Marriage Vacation

by Pauline Brooks

  “Good to have you. It’s nice to have the kids running around.”

  I’m a forty-year-old woman, I wanted to tell him. I have two children of my own. But I realized it would do no good. I was a friend to his children and therefore, to Dusty, I was a child myself.

  “Did Mia show you the cottage? It ain’t much, but you should be comfortable back there. Derek told me you got banged up. Two of you got attacked in Burma? I told him not to go pissing around up there. Adele and me went there when the junta was still on. I bought her a slab of jade the size of my foot, but we nearly got shot trying to get it out of the country.”

  I laughed too loud at his story. Get ahold of yourself, Kate, I thought. He’s just a guy, just Mia and Derek’s dad. I yawned and stretched my arms over my head, forgetting about my injured ribs. I let out a yawp like a cat whose tail has been trampled.

  “Oh, honey.” Mia moved to help me. “You’ve had a really long day.” She looked at her dad. “It’s been a lot of traveling. By the way, I think we need to check the engine on the Cub. It was making a noise I didn’t love when we came in for the landing. And we need to clear the brush off the airstrip.”

  Dusty let out a long and low sigh. “There’s a lot that needs to get done out here, but it won’t be my job after this summer. We’ll be fine until then. Why don’t both you girls get some sleep. I can fix my own steak and something for Derek.” He reached out to wrap his arms around Mia in a tight hug and gently kissed her on the top of her head the way I’d seen Karl do hundreds of times to our own girls. “I love you, monkey butt. I’m happy you’re home.”

  • • •

  I didn’t wake up until close to noon the next day. My broken body craved sleep, and Mia had pulled down the shades for me to keep me from waking with the sun. The room was small but sweet, with white brick walls and a cozy daybed. Mia left me her old laptop and logged me onto the house Wi-Fi. After so long in my little Thai tree house, this felt like a five-star luxury hotel. It even had an en suite bathroom with hot water.

  The first thing I did after getting out of bed was turn on that computer and e-mail Ben Hirsch from Zoetrope. I apologized for the delay and blamed an extended trip out of the country. That wasn’t a lie, not entirely. His positive response was brief, but came quickly enough that I was able to convince myself he was still interested in my story. I wrote for four hours that first day and rested for the remaining twenty. Each day continued like that for an entire week. For dinner I joined Mia, Derek, and Dusty around the old wooden kitchen table and listened to them tell family stories I knew they’d told one another dozens of times before, including the time Mia brought home a baby dingo who’d lost his leg after it was caught in a barbed wire fence. They named him Tripod and he lived in the house for the next ten years.

  I wrote and revised and revised and wrote and finally I had something I thought might just be worthy of publication. The pride that came over me when I hit send on that manuscript gave me an intense high, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I knew it was good.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Karl. He’d been diligent about checking in on my recovery, mostly over text message, but I hadn’t kept him updated on my writing. Now, I was ready to tell him.

  I wanted to start my e-mail to him with something a little less personal. I knew that one of his top authors, Ellen Bloom, had a book coming out this month. Her novels always came out just in time for summer. They were endless tomes about recently divorced women finding love when they least expect it with someone adorably working-class—a plumber, carpenter, or policeman in a small beach town. If I remembered correctly this year it was the pizza guy in Montauk.

  I googled Paradigm to check for a review, thinking it could be a nice thing to start my e-mail with.

  But the most recent story about Paradigm had nothing to do with books.

  Publishing Honcho Hooks Up with Heiress

  I slammed the laptop so hard I worried I shattered the screen. It was the last thing I expected to see, and yet it also explained why Karl hadn’t objected to my coming to Australia, to me staying away even longer, why he actually seemed happy when I spoke to him on the phone. Karl had moved on.

  I slowly opened the screen again and began to read. My heart thumped harder and harder until I finally placed my hand over my breast, as if to keep it inside my body.

  The newly single head of Paradigm Publishing, Karl Carmichael, stepped out on the red carpet for the movie version of last year’s number one bestselling thriller, The Woman Under the Stairs, with the beautiful and brilliant heiress to the international Hoxton hotel chain. Daphne Sarraf, twenty-seven, is an Oxford-educated PhD in evidence-based health care currently working for the World Health Organization. Her family’s net worth is estimated to be just over one billion. Carmichael is a mature departure for Sarraf, who split last summer from Jake Wellsley, the lead singer for the indie rock band The Drags. A close friend of Sarraf revealed to Page Six that she and the publishing magnate have been canoodling for several months. Carmichael is currently estranged from his wife, Katharine, the mother of his two children.

  Too many questions filled my brain. Did Karl know this story was being published, or worse, was it planted in the newspaper by the Paradigm public relations department in an effort to drive sales for The Woman Under the Stairs? Karl would never do that on his own, but I wouldn’t put it past Donna, their Machiavellian head of marketing. And then there was this girl. And that’s what I would call her from then on, the girl. I couldn’t bear to say her name. Daphne was too pretty, too sweet, too perfect. And why couldn’t she be less perfect? Why couldn’t my husband’s rebound be a cocktail waitress with a lisp and an unfortunate back tattoo? Why did she have to be beautiful, brilliant, and worst of all—a good person? I suppressed the urge to call Karl. What would that accomplish? And besides, it was the middle of the night and there might just be a gorgeous naked body lying next to him, her elegant toes touching his the way mine used to in the middle of the night. I gasped out loud then. Had she met my daughters? Did she sleep in my bed?

  I wanted to crawl into my own bed and never get back out, but I could hear Mia rustling around in the main house, and I’d promised her I’d come for a drive with her today to check the perimeter of the property for broken fences.

  I pulled a discarded pair of pants off the floor and looked at myself in the mirror. I liked this new woman staring back at me, the woman who’d finally started to pursue her passions again, who woke her brain back up, who was beginning to understand what she wanted out of the rest of her life. She was stronger, more confident, more sure of herself—happier.

  But could this new version of Kate Carmichael compete with Daphne Sarraf?

  Chapter Fifteen

  * * *

  Just as I felt myself at my very lowest, an e-mail arrived that changed everything.

  I read it over and over. I read it quietly to myself. I read it out loud to Mia and Derek so many times I knew they were sick of hearing it, but they smiled through each subsequent recitation.

  It wasn’t an e-mail from Karl. It was from Ben Hirsch. The editor of Zoetrope wrote me back and told me that my revisions were perfect. He planned to run the story a few months from now. I was going to be a published writer. They’d pay me $300 for it. But that wasn’t the part I kept reading. I recited his praise over and over:

  You have a rare talent for capturing a playful irony that is incredibly difficult for many writers to articulate. Your interplay with time and memory manages to stir emotions in the reader in surprising and exciting ways. Reading this piece has been a pleasure and I hope to hear more from you.

  He wanted to hear more from me. I was a real talent. Screw Daphne.

  After getting Ben’s e-mail and learning about Daphne I was that much more motivated to make the most of my remaining time here.

  Each morning I sat down at an antique writing desk pushed up against a window that overlooked the vast plain for as far as the eye could see. Mia told me t
he wooden desk belonged to her mother’s mother, an outback poet whose work was still taught in Australian high schools. I was in such a zone of creative flow; within a week I had polished the first hundred pages of my novel I never thought I would write.

  Mia read through the burgeoning novel during her final days at the ranch. She leaned back in her chair in the kitchen and kicked her dusty bare feet up on the table, pages in one hand, a heaping glass of wine in the other. I took a mental snapshot of her there. It was how I’d always remember her. We promised to see one another again soon. She’d come to New York. I’d try to bring the girls to Thailand. I hoped we’d keep those promises, but I knew better than anyone how life could get in the way. I was just grateful to have had this time with her. I’d been starved for meaningful friendships, and I’d gotten more than I ever could have wished for.

  “You’re so fucking good, Kate. No matter what happens with this. No matter what happens with your marriage, please always remember that,” she said when she’d finished.

  “I will,” I promised, and meant it.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll remind you,” she said. “You won’t be getting rid of me.”

  I helped Mia pack all of the things from the house she wanted to keep. We dismantled the gallery wall of photos in the hallway and carefully wrapped each picture in newspaper. We sent some to Jack and put some in boxes for Derek and Dusty.

  Throughout the entire process, Mia hadn’t shed a tear until we began going through her mother’s paintings in the back cottage. She ran her finger over the soft pastels on a small canvas, no bigger than a children’s picture book. Mia’s mother painted a solemn silver moon in the corner. It’s quiet light illuminated a small girl with fiery red hair lying on a boulder in the middle of the darkness.

  “It’s Bahloo and me,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen this one in years. It used to hang over my bed. Bahloo was always watching over me.”

  I stroked her hair and let her tears fall into her lap. “She’s still watching over you,” I said. “Bahloo and your mom. A mother never stops watching out for her children, even when she’s separated from them.” I knew this was true.

  Mia nodded and wiped her tears away. “I know.” She paused and began to wrap the painting in tissue paper. “She’d be happy we were leaving. She never wanted to spend her entire life here. She always thought the two of them would sell it one day and start a whole new kind of life. There just wasn’t enough time.

  “Oh! That reminds me. I almost forgot!” She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a tiny envelope. “Are you ready to take them back?”

  I opened the lip of the small beige package and shook it into my hand. My rings. They were heavier than I remembered. The light from the window caught on the diamond as I blinked back a tear. I stared at them for a long time before I handed them to her. “Can you sell them?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened.

  “For Htet. And her family. I want you to sell them and give the money to Htet. She needs it more than I need these.”

  “Are you sure?” Mia asked.

  I nodded. “I’m not sure about a lot of things, but I’m sure about this.”

  • • •

  Before I knew it Mia was back in Thailand and Derek was spending most nights with Zoe. I’d met the girl about a half dozen times. In the beginning, when we first returned to the farm, I could sense her skepticism, her need for distance, her fear that Derek would leave her again. But he quickly proved himself slavishly devoted to her, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he ended up proposing. I liked her a lot. She was in many ways the opposite of Derek, quiet, reflective, and serious. I could tell that she offered a healthy counterbalance to his sometimes heedless freewheeling spirit.

  Dusty and I orbited one another politely, like he was a landlord and I was a tenant. My habits changed. My recovery had demanded so much rest that I switched from being a night owl to going to bed soon after the sun set. I was often asleep by the time Dusty got in from the fields. He was attempting to castrate more than a thousand bulls before the sale and was intent that every inch of the farm be in perfect working order before he left.

  “My dad would never want anyone thinking he sold them a bad bill of goods,” Derek said, half complaining about all the work they were investing in something that would soon belong to someone else.

  Derek was also good about replenishing the groceries, since it was the kind of thing Dusty apparently never remembered to do. “He’s the kind of man who needs a woman,” Zoe explained about Dusty one day. “He went straight from living with his mother to living with Derek’s mom. I’ve watched him since I was a little girl. He’s a man who doesn’t know how to take care of himself.”

  So I was surprised one night when I wandered into the main house to fix myself a quick sandwich to find Dusty at the stove stirring something in a Dutch oven that smelled like heaven.

  “I was just about to come out to get you.” He smiled at me as I stood in the door. He wore clean jeans, a wrinkled blue oxford, and no shoes. He’d shaved. It was the first time I saw his face without a layer of stubble. Without the beard I noticed a friendly dimple in the center of his chin.

  “Barefoot in the kitchen?” I smiled back at him, suddenly self-conscious of my unwashed hair, sweatpants, and ratty tank top.

  “But not pregnant.” He chuckled at my joke. “I’m making a cassoulet. It’s almost finished. The key is to soak the beans the night before and to use pork shoulder in addition to bacon, but you need to let it get so tender it slides right off the bone. The secret to a good cassoulet is patience. If you don’t give it time you can ruin everything.”

  My mouth must have hung open in surprise.

  “What? You didn’t think I could cook? My kids think I can’t, but I know my way around a kitchen. I loved cooking for Adele, baking too. I just used to do it after we fed the little bastards franks and beans and put them to bed.” He pulled a chair out from the kitchen table. “Sit down. Want a glass of wine?”

  I nodded, still slightly in shock.

  “Red or white? I think Australian whites are shit, but our Shiraz is some of the best in the world.”

  “I’ll never say no to a good Shiraz.”

  “My kind of woman.”

  I felt my neck grow hot at his compliment.

  “So, Kate, tell me more about yourself. I know you’re a writer. You sit and stare out that window most days. Mia tells me you’re going to write the Great American Novel.”

  I took a sip of the wine. He was right. It was one of the better reds I’d ever tasted. “Even talking about the Great American Novel makes me nauseated,” I said honestly. “I just want to finish a novel. If it gets published, that would be a dream.”

  Dusty put the dish back into the oven, set the timer, and poured himself a generous glass of wine.

  “It’s funny how we lower our expectations as we get older, huh? I once thought I’d own the biggest, most profitable ranch in the Northern Territory. Now I’d be happy if I didn’t have to sell out to the man just to keep it alive.” He lifted his glass and clinked it against hers. “Cheers to us.”

  “Cheers to us,” I agreed.

  “What will you do after the sale is finished? Where will you go?” I asked him.

  “That’s a good question. The kids want me to travel, a regular old walkabout around the world. There will be enough money to live on when I turn over the land, probably for the rest of my life and some to leave behind. Jack asked me if I want to come live in Sydney, but he didn’t mean it. He doesn’t want an old man cramping his style, and besides, I don’t know what I’d do, being around that many people all the time. I guess I could take up surfing.”

  The timer dinged on the oven. I rose to grab plates and begin setting the table while Dusty prepared the food. A comfortable silence settled between us, as if we’d been doing this, preparing dinner together, for years.

  “This is the best cassoulet I’ve ever had,” I said, and meant it
. Cassoulet, I knew from experience, was an easy dish to ruin. I’d ruined plenty when I had tried to replicate a version I served when I was a waitress in Paris. These beans turned to butter in my mouth. The liquid was rich and hearty and warmed my entire body like a familiar hug. “I used to order this all the time when I lived in Paris.”

  “You lived in Paris?”

  From there I filled Dusty in on my life before I took a break from my life. We talked about Paris and leaving Paris. How I met Karl and fell head over heels in a way I had never even thought was possible. He told me about Adele and how her unexpected pregnancy changed both their lives when they were still just babies themselves.

  “We took a road trip as a honeymoon. She was five months along then. The second trimester was good for traveling. She had this sweet tummy, but none of the sickness of the early days. We took my dad’s old camper van and drove from here to Ayers Rock. You could still climb it back then, and damned if Adele didn’t beat me up to the top. It feels like you can see the whole world from the top of that rock. It makes you understand why it’s so sacred. Then we went on down to Adelaide and over to Bells Beach and Melbourne and then up to Sydney and Brisbane. We snorkeled on the reef and then we drove home. A whole month, it took us. You know we hadn’t been dating that long when she got pregnant. It was that trip where we really fell in love.”

  “That’s incredible,” I said. “Karl and I traveled before the girls and then a little when Izzy was born, but traveling with two seemed impossible.”

  Dusty nodded. “We didn’t do much once Mia came.” He paused, lost in thought. We both brought the final slurps of the soupy stew to our mouths. I closed my eyes to savor the last bite.

  I was so lost in my thoughts, I was almost startled when Dusty spoke again. “Adele and I didn’t have the perfect marriage. It’s hard when you’re that young. You’re not fully formed humans yet. But then, I don’t know if we would have done better if we’d been twenty-seven instead of eighteen. I know her eye wandered sometimes. I wasn’t a damn saint. We fought like cats and dogs. If I had a dollar for every plate she threw at my damn head I wouldn’t be selling this place now. But in the end I think we did OK. We did that trip again just a few months before she passed.”