How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  Amy nods again. “I understand what you’re saying. He’s been a little stressed-out…work, you know. With everything that’s happening with health care, being a family doctor isn’t exactly a Norman Rockwell scenario.”

  It’s not that I don’t believe her, but if she’s trying to tell me that work stress gives you license to act the way that Mike does, than I should be a tantrum-throwing, hotel-room-wrecking Hollywood nightmare by now.

  “Are you handling everything okay, though?” I ask.

  “Of course. We’re fine.”

  My ears perk up. I can’t help but notice that even though I asked about how she’s doing, she’s answered by telling me how they’re doing. I suppose it’s the kind of slip that any coupled person could make—and after all, we are talking about her relationship—but it’s ironic, and it reignites my suspicions that she’s not being honest with me.

  “It’s just a rough patch. Things get busy with work and kids and everything,” she says again, glancing over at Emma. “Honey, come over here, please,” she calls to her.

  “Well, if more time together is what you want, then what do you think is preventing it, exactly? I mean…is Mike gone a lot? Does he ever work late?” I say. I’m quickly discovering that there isn’t a subtle way to ask, “Do you think your husband is cheating on you?”

  “What do you mean?” Amy says. She looks at me quizzically.

  “I don’t know…” I grasp for words. “I really…I don’t know.” Is it the right time to bring up any of this in the first place? At any moment, I might have to jump up to answer the phone or help a customer. Emma’s just a few feet away…“I just hate to see you looking so miserable.”

  Amy gasps. “Have I really seemed that miserable?”

  “Well…” I shrug. “I’m sorry, but yeah, I’ve been a little worried.”

  “Waverly, really?” Amy teases and cocks her head to the side, as if I’m putting her on. “Come on. I’m fine.”

  I suck in my lips and raise my eyebrows at her.

  She shakes her head and starts sweeping crumbs off of the table into one cupped hand, then dumps the contents into her napkin and folds it up. “Everything’s okay,” she says. “It’s just a rough patch. Nothing for you to be concerned about.” She stands up. “Emma, come on, honey, we have to go.”

  She turns to me. “I’m sorry, groceries in the car. I totally forgot.”

  “Yeah, of course. Call me later.” I feel instantly guilty, like I’ve crossed a line that I shouldn’t have.

  “I will,” she says, but it’s a breezy kind of promise, even a little passive-aggressive.

  I watch them leave, Amy helping Emma with her coat as they walk because she’s apparently in such a hurry that she can’t stop to do it. Kate and I bicker plenty—like an old married couple, Larry says—but I’ve never had any sort of confrontation with Amy. This tiniest, most benign little scuffle feels awful and foreboding, like some current between us has changed.

  My father always warned me not to give people advice unless they ask for it, and I worry whether I’ve gone too far, even though I barely criticized Mike. It’s alarming to see Amy tense. I’ve seen her upset before, of course, lots of times. But there is never anything covert about her feelings—happy or sad, you see it in the genuine, transparent way that you see in a child. And when she talks about a problem she’s having, it’s always in this buoyant way, as if she already knows the solution and is just giving it a voice for her own sake, not because she needs your help. Now, seeing how obviously reluctant she is to admit that something is wrong, it’s jarring.

  Strange, I think, pushing up from the table and walking back to my cupcakes, how you can’t really talk openly to your friends about their relationships once they get married. I remember that when Amy and Mike started dating, every little detail was fair game. I can tell you everything about how they met: She and Kate and I were at an Independence Day party on the roof deck of a law firm on K Street. I was standing with Amy at the buffet table, each of us shoving pigs-in-a-blanket into our mouths, when she turned, accidentally bumped into Mike, and spilled her plastic cup of white wine down the front of his golf shirt. Humiliated, she rushed to fix it, patting him down with the crumpled cocktail napkin in her hand. He laughed, got her another drink, and then another, and then several hours later, having talked about everything from their childhood pets to their favorite college courses, they stood together, hand in hand, and watched the fireworks erupt over the Washington Monument.

  As they got to know each other in the ensuing months, we discussed everything about him, from his reluctance to say much about his family to his reluctance to go down on her. I know that he put on a whole candles-and-roses production to prepare for the first time they had sex. I know that Amy saved the stubs from their first movie date.

  But as soon as they got married, those conversations stopped. Same thing with Kate. When I first met Brendan, I thought he was a nice-enough guy but ultimately the same kind of cocky, self-important pain in the ass that we’d grown up around. She says as much, but I would never, ever think to chime in. You just don’t do that. I’d be just as pissed if they criticized Larry.

  The thing is, though, now that those dishy girl-talk conversations have come to an end, I’ve also stopped learning anything worthwhile about my friends’ spouses. If Amy and I have grown to know each other so well over the years that she’s like a favorite worn photograph, admired so often that I can re-create every last detail from memory, Mike is a faint pencil drawing, one-dimensional and thinly known to me. I don’t like it, how such a big part of her life is such a mystery. And somehow, in some way, the silence that’s growing between us feels like the loudest alarm.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I can hear the music before I even get out of the car. Shit. After ten years together, I know that when Larry blares music at night it almost always means that he is feeling celebratory. I am not in the mood for celebratory. I am in the mood for my sweatpants, a massive bowl of the chipotle macaroni and cheese that I swiped from work, and an extra-large glass of something with a very high alcohol content. I don’t want to hear about Larry’s fantastic day; I don’t want him to grab me and twirl me around the kitchen in the way that he’s apt to do when he’s feeling especially euphoric. I don’t even want to speak. I huff up the steps and fumble with my bags—my purse, the mac and cheese—to get the key in the door, then turn the knob and kick the door open with my foot.

  I drop my purse on the kitchen floor. “Hoochie Coochie Man” is blasting throughout the house. Good God. Muddy Waters. Not this. Not tonight.

  It is not fair for me to be this way. Not tonight. Not on Valentine’s Day. While Larry is not exactly a Valentine’s guy (is any man a Valentine’s guy?), he has historically been supremely understanding about it being one of the busiest days of the year in my business. He is accepting of the fact that I will always work late on February 14 and is probably secretly relieved that the very last thing that I want to see when I get home at the end of this particular day is anything indicative of romance. In fact, the very best thing he can do, which is precisely what he’s done the past several years, is to act like it’s any other day. Last year when I got off work, we drank a couple of beers and watched old Cosby Show reruns. It was perfect.

  But I’m not even in the mood for that. Even though we were slammed all day with people elbowing their way into the bakery for last-minute Valentine’s sweets, and even though my guess is that we did better than last year, the unrelenting albatross around my neck is that I know it’s just a drop in the bucket. I need 365 days of Valentine’s shoppers to pay off my debts.

  “Larry!” I scream, walking to the living room. Muddy’s voice booms off of the walls. “Larry!”

  I scream his name as I stomp up the stairs, pulling off my jacket and letting it fall behind me as I ascend.

  When I push open the door to our bedroom, he’s lying on the bed, his arms crossed over his face. “Larry?”

  �
��Hey.” He pulls his arms from his face and props himself up on his forearms. He does not look celebratory. Not even a little bit.

  “The music’s loud,” I say. “What are you doing?”

  He purses his lips for a moment before he looks at me. I gulp. Did he find one of the overdue bills?

  He clears his throat. “Something bad happened at work.”

  The words don’t register at first. “What do you mean?” I sit down next to him. Bad things don’t happen at Larry’s job.

  “Well,” he says. “They’re cutting people from our department.”

  “What?” No! “Cutting people?” I put my hand to my chest.

  His eyes meet mine for a moment and then he looks away. “It’s bad.”

  Larry Tackett is, above almost everything, a patriot. My boyfriend is the kind of person who gets teary the moment he hears the opening bars to “The Star Spangled Banner.” When we watch the annual State of the Union address and the guy announces the president with the customary “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States!” Larry stands in the living room, beer in hand, and bellows joyfully right along with him, whether or not our current commander in chief got his vote. Last summer, when we went to a Nationals baseball game, I thought he was going to throttle the three guys in front of us who not only talked loudly about their predictions for the game during the national anthem but also neglected to take off their caps while the ten-year-old music prodigy from Anacostia sang.

  He moved to D.C. specifically to work at the National Museum of American History. When he was eleven, his family had taken a rare family vacation to D.C., and Larry says he’ll never forget the awe he felt when they toured the museum and he saw the top hat that Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre, or the desk microphone that FDR used to give his famous “fireside chats” during the Depression and World War Two. After grad school, he got an internship at the museum, which led to his current job as a curator. Ninety-nine percent of the holdings he takes care of aren’t even on display. He seeks out new items to add to his department’s collection, works with other curators to create exhibitions, and generally gets to dork out on a daily basis over things that he realizes many people couldn’t care less about. When we first met, he told me about how he was the kind of kid who collected odds and ends that he kept in a shoebox under his bed—an old piece of rock that he found in the woods that he was convinced was an ancient arrowhead, random plastic toys that held special significance, an oddly shaped screw found in the back of his parents’ hardware store. “My job is like the big-kid version of that,” I remember him telling me. “It’s the greatest job in the world.”

  I look at him now, with his eyes closed and his lips pursed in an anxious way I’ve never witnessed before. “What happened?” I say, as sweetly as I can, given the volume of the music—and the way I feel my blood pressure ratcheting up with every passing second.

  “The head curator pulled us together for a meeting and said that he heard from one of his higher-ups that furloughs are probably going to happen in the near future.” Curators at the Smithsonian are federal employees, and furloughs—involuntary, unpaid leaves—have been a possibility for a while given the horrendous state of the federal budget.

  “Fuck.” Fuck.

  “What’s worse is that because of budget cuts, we might have to reduce the department altogether, which means I could be out of a job.”

  “But you’ve been with them forever!” I shriek. “They wouldn’t cut you. Aren’t there other people who’d be more likely? People who are more junior?” I don’t want to freak out, but if Larry can’t pay his half of our bills…Fuck.

  “I wish that were the case. But with layoffs, they typically cut people who have higher salaries because they can be replaced with cheaper employees. I don’t know…” He scratches his chin and starts to gnaw at his cuticles. Larry is never nervous. It’s unsettling to see him like this. “I haven’t published any papers in a while.” He says it so quietly that it’s as if he’s talking to himself. “Though I did just bring in those paper ballots from Grover Cleveland’s election.”

  “I can’t imagine that you would be one of the people they cut.” My mind is reeling now. Way back when we first moved in together, we decided that since Larry wouldn’t have to pay rent, he’d pay most of our homeowner’s insurance and utilities. Then, when I opened Maggie’s, he started to chip in even more. He even helps me pay my exorbitant self-employed health insurance plan. He shares the cost of groceries, gas…there are our cell phone bills, auto insurance. My heart starts to pound, thinking about all of the ways his income keeps us afloat. “They can’t cut you, Larry. They just can’t.” My voice quivers. “If they furloughed you, how long would you go unpaid?”

  “As of now, they’re talking about two weeks, which isn’t much, I know, but I’m worried about the bigger picture. You start with two-week furloughs and then what happens? I mean, if federal employees’ jobs need to be cut, I have to believe that a curator at the Smithsonian is going to be far more disposable than someone working in Homeland Security, Health and Human Services…anywhere, really.”

  “What about another job somewhere? Do you think you should look around, just to be safe?” I’m the one chewing my nails now.

  “I have a friend in the history department at Maryland that I could call, I guess, but my options are limited with just a master’s. I don’t really want to go back to school for a Ph.D.” I can tell that the idea depresses him. He has his dream job.

  “When will you know whether they’re cutting people in your department?”

  “Next few weeks, I think.”

  He looks up at the ceiling. I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my legs.

  “Thank God for the bakery,” he says. “If anything happens, at least we’ll have that to keep us going until I find something else. I know it’s not ideal, but at least it’s something.”

  I clench my jaw and let my head fall to my knees. I squeeze my arms tighter around my legs, curling myself into a ball, wishing I could disappear.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I say into my knees, not believing a word of it.

  He doesn’t say anything, and I realize that for the first time in all of our years together, I am the one doing the reassuring instead of the other way around. Larry is actually worried, and there’s nothing scarier than that.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  You’re here, thank God,” Kate says, giving me a quick hug hello. She’s wearing a trim black suit with a silver ribbon pinned to the lapel.

  “What’s the ribbon for?” I point at it.

  “What? Oh,” Kate says, looking down at her lapel. “You know, I don’t have any idea. Someone from the campaign put it on me this morning. Listen, I really appreciate you coming to this.”

  “Of course,” I say. “I’ve never been to a campaign luncheon before. This is exciting for me.”

  Kate laughs. “Yeah, I’m sure it will be just as memorable as when Larry got you tickets to see that singer-songwriter you love.” She snaps her fingers, trying to think of his name. “You know, the one who looks like an organic farmer.”

  “Ray LaMontagne.” Larry had taken me to his show for my birthday the year before.

  “Right, him. It’ll be just like that,” she jokes. “Seriously, though, thanks for coming.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Stop thanking me,” I say. I look around the crowded room, searching the overwhelmingly white male crowd for one particular female face. “Is Amy here yet?”

  “Haven’t seen her,” Kate says, studying her BlackBerry.

  “Hmph, that’s weird. She’s never late for anything.” I haven’t talked to her since her visit to the bakery. Worse, she hasn’t returned the messages I’ve left on her home and cell phones. It’s been almost a week.

  “Huh?” Kate says, her thumbs furiously typing out a text message.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  The ballroom of the local Hilton looks like every other hotel b
allroom I’ve ever been in—for wedding receptions, the junior and senior proms, and the local restaurant association meeting that I drag myself to each year, wondering the whole way through how it is that a restaurant association finds it reasonable to stage their annual meeting in anything other than a restaurant. Everything from the carpet to the damask wallpaper is a drab peachy-beige that reminds me of silly putty.

  I could be at one of the bland teacher’s conferences I used to go to if not for one conspicuous difference: the throng of Berkshire fans crowding into the room and twisting around each other to get to their seats. They move swiftly and deliberately, like mice in a maze, and their excitement is so palpable that you would think that the small wooden podium decorated with campaign bunting at the end of the room is the elaborate set for a U2 concert. Behind it, a banner tacked to the wall reads, “BERKSHIRE: What’s right for Virginia.”

  “I just need to go…,” Kate starts while walking away, her eyes still locked on her BlackBerry.

  “Yeah, yeah, go do your thing.” I look down at the number on my ticket, squeeze past some suits to get to my table, and sit down. I scan the crowd again for Amy, noticing that most of the women are wearing pantyhose. Women still actually wear pantyhose? I fiddle with the sleeve of my black button-down from the Gap, the go-to in the back of my closet for the rare occasion when I need something more formal than my usual T-shirt and jeans, and say a silent prayer of thanks for the long tablecloth that conceals the clogs that I’m wearing because I forgot to bring something dressier when I packed my stuff for work at four thirty this morning.

  I don’t recognize a soul, which is strange considering that I’ve lived in Maple Hill my entire life and a decent chunk of the town’s population passes through the bakery each week. I crane my neck to get a better look at the tables at the front of the room. Surely Evelyn is here. Kate likes to joke that her mother would attend the opening of an envelope. But there is no sign of her at the large round table placed in front of the podium—just a couple of older men who look like money and a woman with a stiff bob in that particular shade of not-quite-blond and not-quite-gray that so many older women prefer.