.

  “It said she missed practice. Did she have something going on that I forgot about?”

  “No!” Charlotte says, the tingling moving up her arms, down her spine. “No! She didn’t have anything.” She punches the power button on the laptop. “I’m waiting for my computer to come on. Do you have it right there? Read it word for word.”

  “Yeah, it’s right here,” he says, a biting urgency in his voice that she can’t place. Is he irritated with me, she thinks, or the situation? “Okay. Here—” She hears rustling, then his voice on speakerphone. “It says, ‘I’m writing to check on Birdie. She wasn’t at practice today and I want to make sure everything is okay. As you know, we have a big match later this week. If she’s sick and/or unable to play, I’ll need to readjust the roster. Please let me know at your earliest convenience.’”

  Charlotte pictures the coach, an affable guy in his mid-twenties, originally from New Zealand, whose curly hair that poofs out behind the Adidas baseball cap he always wears makes him look like a young Pete Sampras. In her effort to be unlike the overbearing parents she deals with at Georgetown, she has spoken to him only casually, once or twice at the start of the season. Birdie adores him, more than most of the coaches she’s had over the years. But even with the ones she didn’t particularly like, she loved the sport too much, and was too responsible and conscientious a kid, to just up and skip practice. This is about as unlike her as could be.

  “I don’t understand, Jason,” she says, her eyes scanning the email now that it’s in front of her. “What did she say? Where would she have gone?” she asks, images of Birdie and Tucker lurking in the shadows of her brain. “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t say anything because I didn’t ask her,” he says. “She was already asleep when I got the email. But, Char, when I got home from work, she was freshly showered, just like she’d been to tennis. And when I asked her about practice, she said it was fine.”

  “Shit,” Charlotte says. “Shit!”

  “I know.”

  “You know who she must have been—”

  “I know,” he says. “I know, Charlotte.”

  “Dammit!” she says. “I’m tempted to have you wake her up.”

  “I’m not waking her—”

  “I’m not asking you to. But I’m tempted,” she says. “To show her how serious this is.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I know. Do you think there’s any other possibility? Tucker would have had lacrosse practice, so . . .”

  “He must have skipped, too. Or, I don’t know . . . What did you tell the coach?”

  “Nothing yet. I wanted to talk to her first. Maybe there’s a possibility she had to stay after at school for something. Maybe there was a test or a . . .” His voice trails off.

  “No,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “All right, well,” Charlotte says, sighing deeply. “We need to get back to him soon.”

  “I’m aware,” he says. “I can write him back right now. Or call first thing in the morning. I know you’re busy.”

  “Jason, I wasn’t—”

  “I can handle it, Charlotte.”

  “Okay,” she says, not wanting to bicker. “My talk’s at eleven tomorrow. Update me as soon as you can.”

  “Yup.”

  As soon as they say good night and hang up, she finds her way to Instagram to check Tucker’s account. No new post, but when she clicks on his story, there’s a video of him hopscotching to the lacrosse goal in his yard, making a shot, and then doing a blooper-reel-like roll across the grass. Somebody else is taking the video, and in the last few seconds of it, she hears an unmistakable blip of a sound: Birdie’s laugh. She watches it again, then again, then again.

  She reaches for her phone. “Jason,” she says, as soon as he answers. “I just watched his Instagram story. She was at his house. I could hear her laughing.”

  “Okay,” he says, his disappointment evident in his voice. “All right, I’ll call you first thing, right after I talk to her.”

  “Should we get in touch with the Cunninghams?” she says. “Should I message Dayna?”

  “Charlotte, I . . . What is that going to—?”

  “Never mind,” she says.

  After they hang up, she watches the video over and over, racking her brain for an explanation or excuse, but of course there isn’t one. At least not anything other than the fact that her daughter is fourteen, and this is what teenagers do. Other teenagers, she thinks, a sickening anger creeping over her as she considers that what she saw is only fifteen seconds of the afternoon that Tucker and Birdie spent together. She’s tempted to send him a direct message through the app but talks herself out of it. The repercussions are too great. And then she has another thought: If he actually pays attention to who watches his stories—with over fourteen hundred followers, she’s really not sure—he must know that she’s watching, and that’s
even worse, because it means he doesn’t care.

  She sits there in the silent bedroom, trying to figure out what to do, then stands, nervous energy pulsing through her veins. She knows she shouldn’t, but . . . What’s the big deal? she asks herself. I need to sleep. It will help.

  The kitchen is dark. She tiptoes through, thankful for the soft slippers Amanda keeps in the guest room for her, and finds the bottle of sauvignon blanc from earlier this evening. She pours a bit into her water glass (why dirty another glass?), and then, judging the amount, pours a little more. She takes a deep drink, the crisp tang tasting of relief, and slips back upstairs. She already feels better.

  Her photo of the Spanish moss has nearly four thousand likes, she sees, closing the bedroom door.

  Gorgeous!

  Stunning!

  Wow, so jealous!

  She climbs on top of the bed, scrolling through the comments, trying to ward off her craving to watch Tucker’s video two, four, ten more times. A few of the commenters mention that they’ll be at the talk tomorrow, and she tells herself she ought to go to sleep. She has to speak to two thousand people about her tenets for a happy life, rattling off her canned advice about action over feelings. A year ago, this would have spurred her to overprepare, read through her notes again and again while she paced the bedroom, waking up extra-early to make sure she was ready. Now she just can’t wait to have it over with. She takes another sip from her glass and notices a little red icon appear on the top corner of her screen, indicating that she has a new message.

  @KGpartyof5

  Fuck, she thinks. Just what I need.

  So I got off my shift at the restaurant where I work just in time to get home and have my oldest kid tell me that she wants to kill herself, the message begins. She’s fifteen, and she told me she’s been looking up ways to do it on the internet. Want to tell me how to act my way out of that one?

  She puts her hand to her mouth, and before she can think not to, she responds: No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how you must feel.

  The response comes back almost instantly: Of course you can’t. You don’t know problems like mine.