The Husband Hour by Jamie Brenner (26)

Beth heard a car pull up in front of the house. She was neck-deep in the pool, her hair piled carefully in a clip on top of her head.

Was it that late in the afternoon already? She wasn’t expecting Howard back from Florida until close to dinner. She climbed out of the pool and wrapped herself in a towel, wishing she had time to get herself dried off and pulled together. Yes, she still cared about how she looked when she greeted her husband. It was old-fashioned, she knew. It went back to advice her mother had given her when she was just a teenager: “Always make sure when your husband comes home that the house is in order and you’re dressed and made up. If a man doesn’t like coming home, the day will arrive when he doesn’t.” It was outrageous, of course. Something straight out of a Helen Gurley Brown advice manual. But her mother had seemed to manage her own marriage nearly effortlessly, so what did Beth know? Nothing, she’d come to realize. She certainly never had such easy pearls of wisdom for her own daughters when it came to marriage—or, in Stephanie’s case, to divorce.

Beth’s mother seemed to be in the last of the generations that saw divorce as a disgrace, or, as her mother would mutter in Yiddish, a shonda. Beth couldn’t remember a single one of her parents’ friends getting divorced. Of course, by the time Beth was a teenager, in the seventies, at least half of her own friends were from “broken” homes. Still, divorce was never something she viewed as a viable option, and certainly not, as many of her peers saw it, a likely outcome. No matter how tough the time with Howard, she’d never doubted that they would stick it out.

Not until now.

Lately, things felt different. Was this what marriage came down to? You spend decades doing the best you can, and then in midlife, you tally up the blame?

“Howard?” she called, walking through the kitchen.

“Upstairs,” he said.

His suitcase was open on the bed. He wore a golf shirt and navy pin-striped shorts and was deeply tanned.

“Hi,” she said, trying to remember how their last phone call had ended. When had they last spoken? Two days ago? “How was the flight back?”

“Uneventful. What’s going on around here?” he asked. “Did Cynthia come by?”

“Who’s Cynthia?”

“The real estate agent. She was supposed to take photos.”

She had, in fact, stopped by. Beth had ignored the ringing doorbell until the woman retreated back to her car.

“Nope. Not yet.”

Howard huffed his irritation.

“So how was Florida?”

“Incredible,” he said. “Bill and Lorraine’s place is right on the golf course.”

“Well, I don’t play golf, so that’s not a huge selling point.”

“It’s a nonstarter, anyway. Their place is beyond what we’ll be able to afford even if we sell this place at our full asking price.”

Beth tried not to panic. “It’s not just about money. I can’t ride off into the Florida sunset with you while things are so unsettled. And you’re wrong about this summer not helping things; Neil Hanes was here for dinner last night. I think he’s interested in Lauren. He keeps asking about her.” She conveniently omitted the part about him leaving with Stephanie. And that he was potentially interested in buying the house.

“Okay, but you don’t need to be here micromanaging. Has Lauren started looking at apartments yet?”

No, of course not. Lauren was more in denial about the house sale than Beth.

“I’m not sure.” She felt a flash of irritation. Why did he act like she had to answer to him? He was the one who’d put them in this predicament.

“Hi, Grandpa!” Ethan ran into the room and hugged Howard before turning to Beth and asking if he could have another doughnut.

“Sure. Just make sure to put the plastic wrap back on tight. We want to keep them fresh.”

“We baked,” Ethan told Howard with a grin.

Howard shot Beth a look. “Sounds good, buddy,” he said.

When Ethan was out of the room, Howard said, “You’ve got him baking?”

“It was a nice activity for us to do together.”

“I mean, it’s bad enough the kid doesn’t have a father…”

“Oh, Howard, don’t be ridiculous. Why don’t you do something with him instead of criticizing me?”

“I will,” Howard said, turning back to his suitcase. “I’ll take him to the beach. Just as soon as I unpack and make a few phone calls.”

“Great,” she said, feeling oddly like she’d lost the round. With a deep exhale, she said, “Howard, let’s just slow this thing down. Give some time here a chance.”

He shook his head wistfully, as if she were missing something obvious.

“Time won’t help, Beth. I feel stuck. And I’m trying to find my way out of it. I can’t spend one more goddamn day mired in negativity. Problems with the girls, problems with the business. It’s been going on so long, it’s a habit. Life doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Of course it does! That’s why it’s called life.”

“No, that’s our life. Yours and mine together. You know, Lauren’s husband died four years ago—but yours didn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Howard looked around the room like a trapped animal. “Beth, we need to either reset, or separate. But I’m not spending one more year like I’ve spent the past few.”

She knew she should have felt scared or upset that her husband was talking about leaving, but all she felt was a wave of anger. Then a thought exploded, a thought that maybe had been glimmering, a tiny spark, for weeks now.

“Did you lose our house on purpose?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. To give yourself an excuse to leave.”

Howard put down the sports jacket he was holding and moved closer to Beth. He took one of her hands and squeezed it.

“I don’t want an excuse to leave. I want an excuse to stay.”

“Your children need you here this summer. Your grandson—”

“Let me rephrase that: I want an excuse to stay in this marriage.”

Beth pulled her hand away. She felt like she’d been slapped. What was he referring to? Their sex life? Okay, things had dwindled the past year or so. But they weren’t teenagers anymore. And the money problems didn’t help. Nor did their tension over the girls. Howard had never agreed with Beth about letting Lauren isolate herself at the shore, and he had also taken Stephanie’s wayward personal life very hard. But none of this was Beth’s fault!

“Well, maybe I don’t have one for you.”

Howard nodded. “Then I’m going back to Florida next week to stay with Bill and Lorraine.”

Was this how it ended? Thirty years, dismissed with a few words and a half-packed suitcase?

“That’s fine with me, Howard.”

But it wasn’t fine. None of this was fine. Lauren widowed; Stephanie a single mother. Her own marriage disintegrating at middle age. And yet she had no idea how to fix any of it.

The sign, aqua blue with white lettering, read YOU CAN SHAKE THE SAND FROM YOUR SHOES BUT IT NEVER LEAVES YOUR HEART. Matt staged it against a white wall, propped on a table that he kept under the sightline of the camera lens. Then he took another shot of the sign hanging on the wall.

“Which one do you like better?” he asked Henny, showing her the options on the digital screen of his camera.

“I think the hanging version,” she said. “This Etsy thing is complicated!”

“Getting the photos right is the most labor-intensive part,” he said. “Once we have them uploaded, the rest is easy. Did you decide on a name for the store?”

She had told him a few she was thinking of, including Hung by Henny. He had to gently point out the potential sexual connotations with that one; she didn’t believe him until she Googled the old HBO show Hung.

“What do you think of Hen House Designs?” she said.

“I like it.”

“I really appreciate your help with this. I hope you’ll take me up on the offer to stay here a few nights free of charge.”

“Henny, I think I will.”

Ethan turned the page impatiently.

“Do we need to refresh where we were?” Lauren asked.

“No. I remember,” he said, yawning.

“Uh-oh. Are you going to make it through a whole chapter?”

“Two chapters,” he said.

She laughed. “That might be a little ambitious. I don’t know if I can stay awake through two chapters.”

“But it’s a good book!” he said, outraged.

“True.” She smiled, realizing she enjoyed reading the book aloud to him more than she’d enjoyed reading it herself. Ethan, nestled against her on his bed, radiated heat.

She read slowly, trying to do a decent job with the voices to make it lively. Feeling herself perspire, she turned the page and reached for his bedside fan. “Hey, are you hot?” she asked. No response. Slowly, making as little movement as possible, she closed the book, easing Ethan’s back against his pillow. He barely stirred. She kissed him on the top of the head and pulled his light summer quilt up to his shoulders, careful not to upset the meticulous arrangement of stuffed animals on the far side of the bed.

Ethan was neat for a six-year-old, maybe with a touch of OCD. She had been that way as a kid too, always needing to line up her dolls in a certain way before she could fall asleep.

She crossed the room to the bookshelf, where Ethan liked her to put Harry Potter back between Shark vs. Train and Dinotrux. Stephanie had brought a lot of books for the summer. Lauren hadn’t looked through them all but thinking about her old doll collection made her nostalgic. She wondered if Ethan’s book collection included any of her old favorites, like Where the Sidewalk Ends or Where the Wild Things Are. She scanned the spines, and a familiar title jumped out at her: Lights in the Dark: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe.

Hands trembling, Lauren pulled it off the shelf. It was clearly a new book, but the cover was the same as the one she’d given another boy to put on his bookshelf.

How strange. Just that morning she’d been telling Matt about Rory’s interest in astronomy. It had felt good to talk about the high-school stuff, to say things aloud that had begun to feel like they’d happened in another lifetime. Sometimes she felt oddly burdened, as if Rory lived on only in her memory—the real Rory, not the icon the press and the public made him into. For the one hour she spent talking to Matt, that burden had lifted.

She opened the book, her mind many miles and many years away.

Senior year, the only upside to the breakup with Rory was that she didn’t have to worry about getting into a school in Boston to be closer to him. She was free to make Georgetown her top choice, as it had been since the beginning of junior year when she’d won a journalism competition and a trip to DC.

Accepted to Georgetown, she replaced Rory’s old Lower Merion ice hockey T-shirt that she’d slept in for almost a year with a new gray and blue Hoyas shirt.

Still, she wasn’t happy. Not truly happy, not the way she’d felt when they were together. Once you’d known the complete, deep-seated joy of being in love, nothing else compared. Not even personal accomplishment. She tried not to think about him, but every corner of the school, of her house, of the neighborhood streets triggered memories of their relationship. How cruel, how unfair that he should be the one to end it and also be the one to start in a new place free and clear. It was this sense of injustice that had helped turn her heartbreak to anger, and it was this anger, festering for five months, that had steeled her to ignore his texts when they finally appeared.

He was in town for Christmas break. He missed her; they needed to talk. He was sorry. He’d meet her anywhere. Didn’t they owe it to their time together to at least talk?

Delete, delete, delete.

And then, the Thursday before Christmas break. In the Merionite classroom, a makeshift holiday party of Dunkin’ Donuts and Wawa coffee.

“You have a visitor,” the sports editor said.

Rory, standing in the doorway.

The past few months, she had of course imagined seeing him again. In all the scenarios she’d come up with, she hadn’t anticipated that he would be even more beautiful, his chiseled good looks sharpening and deepening, the last vestiges of boyhood gone. For the first time, she saw a preview of Rory the man, and maybe it was best that they had broken up. His perfection was maybe more than she had bargained for.

He invited her to his house for Christmas Eve. It’s over, she’d told him.

And yet, seventy-two hours later, she stood on the sidewalk outside of his house.

The ground was a sheet of ice. She took slow steps, glancing at the front yard, remembering the last time she’d seen it—late summer, verdant. Before everything changed.

She stepped carefully up his driveway, holding an apple pie from the Bakery House on Lancaster Avenue for Mrs. Kincaid and a book for Rory. He had told her she didn’t need to bring anything, but she remembered the bounty of last year, and so of course she could not show up empty-handed.

Her gift was simple, something a friend would give another friend. But it was tied to a memory she had, an afternoon of studying side by side with him in the Ludington Library. She’d barely been able to focus on her work with their feet touching under the wooden table, the occasional shared glance. When it was time to leave, he’d borrowed a big hardcover book on astronomy, Lights in the Dark: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe.

Two nights earlier, she’d ordered a copy of the book online. She wrapped it in green and red paper and taped a card—a painting of a snow-covered pine tree—to the top. This time, there had been no agonizing about whether or not to write Love, Lauren.

He greeted her on the front patio, dressed in a Harvard windbreaker and his good pants. The sight of him made her chest feel fluttery. After so many months of trying to forget him, there she was, walking toward him.

“I want to talk to you in private,” he said, steering her to the garage. They walked in silence, their breath visible.

She thought about this time last year, how hopeful she’d been, certain it was just the first of many Christmases together. Reflexively, she touched her neck. It had been so hard to take off the necklace, to put it in its box and shove it to the back of the highest shelf of her closet. For a long time she’d felt it burning in her room, something aglow, toxic.

“It’s freezing,” she said.

“Just a minute, then we’ll go in the house,” he said, pulling the heavy door down behind them.

“You’re not going to give me another piece of heart jewelry, are you? Because I’m really not in the mood for more empty symbolism.”

“Ouch. You’ve gotten hard in our time apart.”

She wanted to make a joke—something about how she hoped he hadn’t gotten hard in their time apart. But there was nothing funny about their situation. She’d thought she was showing up for closure, but it was like the wound was ripped right open again.

Then he said suddenly, jarringly, “I love you. I’ve missed you. I’m not going to say it was a mistake to break up, because I needed a few months of focus. And I needed some distance to know if this thing was real.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “Well, it’s not just about what you need,” she said. “It isn’t just about you all the time. Did you ever think of that?”

“Of course. And I took a big chance. I’m sorry to have hurt you. I really am. But I think if you can just forgive me, we’ll be stronger for the time apart.”

“I don’t know,” she said. Of course she knew! She was in love. “Maybe we should just be friends.”

“I don’t want to be friends. I love you. I never stopped thinking about you. I don’t have anything going on with any women in Boston. I just worked my ass off. And I’m going to continue to work my ass off because I want a lot out of life. And one of those things is you—by my side. As much as possible.”

She stepped into his arms. He kissed her face, not seeming to mind that she sobbed like a child. When she calmed down, he pulled back, tilted her face up to his with his thumb under her chin.

“Lauren,” he whispered. “I’ll never let you down again.”

I’ll never let you down again.

She reshelved the astronomy book, slipped quietly out of Ethan’s room, and closed the door behind her.