The First Husband

by Laura Dave

  I nodded and started to dry off my own hands. “Right . . .”

  “Also, when you have a chance, I’d like my scarf back.”

  Then she threw her paper towel in the trash, and exited. Leaving me to look in the mirror. All by myself.

  19

  Emily Putney was waiting there, in the parking lot, when we got back to the school. Standing outside even though it had started snowing again, standing in her perfect parka and fur-filled boots, waiting to walk the twins home and spend the afternoon with them.

  From my seat in the back row, from my seat by the emergency exit, I watched as Gia jumped off the bus, and rushed over to give Emily a hug hello—her chin cupping Emily’s shoulder.

  As Gia pulled back, they started talking to each other, hurriedly and happily, their faces still so close together I thought they might kiss.

  I tried to make out what they were saying to each other, but I couldn’t. And truthfully, it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, I knew it didn’t began—or end—with either of them singing my praises.

  “Fantastic,” I said, looking at them out the window, then looking up at the emergency exit and seriously considering pulling its firm red handle, willing it to carry me out of there.

  And then, as proud as I am to admit this, while they were still busy talking, I slid off the bus—and I do mean slid: utilizing two three-foot-five-inch-tall girls as coverage, utilizing their matching Little Mermaid lunch boxes to cover my face, a Dora the Explorer backpack to block my side.

  I knew I should have said hello. I should have tried to engage Emily, but I didn’t have it in me. Not right then. I was too overwhelmed. And too scared about what she might or might not say, too scared it would be something else that would make Griffin feel even more like a stranger.

  Instead, I took the long way home—the back roads of the back roads—not feeling the cold wind, not feeling too much of anything. Which felt like a marker of many things. A good sign, sadly, wasn’t one of them.

  And so I was a little out of it, and more than a little surprised to get back to the house and find someone sitting there. On the front steps. In a long, ridiculously white ski jacket—and a matching white hat, big pom-pom on top.

  I walked closer to the steps, preparing to find another Putney waiting to surprise me—a Putney eager to offer another version of how I was an enormous invasion into a life that long proceeded me.

  But I didn’t find another Putney there in the silly, all-white ensemble, puffing out from all angles.

  I found Jordan there. My Jordan. Looking more than a little like a life-size snowball.

  I stood in front of her.

  “I’m going incognito,” she said. “I’m afraid to be spotted by anyone I don’t want to be spotted by.”

  This, she said, instead of hello. Instead of “How are you?” This, as though it actually made any sort of sense.

  “Is it really you?” I asked.

  “It’s really me, and it’s really fucking freezing out here,” she said. “I’ve never been this cold in my life. On top of which, I’m thinking that you and I have had a slight misunderstanding.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, Go on a date with him. Not marry him.”

  “Oh, is that what happened? I’ve been wondering.”

  She was quiet for a minute, as we looked at each other. “I also thought you said you were in Williamstown,” she said. “Didn’t you? I’ve been driving through Massachusetts all day.”

  “Everyone hears Williamstown,” I said.

  Jordan looked around herself, taking in the cold, which felt colder in the unrelenting quiet.

  “I can understand why,” she said.

  It didn’t matter that I knew I was about to get badly yelled at for disappearing on her, for flat-out ignoring her phone calls, sending shoddy e-mails in response to hers, for acting as if that was something we’d ever historically done to each other.

  None of that mattered. I sat down on the step beside her, resting my head against hers. She didn’t say anything, and I knew she was going to let me. She was going to let me rest there until I was ready to tell her where I’d been.

  But just then, Sammy and Dexter came bounding down the road—both of them with enormous double-scoop chocolate ice-cream cones cupped in their mitten-covered hands—the matching treats dangerously close to toppling over. Emily was a good half block behind them.

  Jordan looked at the boys. Then back at me. Then back at them again.

  “Please,” she said, “tell me they’re not yours.”

  20

  I went upstairs to freshen up: put on some warm gloves, leave my wedding ring on the beside table, my fingers too thinned and red from the cold for me to wear it. Especially where we were going. We took Jordan’s rental car, and I drove us high up into the Berkshires—pointing out Griffin’s restaurant (without stopping) on the way out of town, pointing out the Montague Bookmill, a charming bookstore in Deerfield (as though I’d been inside, even once), and heading to a beautiful mountain trail in Ashley Falls that I’d driven by on my only “Checking Out” trip to the area, the year before—and that I now felt compelled to pretend I visited with some frequency.

  It felt important to me to show Jordan something beautiful in my new world, even if it involved subjecting both of us to twodegree weather.

  From the bottom of the mountain hike, we stared up at the entire two-mile trail, into the clouds, covered in fairly recent snow, the wind moving around us increasingly quickly.

  “Are you kidding me?” Jordan said.

  “It’s worth it,” I said.

  This, as though I knew.

  By the time we came to the top of the mountain, we were breathless and freezing—but not too freezing to notice that it was, in fact, the perfect spot that I’d hoped it would be: placing us at eye level with the crystal blue sky, leaving us to look down over the trees and the untouched snow, and the frozen river far below us.

  “Okay, it’s stunning up here,” she said. “I admit it. It’s the nicest view I’ve ever seen.”

  “I know.” I looked down the mountain at the beauty all around us. “It’s inimitable.”

  We sat down on the bench and I handed her my thermos of water. “If I say I agree with you and that I forgive you for using the word inimitable,” she asked, “can we go back down the mountain now?”

  I smiled. “Maybe.”

  She took a long sip of the water. Then she took another. “I know you think I’m going to judge you,” she said.

  “Not true,” I said. “I think you’re already judging me.”

  “So then why aren’t we at a bar yet?”

  I laughed, a little louder than could be mistaken for genuine. Then, she turned toward me.

  “Look, Annie . . .”

  “Don’t start that way,” I said. “Please don’t start that way. In the history of the world, no one has ever said anything good to me after starting with look, Annie. And something tells me this isn’t going to be the first time.”

  “I was just going to say that I get it,” she said. “I do. You got screwed, royally, and made a major decision because of it. An impulsive decision. One you wouldn’t have made under normal circumstances. Ever.”

  I tilted my head, toward her. “And how is this supposed to make me feel better?” I asked.

  “I’m just saying that you’re human. You wanted to be the one to move on quicker than Nick did, to prove that you’re more okay. So update your Facebook page. New status: Married. Let them put up that dumb red heart beside it, proving to the entire world you’re fine. You’re happy. You’re content.” She paused. “Then come home.”

  I shook my head. “That isn’t what this is about,” I said. “I don’t even have a Facebook page.”

  She gave me a look. “Then I really don’t know where to start.”

  “Jordan, I know what this all must look like to you,” I said, motioning around myself. “But I’m doing great. I’m happy. Yes, it
takes a minute to fit into a new life. But that’s par for the course. You can’t tell me it was all smooth sailing when you and Simon got married. Not with Sasha and his ex-wife and all the rest of it.”

  “It was smoother than this.”

  I shook my head. “I’m happy,” I said.

  “So you keep saying.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  She looked right at me. “If you’re so happy,” she said, “then why do you look so sad?”

  That stopped me. And, before I knew it, I was crying. I was sitting with my oldest friend on top of a crazy mountain, crying about all of it. Losing my job and being inundated by Griffin’s crazy family and being hated by his Town & Country ex-girlfriend and living in a town that felt like everyone else’s home but mine. I cried about how, in all the craziness, I felt disconnected from him. And from myself.

  “The truth is that I get that the restaurant is opening soon,” I said. “I knew that was going to be the deal. But on top of everything that’s going on, it’s just making me feel . . .”

  “Like you don’t belong here?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “A little like I may not belong anywhere.”

  Jordan looked confused, but I wasn’t sure how to say it out loud so that it made more sense than that. I was just becoming keenly aware in all the movement in my life recently—all the movement forever, really—I’d never stopped long enough to know what was going to make me happy. To know the difference between moving around and getting somewhere. And now that I had come to a full stop, what if I didn’t have the tools to hold on to it—something like stability, like happiness—even if I wanted to?

  “So,” Jordan said. “Here’s the other thing maybe you can help me wrap my head around. How does the girl who goes to Williams-Sonoma seven times before purchasing a coffeepot end up married to someone whose middle name she doesn’t even know?”

  “Griffin doesn’t have a middle name.”

  “That you know,” she said.

  That made me laugh, for real this time. I started wiping at my tears, trying to pull it back together.

  “You’ve got no one to blame but yourself,” I said. “You’re the one who told me to be the opposite of myself.”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  I looked at her, dazed. The basis of the whole new me, the advice that I was certain was going to save my life, and she didn’t even remember giving it.

  “That is going to kind of hurt your credibility for a while,” I said.

  “Let me just ask you one more question then,” she said. “Do you love him?”

  I didn’t have to pause, not even for a second.

  “Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

  At the end of everything I told her, there was also that. Maybe I had fallen into this life on some kind of impulse, resulting from my last one falling so stupendously apart, resulting from my feeling like I had something to prove in the aftermath of that. But there was this too. I loved Griffin. With all of my heart. However I had gotten here, I felt that in my core. Which immediately made me feel better.

  But then Jordan pulled her hat down lower on her head, shielding her eyes.

  “Then if that’s true, or you think that that’s true, you’re going to have to work really hard to hear this,” she said. “You need to leave him.”

  “Excuse me? Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Did you hear what you just said?” she asked. “This isn’t the right life for you, Annie. Stuck in the middle of nowhere. Stuck anywhere. You need freedom. And lots of it.”

  “Says who?”

  “Everyone!”

  “Maybe everyone should spend more than ten minutes inside of my life before making that assessment,” I said. “Maybe freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

  She tilted her head. “Did you really just quote Janis Joplin?”

  “Maybe!” I said, gathering steam. And volume.

  In response, Jordan got calmer and quieter, like she was talking to a crazy person, like that crazy person was me.

  “All I’m saying is this is a reversible error,” she said. “You can get it annulled. I can do that for you.”

  I shook my head, feeling myself getting mad. “I really can’t believe you,” I said.

  “Why are you so defensive, then?” she asked. “If I’m not at least a little right, there’s no reason to be defensive.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, standing up, anxious to get away from her before it was too late, knowing we were about to go there. To the place where we both went too far and were inevitably sorry later.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “I don’t want to talk to you about this anymore,” I said. “I would never talk about your life that way.”

  “Well, I’m not you. I’m a royal bitch, at least some of the time. But that’s not news. Also not news: I love you more than anything. And don’t pretend for a second you doubt that all of a sudden. This is about you, and what’s good for you. This isn’t about my brother.”

  I looked down at her. “He’s your brother again?”

  She had no trouble holding my gaze. “My point’s the same either way, Annie. I want for you what you want for yourself.”

  I motioned around myself at the interminable mountain. “This is what I want for myself,” I said. “Did it occur to you that just maybe I found exactly what I’ve always wanted?”

  “Since when is this what you wanted?” she said. “I’m sorry, but I won’t sit around and let you get away with getting less than what you really want: till death do you part. Just because during a moment of Nick ’s slight confusion, you decided it was the right decision to move to the middle of nowhere with Chef Boyardee.”

  I didn’t know where to start, with all of that, but I shored myself up to start somewhere. “First of all, this is not the middle of nowhere,” I said. “There is a state university nearby, if you didn’t notice.”

  “There is also a farm museum nearby, if you didn’t notice.”

  I turned and started walking away from Jordan, started walking through the thick snow toward the entrance to the trail that would lead me back down the mountain and away from her.

  I could feel Jordan behind me, struggling to keep up, and then stopping in her tracks. Coming to a full stop.

  “It’s over with Pearl, by the way,” she called out, after me. “In case you’re interested. It was over before it even started.”

  I didn’t turn around. I didn’t keep going, holding in place exactly where I was, but I didn’t turn around either.

  Then I could hear Jordan’s footsteps start again, as she moved closer, until she was standing right behind me.

  “He’s in London, finishing up his project. And trying to line up whatever work he can get all over Europe, and trying not to be as miserable as he is. It’s pathetic, really. But he says he can’t go home without you. He won’t.”

  I still just stood there, Jordan lowering her voice.

  “Look,” she said. “He knows how royally he screwed up. But he told me that he’s not going to just show up and tell you so, not if I tell him you’re happy. But if I tell him you’re not . . .”

  I turned around fast to look at her, fury filling my eyes. “Don’t do that, Jordan,” I said. “I’m not kidding. That’s the last thing I need right now.”

  “Then tell me it doesn’t matter to you,” she said. “That six months ago he was the love of your life, but now it doesn’t matter to you.”

  “It was more than six months ago.”

  “I’m sorry, my mistake. Seven months ago.”

  I turned away from her and started walking again. “It doesn’t matter to me,” I said.

  “You want to say that while looking at me?” she said. “I’m thinking it’d be more effective.”

  I kept going, right down the cold mountain.

  “I don’t like you very much right now,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a goo
d thing,” she called after me, “I can live with that.”

  21

  Jordan didn’t stay over. She drove back to New York City and was planning to take the first flight out to Los Angeles the next morning. She said she was going to stay by the airport, but I wondered if airport was friend code for spending a day or two in New York City or Boston or anywhere but with me in rural Williamsburg, before heading home to California. Whether or not that was true, she might as well have stayed with me. Right in the house. In my bedroom. Her words kept echoing in my head as loudly if she were right beside me. As if she were still saying them in real time. You shouldn’t stay here.

  This was at least part of the reason why, after she’d gone, I went over to the restaurant to help Griffin. I thought going there was the wise thing to do—to be with him, try to feel reconnected, and get focused on helping him with the endless preparations for opening night. But with Jordan’s words in my head, I’m not sure why I didn’t understand that the wise thing, right then, would have been to stay away.

  We started setting up the outside lights—the beautiful, lotus-shaped lights, white and sparkly—stringing them up on the roof and the front brick, vinelike.

  “I can’t believe the opening is a week away,” I said.

  “Ten days!” he said.

  “Ten days,” I corrected myself.

  I was standing on a stepladder, Griffin beneath me, holding out a lantern to aid us in seeing a little better. He had been asking me about Jordan. He had been asking me in ways that were making it hard to avoid telling him what had happened, unless I blatantly managed to change the topic.

  “And it’s only the soft opening,” he said.

  “I don’t care. It’s still exciting. And didn’t you tell me the test run is almost more important than anything else? That it sets the tone?”

  “Are you trying to freak me out, or is that just happening naturally?” he said.

  I laughed. “Well, maybe it would relax you a little if we actually picked a name for the restaurant. Have you been thinking?”

  “I’ve been thinking . . .” he said. “I’m getting closer. But, in case we don’t hit on it in the next week, the good news is that everyone who is coming to the soft opening knows where to go.”