Second Marriage in Crisis (Crawling Back #15)

1. Marnie

Marnie

"You have a kettle, Mom. You have a French press. There's that camping thing in the garage."

"The camping thing tastes like propane."

“It’s definitely a vibe, we’ll leave it out there, but we can easily do this.

” He drags the kettle onto the burner and clicks the ignition twice before it catches.

My son is twenty years old and taller than his father and still eats cereal standing at the counter like a starving raccoon who broke in through the dog door.

We’re all on edge this morning as something might be happening that will change our lives forever, a strange liminal space between the before and after where we hang in a balance and wait to see.

Our youngest daughter, Erin, is already at the island with her laptop open to a financial live ticker she doesn't understand, refreshing it every eleven seconds. Our oldest daughter’s fiancé, Drew brought grocery store croissants and set them out on the good platter, which is sweet, because he doesn't know yet that the good platter is only good because my husband Keith's mother gave it to us and we can't get rid of it.

Our oldest daughter, April is on the floor by the outlet, charging her phone, wearing one of Keith's old company shirts from the era when the company had eleven employees and a logo somebody's cousin designed for two hundred dollars.

The television is on in the next room. Some analyst in a blue tie is saying the word "cyber" the way people say the names of towns they've driven through but never stopped in.

Keith comes down the stairs at 7:02 in a suit he doesn't need to wear.

"You're not going anywhere," I tell him.

"I know."

"You're standing in our kitchen in a two thousand dollar suit."

"I know that too." He straightens his cuff and I see his hand shake, one small tremor he tries to hide by reaching for a mug. Twenty-four years I've known this man. He was steadier on the morning his father died. This is big, this is bigger than big.

The opening bell rings at 8:30 our time and nobody in this house makes a sound.

Sentline Security, ticker SNTL, priced at thirty-one dollars a share last night. That number was already unreal to me. We spent a decade where thirty-one dollars was a decision.

It opens at forty-seven.

Erin screams. Actual scream, the kind you hear from the parking lot of a middle school. Nathan says a word I pretend not to hear, and Drew, who works in insurance and has never once been loud in my house, says, "Oh my God, oh my God," like he's the one who built it.

The number climbs. Fifty-two. Fifty-five. It dips to fifty-one and Erin makes a noise like she's been shot, and Nathan tells her that's how numbers work, and then it's fifty-eight and holding.

April is the one who does the math, because April has always been the one who does the math. She has a legal pad. She's had a legal pad since she was nine.

She writes. Crosses it out. Writes again.

Then she puts the pen down and looks at her father.

"Dad."

"Don't."

"Eighty-six million." Her voice cracks in the middle of the second word. "Dad. Eighty-six million dollars."

The kitchen detonates.

Nathan's got his hands on his head like a man watching a field goal. Erin is filming. Drew opens the champagne we bought last night at the grocery store because the wine place was closed, and it foams over the good platter, and nobody cares.

I'm standing at the sink with a dish towel in my hands.

I'd like to tell you I felt it. The moment. The lightning.

What I feel is the towel, and the wet spot on my hip where I leaned against the counter, and this thought that arrives fully formed and won't leave:

March of 2003. Four hundred and twelve dollars in checking.

April was four and her winter boots had split along the seam at the toe, and I'd been packing the crack with duct tape on the inside where the other kids wouldn't see it.

I remember standing in the shoe aisle at the Payless on County Road 9 holding a pair of red boots that cost twenty-two dollars, doing arithmetic against the gas bill, and putting them back.

Then picking them up again. Then putting them back.

I bought them. I skipped a dentist appointment.

Nobody in this kitchen knows that story except me.

Keith crosses the room. He puts both arms around me from behind and sets his chin on my shoulder the way he's done ten thousand times, and I feel him breathe out, all of it, twenty-five years of it.

"We did it," he says into my hair.

We.

"We did," I say, the breath leaving my body at last as I realize what this means for our family.

Erin turns the phone on us and April yells at her to stop filming and Nathan starts a bit about how he's quitting school to become a yacht person, and Keith laughs so hard he has to sit down on a stool.

Keith's phone goes off against the counter and he answers it with his hand still on my back.

It's Devi, who was employee number four and used to sleep on our sectional during the nearly business ending disaster of the Verrado outage, and I can hear her crying through the speaker from four feet away.

Keith says her name twice before she can talk.

I made lasagna for eleven people the week of that outage. Four nights running. I remember carrying pans out to the garage where they'd set up folding tables because the office lease hadn't started yet, and Devi ate standing up with a laptop balanced on a paint can.

At some point Erin asks if I'm finally going to replace the Highlander.

"The Highlander is fine."

"Mom. It has a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. The back door only opens from the inside."

"It builds character."

"It builds tetanus resistance,” Nathan says.

April sits next to me with her legal pad and shows me the columns, the tax withholding, the lockup period, the vesting nobody explained to her but she figured out anyway from a forum. She's twenty-six and she's getting married in six weeks and she still brings me her arithmetic to check.

I check it.

"You forgot the second tranche," I say.

"I did not."

"April."

She looks. She groans. She writes it in.

That's my morning. Not the number. That.

Three days later, on a Saturday, April lets herself in through the garage while I'm labeling place cards at the dining room table, and I know something's wrong from her feet. She stops in the doorway instead of coming through it.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey yourself. Do you want Drew's aunt at table six or table nine, because table six has the loud cousins and I feel like that's a decision with consequences."

She doesn't answer. She's got her phone flat against her chest like a hymnal.

"April."

"My mother messaged me."

My pen keeps moving. That's the part I think about later. My hand finishes the word Halpern in the careful print I've been doing all afternoon while the rest of me goes somewhere cold and far away.

I look up.

She hears it about half a second after I do. I watch it land on her face, watch her eyes go wide and wet and horrified, and she says it fast, too fast, tripping over herself.

"I mean Sherry. Mom. I meant Sherry."

The place card in front of me says Halpern, Diane. The pen is one of the good ones I bought for the invitations.

"Okay," I say.

"I didn't mean it like that."

"April. It’s okay."

She comes and sits down and slides the phone across the table toward me, face up, and my daughter is twenty-six years old and shaking.

Sherry Corbett has not spoken to her in almost twenty-four years.