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After everything happened, Jess tried to remember what things had been like at home on the morning of the barbeque where she first met Neil, as she and Malcolm were getting ready to head over to the Hills’ house. She tried to remember what they talked about. They arrived separately because Patrick texted Malcolm to pick up a few bags of ice, and Jess made a Buffalo chicken dip she wanted to bring over early in case Siobhán wanted to pretend she made it. They passed each other in the hallway in their haste, each hustling to their separate assignments, Malcolm in a new T-shirt that still had the size sticker on the sleeve. She put her hand on his chest and he looked at her with alarm, as if he had to brace himself every time she took a breath to speak. She saw everything he feared she would say pass through him, and he knew she saw it and neither of them said a word. She peeled the sticker off and held the little XL circle on her fingertip to show him. He stood there, his expression different now, full of relief, though he would have denied it. He looked at the top of her head for a moment before they both motored on. The day was already warm and the Hills’ yard wouldn’t be fully shaded until late afternoon.
One morning on the old rail trail, she recognized him running toward her, finishing his loop. Couldn’t women and men be friends? Wasn’t she still close with her guy friends from high school, and God knew there was nothing going on between them? It was nearly Christmas, and they were texting enough by then that she stopped herself from polling her girlfriends to find out whether Patrick’s friend from college was texting them all the time, in case the answer was no (in case the answer was yes). Her breathing quickened when she saw him. She decided the best thing was to say something friendly, something forgettable, but to not break her stride. All runners understand not stopping. And it was so cold. They were both wearing knit hats, gloves. But once he reached her, he turned around and ran alongside her without saying a word. He was not as tall as Malcolm. His build was leaner. He had large eyes the color of a faded penny, thick lashes, high cheekbones, full lips. She kept glancing at him and then away, and he kept doing the same. His running watch beeped. Even in the dead of winter his skin had a gold tone and didn’t turn ruddy and pink like hers did, like Malcolm’s did, too. His hair was buzzed to the scalp, and she imagined if he took his hat off right then, the cold would feel like a slap.
She called out a goodbye to Patrick and Neil as she all but jogged to her car. As soon as she drove around the corner, out of their line of sight, she pulled over and parked, tried to make her body stop trembling. Nothing happened. You stopped by your friend’s house. You dropped off shoes. Nothing happened. But she couldn’t make her bones hear a different tune.
She was sure she’d get a text, but nothing came. When she was invited to a party where she assumed he’d be, she declined.
She saw him here and there over the next few months, but always kept the conversations light and quick. It was good to see him but she was on her way somewhere. Dr. Hanley was starting to help a little. The Half Moon’s balance sheet made gentle swings back and forth between red and black each month, but never too widely, never too far. Jess started to wonder if maybe it was possible to dance at the edge of a precipice and keep dancing for the rest of your life. By the time they got their invitation to Amanda and Toby’s annual New Year’s party, she told herself that she was cured of whatever feeling had come over her the previous summer. Hormones. Grief. Boredom. The growing sense that life was passing her by and if she didn’t do something she’d leave nothing behind to prove she was even there.
Jess used to say that he wasn’t himself until he had people around, until he had other moods and personalities to react to, and he resented when she said that, as if he were incapable of self-reflection, but now he sort of knew what she meant. It wasn’t that he disliked being alone, it was more like he felt muted, not completely awake. He held a bag of ground coffee, considered whether he could rig up a percolator on the stove if he found matches to light the pilot. And then, after standing there another minute, he heard the crunch of snow under tires, as if from his dreams.
Fully dressed once again, he went down to the storage room to get the generator he bought in a panic after a freak hurricane, not long after the bar became his. The generator was on the cheap end, not meant to keep the place running, and Jess had argued at the time that they’d be better off spending more on a good one than any money at all on one that would prove near useless in a crisis. The guy who was helping them piped up that he agreed with Jess, that the one Malcolm picked was barely better than a camp generator. Malcolm wanted to ask the guy what business it was of his, but instead of engaging, instead of making his case, he heaved the thing up to the register without using the hand truck, and slapped their credit card down. Jess went silent, staring dead-eyed out the window the whole ride home. Now, two years later, looking at it as if for the first time, he knew Jess was right: the old 1980s space heater he’d inherited from Hugh’s day would pull all of the power. He shook the canister of gasoline he’d grabbed from his shed and wondered how long the gas would last.
rough. bad way to resolve a dispute
He imagined barging in, finding Bratton, throwing him through his giant picture window. He didn’t give one shit if the guy’s kids watched him do it. He had twenty people who’d vouch for him, say he’d been on their couch playing Go Fish with their families all day. And Jess. What a liar, what a—But none of the usual words felt right. And it hadn’t felt good, even in his imagination. As soon as she opened Bratton’s front door and stepped outside, he felt most of the rage evaporate, and instead he felt hollow, tired, adrift. There was his girl. She was just standing in a different house.
“Well, explain it to me then. Looks to me like you went out and got yourself a family. So where does that leave me?” But before she could make any sort of attempt to explain, he held up his hand. “You know how many people I could have cheated with? You want to know how many? I don’t even know. Remember Meg? She was gorgeous, but I didn’t.”
He could see the pale oval of her face in his peripheral vision as she turned to study him. It wasn’t quite his point. It hadn’t come out right. She should know what he meant without him spelling it out.
“Good for you, Mal,” she said after a minute. “What a guy.”
“Sorry. That was a dumb thing to say.”
But she was the voice in his head, even when she wasn’t there in front of him. The men are yours, Jess might say. But the women? She’d make that face meant to warn him not to be so sure. They might understand: her girlfriends, her mother, any woman who listened to her whole story and really took it in. They’d never admit it to their partners—no, they’d never do a thing like that, risk their families, risk their predictable lives, my God, what had she been thinking—but to each other? To themselves, in the privacy of their own thoughts? There were those who’d sympathize with following a temptation to its conclusion. There were those who would admire a woman who had a problem and did what she thought might fix it.
Was she relieved? He couldn’t tell. It was harder to read her than it used to be. She’d always been a doer, that was one of the things he loved about her. She was a worker, a problem solver. If someone got dumped, then she set them up with someone new. If someone needed a job, then she asked around until that person got one. She paid attention to how things were done so that she’d know how to do them herself. When they bought their house and had zero money to spare after the down payment, she took classes at Home Depot to learn how to tile, how to grout. When they were short on food at Siobhán’s baby shower, it was Jess who took everything to the kitchen, cut what they had in half, and rearranged it on more platters so it seemed as if it had doubled. “It was just like the loaves and the fishes,” Siobhán said when she recounted it for Malcolm later. “A miracle.” She felt stuck in her job, so she left. She felt stuck in her marriage, apparently, so she left that, too.