The Wife He Squandered

Chapter 1

DANI

The caterers have laid the long table wrong, and I'm the only one in this house who will fix it without making a scandal of it.

Across the room, Chandra is already here, already laughing, already moving toward my husband like she has somewhere to be and the somewhere is him.

She will find me before the night is out.

She always does. She will say something soft and warm and shaped like a compliment, and I will smile and say nothing, because that is the arrangement, and I am very good at the arrangement.

But first the table. From the doorway I can see it: the place cards alphabetized instead of seated by who hates whom, the Hendersons next to the Pruitts, who have not spoken since a zoning dispute over a marina neither of them needed.

By the time the first guests are handing off their coats, I have moved four cards and warmed a sentence for each, and the room arranges itself around the small lie that everything was always going to be fine.

"You're a marvel," says Gloria from the catering team, low, passing me with a tray. She has a son named Reuben who is taking the LSAT in the fall. I ask her how he's holding up. The Ainsmeres have hosted this woman's company at six events and not one of them could tell you her name.

This is what I'm good at. Being the warmth in a cold house. Making a foundation dinner feel like a place a person might actually want to be. I used to think it was a gift. Lately I've started to wonder if it's just the thing they keep me for.

Chandra arrives at the center of the room the way weather arrives.

She is tall in the way that makes other people aware of their own height, blonde in a way that looks like it was decided in a boardroom, and she comes through the door already laughing at something Thoreau has not yet said.

He's by the bar with his back half to me, and when he sees her his whole face does the thing: the easy, unguarded thing, the thing I have to work for now.

She kisses his cheek. She says something about the wine, the foundation, the new wing.

He laughs, head back, and the sound carries.

Then he turns to find me with his eyes, the way he always does, and Chandra turns too. He's looking at me with the lazy fondness of a man who knows where his keys are. She's looking at me the way you look at a coat you've decided not to buy.

"Dani." She crosses to me, wineglass in one hand, and takes my hand with the other, like we're old friends, because to everyone watching we are.

Her perfume is the kind that costs a mortgage payment.

"You always make these things look so effortless.

" A beat. Her eyes flick down the front of me and back up, quick, surgical.

"I don't know how you do it. I'd be so worried about the dress. "

It lands exactly where she aimed it. The dress is fine.

The dress is more than fine. I chose it carefully, the way I choose everything in this house, knowing it would be measured.

That's the thing about Chandra. She never says the cruel thing where anyone can hear it.

She hands you the worry and lets you carry it home yourself.

Thoreau, ten feet away, hears the words effortless and dress and the warm tone they're wrapped in, and he smiles at both of us like a man whose two favorite people are getting along.

"She doesn't have to try," he says, easy, taking it for granted the way he takes the floor under his feet for granted. "That's the whole trick."

Chandra laughs. "Isn't it just."

I smile. "You're sweet." My voice does it on its own: rounds itself off, warms at the edges, smooths into the shape that keeps the evening moving.

I hear myself do it and do it anyway. Then Thoreau is pulled into a conversation about the children's-hospital grant, and the second his eyes leave us, Chandra's hand tightens on mine, and she leans in close enough that I can smell the wine now under the perfume.

"You really did clean up the place beautifully," she murmurs, soft, only for me. "It must be exhausting. Pretending you belong in it."

She squeezes my fingers. She lets go. She drifts toward the bar with her glass held high, and by the time she reaches Thoreau she is luminous again, gracious, a woman who has never said a cruel thing in her life.

I stand there with the ghost of her grip on my hand and I do not answer. There is no version of answering that doesn't end with me as the problem. I worked that out a long time ago.

So I pick up a stray champagne flute someone abandoned on the sideboard, and I carry it toward the kitchen, and I let the room close over the moment behind me, smooth, like nothing happened.

In the kitchen the temperature is honest, at least. Gloria's crew moves fast around the plating station, and I stay out of their way and find the things that need finding: the extra cocktail napkins, the senator's wife's lost reading glasses, the spare bottle of the Sercial Vivienne prefers and pretends not to.

A young server named Aaron has burned his wrist on a tray and is hiding it because he's afraid of being sent home without the rest of his shift.

I run it under cold water and wrap it and tell him to take ten minutes and that I'll run the tray in myself, and he looks at me like I've done something remarkable, which I haven't.

I've done the bare minimum a person does for another person. It only looks remarkable in this house.

That's the part nobody upstairs will ever clock.

The dinner runs because someone notices the burned wrist and the wrong place card and the bottle that's about to run dry.

The Ainsmeres think the evening simply behaves for them.

They have never once had to learn the difference between a thing that's easy and a thing that someone makes look easy.

When I come back out, the room has warmed two degrees and nobody knows why.

Vivienne holds court near the windows, in the chair that is hers because she has decided it is hers.

She is seventy-one and wears it like a weapon.

The patriarch has been dead twelve years and she runs the family the way he ran the company, with the controlling hand he was careless enough to leave her.

I bring her a sparkling water, no ice, lemon on the side, because that is how she takes it and because she will mention it to someone if I get it wrong.

"Thank you, dear," she says, and the dear has a hook in it. She accepts the glass without looking at it. She is looking at me. "You've put on weight."

"It's good to see you too, Vivienne."

A thin smile. Her gaze travels the room and finds Chandra, who is mid-story for a circle of donors, one hand on Thoreau's sleeve, and Vivienne's whole face softens into something almost human.

"That girl," she says, fond. "She lights up a room. You can't teach that. It's breeding." She lets the word sit. Then, mild, as though commenting on the weather: "Some people are born to a thing. Others just stand very close to it."

"More water?" I ask.

"You're fine," she says, which is not an answer to anything I said, and turns her shoulder to me to greet a senator's wife.

I have been an Ainsmere for six years. I have stood in this room a hundred times. I know exactly how much of me they can see, which is the part that's useful, and exactly how much they intend to keep, which is none.

I find the wine on the sideboard and don't pour it. I put my hand flat on the cool marble instead, breathe once, slow, and let the want go through me and out the other side. Then I go back to work.

He finds me near the end of it, when the donors are pulling on coats and the night has done what it needed to do.

Thoreau comes up behind me at the table where I'm gathering the place cards back into a stack, and he sets his hand at the small of my back, warm, automatic, like a man setting his drink down on a coaster he knows is there.

"You were brilliant," he says, into my hair. "The Hendersons gave double what they pledged. Whatever you did with the seating — I don't even want to know."

"Magic," I say.

"Magic." He turns me around by the shoulders and looks at me, really looks, for the first time all night. His thumb moves along my jaw, and I go still in a way I don't decide on, my whole body listening for who he used to be. "I'd be sunk without you. You know that."

I do know it. That's the trouble. He believes it the way you believe a load-bearing wall — completely, and without ever once thinking about it, right up until the day it isn't there.

His hand stays warm at my back, automatic — the same hand that used to find that exact spot from clear across a room and press once, twice, the private code we had for I'm here, we can go whenever you want.

It doesn't press anymore. It just rests, the message worn off it like a stamp used too many times.

"Go home," he says, gentle. "I'll close it out. You're exhausted."

I am exhausted. I let him kiss my forehead. I gather my coat.

At the arch between the dining room and the hall, I hear them, Thoreau and his mother, just past the doorway, her voice pitched low but not low enough, because Vivienne has spent a lifetime learning exactly how far her voice carries and exactly when she wants it to carry further.

"She did a lovely job, I'll grant her that," Vivienne is saying. "She's a worker. But darling, look at tonight. Look at the room when Chandra's in it. That's the caliber this family needs at the front of it now. People can tell, you know. They can always tell."

And Thoreau — tired, warm, oblivious, my husband — says, "Mm," in the comfortable tone of a man who has stopped hearing his mother's words and only hears the music of her approval.

Not arguing. Not agreeing. Just letting it wash over him the way he's let it wash over him since he was a boy.

The way water moves around a man who has decided not to feel it.

I stand very still in the arch with my coat over my arm.

Then I walk out into the cold, and I do not look back.