She would’ve teased him for that—such a panty-dropper of a line, like something from a commercial for male body spray—but he seemed to genuinely mean it, and she remembered the ease of being his age, of being desired and desirable and naïve enough to think that that’s all that matters.
“Plus,” he said, “you look smart. Your entire aura. I have a thing for smart women. If you put on a pair of glasses right now, I’d pass out. Honest to God.”
“You’re sweet,” she said. “But sorry. I’ve worn contacts since high school. Glasses give me vertigo.”
“Sigh,” he said.
She was aware of the time passing—of the tables filling up around them. “So, you have them, then?” she said.
He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and set her rings on the table between them. It seemed somehow vulgar to slide it immediately back onto her finger, but what choice did she have? That was where it belonged.
“Done and done,” he said.
Neither of them spoke for a moment. She looked around again, hoping not to see Amber or anyone else she knew there in the city of Smalltimore. She hadn’t a clue what she’d say if she did. And then Ryan noticed the empty Chinese food place nearby. “That makes me kinda sad, you know?” he said. “Look at those poor ladies. They have to stand there and watch all those assholes wait in line for shitty Subway. Kinda feel bad for them.”
Goddammit, she thought.
Because, if she’d never been married. If she were divorced. If she were a widow. If she were anything other than what she was, and if there were no Rules or consequences or reality, maybe she’d let him buy her that Whopper after all. Fuck ’em.
“I’m not a bad person, you know,” she said.
He smiled. “Who said you were?”
“We have an arrangement.”
“A what?”
“Oh God,” she said. “I hate how that sounds. My husband and I. We have…We’re trying something. It’s sort of an experiment.”
He sat back in his chair. “Really?”
She nodded.
“People actually do that?”
“Apparently,” she said.
“Well, your husband’s an idiot. If you were mine, no way I’d share you.”
He was trying to be sweet. She knew that, but it hurt anyway. “I should go,” she said. “I’m meeting a friend.”
It seemed like he might touch her hand, but he didn’t. “This is the second time you’ve said goodbye to me forever, you know,” he said.
“For real this time.”
Ryan looked at her in a way that showed pretty clearly that he didn’t believe her. And then, instead of leaving straightaway, he stepped up to the counter at the Chinese place and ordered food. He looked back at her and shrugged.
And that’s how she left him. On her way out of the food court, she looked back just in time to see the two ladies smiling as they heaped his sweet-and-sour chicken into a Styrofoam takeaway container. Jessica spun the wedding rings on her finger as she walked, reacquainting herself with their weight. That was when she saw Kate Upton. She was over the Hallmark Store, hanging from the wall on the second floor. Wearing the smallest nightgown ever, she smiled down at Jessica from above.
This was all her fault.
25
Nordstrom was having an insane dress sale. They did it every year.
Winter dresses, mostly—getting rid of seasonal inventory—but there were deals to be had on spring and summer stuff, too, and Amber claimed to need absolutely everything. A full-fledged restart.
“Work dresses,” she said. “Going-out dresses. First-date dresses. Third-date dresses. Hoochie dresses. Fun dresses. Serious dresses. Dresses to wear when I’m on my period. I can’t live in tank tops and yoga pants anymore like some antisocial mole-woman. This girl’s back in the game.”
Jessica leaned against a SPRING DRESS EVENT sign. “That sounds exhausting,” she said.
“And expensive. Forget the national debt. If I ever do have kids, this’ll be what they’re paying off when we’re all dead.”
Technically, Jessica was shopping, too, but less aggressively than Amber, so she was playing the role of Amber’s Sherpa. There were currently five dresses slung over her arm, and she was lugging a large iced coffee, too.
Amber looked at her watch. “When did Megan and Sarah say they were coming? Did they say there were coming? I get lost in the text chains sometimes.”
“They’ve got kid stuff,” said Jessica. “They said to get started without them.”
“Right.”
The Wives had never shopped together when they were all married. They had a book club, which was really just a wine club. And they’d experimented with a restaurant club a few times, too, but there were always too many conflicts to make a consistent go of it. Now that they were 75 percent single, they stopped making up activities and just hung out when they could. “I mean, this is bullshit,” Megan had said last year at the final official meeting of their floundering book club. “Why do I have to pretend to read Anna freaking Karenina just to see you guys?”
Amber held a floral thing up to herself. “What do you think?” she said. “For garden parties and stuff.”
“You get invited to a lot of garden parties?” Jessica asked.
Amber pouted into a mirror. “No. When I was younger, I imagined there’d be garden parties.”
“For me it was galas,” said Jessica. “I thought there’d be tons of them. And those New Year’s Eve parties where everyone dresses like it’s 1920. It’s a pretty dress, though.”
Amber draped it over the other dresses on Jessica’s arm. “We’ll throw it on the pile,” she said.
They milled for a while. Amber picked up more dresses, seemingly at random, and held them up to herself for comment, and Jessica glanced incessantly toward the mall entrance.
“Why do you keep looking out there?” Amber asked.
“Do I?” Jessica asked. “Sorry.”
“You’re distracted today. I need you focusing on me.”
“God, you’re so high-maintenance. No wonder you’re divorced.”
* * *
—
Jessica hated admitting it to herself, but she was still thinking of Ryan, and now she wondered: Did he take his Chinese food home, or was he sitting on some mall bench out there eating off his lap? Or, more likely, had he sauntered into the Gap and seduced some poor girl folding jeans, just to spite her?
“So, Alan’s seeing someone,” said Amber, quite suddenly.
“What?”
“Yep.” Her face was resigned, emotionless. She was standing at a rack of nautical-inspired floor-length evening dresses.
Jessica had been waiting for this. Mitch had showed her some texts from Alan the previous week, but she wasn’t sure what the exact protocol was for the friends of the recently divorced. How does it work? What do you share? What do you hide? More specifically, do your friends want to know about their ex-husbands’ hand jobs? “How do you know?” she asked. “Are you sure?”
“You know this city. Everybody knows everybody. Plus, he posted something on Instagram, the idiot. We agreed to unfriend and unfollow each other across all social media. Smart, right? But my brother saw it and ratted him out. You can’t escape this shit.”
“How do you feel about it?” Jessica asked.
“Are you being a therapist or a friend?”
“Is there a difference?”
Amber ran her hand over some velvet thing with a silly built-in belt. “Well,” she said, “I feel shitty.”
“That’s normal.”
“Yeah, but shittier than I thought I’d feel. I always figured I’d meet someone before he did, you know. I mean, I don’t love him, we established that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wanna beat him. Right?”
Jess
ica totally understood this.
“And you know what really sucks?” said Amber. “Well, besides all of it?”
“What?”
“Alan’s more attractive now than when we met. Significantly. It’s unfair.”
Jessica understood this, too. Fifteen pounds, three forehead wrinkles, and graying temples had combined to make Mitch far more handsome than the skinny twentysomething she’d married. It was yet another line item on the long list of humankind’s biological injustices.
“What about you?” Jessica asked. “Have you met anyone?”
“You mean future dick-pic candidates?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I dipped my toe in a little with the apps. Did some research. But they were mostly gross.”
“Really?”
“They all brag about their algorithms or whatever—like, these matchmaking formulas—but it’s all just a bunch of people trying to get laid.”
“Well, it kinda seemed like that was what you were looking for the other night,” said Jessica. “Something physical.”
“I was all talk. You know how I get when I drink shots.” Amber looked at her own reflection again, posed with her hand on her hip. “Truth is, I’m just a girl standing in front of a mirror, asking for a boy who isn’t an Internet sex fiend.”
“Well put,” said Jessica.
As they moved through the store, the quality of merchandise steadily improved—less novelty crap—and Jessica noticed a little black dress hanging on a tucked-away rack. It was from Anthropologie—short and form-fitting—and a thought fluttered in and out of her head, like a passing butterfly, of wearing it for Ryan. His eyes moving over her body. Him whispering, “Fuuuuuck.”
“And—surprise, surprise—she’s younger, too,” Amber said. “That’s not helping me feel any less shitty.”
“Who?” Jessica asked.
“Her. Alan’s girl. Whatever her name is.”
“Oh. How young?”
“Who the hell knows? Every chick under thirty-five might as well be nineteen.” Amber tugged at the skin beneath her chin. “Young enough to not have any of this. That’s for sure.”
“Stop it. Your chin is fine.”
“I’m starting to look old,” she said.
“No you’re not. You look great. The lighting in these places is always terrible.”
“Fine,” said Amber. “I’m starting to look like the stage just before old. If I was an actress, I’d be playing the younger, hotter actress’s quirky older sister or gynecologist or something.”
Amber was an advertising and PR writer by trade. She was always saying things like this—too concise and clever to argue with.
The store was filling up fast. Women clustered in groups around them, working through the racks together.
“You wanna see her?” Amber asked, pulling out her phone. “My brother took a screenshot and sent it to me.”
No, Jessica didn’t, not particularly, but then again, of course she did. Either way, the girl on Amber’s iPhone screen was just a girl like any girl. Midtwenties, leaning next to Alan, grinning and loopy eyed and unwrinkled.
“Hot, right?” said Amber.
“Eh,” said Jessica. “Her freckles are cute, I guess.”
“Do you lie to all your patients, Dr. Butler?”
“Amber, she’s just young. That’s all. When you’re that age, you can fool anyone into thinking you’re hot.”
“Do you think they’re having sex?”
Jessica said she didn’t know, which was a harmless enough lie, like telling Emily that her macaroni sculpture was the most beautiful thing ever.
“She’s probably one of those horrible monsters who pretends to like watching baseball and giving blow jobs.”
A mother and her teenage daughter were shopping nearby. Their eyes went wide, and Jessica nudged Amber toward a clearing in the crowd. “Look on the bright side,” she said. “Statistically speaking, there’s a decent chance she has HPV.”
Amber smiled. “That’s sweet.”
* * *
—
“Which one are you trying on first?” she asked.
Jessica sat in an uncomfortable chair, looking at Amber’s feet at the bottom of the changing-room door.
“Garden party,” Amber said.
Her jeans fell to the floor, and she kicked them out of the way. She stepped into the floral dress, and then there was silence. Jessica could hear Amber breathing.
“How is it?” asked Jessica. “You like?”
“I’m too tall.”
“You always say that. Open up. Lemme see.”
Amber opened the door and stood barefoot and pigeon-toed, a little hunched. The material clung to her legs, but not in a good way, and it was cut far too short from shoulder to hip.
“Yeah,” said Jessica. “You’re too tall.”
“Did the designers all get together and decide to abandon me?”
“Well, that one did.”
She shut the door again and started over. Jessica could read Amber’s emotions just by seeing her feet. They were set firm, shoulder-width apart, the way you might stand if you were expecting to be slapped in the face.
“By the way,” said Amber, “Megan and Sarah really got in my head the other night.”
“What do you mean?”
“Their little tough-love speech. What if I don’t want to date fifty-year-olds?”
“I’m sure they were exaggerating,” said Jessica.
Amber tried on something else—the navy blue one, from what Jessica could see. “Okay,” she said. “This one’s for work.” The door opened, and there she stood again. The right length this time, but shapeless. “Thoughts?”
“You look like the branch manager of a bank in 1987.”
“Right? Who puts shoulder pads in dresses anymore?” The door closed, and Amber worked her way out of the second dress. And then she said, “I wish I would’ve talked to that waiter.”
Jessica looked up at the door. “What waiter?” she said, but, obviously, she knew. There was only one waiter.
“You know, the hot one. You guys were trying to get me to go throw myself at him, but I was too nervous.”
“Oh. Him? Really?” Jessica was surprised at the intensity of her instincts—at the ownership she felt.
“Well, he was absolutely gorgeous. And he was taller than me, too. Not a bad combination.”
“He was…kinda young, though, right?”
“Well, Alan has no problem going after young, pretty things. Why should I? If I find a dress that doesn’t make me look like either a horse or Murphy Brown, maybe we’ll head there for another Wives’ night. Or ladies’ night. We should probably stop calling ourselves the Wives, by the way. I’ve been thinking about that. For accuracy’s sake.”
Jessica felt a surge of preemptive jealousy.
“By the way, why aren’t you trying on anything?”
Jessica sipped at the last of her iced coffee.
“You need to buy something, so I don’t feel bad for buying everything. That’s how this works. Didn’t you see anything you like?”
“No,” said Jessica. “Not really.” But that wasn’t true at all. “Well, actually.”
Amber’s forehead and eyes appeared over the changing room door. “Yeah?”
“Maybe,” said Jessica. “Hold on a sec.”
“Atta girl,” said Amber.
Jessica went back out into the store and grabbed the little black dress off the rack. Then she hurried into the changing room next to Amber. “Okay,” she said. “I got one.”
“Nice,” said Amber. “What color?”
“Black,” said Jessica.
“Classy.”
“It probably won’t even work,” said Jessica. “It’s ridiculous.�
�
“I’m trying on the red one now,” said Amber. “The strapless one. I like to attend events with the full knowledge that my boobs might pop out at any moment, so this should be perfect.”
Jessica took off her jeans and pulled her thin sweater over her head and stepped into the dress. Even before she had it on, as she tugged it up over her knees and hips, she could tell it was different from anything she owned. And then she looked at herself. She stood on her toes, pretending to be in heels. She pulled her hair out of its loose tie and let it fall over her shoulders.
“You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine,” said Amber.
They stepped out of their dressing rooms at the same time.
“I’m too tall for this one, too, but—whoa.” Amber took a step back, looking at Jessica.
“It’s short,” Jessica said. “And it’s tight.”
“Yeah. It’s both of those things. But…wow.”
“I really don’t need it,” said Jessica.
Amber reached down and straightened the hem at Jessica’s mid-thigh. “You aren’t looking to get pregnant, are you?” she asked. “ ’Cause this is the kind of dress that gets a girl really pregnant.”
Before they could laugh at this, they heard a sound a few dressing rooms over. A woman. She was muttering something.
Amber pointed. “Did you know there was someone in there?” she mouthed.
Jessica shook her head no.
“Fuck this,” the voice said. Then the door opened, and out walked a short-haired woman who Jessica recognized instantly. The woman stopped when she saw Jessica and Amber standing there barefoot in expensive dresses. It was Jessica’s next-door neighbor.
“Ellen,” she said. “My God. Hi.”
“Hey,” said Ellen. “Small world.”
Amber said hello and introduced herself.
“Ellen’s my neighbor,” said Jessica.
“Oh, that’s cool.”
Ellen was clearly upset. Her eyes were puffy, like she’d been crying. She wore jeans and an oversize long-sleeved Maryland Terrapins T-shirt.
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