How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  “But Amy, this isn’t about failing at marriage. This is about telling the people who love you. The people who really and truly have your best interests at heart and can help you get out of this.”

  “I know, I know,” she says. “It’s just hard. My dad…” Her voice trails off.

  “I can only imagine.” I think of my own father, who was fortunate to have such a late bloomer for a daughter that he never had to deal with boyfriends, but it still didn’t stop him from making thinly veiled comments about how traumatic it would be when the time came.

  “The thing that’s hard to explain is how much I still love him…how sentimental I can still get,” she says. “His doctor’s-office-antiseptic scent…I’ve always joked that it’s like wooden tongue depressors and cotton. And he’s addicted to Altoids. I can’t have one without thinking of him.” I think of Larry, who’s as familiar to me as my own reflection in the mirror. Despite all of my anxiety over where we’re headed, he’s still everything I know about home. I can’t imagine what Amy must feel.

  “It was right after Florida when he had a sort of breakdown and apologized for everything,” she says, lowering her voice as Emma skips toward us and asks for the sippy cup on the steps by Amy’s feet. “I was doing dishes, and he’d just come home from a run, and I heard him making these sniffling, grunting sounds behind me. I thought he was just making the usual annoying phlegmy gurgling sounds that he always makes when he stretches after a run, but when I looked over my shoulder at him, he was sitting on the floor against the refrigerator with his head between his knees, crying. I’ve only seen him cry once—ever. It was the night after he lost his first patient, a twelve-year-old boy who’d been hit by a car while he was riding his bike. He hadn’t cried at our wedding. He hadn’t even cried when Emma was born. He just started saying he was sorry, over and over again. He said he’d never meant to hurt me. It was the first time he’d ever shown remorse for any of it.

  “I’d spent so much time wondering if this apology would ever actually happen. I thought about it while I flipped through coupons at the grocery store, while I squirted baby shampoo into my hand during Emma’s baths, while I sat between you and Kate in restaurants. Now that it was happening, I was stunned silent. Even more than the revenge fantasy, what I’d always wanted was for everything to just magically fade away. I prayed for amnesia. The thing is, my husband’s not a villain, but a broken man who is very, very sick. He has an illness, and I’m the person who vowed, ‘in sickness and in health.’

  “We sat in silence for a long time, Mike crying, me studying him. Later that night, when we talked everything out, there were a hundred things that I wanted to ask him: What makes you do it? Why do you do it? How do you feel when you’re doing it? Are you really sorry? Why are you sorry now? But it was impossible to tell how he’d react, and I worried that if I asked the wrong thing, it would be over. Anyway, that was the night that he decided to go to counseling.” She pauses for a moment. “It’s embarrassing to admit this stuff to you. Larry’s so great. You must be horrified by all of this. Your relationship is perfect.”

  “Not exactly,” I say. It takes me a moment to decide whether to go further—is it completely inappropriate to complain about my problems to Amy or would it make her feel better to talk about something other than her ordeal? Hearing her describe the details of what she’s been through brings it into full relief. It’s tragic. There’s no other word for it.

  “What do you mean?” She looks at me over her coffee mug.

  “I don’t want to burden you with my junk,” I say. “Not right now.”

  “No, please, tell me.” She laughs. “Make me feel a little better about myself.”

  I study her for a minute, just to be sure. “Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I’ve had some real problems with the bakery.” I look over my shoulder toward the back door. Larry’s inside getting ready for work.

  “You have?” she says, surprised.

  “Yeah. Money problems,” I say.

  “How bad?”

  I take a gulp. “A lot of debt. I stopped taking a salary around the time we went to Florida. My rent on the building is consistently late. And until yesterday, I thought I was going to default on my home loan, which means I would have risked losing the house.” I’ve wondered several times over the past few months whether coming clean would feel like a relief, but it unfortunately doesn’t. Telling the truth hurts.

  “Oh my God, Waverly. I had no idea. Here I am, eating up all of your time with my problems, and you’re dealing with plenty on your own!”

  “Please, don’t you dare apologize!” I interrupt.

  “Larry must at least be a huge support.”

  “He probably would be, if I told him.”

  “Larry doesn’t know?” she says. “Why haven’t you told him, Waverly?”

  I take a deep breath. Why? Why, why, why? “I thought I could handle it on my own. I still think I can, actually.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Amy says. She looks at me and laughs. It’s a “what the hell is wrong with us?” laugh. What the hell is wrong with us?

  I smile back at her. “At this point, I’ve kept it secret for so long that I feel like it’s such a deception, like I’ve dug such a deep hole that there’s just no good way to tell him. I don’t know how he’ll react when he finds out how dishonest I’ve been. I’m scared I’ll lose him.”

  “But, Waverly, if your house was at risk…He could help. He should really know. And you’d feel so much better.”

  “I know, I know.” I watch Emma hopscotch across the patio.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she says. “You’re so independent, and I admire you for it, but you never take anyone’s help. You can’t go through the world alone, Waverly. You know that, right?”

  “Why are we talking about me? Are you going to charge me at the end of the hour?” I joke, aware that I’m also deflecting her question.

  “Seriously, Waverly. You need to talk to him. Larry will be understanding.”

  “That’s the problem!” I whine. “Why can’t I see that? I mean, I know that. I think. But I feel like I invent problems in our relationship, almost like I’m trying to sabotage it.”

  “Maybe you are,” she says.

  “But why would I do that?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe you don’t feel worthy of his love or something?”

  I raise an eyebrow, considering it. I suppose I do take some sort of comfort in the identity I’ve created for myself—like if Kate’s the beautiful one and Amy’s the sweet one and I’m the sad, orphaned fuck-up, I can keep my expectations low and shirk off any real, adult responsibility. Good move, Waverly, I think. Look at where that’s led you…

  I put my hand over Amy’s and squeeze it. “Well, things have actually picked up a little bit, so I can tell him soon, once I know for sure that the house is okay,” I say. I fill her in on Brendan’s unintended influence on my business.

  “I’m so glad that things are turning around,” she says. I know that she’s legitimately happy for me—Amy always is—but I can tell from the distracted way she looks at me when she says it that she’s wondering about her own fate.

  Despite everything, I’m sure she still wants the perfect family life she’d been building with Mike. I can see it as clearly as if the symbols appear in a cartoon thought bubble over her head: an old-fashioned pram with another baby gurgling happily inside, family nights with board games and popcorn, photo albums packed with years upon years of memories. But just look at the amount of dysfunction she’s willing to put up with to keep the dream intact. It’s like she’s held on to a certain identity for so long that it doesn’t even occur to her to want something else. And then it hits me: Is that what I’ve done, too?

  Emma gets up from her froggy crouch and toddles toward us. Amy licks her thumb and rubs a smudge off of her cheek. “Come here, Emma,” I say, hooking my hands under her armpits and pulling her onto my lap. Her hair and hands are sticky from t
he doughnut muffin she ate this morning.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” I say to Amy, squinting at her. The sun is gloriously bright all of a sudden. “Promise me that you’ll talk to your mother—or at least to one of your sisters—and I’ll come clean with Larry.”

  She wrinkles her nose, considering my proposition. “I’ll promise you this,” she says, holding her hand to her brow to shade her eyes when she turns to look at me. “I’ll think about it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Later that afternoon, as I’m walking up Kate’s front walk and admiring the flowers that her gardener must have put in since I was here the other day, I leave a message for Amy to find out how she’s doing, though what I really want to know is whether she’s called her mother yet. When I talked to her an hour ago, she said that she and Emma might go to Old Town to walk around for a while. I worried about leaving her at the house alone, but she insisted that she would be fine and that she had no intention of opening the door. Larry offered to stay home, too, but she wouldn’t have it. So when I got in the car to head to the bakery, I sent a quick text to my neighbor across the street. She’s a freelance magazine writer whose desk is positioned right under her front window, where she keeps tabs on all of the action in the neighborhood, because she’s always posting persnickety messages on the neighborhood Listserv about who’s not cleaning up after their dog and who’s left their outside lights on all day. I asked her to send me a message if she saw anything weird in front of my house. I doubt she’s taken her eyes off my door all morning.

  When I drove up Kate’s long driveway, there were a couple of black SUVs parked by the house, and when I reach the front door, it’s wide open. I step inside and walk back toward the kitchen, calling Kate’s name. As I pass Brendan’s office, I notice a couple of twentysomething guys loading files into cardboard boxes. They’re debating health care. Typical Washington nerds.

  Kate’s standing in the threshold of the French doors that lead from her kitchen to her back patio. On the kitchen table next to her is what must be the remnants of her lunch: half a wedge of Brie, a handful of crackers, an almost empty jar of olives.

  “Hey,” she says when she sees me. She’s wearing a men’s oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans. Her hair’s knotted back and she doesn’t have on any makeup. She’s breathtaking. Even after all of these years, it can still sneak up on me.

  “How’s Amy doing?” she asks. I’d filled her in earlier this morning.

  “Fine,” I say, grabbing the jar of olives. “I called to check on her on my way over and she said everything was cool. No sign of Mike, which is great. Can I have one of these?” I hold up the jar.

  “At your own risk. They’re of questionable age,” she says. “I was starving when I realized I had no food in the house, so this is what I went with.”

  I poke my finger into the jar to fish out an olive. “So, those guys,” I say, nodding back toward the hallway.

  “Brendan’s staffers. They’re packing up the rest of his office. They got everything else out yesterday.” She’s not her usual firecracker self, I notice. She turns back toward the open doors, her arms crossed over her chest like she’s cold.

  “I was just standing here trying to remember why Brendan and I bought this house,” she says wistfully.

  I walk over and stand next to her, gazing out at the backyard. The pool is on the right, and behind it, a softly sloping hill of lush green grass leads to a gazebo that will be covered in blooming wisteria within the next few weeks. I remember Kate asking me what the plant was last spring, and when I teased her for not knowing the names of the things growing in her own backyard, she rolled her eyes and said something about how she just writes a check and leaves the rest to the gardener. At the time, I was spiraling into my money issues, and I remember thinking—only half bitterly—that Kate should fire her gardener and hire me.

  “Do you know that in the two years that we’ve lived in this house, we’ve never been in the pool?” she says now. “We never once had a party here. Never once had breakfast or read the paper under the gazebo.” She shakes her head. “The backyard is just another facade, totally meaningless. I’ve basically lived here by myself—Brendan’s always been working…or doing who knows what else,” she adds under her breath. “Six thousand square feet for one person. A house like this was meant for crowds of people, maybe children even.” She glances at me. “Noise. Life.” She shakes her head.

  I look at her, perplexed. She’s been so steely since Brendan’s affair went public, and I wonder what’s made her so suddenly contemplative.

  Her phone rings and she walks to the kitchen counter to grab it. “Ugh.” She rolls her eyes after she looks at the caller ID. “My mother. She won’t stop calling. ‘I’m imploring you to reconsider,’” she says, mimicking Evelyn’s snooty-snoot way of speaking. “‘You’re making a mockery of yourself, Katherine. What will you do now?’” She slides the still-ringing phone across the counter.

  “I’m thinking about a safari. Botswana,” she says. “I haven’t been since I was a teenager, but there are these amazing guides you can hire to take you to all of the best reserves. Want to join me?” She raises her eyebrows.

  Huh? Before I can answer—no, Kate, I can’t fly off to Africa on a whim—one of Brendan’s staffers comes into the kitchen. “Excuse me. Mrs. Berkshire? We’re just about done,” he says somberly, cowering a little. I know that campaign underlings are made to do all sorts of demeaning work beyond the usual coffee fetching, but this must be horribly awkward.

  “Fine,” she says, hardly glancing at him, and then she turns back to me, leaving him standing there, unsure what to do. “What was I saying?” she says to me.

  African safari, I think. “I can’t remember,” I say, noticing the staffer scuttle away out of the corner of my eye. I don’t want to get into a conversation about why I can’t go on a luxury vacation right now.

  “Thank God they’re leaving,” she says once he’s left the room. “They’ve been stomping around here for two days as if they were a hazmat team who’d come to clean up a chemical spill.” We hear the front door close. “I want to make sure they got everything. Come on.” I follow her down the dark, cavernous hall. She’s barefooted, so the only sound as we walk is the squeak-squeak of my sneakers. I never realized how empty this place could feel. How lonesome.

  Brendan’s office smells faintly of his occasional cigars. Of all the rooms in Kate’s house, this is the only one I’ve never been in before. The walls are oak paneled. The carpet is golf-club green. I feel uptight just standing here. Kate immediately walks to the far wall, where a portrait hangs of her and Brendan. I recognize it as their official campaign portrait. They’re on their side porch, standing behind the railing where an American flag had been hung. Her hands are clasped at her waist. His right palm is on her shoulder. They look trustworthy, openhearted. You’d love for them to be your next-door neighbors. She hoists it off the wall and puts it on the floor behind Brendan’s desk, positioning it so that the photo’s turned inward. “Enough of that,” she says. She goes about opening and closing the empty drawers, the file cabinets. “Looks like they got everything,” she says. She looks at me and nods efficiently. “Okay,” she says. We stand there staring at each other.

  “Are you okay?” I say, looking at her suspiciously.

  She nods unconvincingly. “It’s just…” She shrugs.

  “It’s all happened kind of fast,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it has.” She sits down on the green carpet and crosses her legs. I follow suit.

  “Brendan’s called me six times today,” she says. “I’m keeping count. It’s like I’m going through a high school breakup.” I think back to Kate’s high school breakups. Her romances were not of the Sweet Valley High variety—instead of football game pep rallies and prom night wine coolers, Kate’s dates took her to the Inn at Little Washington and wooed her with gin martinis.

  “What do
es he say when he calls?”

  “I refuse to talk to him and he won’t leave messages. I don’t want to hear his voice. I don’t want to see him. When we signed the separation papers at the lawyer’s office yesterday—he insisted we do it in person, together, which was ridiculous—he just kept saying over and over again that he wished we could work it out.”

  “Do you wish you could work it out?”

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell I want.” It’s probably the first time this statement has ever come out of Kate’s mouth, and it’s unsettling to hear. Judging from the troubled look on her face, she feels the same way.

  “Well, welcome to the club. I don’t think I’ve ever known,” I say, trying to make her feel better. What do I want? It could be the tagline for my life. The words tick at me all day long, like somebody flicking a finger against the side of my head: What do I want? What do I want?

  She smirks at me. “Please.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  She thinks about it for a minute. “I’ve missed him for a long time. I realized that yesterday, sitting in that conference room. I studied his face while he was signing the papers, and it was as if he was some strange sort of mirage, a figment of my imagination. I looked at him and thought, ‘Who is this person?’ But then I come back here and the silence is so horrible. It’s so bad that I almost pine for the sound of the reporters outside. I think I’m going to put my house on the market.”

  “Where would you go?”

  She shrugs. “I liked living in Georgetown when we were first married.”

  Who wouldn’t have? I think. They lived in Brendan’s four-thousand-square-foot show palace near the French embassy. The Washingtonian ran a feature about it.