Chapter 7 The Birthday
Summer
I've been looking forward to this for three weeks.
That's the part that makes it pathetic. Not the curling iron or the green dress or the earrings I've changed four times.
It's the anticipation. Twenty-one days of building this night in my head.
The table. Colt next to me. A night that's about me.
Not Bennet Holdings. Not Tidewater. Not the slow erosion I have been watching happen to my marriage for months.
Twenty-four years old today. I am standing in my bathroom putting on mascara, believing tonight might fix something.
My phone sits on the edge of the sink. No calls. No texts. I pick it up and type:
Me
Dinner at 7 at my parents'. Don't forget.
Stare at it. Send.
Read receipt pops up immediately.
No response.
I tell myself he's in a meeting. He saw it and smiled. He'll walk through the door in twenty minutes smelling like Tom Ford and pull me in by the waist and say something that makes me feel like the only person in any room he's ever stood in.
I tell myself a lot of things these days.
***
King's Diner is beautiful.
Mama has outdone herself. Sunflowers on every table. My favorite since I was six and Daddy grew them along the back fence. A banner across the wall that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUMMER in gold letters. Daddy's handwriting. Careful block print. The man has never written in cursive.
The diner is closed tonight. Just for us. Mama's made fried green tomatoes and shrimp and grits and the brown butter cake she only makes for birthdays.
Autumn is on a barstool when I walk in, boots on the rung. She screams when she sees me. Actually screams. Daddy flinches behind the register.
"The green dress." She grabs my hands. Holds my arms out. "You absolute weapon."
"That's the plan."
"Where's Prince Charming?"
"On his way."
She doesn't say anything to that. Just smiles. Squeezes my hands. Pulls me toward the table where Jake is sitting with a beer and a wrapped present.
"You're late to your own party." Jake stands and lifts me off the ground. "Happy birthday, King."
"Put me down."
"You look good. The green thing is working."
"It's called a dress, Jake."
"Whatever it's called, it's doing what it's supposed to do."
Daddy comes around the counter. Kisses the top of my head. "There's my girl. Twenty-four. Lord help us all." He looks past me toward the door. "Colt parking?"
"He's on his way."
Daddy nods. His jaw tightens. He smooths it out before he thinks I notice. I notice.
Mama comes from the kitchen with hush puppies. Cups my face. Gives me the look. The one only mothers can give.
"Happy birthday, sweet girl."
"Thanks, Mama."
"Is Colt..."
"On his way."
She glances at Daddy. The look between them lasts one second and I hate every millisecond of it.
***
Seven fifteen.
Empty chair.
I check my phone under the table. Nothing.
Me
Hey, we're all here! Are you on your way?
Delivered. Not read.
"He's probably stuck on the bridge," I say to no one in particular. "Traffic's been terrible."
Autumn is across from me. She hasn't mentioned the empty chair. She keeps refilling my sweet tea with a focus that borders on medical intervention.
Seven thirty.
I excuse myself to the bathroom. Lock the door. Call Colt. Five rings. Voicemail.
"Hey, it's me." My voice sounds normal. "We're all at the diner. Wondering where you are. Call me."
I hang up. Stare at myself in the mirror over the porcelain sink I used to reach on my tiptoes. The woman in the mirror is wearing a green dress and careful mascara and an expression she is working very hard to maintain.
I flush the toilet so it sounds like I had a reason to be in here.
***
Seven fifty-five. Mama brings out the shrimp and grits.
Eight ten. I open Jake's present. A first edition of The Silence of the Lambs from an estate sale in Charleston. I press it against my chest and he pretends not to see my eyes get wet.
Eight twenty. Autumn gives me gold hoops with tiny emeralds. Coordinated with the dress.
Eight thirty.
Empty chair.
My phone buzzes.
I look at it under the table. Angle the screen so nobody can see. Like hiding a bad grade.
Colt
Hey babe. Tidewater call ran late and I still have a stack of briefs to get through before tomorrow. Going to be a late one. Don't wait up.
Read it twice.
Three times.
No "happy birthday."
He didn't forget the dinner. He forgot my birthday. The day. The fact that twenty-four years ago today I arrived on this planet and he is supposed to care about that. It didn't register.
I lock my phone. Set it face down on the table. Look up at Mama, who is watching me with a stillness that tells me she saw my face change before I could fix it.
"Everything okay?"
"Colt's stuck at work." I smile. "Big deal closing. He said don't wait up."
Daddy's hand goes still around his fork. He sets it down. Carefully. Like he doesn't trust his own hands tonight.
"He's not coming." Not a question.
"He got tied up, Daddy. The Tidewater account. It could change everything for his career."
I hear myself. The bright, practiced quality of my own voice.
Daddy looks at Mama. The jaw thing is back. He doesn't smooth it out this time.
"Greg," Mama says softly.
He picks up his fork.
Autumn reaches across the table and takes my hand. Doesn't say anything. Her grip says it all. I see you. I'm furious. Tonight I'll let you pretend.
Jake clears his throat. "So, Summer. Tell me about the new book. Your editor called it the best thing you've written."
Jake Holloway, building me a bridge to walk across. Making it look like solid ground.
"She did, actually." My voice wobbles once.
Then steadies. And I talk about my book for twenty minutes while my family listens like it's the most fascinating story they've heard, and nobody looks at the empty chair, and the brown butter cake has twenty-four candles, and I blow them all out in one breath.
I don't make a wish.
***
I tell Mama and Daddy I'm staying at Autumn's tonight.
Mama doesn't ask why. She just nods. Folds a napkin in half. Folds it again. "Take some cake, baby. For both of you."
Daddy walks me to the car. He doesn't say anything until I've got my hand on the door handle, and then he says, "Anything you need, Summer." That's it. That's the whole sentence. Coming from Greg King, that's a paragraph.
"I know, Daddy."
"Anything." He kisses the top of my head.
I drive to Autumn's with the cake in a Tupperware on the passenger seat.
She doesn't ask questions either. She unlocks her door, hands me a pair of sweats and a Vandy t-shirt that smells like her detergent, pours me a tequila I don't need and absolutely do need.
We sit on her couch with bad reality TV on low and she lets me cry without trying to fix anything.
Around two in the morning she puts a blanket over me and goes to her room and leaves her door open in case I need her.
I sleep on her couch. Real sleep. The first I've had in weeks. Which is its own kind of indictment.
***
I wake up at seven thirty on Sunday to coffee smell and Autumn typing at her kitchen counter. She looks up.
"You can stay all day. Or all week. Or forever, honestly."
"I have to go home."
"Why?"
That's a good question. I sit with it for a minute. "Because if I don't go home, he gets to keep telling himself a story where this is fine. And I don't want him to have that story. I want him to have to look at me."
Autumn nods. Slides me a coffee. "Take the rest of the cake. I'm not eating sad cake. I have standards."
I shower at her place. The sweats and the Vandy t-shirt go back on. I can't make myself put the dress back on this morning. I fold it into my bag. I look like exactly what I am. A woman who slept on her best friend's couch on her birthday because her husband forgot she existed.
"Call me," Autumn says. "Whatever happens." She holds the door. "And Summer? Stop asking whether he loves you. He does. Ask what he's turning into while he does it."
"I just can't right now Autumn, this is all just such bullshit. I'll call you as soon as I can."
I drive home.
***
The driveway is empty.
For one stupid second I feel relieved, because if he isn't here I don't have to do this yet.
I park. Get my bag. Walk to the front door.
I hear him before I see him.
His voice. Through the kitchen window. The bay window over the sink that faces the driveway, because the driveway is on the side of the house and the kitchen is on that side too, which means he's standing at the sink with his back to the window or he would have seen me park.
He's on the phone. Laughing.
I stand on my own front porch and I listen to my husband laugh with someone who isn't me on the day after my birthday that he forgot.
I open the door.
***
He doesn't hear me.
The kitchen is across the front hall and around the corner, and his voice is bright and easy and pitched low because he doesn't think anyone is home. The front door doesn't slam. I close it behind me with the kind of care a person uses when they don't want to be noticed.
"...no, I told him I'd handle Calloway personally. He's not going to push back on that." A pause. A laugh. "Stop. I'm not going to say that to my father. I have to live with him, Cheyenne."
He talks to her the way he used to talk to me. Like she is the person he tells things to.
I stand in my own foyer in the clothes I slept in at my best friend's apartment and I listen to my husband flirt with another woman. I don't cry and I don't make a sound. I don't let my keys clink in my hand. I don't breathe loud.
I take my shoes off.
I carry them up the stairs in my hand.
***
The bedroom is exactly as I left it. Bed unmade on his side, made on mine.
I close the bedroom door. Quietly. Take the green dress out of my bag. Hang it back in the closet where it came from last night, when I got dressed for a birthday dinner he didn't show up to.
I turn on the shower.
The hot water hits my back and I stand under it and I don't cry.
I have decided, somewhere between the front porch and the upstairs bathroom, that I am not crying anymore today.
The crying happened on Autumn's couch. What's happening now is something else and it doesn't have a name yet but it doesn't require tears.
I wash my hair. I scrub my face. I let the water run hot enough to leave a mark.
He hasn't even checked on me, no call, no text to find out why I didn't come home.
He also doesn't know I'm home. He's standing in our kitchen in our house on a Sunday morning and he is so completely outside of his own marriage that the woman he is married to could walk in the front door and walk up the stairs and turn on the shower and he doesn't notice.
Because his attention is somewhere else entirely.
Because there is a different woman in the room with him.
The version of him that exists in our house with me has become someone else completely, and that person is wherever Cheyenne is.
***
I'm wrapped in a towel, hair dripping, when I hear him.
What I hear is his voice stopping. The phone call ending mid-laugh. A second of silence. Then footsteps. Fast. The front door opening.
Then nothing for a second.
Then his voice, sharp, alone, in the driveway.
"Summer?"
He saw the car.
I stand in the bathroom in my towel and I look at myself in the mirror that's fogged at the edges. The woman in the mirror is calm. Her eyes are clear. Her hands aren't shaking.
I don't answer him.
I hear him come back in. The front door closing. His footsteps moving fast through the kitchen, through the living room, to the bottom of the stairs. He stops there. He's listening for the shower and not hearing it. He's calculating how long I've been home.
"Summer? Babe?"
I don't answer.
I dry my hair. Slowly. Take my time. Find the soft jeans and the old t-shirt I keep in the closet for the days when I don't want to look like I'm trying.
By the time I open the bathroom door, he's at the top of the stairs. Pale. The phone still in his hand. Looking at me like he's trying to calculate the mood in his head.
"You're home," he says. "I didn't... when did you..."
"Long enough."
I walk past him.
I go downstairs.
I make myself a coffee in the kitchen where he was just standing, and I don't look at him when he comes down behind me, and I don't say anything when he says my name a second time, and a third.
There is nothing left to say to a man who didn't know why I didn't come home and when I came home.