3. Now What?
NOW WHAT?
LUCY
Iwish I were the type of woman who could forget what she hears and continue to live the life she has, because, boy, that would be so much easier than what I know I have to do.
I text Dina that I need a day off. She calls worried because I don't take days off. I lie to her that I'm having bad cramps and don't want to be interrogated, so she drops it, albeit with a good dose of suspicion.
I leave the duck and cassoulet with Fox's assistant, with a drab smile. I lie to her as well, saying I have to rush, and it can't wait.
Then, I come home.
Our home. Not for long, though, now that I know this marriage is over.
It's a huge, almost palatial place, and I have always felt like a milkmaid playing Queen whenever I'm here. I love the house, though, because it's ours.
"Add what you want. Take out what you don't want.
This is your house, and you should feel at home here, sweetheart," Fox said to me when I moved in after we were married.
I didn't remove anything, but I did add color and coziness to make it feel homey to me.
He appreciated all of it. He never said I was changing his home—oh no, he said I was making it our home.
When Margaret wanted us to move into the Bennett estate in Belle Meade—you know the one with boxwood hedges and a live-in chef—Fox told her that was absolutely not going to happen.
"We love our home, Mother, we're not moving." He treated us like a unit.
I felt so lucky. So fortunate to have married a man like Fox.
I should've wondered then, instead of naively walking into a world that isn't mine, what his reasons were. If I'd known it was some mix of honor and guilt, maybe I'd have been able to resist the temptation to marry the man I was and still am in love with.
I get a text message from Fox as I stand in the kitchen, contemplating whether I need a shot of tequila, a glass of bourbon, or both.
Fox: Thank you, sweetheart, for the lunch. Your cassoulet is the best. Even Percy thinks so.
I stare at his message for a long moment, not sure how to respond to him. What I want to do is ask him about what I overheard him say, but that conversation, no matter how unpleasant and heartbreaking it would be, would have to take place face to face.
Me: Enjoy.
It's not honest, because I also want to ask him to choke on a duck bone. As the shock of what I heard wears off, anger starts to simmer.
How dare he talk to Percy about us and not mention a thing to me?
Then, I cook.
It's the only thing I know how to do with feelings that confuse me—I put them in my hands, which I then use to do something useful.
I make lamb ragu, which takes three hours. I chop, I clean, I grind, I stir.
Now, one may ask, as I do myself, why I'm making one of Fox's favorite meals when he's telling the world he doesn't love me and never will?
Pathetically, it's because there is a part of me that hopes I misunderstood, that language is slippery, and context is everything.
Maybe when he said, "I don't love her," he meant something different in the vocabulary of men who went to Vanderbilt and inherited their names from grandfathers who own forests and hunting lodges.
It doesn't, though.
I know that.
I am not a complete moron. I know his family thinks so because I cook at a diner and grew up in Antioch—but I'm really not.
Hopeful? Yes.
Sometimes deliberately na?ve? Absolutely.
Dumb as a doorknob? Not even close.
I know exactly what Fox said.
I know exactly what he meant.
There was a certainty to his tone—one of a man explaining out loud something he's been ruminating over for a long time.
As I cook, I go from "Why didn't he tell me?" to "Why didn't I see it?"
That's the normal course of such thought processes. You start with denial and move on to anger. Then, slowly but steadily, you land on acceptance and then…grief.
I am feeling all these feelings like electric glitches in my brain. One second, angry. The other, sad. Then the other, certain I heard wrong. And so on and so forth.
Three hours is a long time to dance with your thoughts.
So, as the ragu that I have no appetite for simmers, I come to a few conclusions.
First, I must set the table. I do. Cloth napkins.
The works. I am giving myself a stage set because I have a strong feeling this is the last dinner I'm going to cook for Fox, and there is something gut-wrenchingly sad about that.
Food for me is love, and after we talk, after he tells me his truth, I won't be able to give him my love sprinkled liberally with spices.
Second, I must open some wine and let it breathe.
I go to the wine fridge—yes, Fox Bennett has a wine fridge, stocked with bottles that cost more than my parents' monthly mortgage—and pull out a Bordeaux without checking the Vivino app.
I hope it's rare. I hope it's expensive.
I hope losing it costs him even a fraction of what today has cost me.
Third, I must accept that I am not a woman who pretends, who can't tuck this away. No way around it. No chickening out at the last minute and feigning ignorance.
Fourth, what comes next will hurt—a lot.
Fifth, I will break for a while, and that's okay—because I know how to pull myself up and dust myself off. At least, I hope I do.