“Of course,” he says.
Of course, I repeat to myself.
Earlier in the day, after my third and final attempt to try to get Amy to eat something, she said something that’s been on my mind since. She was standing on the threshold between the kitchen and the living room, watching Larry sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” with Emma.
“He’ll be a great dad someday, you know,” she said, taking a sip of the cup of tea I’d forced into her hands. “When you both finally realize that you were made to be a family.”
I didn’t know what to say considering the circumstances, so I didn’t say anything. I walked to where Amy stood and looked over her shoulder at Larry, who was now folding a hat out of the Sports section. Emma giggled and reached for it, dancing around him impatiently.
Now I wrap my arms tighter around Larry’s waist, dropping my sponge on the floor behind him. As I nestle against his chest, my mind drifts to being at Amy’s house and watching the way that Kate comforted Amy today. Amy must have been surprised by it, and it reminds me of when my parents died, and how people I hardly knew did the most wonderful things, like dropping meals off unannounced, or writing to tell me about some heartfelt memory they had about one of them. A lesson I’d learned then is starting to work its way back to me: I need to hold on to the people who care for me, because the next time I fall—and there will be a next time; there always will—they’ll be the ones to help me through.
It seems so silly, looking back now, that I kept my problems a secret from the people who cared for me most. Isn’t it easier, I realize now, to just let things be? And, I think, my fingers laced behind Larry’s back, to hold on to a good and true thing when you have it? I need him just as he is. Now. I need to be just who I am. Now. Someday—hopefully a long time in the future—I may have to let him go, just like I did with my parents. But in the meantime, I should celebrate. Because what I have is a lot.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Last night, after I finally collapsed into bed, I dreamt that it was summertime. I was in my childhood bedroom, sitting in the center of my twin bed, which was pushed against a wall under a window. I rested my elbows on the window ledge and dragged a bumpy trail across the window’s screen with my fingernail. I was wearing one of the gauzy white nightgowns that Babci made for me at the start of every summer, and it was damp in the spot between my shoulder blades, where my hair was wet from the shower and combed into thick, seal-slick strands.
Sitting with my nose nearly pressed to the screen, I could smell summer in the air; that distinct, indelible scent that the sun leaves on the street after radiating onto the concrete all day. I could hear the television down the hall—a laugh track, my parents watching Johnny Carson. I pictured my mother curled into a corner of the couch and drinking a soda out of a plastic tumbler. She’d have a forgotten needlepoint on her legs, which would be tanned from her weekend tennis. My dad would be in the chair next to her, contentedly twiddling his thumbs while he watched Johnny banter with Ed McMahon.
There was nothing to be afraid of here; that’s what I felt gazing out of my bedroom window at the peaceful street that I grew up on. It was quiet and dark, with a thousand shadows where dangerous things could lurk, but I wasn’t scared. Not even a little bit. This was home. As predictable as a calendar.
Then suddenly it was as if a curtain was pulled, and my adult self, sitting in my childhood bed, realized that I could still have that security, because it—my parents—were still deep down inside of me, and always would be, no matter how many mistakes I made. I pulled my faded Holly Hobbie sheets up to my chest, heard the chirping crickets outside my window, and knew that this peace—this optimistic, childlike certainty—was going to lead me now. I didn’t need to waste another minute worrying. It wasn’t too late. I could hold on to everything I’d learned over the past year—all of the problems with work and my money, all of the tragedy—and life would still be quite good. The sun always rises.
I still feel it, two hours after getting out of bed. I’m brushing my teeth to get the stale coffee taste out of my mouth even though I know I’m minutes from another cup. Downstairs, I can hear Emma’s cartoon. Amy and Larry are chatting with Amy’s parents—about the weather. What a beautiful thing, to chat about the weather. There’s no talk of Mike, who’s on all of our minds nevertheless, and probably will be for a long while. There’s no sense of, “What should we do?” For now, in this moment, it’s just eight a.m. A Thursday morning. Let it be.
The doorbell rings. It’s Kate, who insists on accompanying me to my hair appointment before the catalog photo shoot later today. I put my toothbrush in the holder next to Larry’s and then hang my towel over his on the crowded hook on the back of the door. I glance in the mirror, decide I look fine, and then I go downstairs, where my family is waiting for me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am immensely grateful to my agent, Katherine Fausset, for her unparalleled wisdom and enthusiasm for this book, and to my editor, Emily Griffin, for her insightful, expert work. Thank you for making this experience such an enjoyable one.
Thanks also to Eileen Chetti, Erica Warren, and the rest of the team at Grand Central. Matthew Crowley, Susan Laubach, Jason Sulham, Rita Anita, Claudia Ybarra, Michael Johnson, and Chris Reisenger were generous with their professional expertise and helped me keep my facts straight. Jessica Crowley, Jay Lewis, and Peter Kusek read early drafts and provided valuable feedback.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline connected me with several women who bravely shared their stories with me. Thank you so much for your candid honesty. My respect for you is boundless.
Most of all, to my family: Thanks for making me feel like the luckiest girl alive. You’re everything.
Reading Group Guide
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This story started with a rumor. Years ago, I’d heard whispers that someone I knew was being hit by her partner. For a variety of good reasons, I never believed it, and I still don’t. But the questions surrounding it stuck with me: what if it were true, after all, and what if I’d sat idly by while someone I knew was in crisis? Yet I also wondered—and I’m ashamed to admit it, because it feels like a horribly lazy and selfish way to be—How much could I have really helped? The question nagged at me: when is deciding that something’s “not your business” irresponsible and when, conversely, is it the only choice? How much, really, can you insert yourself into someone else’s troubled relationship?
These are the questions I was working with when I began the first draft of this novel. The story grew from there, of course. While it’s still very much a story about how women’s friendships influence our love relationships and vice versa, it ultimately became a story about the way that we compare ourselves to each other, even to our closest friends, and about the images that we both create for ourselves and project onto people’s lives. I don’t believe that Waverly’s an inherently jealous person, and yet her life is consumed by the comparisons she makes and the feeling that she doesn’t quite measure up. Even though she’s aware, as we all are, that the grass isn’t actually any greener next door—she knows that Kate doesn’t really have it all, and she knows that Amy and Mike don’t have a perfect family—she still can’t help but feel like she’s the only person on earth who’s flawed, and her shame about this runs deep enough to almost cost her every good thing she’s created for herself.
This feels to me like an instinctively female problem, and even after spending hundreds of hours thinking about this story while I sat at my desk, or ate dinner, or went for a run, or nursed my two babies, I still can’t put my finger on why. Do we compare ourselves to each other because we feel, on some level, like we’re expected to have it all—Kate’s beauty and wealth, Amy’s dedication to motherhood and family, Waverly’s independent spirit? Does it start in middle school with appearances, and if so does the ante slowly ratchet up from “Why is she already wearing a bra and I’m not?” to “Why is she getting married, or having kids, or getting pro
moted, and I’m not?” Maybe it’s just human nature, but we all know what the deeper question is when we play this game with ourselves: What’s wrong with me?
The answer is “nothing,” of course. There’s a decent amount of Waverly in me—for many years during my teens and twenties, I was a class-A perfectionist who actually believed that if every area of my life wasn’t scrubbed to a flawless shine, then I was failing at life. It was exhausting. But I’ve come to believe that it’s our imperfections that make us and, ultimately, connect us. It doesn’t do any of us any good to pretend we have it all figured out. I frankly like a person a whole lot more when she welcomes me into her messy house, wipes sandwich crumbs off the table before she sets a drink in front of me, and tells me a story about whatever real-deal, nitty-gritty monster she’s wrestling with that day. Don’t you?
I’m a person who loves quotes, and I recently came across this one from Theodore Roosevelt that sums all of this up pretty perfectly. I’ve come to think of it as the mission statement for this book: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” Or, as a wise friend once told me: Don’t look left. Don’t look right. Be yourself.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION
At its heart, How Lucky You Are is a novel about friendship. Do you have just a few close friends, like Waverly does, or do you rely on a much larger circle?
In what ways does Kate fit your stereotype of a politician’s wife? In what ways does she defy the stereotype?
Have you ever had a friend with Amy’s sort of optimism and willingness to see the best in people? Or, have you been that person?
Kate and Waverly both make comments throughout the novel about growing up in the Washington, D.C. area. How much does where you come from influence your personality?
As Waverly’s financial situation worsens, she finds herself less and less able to take a hard look at her finances. Do you think this is a common response to a crisis?
Waverly says that she doesn’t care whether she and Larry ever marry. Do you believe her? Do you think it’s possible to have a lifelong commitment without marriage?
In one of the novel’s most heartbreaking moments, Waverly catches herself wishing that Amy’s injuries might be ever so slightly worse so that she’d realize she needed to leave Mike. Have you ever wished for something awful in the service of the greater good?
Gore Vidal once said, “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.” Does this statement apply to any of the characters in the book? Why or why not?
Waverly spends so much time looking at others’ lives from the outside, imagining that their exterior order is connected to inner peace. Do you find that this is actually true more often than not?
On a related note, Amy and Kate both have perfectly clean and organized homes—albeit on quite different scales—while Waverly lives with more disorder. What do we learn about or project onto people from seeing the inside and outside of their homes?
During their conversation in the hospital cafeteria, Amy’s mother tells Waverly that you can never have absolute certainty about a relationship’s future. Do you believe that to be true?
In that same conversation, Amy’s mother worries whether she concentrated too much on raising “nice girls.” Is too much pressure put on girls and women to be nice? Do women seem weaker if they’re perceived as agreeable and optimistic?
At one point early in the novel, Waverly tells us about losing her parents and says that she doesn’t need to pay a therapist to tell her what she already knows. What sort of emotional transitions and breakthroughs has she made by the novel’s end? How many are driven by external events versus internal changes?
What do you think happens after the novel’s final pages? Do you think that Mike is gone for good? Do you see a future for Kate and Brendan? Will Waverly and Larry ever marry or start a family?
Coming in December 2014, a new novel about love, truth—and forgiveness:
A preveiw follows
Chapter One
The cancer is back. I’m sure of it. What else could explain why I haven’t heard from him?
I called Owen’s cell twice in the hour I sat at the airport in Philadelphia and once before that, from my hotel. Be patient, Daphne, I think. I pull the newspaper out of my bag and try to flip through it but I can’t focus. The words are slippery. My eyes jump from headline to headline. New campaign finance legislation introduced. Silver screen legend dead at the age of ninety-six. Strong storms expected in the Midwest.
The flight attendant gets on the intercom to tell us that we’re beginning our descent into Raleigh–Durham. Two different places, I think. I don’t know why it irritates me so much every time I hear it, but it does. People don’t live in Raleigh–Durham any more than they do in New York–New Jersey or San Francisco–San Jose. Two. Different. Places. I fold the paper in my lap and close my eyes. He’s just busy, I say to myself like a mantra—he’s just busy, just busy. No news isn’t always bad news. Minutes later, the plane’s wheels hit the ground and I pull the phone from my bag. No messages. I call him again. No answer.
I shove the newspaper into my bag. The woman next to me—skinny, smelling faintly of coffee and the mint gum she’s been chewing since takeoff—is sitting obediently with her hands clasped over her lap, her eyes pinned on the seat belt sign, waiting for it to ding and tell her it’s okay to get up. I look out the window and tell myself to stop overreacting—he’s just busy—and remind myself to breathe.
It’s normal for Owen and me to ignore each other’s messages during the workday, but this day is different. Kevin, who’s fourteen and one of his favorite patients (really his favorite patient, not that he’d admit to having one) is getting the results of his latest scan. Owen’s done everything he can to treat the leukemia, all of the traditional methods and then a clinical trial. The test is due back today. If the blood work still shows evidence… I stand up in my seat and smile at the woman next to me, who’s still frozen in her seat even though the people three rows up are starting to get off the plane.
I could tell that he was anxious when we spoke last night, him at home and me in my room in Philadelphia, where I was staying for an annual medical conference I always dread. I hesitated whether to even bring up his birthday, which is today, because I knew he wouldn’t want to acknowledge it if Kevin’s cancer had come back. Are you nervous? I finally asked. He cleared his throat and muttered that he was. When he didn’t elaborate, I changed the subject, saying that I’d pick up takeout from his favorite Mexican place and that we could just eat it whenever he got home. He said that sounded fine (his code for that he didn’t really care) and then asked how my talk had gone. I made a bad joke about there being a drunken rush for my autograph at the cocktail reception, and he laughed politely.
I told him that I loved him. I wished him luck. I said good night.
Three hours later, I look out our kitchen window at the sun setting behind the pine trees that line the edge of our property. I know that I am lucky to have such problems, but I can’t help feeling like there’s something wrong with the fact that it’s seven p.m. and I still haven’t spoken to my husband on his birthday. I picture him in one of the hospital conference rooms with Kevin and his parents, whom I’ve never met, of course, but whom I feel like I know well. I picture the boy’s mother with a crumpled tissue in her hand. I picture the boy, his thin frame lost in an oversized Duke sweatshirt (he was a fan long before his health brought him here for care), and I sit down on the wood floor next to Blue, the Newfoundland we adopted two years ago. Our pre-baby baby, I joked. I scratch the top of her head and wonder how soon he’ll be back, whether I should put the takeout in the oven to warm it up.
I decide to set the table at least, placing Owen’s present in the middle like a centerpiece. Inside the box is a gift certificate for the two of us to go on a paddling trip later this spring on the Outer Banks, which, despite the fact that we’ve lived in North Carolina for ten years, is a place we’ve never been. I was able to make a reservation with a
touring company without specifying a date, which is good, since pinning down a weekend when Owen can take off work is never easy.
It will be good for us. Canoeing is our thing—sort of. Owen even proposed on a canoe trip six years ago, which, now that I think about it, might actually be the last time I held an oar in my hands, but it’s part of our history. We met when we were twelve years old, at summer camp in western Massachusetts, and our friendship began on the day that we sat across from each other in an old metal boat on the lake. Though it was almost twenty-five years ago, I still remember how it felt to be there, my skin seeming to glow from the summertime film of dirt and sweat that I can feel just thinking about it. Owen and I were buddies, that’s the very best way I can describe it. We compared bug bites, raced each other during Capture the Flag, and sang the goofy songs that the counselors taught us to pass the time during hikes (“Fried ham, fried ham, cheese and bologna…”). He called me Daph and I let him, even though I had recently decided that because I was almost a teenager—twelve and a half, almost an adult, really—that I would answer only to Daphne.
The following summer, we shared a tentative slow dance at the August banquet and then we kissed. It was quick and sweet and meant that the one photograph that I had of him, in a dirty T-shirt and the soccer shorts we all wore that summer, was granted a permanent spot in the front of the Velcro wallet that I’d started carrying in my book bag. We wrote letters throughout the fall. My family lived outside of Boston, and he was farther west, near Springfield. He doodled at the bottom of the spiral notebook pages where he signed his name—blocky graffiti letters, Owen + Daph. Of course, we were in middle school, so by Christmas break, the letters were sporadic on both of our parts. That spring, my father’s job got us transferred to Northern Virginia. Owen became a memory, and a good one.
How Lucky You Are (9781455518548) Page 33