Chapter 2 An Arrangement
Brandon came back a little after seven, showered and shaved, with two cups of coffee from the bar downstairs. He held one out to me. Breakfast, or a peace offering. I don’t think he knew either. I left it in his hand.
I’d spent half the night on top of the covers in yesterday’s clothes, listening to Maddie flinch in her sleep every time the cut knee brushed the sheet. By first light the crying had run out, and the anger, and one thing was left. I wanted him to say it, all of it, to my face, without managing it.
Maddie was still asleep. I eased the bedroom door shut.
“Tell me exactly what’s going on with Julie.”
He set both cups on the dresser and sat down in the armchair, and the room got smaller around him. He rubbed his face with both hands, as he did when a meeting he’d meant to skip landed on his morning. Then he looked at me straight. No guilt in it. Only a man who’d been made to come in early.
“Julie and I have been together almost a year,” he said. “It’s not a fling, it’s not a slip. But I don’t want to blow up what works. We have Maddie. We have the house. Everything’s fine, and none of that has to go anywhere.”
“So what are you proposing?”
“An arrangement.” He said it easily. He’d settled it with himself long ago.
“You keep everything you have. You’re my wife, you’re Maddie’s mother, you run the house.
You’re my home base. I keep providing, same as now.
Nothing gets cut. Julie’s a separate department.
She’s not about any of that. Grown-ups live like this.
Most of them just don’t say it out loud.
Nobody leaves anybody. Everybody gets what they need. ”
“And Maddie? What do you tell your daughter when she finds Julie in our kitchen some morning?”
He shrugged. “Kids adapt faster than adults. She’ll have two moms.”
It didn’t sound like a thing that could be true. Behind him the lake was filling up with light. Down on the terrace a cup touched a saucer. Someone was being served the breakfast I’d pictured all week. His were ordinary words. They shouldn’t have been able to add up to that.
“Let me make sure I’ve got this right,” I said. “I’m the home base. So I’m the cleaner, the cook, the nanny. The staff. And the woman is Julie.”
He winced. “Don’t twist it. You’re the mother of my child. That outranks all the passion stuff. Be honest with yourself, Katie. You never wanted what Julie wants. Not from me. You’re different.” He opened one hand toward me, his gesture for the good part of a pitch. “You’re the home.”
Nothing came after it. That was the word. I’d made him say it to my face.
An affair would at least have meant I was worth the trouble of guilt. He’d hidden nothing and he felt nothing, because at some point he had moved me out of the column marked woman and into the one marked household, and he was sure that leaving me there, funded, was a favor.
We married when I was twenty-one, in my junior year.
He needed a good-looking wife who wasn’t stupid, and a child, and I checked every box.
The communications degree got finished pregnant, and the diploma went into the closet and never came out.
My friends from school were unserious, he said, so I stopped seeing them.
I learned to cook what he liked, to host his colleagues, to iron a collar flat.
I thought I was building a family. What I built was a comfortable life for a man, with a housekeeper who did a little of everything, and the passion kept in a compartment that was never mine.
Julie was everything I’d never been allowed to be. Loud and free and a risk. With her he felt alive. With me he felt calm, and calm had stopped being worth anything to him long ago.
I could see it now, filed in order. Julie in our kitchen last fall, head back, laughing, her hand on his sleeve for one second and gone.
Me on those nights going around the table with the wine, running plates in from the kitchen, glad he was having a good time with his people.
Me walking her to the front door of the townhouse and handing her her coat.
A good wife. A convenient one. Blind exactly as far as he needed.
“No,” I said.
“No what?”
“I won’t live like that. Not as the base, not as the home, not as convenient. You choose.”
He leaned back and looked at me with pity. His voice went to the one he used on junior staff over the phone, patient and a little tired.
“This is so like you, Katie. Everything’s all or nothing. Grudges. Ultimatums. I’m offering to keep everything the way it is. A father for Maddie. A comfortable life for you. And you’re turning it into a tragedy. You know what Julie would do in your place, she’d—”
“Julie’s not in my place!” I said. “She’s in my bed.”
He went quiet. Not shame; he had none of that left for me. Behind his face something got priced, fast, and the number came in and settled. Final.
He stood up like a man leaving a conference room.
“Fine,” he said. “Then let’s not make this harder than it has to be. I’ll leave today. Julie’s here too and we’re going the same way, so we’ll travel together. We’ll handle the paperwork at home, quietly, like adults. I’m not going to abandon Maddie, don’t worry.”
He went to the wardrobe, pulled the suitcase out, and started on his shirts.
He pulled them off the hangers in twos and threes and pushed them in any way they went, balled up, sleeves inside out, the blue pinstripe with the rest. Nothing he’d said all morning had gotten all the way in.
That did. He’d never needed them perfect.
All the hours I’d spent getting a collar to lie flat had been for a standard he didn’t have.
Four years, and I could have told you how he took his coffee, which pocket the keys went in, the voice he used to lie to his mother on the phone and the other one he used to lie to me. In four years he’d learned nothing about me another woman couldn’t supply.
“Brandon.” My voice caught, and I hated that. “We’re abroad. I don’t have any money of my own here. The only card I have is on your account, I’m an authorized user, it’s your—”
He didn’t turn around. “We’ll figure it out,” he said over his shoulder. “You’re not a child.”
Not a child. Twenty-five, that was true. But I’d never rented an apartment or bought a ticket or paid a bill with anything but his card. My part was the second signature, the one that went under his so his decisions counted as ours. I opened my mouth to say so and closed it. He wasn’t interested.
Maddie was in the bedroom doorway, creased from sleep, the dolphin band-aid on her knee, Bunny squashed flat against her chest.
“Daddy, where are you going?”
He smiled, the first real one of the morning, and it was for her.
“Daddy’s got some business to take care of, princess. I’ll see you real soon.”
He’d lied to her with the same ease he’d used an hour ago to tell me the truth.
I took Maddie by her hand, hot from sleep, and led her to the window, past the two cups of somebody else’s coffee going cold on the dresser.
Behind me the suitcase locks clicked. I didn’t turn around.
Maddie flattened her nose on the glass and counted the boats, and I counted with her.
One, two, three, all the way to seven, where she stopped every time, and every time I started her over from one.
There were a lot of boats that morning. Enough for as long as it took a father to pack a suitcase.
The door slammed.