The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  How it had happened was this.

  Susan Howard had gotten wind of Gordon Allen’s attorney’s proposal to Owen and Lucy—the “whatever you want,” the blank check—and Susan was not one to let such an opportunity go to waste. She was in the middle of her own divorce, Susan was, but the strange thing about her split with Rowan was that their shared custody arrangement left her with gobs of free time. When she realized that Owen and Lucy were too wrapped up in their own stuff to think about it clearly, she immediately grabbed the reins. She unleashed the full power of the Mommies of Beekman, gathering them over drinks, thinking about what made the most sense given who Owen and Lucy were, what Wyatt would benefit from, what kind of legacy they might want to leave, and what the community could use the most. First, they dreamed together. Then they narrowed it down—to their credit, the ladies nixed a lot of one another’s pet ideas: the new auditorium, the state-of-the-art science lab, the indoor pool, the Maya Lin art installation—and then they did the research, they consulted specialists, they ran the numbers. Finally, they presented a plan to Owen and Lucy (separately, Susan had decided, after conferring with Sunny Bang) and, when they got their respective stamps of approval, they brought the whole thing before Gordon Allen and his attorneys. Claire had done the PowerPoint, Susan the artist renderings, and Sunny Bang the budget. The women in this town could take over the world, their husbands all thought as they sat on the sidelines, watching. Thank goodness they’re happy to raise our kids.

  The whole thing was a spectacular boondoggle in the end, but Gordon Allen didn’t mind. All he asked for was that Dirk, his bee guy, be allowed to build a house on the farm property with zero interference from the town zoning board and that he be employed in perpetuity to develop whatever kind of cockamamie projects he wanted to do with the kids. (“If you want to build your house out of old tires and donkey dung, you can do it,” Gordon said to Dirk as he watched one of his Titleist V1xs plop into the mighty Hudson River. “If you want to teach a class on how to make a tractor run on algae and old French-fry oil, go right ahead.”)

  All of it, the whole thing, was generously, perpetually endowed. With zero tax dollars involved.

  Thank you, Fat Black.

  Owen walked up the driveway, reading the letter as he went while he listened to Wyatt with half of one ear, the way a parent who spends a lot of time with his kid listens when the kid is talking about nothing much in particular. What was happening at school, who has a crush on who, what happened at recess, could he go camping with Brannon and Brannon’s dad, were they going to go to Maine again in the summer. Sometimes the reality of Wyatt was a shock to Owen, but lately, more often than not, it was like this: It was no longer extraordinary for Wyatt to be just about ordinary. Not totally, not by any means—but just about. He was a quirky, unusual, challenging kid. He was an amazing, unique, wonderful kid.

  “Who’s that from?” asked Wyatt.

  “What?” said Owen. He was lost, gone, deep in the letter.

  “Who’s that mail from?”

  “Oh, this?” said Owen. “It’s from an old friend.”

  * * *

  Lucy was upstairs, looking out the window, watching Owen and Wyatt walk up the driveway.

  Lucy had moved back home a few months ago. Or, rather, she and Owen had both moved back home, together. It turned out that Wyatt couldn’t handle the shuttling-back-and-forth part of Lucy’s original exit plan, and so Lucy and Owen each moved in and out of the house every few days while Wyatt stayed put. Owen lived in the Callahans’ luxurious guesthouse when he wasn’t at the house, and Lucy split her time away between Ben’s place and the spare futon in Sunny Bang’s dank basement.

  Sunny Bang was completely beside herself over the whole situation. She took the blame herself, too much of it, surely, and she did everything she could to make things right, even when Lucy was swooning around like a love-struck teenager. Basically, Sunny Bang went to work. She made a few phone calls. She invited her sister up to Beekman for the weekend, poured tequila down her throat, and got her talking. Sunny collected as many unsavory tidbits about Ben as she possibly could—stuff from as far back as college, ugly details about his divorce—and she held on to them until the first hot heat of passion and escape and fantasy had begun to burn itself out of Lucy’s system. And then? And then she oh so casually dropped them in Lucy’s path, like ancient Asian coins or tiny hardened turds, whenever she sensed they would have the most impact.

  “Ben cheated on Deborah during her residency, but she always said it wasn’t really his fault,” Sunny said to Lucy one night while they were cooking dinner. “She was pretty much gone all the time. They worked it out, though. Stayed together for eight more years.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” asked Lucy.

  “To show that people can work things out,” said Sunny. “Why else would I be telling you this?”

  Victoria had claimed over drinks that rainy afternoon in Brooklyn that it took three years for something like this to fizzle out, but for Lucy it took less than half of that. There was a good six months of, well, bliss—there was no other word for it, and Lucy would not call it something else, it was bliss, falling in love with a new person, no matter how old you are or how complicated things were, falling in love is a thing like no other, and the fact that Lucy had fallen just as deeply and completely in love with Owen all those years earlier did nothing to detract from that fact. So, six months of bliss, five months of pretty horrible, and then four months of date nights and long walks and counseling twice a week with Owen.

  “This is really fucked up,” Lucy said to Owen when they met in the therapist’s waiting room the first time.

  “Yeah,” said Owen.

  “We really fucked up.”

  “We really, colossally fucked everything up,” said Owen. And then he reached out for her hand.

  Lucy found herself circling back again and again to something Ben had said to her on one of those very first nights she was on her own, right after Owen had asked her to leave the house. She was sleeping in a motel room two towns over, talking to Ben on the phone for hours every night, and driving home each morning in time to get Wyatt out of bed and off to school.

  “I feel like I should tell you something,” Ben had said to her.

  “What?”

  “Keep in mind, this is not a hidden message. This has nothing to do with you and me or our future together or anything like that. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” Lucy said. “At least, I think I do.”

  “I look at Eliza and Peggy when they’re asleep sometimes, when it’s one of my nights with them.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I can’t shake it, the same thought just goes running through my head.”

  “What?” asked Lucy.

  “It’s, well…” Ben paused for a second, like he wasn’t sure he should say this, but he forged ahead. “It’s What was I thinking? It’s What in the world was I thinking?”

  Lucy heard the back door open. Owen and Wyatt were making a bit of a commotion, and the door kept opening and closing and then opening again. Lucy stood at the top of the stairs for a minute and listened to the two of them talking. They were hauling in firewood, and Wyatt wanted to carry each log one by one instead of using the canvas log carrier. Owen was telling him why the log carrier was better. “It’s more efficient,” Owen explained. “That means it’s easier and faster and better.”

  “Okay,” said Wyatt.

  “We’ll do it together,” said Owen. “We’ll each hold one handle. And then we’ll make a great big fire for Mama.”

  Lucy slipped on her sweater and headed downstairs to her family.

  “You want some wine?” she called.

  “Yes, please,” said Owen.

  Lucy poured two glasses of wine and went into the living room. She sat in the big red chair and looked on as Owen and Wyatt set about building the fire.

  “No fire starters!” said Wyatt.

  “No fire starte
rs,” agreed Owen.

  “And only one match,” said Wyatt.

  “Are you sure?” said Owen.

  “Yes,” said Wyatt. “We’ll pretend we’re in the woods and we’ve lost all our stuff and we only have one match left.”

  Owen turned to Lucy and said, “I’ve got something for you to read, if you want to read it.”

  “What is it?”

  “A letter.”

  “Do I want to read it?” asked Lucy.

  Owen thought about it for a moment and then said, “I think you do.”

  Dear Owen,

  I’m writing to you from sunny Scottsdale, Arizona, where it’s eighty-five degrees and the sky is blue and today, for some reason, there are about eighty hot-air balloons floating up in the sky. I’m still alive, just so you know. This isn’t one of those letters people write when they’re dying and then have someone mail for them after they’ve bit it. Well, let’s just say it’s March Madness and I was alive when I put this in the mailbox. Real stationery too.

  I’m sorry I disappeared on you. I left Beekman to go die at my sister Mona’s house. I know, I know, I never said I had a sister. Mona and I both spent most of our adult lives trying to forget about each other and it turns out we did it more successfully than either of us ever imagined. When I called her to tell her I had cancer she laid out all of the reasons why I should stay in Beekman, but I got on a plane and showed up on her doorstep anyway. She didn’t want me there. She really, really didn’t want me there. I kept saying to her, “If the shoe were on the other foot”—but if the cancer shoe had been on her foot, I can’t say I’d do for her what she did for me and offer to let me die on a rented hospital bed in her dining room because I was quickly going to be too weak to walk up the stairs.

  I decided I would binge-watch The Sopranos as I lay dying, while the docs from the Phoenix Mayo Clinic did some experimental last-ditch efforts on my failing form. The doctor stuff was a condition imposed by Mona if I wanted to go gentle into that good night shitting blood in her dining room while hiding my chardonnay in her breakfront. It’s possible she thought it was experimental enough it just might speed the whole process along (okay, that’s not fair—but I’m not crossing it out, just so you see that cancer didn’t really soften me all that much).

  Where was I? Oh, The Sopranos. Let me tell you, that show holds up. And I realized I missed about a third of the episodes on the original run so every few days I’d have this flicker of a good feeling, that hey-I-never-saw-this-one feeling, and when you’re convinced you’re dying it’s nice to have a reliable source of good feelings.

  Christopher came to visit me, back when things were at their direst. Mona tracked him down and told him I was with her. I made him promise to keep it to himself, which it seems he did, unless you are really over me (joking!). It was nice. Making peace with your ex-husband on your deathbed is not the worst thing to do. He stayed at the Comfort Inn for a few days, played a little golf, and sat and talked with me when I was lucid. It’s amazing how a slow and painful death looming over you makes all the other things shrink down to their proper size. So he put his dick into other women; so what? It really wasn’t worth the amount of rage I carried around with me for all those years because of it. I mean it: it really wasn’t worth it. And I don’t like that Louise L. Hay stuff about rage causing cancer, it feels a little too blame-the-victim for me, but if rage DID cause cancer, then, well—I’m not going to finish that thought. Anyhow, talking to Christopher, I realized how nice it was to be friends again, and I remembered how he always could make me laugh. We were, in our own way, important to each other.

  And I was completely ready to go down with this ship, I did not survive because of some inner strength or will to live or prayer or even a shred of New Age hope. There’s only one reason I’m still alive: Because they caught it in the nick of time. The doctors said even three months the other way would have meant I’d be dead now for sure.

  So what I’m saying is, basically you saved my life. Not even basically. YOU SAVED MY LIFE.

  So, thank you. As Sunny Bang said to me after she figured out about the two of us, there’s a pretty small overlap between the kind of men I sleep with and the kind of man who would force me to go to the gynecologist. I’m lucky it was you.

  I thought Lucy should know too. I think, in a different life, in a parallel universe, the two of us would be friends. Tell her I apologize for putting the gravel in her gas tank. Better yet, ask her to read this letter if she’s willing to. I’m sorry, Lucy. I hope you are well and happy. Truly I do.

  I still stand by the statement that you two were idiots to do what you did to each other, what you did to your marriage, the peril you put your family in, and for what? One last taste of something you hadn’t had since you were young? Passion? Freedom? Well, let me tell you something from this side of the cancer fence, and from this side of the divorce fence, let me go ahead and drop some wisdom on you. What you guys have is enough. It’s a fuckload more than most people ever get, ever even dream of getting, and it is your job, it’s your duty while you are alive on this planet, to be thankful for it. And to protect it too.

  P.S. You’re wondering how I know you and Lucy are back together. Please don’t be mad at me. But I can read your e-mails and your texts. Other than The Sopranos, it was what kept me going for a while. It was sort of nice, like listening to a soap opera and rooting for the star-crossed lovers to figure their stuff out. Except you and Lucy aren’t star-crossed, you’re actually the opposite of star-crossed—you’re truly and deeply meant to be together and just went a little crazy there for a while. Don’t be too mad at Lucy for falling in love with Ben. I fell a little bit in love with you too—we’re women, and where sex is involved, I’m starting to believe we can’t help it. He seems like a quality person, from what I read. A stand-up guy, as my father would have said. In the end, he did the right thing, and so did Lucy, and so did you. What were the chances?

  P.P.S. Lucy and Ben are really and truly 100 percent out of contact with each other in case you ever wake up in the middle of the night wondering.

  P.P.P.S. You and Lucy should probably get new computers and new passwords and ditch your phones. Change e-mail providers, too, and maybe get a different phone carrier. I feel better with that off my chest. Oh, maybe drop a note to Ben to do it too.

  P.P.P.P.S. I’m staying in Scottsdale. The women my age out here all have skin like beef jerky, they’ve had so much sun, so compared to them I feel pretty good about myself. I figure I’ve bought myself about ten more years in the forty-five-and-under dating pool if the terry-cloth-sun-visor crowd is my competition. I lost my hair, and then got it back again, but the texture changed, and it’s been a whole learning curve for me. I have a pixie cut now, and people tell me I look like Mia Farrow—not a young Mia Farrow, just Mia Farrow, but hey, I’ll take it.

  Life is long. And it’s getting longer for most of us. Most people in this country will have three or four marriages in their lifetime. Each one will challenge them and suit them in a different way. The lucky few, the ones who are willing to work at it, will have a handful of very different marriages, all with the same person.

  —Constance Waverly

  TED Talk

  About the Author

  Sarah Dunn is a novelist and television writer whose credits include Spin City (for which she cowrote Michael J. Fox’s farewell episode) and the critical darling Bunheads, which you would have loved. Her debut novel, The Big Love, is available in nineteen languages. Dunn is also the creator and executive producer of the 2016 ABC series American Housewife. She lives outside New York City with her family and their seventeen chickens.

  Also by Sarah Dunn

  The Big Love

  Secrets to Happiness

 

 

 
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