The phone rings again, Nancy’s name on the dashboard screen like a warning sign, and Charlotte finally answers, knowing that if she doesn’t, her mother may just call back. They haven’t spoken in several days because of her trip, and according to texts from both Amanda and Aaron, this vow renewal has turned her mother into an unbearable silver-haired Bridezilla.
“Well, finally,” Nancy says, in lieu of How are you? Or How was your trip?
“Hello, Mother,” Charlotte says.
“You’re tough to get ahold of.”
“Remember, I had that trip out to—” she starts but Nancy cuts her off.
“Even I have time to make a phone call, dear, and I’m planning a major event.”
Charlotte takes a deep breath. “Everything going okay?” she asks.
“Oh, splendid. It’s going to be fabulous.”
“Good,” Charlotte says. “I’m sure it will be.”
“So we’re having dinner tonight at Husk and I was just starting to plan an outfit,” she says. “And I was sitting here in my dressing room and it occurred to me that I haven’t asked you yet about what you’re thinking about wearing to my vow renewal.” It’s not lost on Charlotte that every time her mother brings up the vow renewal, she refers to it as her own, and not hers and Emmett’s. “You know, it would be nice if we all coordinated,” her mother says. Charlotte pictures her sitting in the anteroom between her bedroom and master bath, enough makeup for a magazine photo shoot laid out on the glass table in front of her.
“Remind me what your colors are again?”
Nancy sighs. “Charlotte, we talked about this just last week.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she says, remembering how she’d tuned out during her drive into work that day. It had been so easy. She’d hardly had to say a word during the monologue about the merits of silk shantung table coverings versus linen.
“Well, it’s spring down here, you know,” Nancy says. “Goodness, I saw your weather up there,” she adds. “Still just in the sixties? I don’t know how you stand it. So I think I’ve settled on a lilac and then a very, very subtle vanilla to complement it. You know, I’ve always looked good in purple.”
“Mm-hmm,” Charlotte says. “The color of royalty,” she says, knowing her mother will love such a comment.
Nancy laughs. “Yes, yes!” she says. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Marie Antoinette,” Charlotte mutters.
“I’m sorry?” Nancy says.
“Never mind,” Charlotte says. “So if I do a deep blue dress, will that work for you?” she asks, thinking of the Veronica Beard dress she borrowed from Rent the Runway but didn’t end up wearing for the Montana trip.
“Oh, honey. It’s not a funeral. Can’t you think of a happier color?” Nancy says, her emphasis on the h-word. Another one of her digs. “I had this lavender in mind . . . Kind of the same tone as that lavender dress you wore to your senior prom with Reese? Oh, it was darling.”
Charlotte feels a burn in the back of her throat at the mention of Reese’s name, though she shouldn’t be surprised. Her mother still has their prom picture in a little oval silver frame on an antique oak table in her living room, Charlotte in a strapless Jessica McClintock, her hair a weird yellow-white from the Sun-In that she and Amanda had applied before they laid out on Charlotte’s dock each day after school in anticipation of the event.
“I’ll find something,” Charlotte says.
“I’ll send you a link,” Nancy says, finally circling around to what she wanted to say all along. “I have the perfect thing. Now, Birdie and Jason . . .”
“I don’t know yet,” Charlotte says, swallowing, not wanting to tell her mother that the reason her family isn’t coming with her is not because of Birdie’s imaginary “big match” but because Jason wants space, and she doesn’t want everyone back home finding out about it, which would almost certainly happen even if she just brought Birdie. “You know, it’s the height of Birdie’s tennis season, and her team is quite dependent on her,” she says, her mind flashing back to the meeting at school the day before. “And Jason—” She pauses, imagining the field day that Emmett would have if she made up any sort of zoo-related excuse, but goes for it anyway. “He has a lot going on at work right now.”
Her mother is silent on the other end. One beat, and then another, and then another. “Oh, Charlotte,” she says. “Your priorities . . .”
Charlotte closes her eyes. After a lifetime of it, her mother’s commentary shouldn’t hurt anymore, but even at her age she still pines for the kind of comforting, cookie-baking mother she never had. She thinks again of Birdie, hoping that her daughter never feels this way about her, and wishes she could believe that she’s done everything she could to be the kind of mother she didn’t have.
“Aaron and Amanda’s boys will all be in khaki summer suits. She found the most darling lavender-and-white bow ties. Just perfect . . .” Nancy says, the words, they both know, like little drops of arsenic being deposited on Charlotte’s tongue.
“Let’s assume for now that it’s just me,” Charlotte says. “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
“Talk to Amanda about a dress,” she replies. “She’ll know the right thing. She always does.”
“Okay, I will,” Charlotte says, thinking of Amanda’s noisy house, the messy boys leaving trails of tortilla chip crumbs everywhere, shouting and wrestling, drums banging, balls being thrown despite Amanda’s warnings. And then she thinks of her own deadly silent house, what she’s about to arrive home to, Birdie locked in her room, Jason not there at all. “I’ll talk to Amanda. You’ll have final approval.”
“Oh, Charlotte,” Nancy says, laughing. “You know better than to lie to me.”
Seventeen
Jason is sitting at the ancient Dell computer in the basement of his childhood home. His parents have turned one corner of it into an office, delineating the space with an old green carpet remnant and a row of metal file cabinets where his mother still methodically files all of the paper copies of their bills after she pays them each month.
He takes a sip of his beer, turning in his chair, a shaft of late afternoon sunlight beaming through the little rectangular window at the top of the wall in front of him. Beside him is the old couch facing the TV where he and Tate played their first Nintendo, where he and his friends slept until noon on Saturdays in high school, where he made out with a girl for the first time.
Being here is horribly depressing, and several days into the so-called break, he’s started to think he may have made a terrible mistake. Charlotte doesn’t seem to think so, though. She’s been oddly cheery since he left, her voice taking on a chipperness the few times they’ve talked that makes him uneasy, in part because it doesn’t seem like she’s faking it. Their conversations so far have been solely logistical, neither one of them broaching the actual problem of their relationship, treating it like a bruise they know is going to hurt if they touch it.
This week they took turns picking up Birdie, who barely speaks to either of them, making him feel even worse about what he’s done and worried about what lasting impact this might have. Two days ago, after he met her in the parking lot behind the gym, where other kids were sauntering off to their various practices, arms swinging, heads tipped back in laughter, he tried to get her to go out for frozen yogurt, or to the driving range over on Hains Point, something they used to love to do together. He knew, on some level, that it was wrong to treat her suspension from the tennis team and the free time it afforded her as an excuse to have some fun, but he wanted to make it better, this thing that he’d done. He wanted everything to get better. Finally she asked if they could go to Bluemont Park for a little while, and he thought she might want to go for a walk or a run, maybe talk some things over, but instead, when they got out of the car, she slung her racket bag over her shoulder and marched determinedly to the tennis courts, where she hit balls for forty-five minutes straight, never saying a word to him, banging e
ach shot into the wall with impossible force.
When Charlotte called earlier, she said she had just been planting some flowers in the front yard, and he pictured her, her favorite Emory cap pulled low over her eyes, singing to herself the way she sometimes used to when she would garden. She sounded so relaxed, and there was music playing in the background; country, he could tell, which he had never been able to stomach so she usually listened to it alone, in her car or when she went running. She asked if it would be okay with him if Birdie went to Hannah’s to sleep over tomorrow night. With all of the lightness that would suggest she was talking about something as inconsequential as the sandwich she was about to eat for lunch, she said, “I think it’s fine if we give her a pass, Jason. What we’ve done to her this past week is punishment enough, not to mention what she’s probably been through at school. You know how cruel kids can be.”
He looks up and stares at the computer screen, clenching his jaw as he scrolls through the site he googled a little earlier. The face staring back at him looks so happy, so smug.
He rubs his eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping well. Last night, he tried moving into the guest room. He’d been staying in his childhood bedroom, but he discovered, not that it should have surprised him, that it felt truly pathetic to be forty-four years old and sleeping in your old twin bed, under the same quilt where you first learned how to jack off, with the same soccer trophies on the shelves, the same Heather Locklear poster on the wall. He’d said as much to his brother on the phone late last night. It was just past midnight in Arlington, only nine out in Oregon, and Tate was walking to that same sushi place where he and Paul are regulars. Tate snickered that it was funny how their mother hadn’t touched Jason’s room since he left home, but had no problem turning Tate’s room into a sewing room. Jason said that it was only because Tate’s room had the good windows, but they both knew that wasn’t true, and they laughed, making guesses about whether either of their parents ever caught on to the fact that the Rambo poster that had hung in Tate’s room for the entirety of his teen years was purchased because of Sylvester Stallone and the beefcakey picture of him, skin glistening and that headband around his forehead, and not because Tate had any interest in the actual movie.
Jason kept waiting for him to say something about Charlotte, to confirm that he’d made the right decision to take his advice and try a sabbatical, but Tate was oddly silent about it. When they got off the phone, Jason wondered if, in some small way, Tate was pleased that this had happened to him, if only because it might show their parents, who’ve never fully embraced his partnership, that he is every bit as stable and committed to their family values as Jason is, maybe even more so.
Jason looks at the screen again and takes another sip of his beer. When he first saw the name in bold at the top of Charlotte’s email inbox that other night, it took a few beats for him to register it. And then he saw the subject line, a simple Re: Hey, telling him that she had composed the email he was responding to, her “Hey” telling him, like a burn singeing his skin, that there’s a familiarity between them that is recent.
He’d walked into the office after Birdie had slammed her bedroom door, after he and Charlotte had stood there in the hallway, staring at each other, the weight of what their daughter had just experienced settling over them. He’d paced in the kitchen for a while after that, not knowing what to do with himself, and when he went upstairs to brush his teeth, he heard Charlotte crying on the other side of their bathroom door despite the running faucet, which never muffled noise like she thought it did. He went back downstairs to turn off the lights and lock up the house for the night, and seeing that the lamp in the office was still on, he went to turn it off and collect Charlotte’s teacup from earlier.
And then his eyes landed on the computer and he saw the email. Reese Tierney. Re: Hey. Reese Tierney, MD, he sees now, looking at the home page for Reese’s medical practice. He remembered vaguely that Reese had become a plastic surgeon, a factoid he’d forgotten because it was inconsequential. Reese Tierney was a relic from his wife’s past, he thought, irrelevant to the present, as pertinent to their lives today as the old high school yearbooks he’d found in his childhood dresser a few days ago.
He clicked open Reese’s email and scrolled down, the oxygen seeming to leave his lungs as he read what his wife had written her ex-fiancé just an hour earlier, about how he made her feel, about her mistakes. He takes a swig of his beer now, thinking of what Reese had replied. I’m here for you, always, the last line said, and then he’d used the salutation Yours, which sounded like a declaration, staking ground.
He’d known before he read Charlotte’s email that she was distracted. He knew that she felt stretched too thin and scattered, because she’d said as much over the past several years, and it had shown in the way that she pinballed through the day, often with a glass of wine nearby to soften the edges. He looks at her Instagram now, where he sees the container of flowers she’s planted, pink and white, green leaves hanging down the side of a pot, captioned “Spring’s my favorite,” and his blood roils. How can she do this? How can she compartmentalize like this when he is sitting here seething?
She wrote to Reese that she had humiliated herself in Montana, that some twenty-something kid named Leo had to walk her back to her room. He couldn’t wrap his brain around it, he’d had to read the message several times before the words made sense to him, because he had never thought his hyper-capable wife could blow it the way she said she had. (“Leo Montana” he’d googled in stupid desperation, finding only horoscopes from the local paper as a result.) Worse, she had chosen to confess the disastrousness of her trip not to him but to her ex-fiancé. She felt guilty, she said in the email, for her behavior, for flubbing her talk, for drinking so much, and for turning to him instead of her own husband. But not guilty enough to do something about it, it seemed.
I’m here for you, always, Reese replied.
Jason had thought that the break would give them a chance to sort through their thoughts, to come back to their marriage with fresh eyes. A few weeks, he thought, but maybe, he worried now, he was just giving Charlotte the out she wanted, deep down. She sounds lighter than she has in so long, and maybe it’s because he’s the deadweight.
He closes out the browser, making Reese’s face disappear from the screen. What else is he going to do? He can’t sit here any longer. He can’t wait for her to come confess to him, and actually, he thinks, his frustration brewing, he’s spent enough of the past few days thinking about her. It’s not doing him any good. He tugs the skinny chain that turns off the lightbulb hanging from the basement ceiling and starts up the creaky wooden stairs, fishing his phone from his pocket.
“Hey,” Jamie answers as he’s closing the door to the basement and walking into the kitchen. “What’s up?”
“Not much,” he says. “I know it’s last minute but any chance you want to grab dinner? Pizza or something? I remember you said that the kids are at your parents’ for the weekend. I can head toward you.”
“Oh,” she says, the slightest hesitation in her voice, and he suddenly feels embarrassed. This was a stupid idea. “You know, I’d love to, but I’m actually heading out the door.”
“No,” he says. “It was last minute. No problem.”
“You okay?” she says. “Living it up at your bachelor pad?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, scratching his head, thinking that he shouldn’t have told Jamie about the break. He feels pathetic now, imagining himself sitting in front of the TV alone again tonight, a container of some greasy takeout balanced on his lap. “Where are you headed?” he asks, trying to sound casual.
She laughs. “Actually, I’m meeting Heath for drinks.”
“Heath? The dad-band ukulele player?”
“Yes,” she says. “And you know, I have to tell you, I went and saw them play the other night at a bar and they weren’t half-bad. The ukulele thing is quirky, one hundred percent, but actually weirdly endearing.”
&nbs
p; “Huh,” he says, surprised by this development.
“I know,” she says. “Who woulda thought? Hey—” She laughs. “Does Birdie still have that birth control pamphlet lying around? I might need some info.”
He sucks in his breath.
“Too soon?” she says. “Sorry, Jason. That was bad. I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s fine,” he says, forcing a chuckle. “Totally fine. Go, have fun,” he says, sinking into the couch in the living room and reaching for the remote. “You deserve it.”
“You know, I do!” she says, with a little too much exuberance. “That’s exactly what my therapist keeps telling me and I think I’m finally starting to get the message. Thanks, Jason. I hope you have a good night.”
“Thanks, yeah, I will,” he says, swallowing. “All good here.”
“Well, call me if you need anything.”
“No, I’m good,” he says. “All good. Have fun!”
* * *
Charlotte ends up having Birdie’s leftover macaroni and cheese from the day before for dinner. She’d had grand plans to try to enjoy her Saturday night alone, to try to see it as an opportunity to pamper herself and relax, practice self-care, like she’s advised her readers to do so many times. But ever since she dropped Birdie off at Stephanie’s house, biting her tongue to keep herself from reminding her daughter that they are not to leave the premises, she’s been frittering away, puttering around, biding her time.
She pours herself a glass of the rosé that she bought at Whole Foods this afternoon, when she and Birdie were picking up groceries. She’d slipped it into the cart while Birdie was browsing the cookie case in the bakery department, tucking it under a plastic clamshell of microgreens just as a text came in on her phone. Seeing the name, she turned away from her daughter, muttering something about how she’d forgotten something over in the dairy aisle, and furtively typed back to Reese that she was looking forward to talking later. He replied that he’d call her at nine. She slipped her phone back into her tote and proceeded to let Birdie fill the cart with whatever she wanted—the fifteen-dollar tubs of sliced mango they never bought because they were rip-offs, the chocolate–peanut butter cereal that’s essentially candy for breakfast, several bags of chips, a couple of bath bombs, a new shampoo.
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