How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  But now, here it is.

  Doesn’t Amy understand that you’re just supposed to leave? My eyes bore into the ceiling. They burn from lack of sleep and from the tears I’m fighting back.

  Isn’t this one of those simple rules you learn just by being born female? I think. When somebody leers at you at a stoplight, you focus on the car in front of you or fiddle with the radio. When you live alone, you record an outgoing message on your voicemail that says that “we’re” not home. And when a man hits you, you leave. You do whatever is necessary to get away—escape in the cover of night, empty the bank account, walk through the woods if you have to. You just go.

  Was it something about our friendship that kept Amy from saying something? It couldn’t be, I think, because one of the unspoken truths of our relationship is that I am the friend whom Amy always calls first. I was the first person Amy called when Mike proposed and when she announced that she was pregnant. But Amy hasn’t ever really confided in me, has she? She isn’t like Kate, who veneers over every problem with her practiced, got-it-together comportment, but she also never really appears to be bothered by anything.

  In years and years, Amy has always just been fine, as still and untroubled as bathwater. I have envied the ease of her life. Maybe that’s the red flag I should have noticed.

  Larry comes down the stairs and into the room. He’s wearing a Maggie’s T-shirt. “Hey,” he says, in a way that tells me he’s still angry about our fight at the bakery earlier today. He sits down next to me. He smells like Irish Spring.

  “How was dinner?” he says, reaching for the remote.

  My face crumples as soon as our eyes meet.

  I bend my head down into his chest, gripping his upper arms with both hands as if I might otherwise sink into a black hole in the floor. I start to sob and watch my tears fall onto his bent legs. “Amy,” I finally gulp out against the phlegm and saliva that have built up in my throat.

  “Amy?” Larry says, stroking my back. “What about her?”

  “I was right,” I say. Larry’s hand stops moving on my back. I close my eyes.

  “Oh my God,” he says. He cups my chin and gently guides my head up to look at him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “She told me everything.” I flop back on the couch and press my fingers to my eye sockets as if I can push away the thought of it.

  “Wait—what are you saying? Mike hit her? That’s where those bruises came from? Where is she now? Where’s Emma? Does she need to come stay here? What did she say?”

  “She doesn’t plan on leaving.” I say through my hands over my face.

  “What?” Larry says. “What do you mean she’s not leaving?”

  “She says he’s agreed to see a counselor. It’s been going on for three years.”

  “Three fucking years?” His outrage makes me feel better. I’m not the only one.

  I nod, wipe my nose.

  “We should go over there right now. Or call the police. Something.”

  “We can’t do that, Larry.” I sit up again. The room is spinning.

  “Why not?” He stands up from the couch and paces for a moment, runs his hand through his hair. “Three years?” he says again. “Does anyone else know?”

  I shake my head. “You wouldn’t believe how casual she was when she told me. It was as if we were talking about them getting in a fight over, I don’t know, whose turn it was to finish the dishes. It was crazy.”

  “Jesus.” He sits next to me on the couch. “How bad has it been?”

  How bad?

  I look at his face, so close and familiar. The patch of red stubble on his cheekbone that he always manages to miss with his razor, his eyes the color of sea glass. How bad has it been? Is there a degree of better or worse? “Did you really just ask me how bad it is?” I say. “He hit her.” Each word pops from my mouth with the definitiveness of a book being dropped on the floor. “That’s how bad it is.”

  “Waverly, I didn’t mean…” He inches closer and puts his hand on my knee.

  “I know,” I say. I push his hand away.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “I know.”

  At two thirty that morning, staring at the spiny shadows on the ceiling from the trees outside our bedroom window, I finally resign myself to the fact that I’m not going to sleep. I pull myself out of bed, grab my journal, and slowly hopscotch over the piles of clothes on the floor, cursing Larry for leaving his things everywhere.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, I turn on the light over the sink, get my leftovers from dinner out of the refrigerator, and grab a fork from the drawer. After a few bites of cold pasta, I pull a stool up to the island, sit down, and start writing. It’s just stream-of-consciousness ramblings about what Amy’s told me. I hope that by getting it down on paper, I can stop obsessing over the details and get some sleep, but it doesn’t work. Each thought breeds ten new ones: Has he hit her in front of Emma? Have the neighbors heard anything? Could he have—God forbid—hit Emma? Ten minutes later, I flip open my laptop and click to the domestic violence prevention website that I’d visited before. There has to be some way to convince Amy that counseling isn’t going to be enough. I scroll through the site’s homepage and my eyes snag on certain words as I read: intimidation, assault, battery. Oh, Amy, I think. What have you been through?

  After a while, wanting a distraction, I check my email, but there is only a forwarded joke from Larry’s mother and an automated message from my bank reminding me—as if I need the reminder—that my home equity loan payment was due two days ago. I’ll deal with it first thing in the morning. I close my email and click back to my web browser and, almost as a reflex, over to the Washington Post website. And then—

  It takes a minute for the words on the screen to register. My eyes scan over the headline again: ALLEGED AFFAIR COULD RUIN BERKSHIRE BID.

  Wait a second.

  I tentatively click on the link, knowing that I’m not going to like whatever is about to load on the next screen. Then there it is, in big emergency-red letters: BREAKING: FRONT-RUNNER IN VIRGINIA’S GOVERNOR RACE CAUGHT IN SEX SCANDAL.

  Oh no.

  Brendan, no.

  I keep reading:

  According to an unnamed source, Brendan Berkshire, the Republican contender for the Virginia governorship, is reportedly involved in an extramarital affair with a member of his campaign staff. His wife, Kate Berkshire, is the daughter of tycoon William Townsend and the granddaughter of deceased Supreme Court Justice Roger Todd.

  The candidate was photographed leaving the Dupont Circle apartment of his coordinating assistant early Wednesday morning. The woman, Stephanie Hanson, is a twenty-six-year-old former college basketball star. According to the source, the affair has been under way for at least six months. “These late-night trysts are nothing new,” says the source, who also stated that Berkshire’s wife appears to be “either totally in the dark or in complete denial.”

  Berkshire, widely believed to be a shoo-in for the state office, is a former attorney at Fitzgerald Sanders, the Washington law firm. He has no prior political experience. Pundits inside the Beltway have speculated that the success of his campaign is due in large part to donations from his wife’s family and their long-standing Washington connections. No statements have been issued by the campaign regarding the allegations or the photos, which have not yet been released to the public.

  I slam the screen shut like I am turning away from an accident on the highway. The only sound in the kitchen is the clock over the kitchen sink. Noticing it, I can’t help but think that it sounds like a ticking time bomb.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  By noon the following day, I start to consider calling Kate’s mother. I fiddle with my phone in the pocket of my apron. I’m checking it every few minutes, when I’m not leaving Kate another message. It kills me that I didn’t go straight to her house this morning, but I have to work. Sarah, the owner of the jewelry shop next door, hooked me up with a last-minute cate
ring job. My oldest friend is going through the worst tragedy of her life and I’m stuck making deviled eggs for a local Realtors’ conference. I can’t believe what the past twenty-four hours has taught me about my two best friends. My perfect friends.

  This morning, I had Larry drive by Kate’s house on his way to the Metro station. When he called from the car, he said it was mayhem, the worst version of what we could have expected. News trucks were lined up along both sides of Kate’s street with reporters loitering in the spaces in between. “You would think that Lindsay Lohan is in there,” he’d said. I could hear the muffled sound of a crowd outside his car. It sounded like he was calling from the stands at a football game.

  My phone buzzes. Another text from Amy: I can’t believe this. Do you think it’s true? Is Kate okay? I look at the words on the display and think that if I’d only told Kate about what Amy had confessed the night before, Kate might be texting me with the same words about Amy.

  I’m hiding out in my office when I should be cooking. In addition to the damn eggs, I need to make two hundred turkey sandwiches and several dozen brownies. My eyes fall on the picture on my computer’s desktop: Larry at the beach the previous summer in the unraveling Minnesota Twins cap that I’ve threatened to throw away but secretly love on him. We were at Rehoboth with his parents and his brother’s family. In the photo, Larry’s leaning on his knee, with his foot propped up on the mountain of sand that we’d piled on top of one of his nephews. Nathan, the boy, is laughing hysterically in the photo, his mouth open so wide that you can see his molars. I remember how later that night, over crab cakes, Larry’s mother asked us whether we’d “thought any more about a wedding,” as if she didn’t bring it up nearly every time she communicated with me. She was looking directly at me when she’d said it, and I purposely took a big crocodile bite out of my corn on the cob so that I could avoid answering—and wait to hear what Larry would say, since he normally avoids this subject with his family, all of whom believe that marriage is something you do well before your thirtieth birthday. “We’re cool, Ma,” I remember Larry saying.

  I look at him smiling through the screen, noticing the slight gap between his two front teeth that makes him look boyishly mischievous, up to no good. God, I love him. I hope he knows that. I remember the conversation that the girls and I had in Florida, and how I’d complained about Larry’s sloppiness. How inane that must’ve sounded to them, like bitching about a hangnail to an amputee. Compared to Kate and Amy…we’re fine. We are. I need to remember that.

  I walk out to the kitchen and pull a handful of tarragon from the pile on the worktable and start chopping.

  “Fuck!” I drop the knife and put my finger to my mouth.

  “You okay?” Randy calls from the counter out front.

  “Fine, just sliced my finger.”

  I walk back to my office to grab a Band-Aid out of the stash in my desk and dial Kate again.

  “Hello, you’ve reached the voicemail of Kate Berkshire…” I know the recording by heart—every nuance, every pause. It is Kate’s “formal” voice, something I’ve teased her about ever since I first heard it on her college answering machine. It sounds like the vaguely sultry voice on a hotel’s television welcome screen (to sign up for one of our luxury spa services, please dial the front desk…).

  I cradle the phone on my shoulder while I wrap the Band-Aid around my finger and wait for the beep. “Hey, Kate, it’s me. Listen, I know—well, I don’t know at all what you’re going through, but please call me back. Or send me a text—just do something to tell me you’re okay. I’m not worried about you—I know you can handle this—but I just want to talk to you. Okay? Call me.” I am lying, of course, but I know Kate well enough to know that coddling isn’t what she needs. Sympathy just looks like pity to her.

  I think back to the dinner party I had just weeks ago. Everything had been fine.

  Actually, no, I catch myself. It hadn’t really been at all, had it? It had appeared that way, as if we’d all been actors blocking out scenes on a stage. We’d stood in the kitchen drinking wine and talking about…what? The usual stuff. Nothing memorable. Where had Brendan actually been that night? What had Amy dealt with when she got home? Mike had been so angry…

  My phone rings. “Kate!” I yelp, not bothering to check the caller ID first.

  “No, Waverly. It’s Gary.”

  My stomach drops. I emailed him yesterday afternoon to tell him that I wasn’t going to be able to make this month’s house loan payment. “Hi, Gary,” I say.

  “I got your email,” he says.

  I don’t say anything. What’s left to explain?

  “So here’s the deal,” he says. “Under the terms of your loan, you have 150 days to make up for missed payments before the bank can start foreclosure proceedings.”

  I slump into my chair. Foreclosure. Babci’s house. My home.

  “Listen, I’m not going to lecture you,” he says. “But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t tell you how serious this is. You cannot miss another loan payment, Waverly. Under any circumstances.”

  “I know,” I say. “But foreclosure?” I can barely get the word out. “After just one missed payment?” I hadn’t actually looked back at the loan paperwork to discern exactly what the consequences might be. I assumed there would be some sort of fee or warning, but foreclosure? After one misstep?

  “We could argue against it if your credit was intact and you had no history of defaulting to other creditors,” he says, tactfully omitting that neither scenario applies to me. “But let’s just assume we’re not going to get to that point because you’re going to get caught up before we even face the risk.”

  “Right,” I say. “Okay.”

  “Stay in touch,” he says. “I’m here to help.”

  I hang up and put my head on my desk. When Babci left her house to me, it was about so much more than brick and mortar. Her home—my home—is the only remaining tie I have to my family. The knowledge that I’ve now risked losing it fills me with a shame I’ve never felt before. My grandmother and grandfather put everything they had into that house. Their legacy permeates every inch of it: the paint colors they chose for the walls that still remain in most of the rooms, the dent that my grandfather put in the banister carrying up the new king-sized bed that Babci finally convinced him to get, the dogwoods that they planted out back that bloom faithfully each year. How could I?

  “Hey, Wave?” Randy calls, knocking from the other side of the door.

  “One second, Randy,” I call, wiping my eyes.

  “I think you should come see this,” he says. He speaks carefully, his tone like the time that he accidentally left the refrigerator door cracked overnight and everything in it spoiled.

  I stand and open the door. “What? Is something wrong?”

  “The press conference is starting,” Randy says.

  “Oh, no.” I can only imagine. “Okay. Turn the stereo off.”

  Last year, I’d finally relented and put a small television in an inconspicuous corner of the bakery. Customers kept asking for it, and I compromised by keeping it muted with the closed captioning turned on, with my music playing over whatever high-speed chase or celebrity’s rehab stint the news channels deemed to be breaking news. I walk out to the front of the store and lean against the countertop. One of my favorite regulars, a retiree named Mona, gets up and stands beside me. She squeezes my wrist. Mona knows Kate through my stories and always asks about her. She’s one of those women of a certain age who frequents yoga classes and poetry readings and is full of stories about her Reiki workshop or the new bulgur salad recipe she’s found.

  “Randy, turn it up just a little.” I glance over at him. There are four other customers in the room—two couples I’ve never seen before—and I’m grateful that there aren’t other regulars here who would be as interested in my reaction to the press conference as the event itself. I look up at the television screen and wonder if Kate will be there.

  “A
nd now, Brendan Berkshire is about to speak,” whispers the anchorman over the shot of Brendan approaching a podium in front of his campaign office, a brick storefront just a few blocks from here. It’s a bright windy day and he squints hard against the sun as he looks out at the crowd beyond the podium and adjusts his microphone. But then…what is it? I lean forward slightly to get a better look. Something is off. Wait a second—

  “Does he have a black eye?” says a woman at one of the tables.

  “I think he does,” says the man at the other, laughing.

  “Please,” Mona says gently. “We want to hear what he says.”

  I look closer at the screen. The spot under Brendan’s eye is caked with orangey makeup, like a thirteen-year-old girl applied it, and there is a very definite, slightly swollen bruise underneath.

  “I want to start by apologizing to my fellow Virginians,” Brendan says. The camera pans out to show the usual crowd of suits standing behind him. Two particular women are very conspicuously missing.

  “I have disappointed my campaign team, the people who have worked so hard for what they believe is right for the future of our state. I have disappointed you, the public. But, most of all, I have disappointed my family. Kate, I love you and I hope that you can forgive me. My wife is the most important person in the world to me, and I’m so sorry to have let her down.”

  “Asshole,” Mona says under her breath. I couldn’t agree more. I white-knuckle the counter behind me for fear that if I let go, I might rip the television set off of the wall and throw it through the front window.

  “To the rest of my family, my parents, my parents-in-law, I’m so sorry.”

  Because you cheated or because you just lost your meal ticket? I think of Kate’s mother, who has surely already told Kate to get over it for the sake of appearances, and of her father, who’s almost certainly placed calls to his legal team and his bankers just in case she doesn’t.

  “It’s an unfortunate fact that I have been unfaithful to my wife. By now, you’ve all seen the pictures,” he says. He purses his lips and bows his head slightly, a contrite expression that looks a little Clintonesque. Knowing Brendan, he probably checked Clinton’s impeachment trial testimony on YouTube before the press conference to study the facial expressions. “I want to tell you that I know that what I did was wrong and so does the other person involved in this thing. But I also want to tell you that this was not, um, a long-term relationship. It was just a couple of isolated incidents. The stress of a campaign…it’s hard to describe. And people start to forget who they are. It’s easy to get swept up by the whole thing, to feel entitled, to forget what life is really about. To forget what you really stand for.” He stops and looks up, taking a moment to glance around at his audience, and then he looks directly at the camera. “But I now know, more than ever, what’s really important. Family. Values. Doing what’s right. I think that this experience, while it’s horrible and it’s something that I take complete responsibility for, is going to help me remember where my priorities should be. And if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to prove to you that I have my priorities straight. Family, values, doing what’s right. For my family and for you, the people of Virginia.”