Chapter 1
Chapter 1
“Have you seen my wallet?” Dan yells from another room in the house. Jane can’t tell if he’s in the kitchen or his office or the den. Not that it matters.
This is the last time.
This is the last time.
This is the last time.
As she repeats her mantra, Jane slicks a tube of bright red across her lips and stares at herself in the mirror. She never wears red lipstick. She never wears lipstick, actually. But a few days ago she saw this post on Instagram: Change your lipstick, change your life! It was written by one of those pseudo-serious influencers who fluctuate between penning deep, thoughtful, and slightly condescending captions about loving your cellulite or your crow’s-feet because YOU ARE ENOUGH and making a six-figure income hawking clothing and cosmetics that will improve your life in some way because you’re very obviously not enough. Of course, these women don’t actually have all the answers but have somehow convinced their one hundred thousand desperate followers they do. Jane knows it’s all bullshit. Jane is also desperate.
“Babe?” Dan calls again.
She takes a deep breath. This is the last time.
“Have you looked on the table beside the door?” she says.
Where it always freaking is? she does not say.
“Beneath the mail,” she says.
A few beats of silence follow. “Found it!”
Jane scrutinizes her reflection in the mirror. She raises her eyebrows and watches the horizontal lines deepen on her forehead. She wonders, as she often does, what she’d look like with Botox, even as she knows she doesn’t care enough to get it. Or maybe it’s that she cares more what it would say about her if she did. She often fancies her anti-Botox stance as part of her long-fought battle against the patriarchy—yet she dyes her hair and applies mascara daily and she’s not sure how to reconcile her hypocrisy, except to say that shooting poison into her face is a bridge too far. She wishes women would make a pact to just not get it (much like the Wait Until 8th campaign a group of parents spearheaded when Sissy was in middle school to not buy their kids cell phones until the eighth grade), not because of the patriarchy as much as her selfish desire to not look so old and tired compared to her smooth-skinned friends. The irony isn’t lost on her that the fact that she thinks this much about her aging appearance and Botox at all means the patriarchy has already won.
She plucks a tissue out of the box and wipes the slash of cherry red off her mouth, replacing it with her reliable un flavored lip balm, and thinks: When we’re divorced, Dan will never find his wallet again .
Pinpricks of excitement tingle her neck, then shoot down her spine: the same feeling she’s experienced every day since she decided she was going to finally do it. It doesn’t bring her joy to think of Dan losing his wallet for good. There’s no schadenfreude to be found in his inability to look under or behind things. She’s genuinely concerned with how he’ll get on when they’re apart. And how she’ll get on without him.
She hasn’t had to take out the trash in nineteen years. Or iron a shirt. She doesn’t even know where the ironing board is. Or whether everything needs starch or just some things.
But that’s no reason to stay together, is it? Whenever someone asks the secret to making a marriage last, the answer is never, He’s the only one who knows where the ironing board is kept.
“Mom, I can’t find my charger and my phone’s about to die and I was supposed to leave ten minutes ago!” Sissy comes rushing into the bathroom like her hair is on fire and not like she loses her charger four times a week, which she does.
“Mom!” Jane hears Josh’s voice before he, too, appears in the bathroom. “Can you drop me at King’s house on your way out?”
Jane turns to Sissy first. “That’s the third charger I’ve bought you this year.”
“I know,” Sissy says, her voice laced with irritation, as though it’s Jane’s fault that Sissy keeps losing her chargers and Jane keeps replacing them. It actually is my fault , Jane thinks, knowing she’s made it too easy, hasn’t made Sissy feel the consequences of her actions.
“If you can’t find this one, you’re paying for the replacement.”
“Fine! Whatever. But I need a charger now .”
Jane takes a deep breath and tries to tamp down her own irritation, knowing it will do no good to match Sissy’s anger with her own. “Use mine,” she says.
“Really?”
“Yes.” Jane never lets Sissy use her charger precisely because she is so prone to losing them, but she’s about to ruin Sissy’s life by divorcing her father, so she figures this one time it won’t hurt. She turns her gaze to Josh.
“Are King’s parents home?”
“I think so.”
She cocks an eyebrow at him.
“I’ll double-check.” He darts out as quickly as he appeared, Sissy trailing in his wake.
“Wait! Sissy!”
She turns around.
“What are you ten minutes late for?” Jane can barely keep up with her own schedule, much less those of two busy teenagers.
“I’m going to Jazz’s house to watch the final episode of Yellowjackets , remember?”
“Are her parents home?”
“Mom,” she says, disgust overpowering the irritation. “I’m eighteen.”
“I know you are,” Jane says wistfully.
Sissy hesitates, her face softening. “Thanks for the charger,” she says, and then she’s gone.
Jane glances at the counter and considers swiping the makeup tubes and compacts out of the way with her arm so she can lay her head down on the cool surface of the quartz. It’s not the parenting that’s so exhausting as much as the performance of the same script day in and day out. Or maybe it’s the trying to fix all the things for all the people in her family, when she can’t even fix herself.
Or maybe it’s the anticipatory grief she feels at Sissy leaving for college in four short months. There was a time—when her children turning eighteen seemed so far off it was another lifetime—that Jane fantasized about what those years would be like: the freedom of having her house, her time to herself again. But at some point, as the reality of Sissy’s leaving drew nearer, it started to feel less like gaining freedom and more like a cavernous, overwhelming loss. Even though Stanford is on the same coast, it’s still six hours away by car, and though Jane was overjoyed and so ridiculously proud when Sissy got in, she can’t imagine not seeing her daughter every day, not knowing what she’s doing, whom she’s with—and more importantly, if she’s safe, alive, and well. The thought of her leaving is a mix of anxiety and grief so encompassing, she doesn’t understand how other mothers have survived it.
Jane sighs, taps the screen of her phone on the counter, and pulls up her email, scrolling past one from the publishing house of her first book announcing a brand-new publicity team! that Jane thinks is about six years too late, then opens the latest editor’s rejection she received from her agent that afternoon for her sophomore novel—a book she’s been working on for the past six years that has been on submission for nearly five months. This was the seventh rejection.
She knows she shouldn’t let it get to her. Rejection is part of being a writer. Harry Potter was rejected by twelve different publishers! But Jane thinks rejection—like most bad things—is probably an easier pill to swallow in hindsight, once you’re a worldwide fiction-writing phenomenon, raking in millions of dollars and living in a country estate with an oak-paneled library to shelve all the international editions of your novels. And Jane doesn’t even want millions of dollars! She’s not greedy. She’d be happy with minor success. And OK, truth be told, she also has one tiny recurring daydream of being the author guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. She’s even gone as far as to practice in the mirror looking very humble and grateful, yet composed and confident, while saying, No! I had no idea my book would go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, Jimmy!! It’s all been very surreal . And then she always adds: But I couldn’t have done any of this without my husband, Dan . It’s not true, but it’s what celebrities always do when accepting awards—deflect their accolades, shine a light on the support of their loved ones. It’s easy to be self-effacing when you’re feeling magnanimous about the state of things.
All that is to say, Jane has had exactly one book published, exactly six years ago, and it was nowhere near a bestseller and certainly nowhere near the radar of Jimmy Fallon—in fact, more books got returned to the publisher than actually got sold. It was devastating, yes, but she knows logically that it’s ridiculous to care as much as she does; that as adversities go, not achieving her lifelong career dream to be a bestselling novelist is a first-world problem, at best. She has so much in her life to be grateful for—her kids, her health, a roof over her head. That’s what those influencers she follows remind her of every day with their platitudes. Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have.
But they were dead wrong about the lipstick, so…
Dan appears at the open door of the bathroom, staring at his phone. “Did you hear that cryptocurrency Ottobyte just knocked off Bitcoin as the most valuable? It’s worth thirty-eight thousand dollars per coin.”
Both Dan and Sissy—who had more understanding of technology and economics by the time she reached middle school than Jane had ever possessed in her entire life—had tried to explain cryptocurrency to Jane on numerous occasions, once even going so far as getting potatoes out of their pantry as a visual aid. Jane still didn’t understand it and thought it was absurd that people spent their real money on money that didn’t actually exist.
“Huh,” she says, because saying anything else would provoke Dan into yet another explanation she wouldn’t understand.
“I knew I should have bought some,” he mutters as he grabs the handheld mirror and angles it behind and slightly above his head to better study the thinning hair at its crown. It’s a bald spot, to be honest, but Jane never calls it that, to spare Dan’s feelings. Dan looks at it every day, as if closely monitoring the hairs like an unruly dog one is trying to train will make them stay. Satisfied, he puts the mirror down on the counter, then meets Jane’s eyes. “You ready, babe? I don’t want to be late.”
She stares back at him, her husband. Dan’s wearing a navy-blue-and-red-striped tie his mother bought him for Christmas a decade ago. It doesn’t go with his gray suit jacket. The paisley lavender one would look infinitely better. Jane would say something, but Dan’s going to have to pick out his own ties from now on, so, she figures, he may as well start now. She stands and smooths her dress, then moves to walk past him to the bedroom, where her purse is. He grabs her wrist gently.
“Hey,” he says. “Happy anniversary.”
She stops. Looks into his muted blue eyes. They’re not ice blue or slate blue or pure blue or pale blue or piercing or sparkling or any of those clichéd adjectives people use to describe blue eyes. She remembers texting him once, years ago, when the wall color greige was all the rage for suburban women who watched too much Fixer Upper .
Greige-blue! she typed. That’s your eye color.
She doesn’t remember what he wrote back. Probably something benign and loving like: You’re a nut . That was before. When things were good. When Jane couldn’t even fathom divorcing Dan—aside from the normal, expected moments every wife fantasizes about leaving her spouse, like every time Jane sees Idris Elba strutting in a trench coat on-screen, or in the middle of the night when she would go to the bathroom in the dark, only for her bare ass to meet the top of the cold, hard toilet seat. While most men were prone to leaving the toilet seat up after relieving themselves, Dan put down the whole kit and caboodle and Jane found it maddening.
“Happy anniversary,” she says.
This is the last time we’ll celebrate it , she doesn’t say.
“You should wear the lavender tie,” she says.