Three #3
He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand.
Ordinarily, in conversations where he didn’t know what to say, Judd got up and walked away or poured himself a drink.
When Uno needed a liver transplant, when they thought she might die, he sat down to tell Ferry but then got up and drank an ounce of bourbon instead and then realized that might look bad to Ferry, who was old enough to realize his mother’s own drinking had put her in the position of almost dying.
So he left the room entirely, and Amy explained the transplant to Ferry, gently, and held him in her arms while he tried to figure out whether or not to cry.
He didn’t like his mother very much, but—he did start to cry.
He knew what death was. He was eight years old.
The cats crept toward them on little cat feet. Three cats, then four.
“Amy, I understand that you’re mad at me, I understand that you don’t want to deal with me right now, which is fine. I don’t want to deal with me either. But I don’t think you have to go to some Russia-adjacent terrorist state because we’re having an argument—”
“It’s not a terrorist state at all,” she said. “Tbilisi is a very safe city, one of the safest in the world—”
“How do you know that?”
“The State Department website.”
“I’m not sure we’re going to believe the internet on this one.”
Last week Judd’s disapproval would have made her reconsider her plans. Today she felt both tired and free. “My friend Irine is letting me stay with her.”
“I had no idea you had a friend in Georgia.”
She shrugged to imply there’s a lot about me you don’t know.
“When are you coming back?”
“If I do everything I set out to do, I’ll come back in two weeks.”
“Set out to do?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a return ticket?”
“I do.”
“So?”
“So I’ll be back in two weeks.”
He sighed, performatively. “And what, exactly, are you setting out to do?”
“I really don’t feel like getting into it, Judd,” she said.
“Is it for an animal?”
“It’s for me,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “But this seems… extreme.”
“I suppose it does.”
“You sure it’s not for an animal?” He had always supported her love of animals, had let her turn their apartment into an animal shelter (Ferry had calculated that, over the years, they’d fostered sixteen dogs, thirty-nine cats, five rabbits, four guinea pigs, and, for a few weeks in the early teens, twin pot-bellied pigs) but also always treated her love of animals like it was a sort of cute, sort of unserious hobby (yet what could be more serious than saving a life?
She did not know). He didn’t condescend, exactly, but he sometimes called her the Family Zookeeper in public.
Judd, meanwhile: ate animals, cooked animals, occasionally hunted animals; had taken a course in whole-animal butchery up in the Catskills; had deep-sea-fished off the coast of Baja California, slaughtering majestic bluefins right there on the boat.
Crabbed in Maryland, clammed in Maine; killed lobsters by plunging knives into their heads.
Amy tried not to think about the complexity there (he loved Roxy, tolerated the cats), but she herself hadn’t eaten meat in years.
She just couldn’t. These were animals that nursed their babies.
“Okay, listen, I know you don’t want to tell me everything right now—” he said. “I mean I know there’s a lot that we have to work out—”
She looked at Judd then and wasn’t sure if the person she saw was the actual person in front of her or an amalgam of every role he’d ever played in her life. Was he as beautiful as she thought he was? Was it his physical beauty that tied her to him like a cord?
No, it wasn’t that. It was everything else in her life. Her food, her shelter, her child.
“You can ask me whatever you want,” she said, magnanimous.
“I would just feel—I would just feel a little safer if I knew more about this trip.”
“I understand that,” she said.
“But you’re not going to tell me.”
“I will give you Irine’s address and phone number so you can reach me if you need me. Or if Ferry needs me.”
He leaned back on the bed. One of the cats, Magnus, came over and sniffed him. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to the Caribbean?”
“I don’t.”
“St. Barts?”
She was silent. Magnus settled himself on Judd’s broad chest, his tail up against his chin, a feline beard.
“Kripalu?” he said. “You could take Lynne.” Lynne was Amy’s closest girlfriend, but they weren’t enormously close. “You could take your brother.”
“Why on earth would I take my brother to Kripalu?”
“You could take me,” he said, sounding forlorn enough that she actually felt sorry for him for a split second, so she lay down next to him and Magnus on Ferry’s bed and took his hand. Ferry’s ceiling was still spackled with the glow-in-the-dark stars they’d plastered up there when he was a child.
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you more,” she said. “I won’t be in danger. It will be perfectly safe. But I have to do this. And I’m an adult. So I’ll be fine.”
“Are you going because you’re angry at me?”
“Judd, you’re an adult too,” she said. “Act like one.”
He squeezed her hand.
“When I get back we can go to Kripalu if you still want to.”
“I don’t think the food’s that great there,” he said.
“That wouldn’t be the point,” she said, and he turned to her and smiled, his way of admitting he was kind of an idiot, and they kissed for a while even though Magnus refused to move, and then they went to their own bedroom so as not to desecrate Ferry’s.
And afterward, as he showered and got ready to go to the restaurant, she lay in their bed and felt scared: scared at how easily she had forgotten Meret but also scared that she had extracted something from his transgression.
The only thing she had ever extracted before was a promise from him to be better.
To do better. Now she had gotten something else—a secret of her own—and she thought of the women she had met or heard of whose husbands cheated with impunity but rewarded their forbearance with diamonds, cars, personal pilates instructors.
She had never exacted revenge before. Not that the trip to Georgia was revenge, but it was kind of a mindfuck, and that had never been her thing.
Or was she scared because in the decade since she’d stopped cooking at the restaurant, she’d stopped thinking of herself as intrepid and started thinking of herself as a wife and a stepmother and a teacher and a rescuer of stray dogs and feral cats, none of which seemed particularly brave no matter how much Glennon Doyle she read, and now here she was, going to a place she had not really even heard of before last month. Because of a dog.
It had been a year and a half since Ferry had left for college, a year and a half since her days had been structured around keeping a teenager fed and schooled and healthy.
Why hadn’t she worked harder to raise enrollment for her class?
Why hadn’t she gone back to the kitchen at Le Coin?
She could have done anything—why had she done nothing?
But now—now she had something she could do.
Judd came out of the steamy bathroom wrapped in a towel, his hair matted to his forehead.
“Georgian food is great,” he said. “They have these breads, they’re called khachapuri, they’re filled with cheese and egg.
And dumplings. Huge ones, like Turkish manti but much bigger.
And Georgian wine is incredible, some of the oldest vineyards in the world. ”
“Sounds good,” she said.
“You should take notes on the food,” he said. “You can use it in your next food writing class.”
“I don’t think I will,” she said.
“Well, if you think of it,” he said.
She nodded. She was still wearing the T-shirt she’d slept in, her underwear kicked down somewhere toward the bottom of the bed. “Should I hire someone to feed the animals or will you come home to do it?”
“You should probably find someone,” he said. “And a dog walker too.”
Of course he wouldn’t leave Le Coin for all of twenty minutes at night to come home and feed everyone. But there was a limit to how many battles she needed to win in one day.
After he left, she showered and threw a load of T-shirts and jeans into the washing machine, then dusted off her suitcase and pondered exactly what she should take, what she would need.
Comfortable shoes, a flashlight, a slip leash, dried pig ears, bully sticks.
Her drone, a charger, a fresh notebook, and some pens.
She thought about it for a second and then removed her ATM card and credit cards from the accounts she shared with Judd from her wallet.
She stuck them in the desk and replaced them with the under-used ATM card that connected to the little account of her own, the one she’d always kept secret, the place where she squirreled away her occasional paycheck or stipend.
This was the other piece of advice her mother had given her that she had chosen, for some reason, to follow: make sure you always have a little something of your own.
This trip could not be on Judd’s dime.
Her phone pinged: “Proud of you, Dos,” Ferry texted. “You’re going to find that dog.”
“Proud of you too, Ferry,” she texted back. “You’re going to ace that chem test.”
“We’re both heroes,” he wrote.
“I think you’re right,” she wrote, then followed up with eight million hearts and stars.