Chapter 3
three
LYDIA
I woke to the sound of my husband being funny somewhere underneath me.
You can hear the great room through the floor of that bedroom. I know because I chose the floor. There’s a rug I should have doubled and didn’t. I lay there in the warm dent Zach leaves, listening to him tell some story I’ve heard before, and the whole room went up at the end of it.
He’d left coffee on the nightstand. It had gone cold hours ago. He’d have brought it up before the sun was fully over the ridge, set it down quietly, and gone back to everybody.
I drank it cold. I wasn’t going to waste it.
Shayna was in my kitchen making eggs for eleven people.
And she was in an apron. She’d found the good pan. She had Magda on a stool beside her with a coffee, and Zach’s cousin Petey doing toast under supervision, and when I came in she looked up with her whole face.
“Lydia. Sit down, I’m feeding you.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I absolutely do. Sit.”
So I sat in my kitchen and let my husband’s ex-girlfriend cook me breakfast, and it was very good breakfast.
She was lovely all morning. Genuinely, thoroughly lovely.
She asked me about the beams. Not politely, either.
She wanted to know where I’d found them, what the man had wanted for them, whether they’d had to be milled.
She put her hand flat on the mantel and said, “Somebody knew what they were doing in here,” and I opened my mouth to say it was me and Magda said, “Isn’t it beautiful, we were so lucky with the designers,” and the moment closed over like water.
Shayna didn’t do that. Magda did.
I’m trying to be fair here. I really am.
By the middle of the day, though, it was tough. She had Simon.
I don’t blame him. Simon is a golden retriever with a mortgage. She asked him one question about the light fixtures and he was gone. By lunch they were in the window seat with their heads together, and he was doing the voice he does when he’s enjoying himself.
He caught me looking and waved me over, delighted, wanting to share it.
“She knows about Deco,” he said. “Lydia. She knows about Deco.”
“Barely,” Shayna said. “I had a phase.”
“Girl, everything’s just a phase.”
I sat down with them. I was perfectly nice. I laughed in the right places and I meant some of it, because she’s funny. That’s what nobody warns you about. There was a stretch in there where I forgot to be careful and just talked to her.
Then Petey came past and said something about the summer they all went to Baja. She said God, that boat. Simon said what boat. And she told it.
She told it beautifully. Zach in it, young and stupid, doing something insane off the back of a boat I’ve never seen. Simon laughed until he had to put his glass down. And I sat there with my face on, waiting to hear the end of a story about my husband that I didn’t know.
Then later, dinner was a mess. Not the food, that was lovely, but the abrupt turn of conversation.
It came up so gently that no one else there would’ve known.
Somebody asked Magda about grandchildren and then the idea of a great-grandchild, the way people do to a woman her age with a grandson in the room.
Magda said something warm and unhelpful.
And Shayna, laughing, easy, with her fork in her hand, said, “Oh, Zach was never going to be a baby person. This is a man who once told me children were a life sentence with better photographs.”
The table laughed. It’s a good line. He probably said it.
“He was twenty-three,” she said, into the laugh. “We were terrible.”
I looked at my plate.
Because I can’t say any of this out loud at a table.
She said it fondly and I know she wasn’t aiming at me. She almost certainly does not know we have been trying for two years, or what the inside of that has been like, or that I keep a folded paper in my bag with dates on it that I don’t let him see.
And she also just told a room full of his family that she knows what my husband wants, and that it isn’t this.
Zach said, “I was an idiot at twenty-three.” Lightly. Charmingly. To the table.
He didn’t look at me when he said it.
Upstairs, later, with the party still going underneath us, he came in and shut the door and leaned on it.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Is it a night?” he said. His eyebrow is cocked ever so slightly in that way that drives me nuts.
That’s how we ask each other now. Because I have a folded paper in my bag, and he has never once asked to see it, and I love him so much for that I could put my head through a wall.
I slid to the edge of the bed. “It’s a night.”
He’s good at this. He has always been good at this.
He took his time getting my dress off, the way he does, one shoulder and then the other.
He kissed the inside of my elbow, which he did the very first time and has never stopped doing.
He got me back onto the bed, knelt over me, and looked at me long enough that I put my hand over my face. He took it away again.
“Don’t,” he said. “I like looking at you.”
“You’re looking a lot.”
“I’m going to look even more.”
He put his mouth on my collarbone, my breast, the soft place under my ribs I hate and he doesn’t.
He knows where to be. He has known for years.
When he finally got his hand between my legs I was already there, already going, because whatever else is wrong my body has never once had a single doubt about him.
He came up over me and pushed in slow. I got my heels around the back of his thighs and pulled him down, and for a while it was exactly what it used to be. His breath going. His hand under my back. My name in my ear in that low voice he only uses in the dark.
And then somewhere in the middle of it I heard the room downstairs go up at something, the way it had that morning.
And I lost it.
Not all of it. Enough. Enough that I put my mouth on his shoulder so he wouldn’t see my face, and I moved with him, and I made the sounds that are true even when the rest of you has left the room.
He finished with my name and both arms under me, holding on like he does, and he stayed a long moment with his face in my neck.
“I love you,” he said. “God. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
And I meant it. That’s not the part that was a lie.
After, I did what I do.
I stayed on my back with a pillow under my hips, which the internet says does nothing and I do anyway, and I stared at the beams I hauled out of a barn in a snowstorm.
He kissed my forehead and pulled his shirt back on.
“I should go down,” he said. “Dan’s got the whole Denver contract thing and I said I’d?—”
“Go.”
“You sure?”
“Zach. Go.”
He went. He kissed me first. He has never once left without kissing me first.
So, I lay there with a pillow under my hips in the room I decorated, in the building I made, and listened to my husband be wonderful directly beneath me.
The room was full and I could pick her out through a floor, and I won’t lie, it dug into me deep.
I told myself what I always tell myself. That he came upstairs. That he chose to come upstairs, in the middle of his own party, and shut the door. He chose me.
It even worked, mostly.
Then somebody put music on, and I heard my husband whoop like a boy, and I lay in the dark doing the only thing I have ever been any good at, which is noticing.