530 PM Mia
Five minutes later, on the street outside Sasha’s house, Mia removed her phone from the pocket of her coat. Her fingers shook as she tapped its screen; there was this awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. She scrolled through her applications, tapped the phone again, and ordered an Uber.
“I’ll get us a car to the train station,” she said.
“No way.” Richie sat down on the curb. “Get us one back to the city.”
“That’ll cost, like, a hundred fifty dollars.”
“I don’t care. I’ll Venmo you. I want to get out of this place.”
Richie reached into his pocket for his vape, then exhaled a long plume of smoke.
When he spoke it was slower than normal, his sentences lacking articulation.
Mia thought of the tray of Jell-O shots that Sasha couldn’t find, and of how she hadn’t really seen much of Richie at the party.
She watched as he lowered the vape, then as he removed his sunglasses from the top of his head and put them on his face, his spine hunched beneath his sweater.
She glanced at Adam—his back was turned toward her.
Since they’d stepped outside he hadn’t said anything.
Mia clipped her hair up with her tortoiseshell clasp, working her lower lip with her teeth.
A family left the house. The mother was dressed as a glass, the father as a carton of milk, and their child as a chocolate chip cookie.
The cookie fell; the milk scooped her up.
Mia looked at the screen of her phone. She entered her Greenpoint address and confirmed a car.
“It’s eighteen minutes away.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You can try if you want.”
“My battery’s at two percent.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to wait.”
Mia sat on the curb next to him, pulling her coat across her knees.
The tiny car icon idled motionless on her phone.
The knot in her stomach grew. It pressed against her ribs and made it more difficult to breathe.
Richie brought his vape to his lips; Mia waved the smoke away from her face.
She thought about going back into the house to apologize to Sasha.
She imagined telling her that she recognized she was being immature and selfish, and that she didn’t actually care that Sasha had lied about Emily, even though she did, so long as that meant they could move on.
She pictured them walking upstairs and going back into the bathroom where Sasha had drawn the whiskers on her face.
She imagined saying something like, “So, it turns out I’m a bitch,” and Sasha laughing a little before responding with, “It turns out I’m one too,” and then spending a few minutes deciding where this fight ranked in the history of every fight they had ever had.
It would be so easy, she thought, and then tomorrow she could text Sasha as if nothing had ever happened, and they could both act like things were normal between them.
But then she remembered all the things that Sasha had said to her, how small and insignificant she had made her feel.
And for doing what? Being hurt that Sasha had done something shitty?
Making an effort, then having that effort thrown back in her face?
Richie pulled on his vape again—this time Mia let the smoke cloud her face.
She considered that the downside of knowing people for so long was having time to change what you thought about them, and decided that if she had met Sasha now, at forty years old, she would have hated her.
No—not would have, but did. She did hate Sasha, and the realization made her feel light and giddy, like she wanted to grab Richie’s arm and laugh.
At the very least, it was enough to keep her from going back inside.
“You shouldn’t have said that about Mitch Reynolds.”
Adam had turned back around. His fake glasses were off, slipped into the pocket of his shirt, and there was a faint red mark across the bridge of his nose.
Richie twisted to look up at him.
“Okay, well, it’s true.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Actually, Adam? I do. Nina Guzman told me. She walked in on them fucking in Amagansett.”
The Milk and Cookie family piled into a Tesla parked halfway down the street and a minute or so later it glided silently in front of the house.
Streetlamps flickered on throughout the neighborhood.
Mia could feel Adam staring at her; pulling her knees to her chest, she kept her gaze fixed forward.
She considered the revelation of Sasha’s infidelity, turning it over, examining its many sides, trying to decide what she made of it.
She kept waiting to feel surprised, or appalled, or curious, because those were the normal reactions to finding out that someone you knew had been having an affair.
But none of those feelings came. All Mia could think was: How could she not tell me?
How could Sasha have sex with Mitch Reynolds multiple times and not tell me?
Adam said, “It was a shitty thing to do, is all I’m saying.”
“And why, exactly, was it shitty?”
“Because it’s none of your business, Richie. It’s not your marriage.”
Richie stood from the curb. He took a few steps back, then righted himself, planting his boots in the grass. He removed his sunglasses.
“So, let me get this straight: it’s completely fine for Sasha to be selfish, and to lie to Mia, and to tell us all to grow up. But when I point out that she’s a hypocrite because she’s the one who cheated on her husband with Mitch Reynolds, then somehow I’m the villain?”
“I never said anyone was a villain.”
“But you are. That’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re implying it.” Richie ran his hand beneath his nose. He said, “And not for nothing, Adam, but it’s what you’ve been implying for the last twenty years.”
Adam was becoming flustered—Mia could see it.
He kept licking his lips, and his gaze darted between the street and Richie and the house.
Lines formed across his forehead, as if he couldn’t quite figure out how the conversation had arrived at this point and was trying to remember a word that he had inexplicably forgotten.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I’m trying to say is that I think backing out of a trip to Miami is a little different than ruining a marriage.”
Lights turned on in the house across the street.
Mia saw a woman walk the length of a living room.
She knew she should say something, but she couldn’t think of what.
For the third time that evening, she had the sensation of sinking into the earth, of being both angry and scared, but mostly wanting to disappear.
On her screen, the car remained exactly where it had been four minutes ago, its orientation flipping at ninety-degree angles without making any actual progress.
Richie rocked back on his heels. She was beginning to wonder if they would ever get home.
“Every time you asked me if I really needed another drink. Every time you fucking, like, touched my knee under the table to shut me up at dinner. When you told me it was a bad idea to travel to Mexico with drugs in a peanut butter jar—”
“I didn’t want you to get arrested!”
“—that’s exactly what you were doing. You were telling me that I was the villain, and you were a saint, and without you I’d be hopeless. It’s exhausting, Adam. Don’t you see that? It’s not kindness, it’s moral superiority, and it’s fucking exhausting.”
Adam continued to stare at Mia. He removed his hands from his pockets and was holding his palms up, as if he was feeling for rain, and his eyes were wide and pleading.
Mia’s initial instinct was to stand and walk over to him and hug him, in the same way that when she heard the shower dripping, she went into the bathroom and gave the faucet a hard twist without thinking about it.
She stopped herself, though—because why should she have to come to his defense when he had done nothing to come to hers?
She suddenly recalled every moment that Adam had gone back to switch off a light that she had accidentally left on when walking out of a room, every time he had said, “Actually, Mia, you can recycle that.” She recalled the awful pout he’d made with his lips an hour earlier, when he told her to check herself, and every other time his magnanimity had made her feel like she was less than a good person.
She said, “He’s right, Adam. You’re fucking exhausting.”
Adam opened his mouth, made a noise that sounded like hum, and closed it slowly.
He removed the fake glasses from his shirt pocket and returned them to the bridge of his nose, as if that would help him see more clearly; when she thought about it in retrospect, Mia would find this particularly heartbreaking.
Then for about ten seconds his face stiffened and his mind seemed to travel elsewhere, to some place where it was free to reach conclusions that until now it had resisted.
“I’m so over this,” he said. “It’s like, I try so hard to make everyone happy, but what’s the point? You’re going to be miserable and mean no matter what I do. So, guess what? I’m done.” He placed his hand against his chest. “I’m done.”
Richie blew another cloud of smoke out into the night.
He said, “Good for you, Gandhi,” but Adam had turned and walked a few feet down the street.
Then he stopped, illuminated his phone, looked at a street sign, and walked back in the other direction, passing Mia and Richie again without so much as a glance.
Mia’s lungs felt empty, like she was swimming in a heavy surf, and each time she emerged to catch her breath, another wave was there, forcing her beneath the water’s surface.
Her vision blurred over: she wished she could take everything back, and start again with what she knew now.
She wished she could move through the last twenty years, sweeping away all the resentments and slights that had accumulated into this particular moment.
But she couldn’t—they all made their choices.
Adam was walking down the street, and Sasha was cleaning up Halloween decorations, and Mia was sitting on the curb outside.
The resentments were part of the landscape—you couldn’t sweep them away.
“You’re going to be a shitty father!” Richie shouted, and Mia wrapped her hand around Richie’s ankle, pulling him down toward the curb.
Adam didn’t stop walking. He reached the corner and, after consulting his phone beneath a streetlamp, turned right and continued on to wherever he was going. Mia watched him until he disappeared behind an overgrown box hedge.
The Uber was still eighteen minutes away.