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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.
She went to the spice rack and removed this and that. She measured rice into a small pot, covered the rice with water. Never in a million years could Malcolm have looked at the random things she assembled and make his mind see a meal.
“Plenty here,” she said. Malcolm lit the pilot on the stove and in twenty minutes they had hot food. Just like the story of the baby shower, she’d made something out of nothing. When they finished their first bowls, eating in silence, they each had another. It was so elemental. Cooking. Eating. Washing up after with the water Malcolm had collected. Two white bowls left to dry on a worn kitchen towel. A cobalt blue sky beyond the window. It was an extravagance, thinking only about the present moment. There was Jess, next to him. He already felt warmer, his headache fading.
Whatever Jess might have said to object, she swallowed back. “Okay,” she said. What harm? He was different than he was before she left. She’d first noticed when they were in the basement of the bar. Something in the way he held himself apart from her. Something about the solemn way he listened as she spoke. And now she was seeing it again. Where was the guy who clapped a dozen backs when he walked into a room? The guy who parted the air just by walking through it? Where was the kid who sprang for ice cream cones for the whole neighborhood, without having the first idea what the tab would come to? Gone, as far as she could tell. Humbled. Crushed. By her and what she’d done, yes. She made herself acknowledge that fact. But also, the slow-motion failure of a dream. She’d seen that failure coming, but he hadn’t. She saw that it hadn’t just been denial; he truly had not seen. And then it hit her that it was the same for him when it came to her dream. He knew long before she did that she would never deliver a baby. But he’d stood aside and hoped she’d arrive at that conclusion on her own.
[...] She was divorced now, living in Toms River, and emailed to say that people having opinions about what happened even though they didn’t have the first clue would be the hardest part, but that Jess should just remember that they don’t know anything, it was no one’s business but hers.
“Jenny,” Jess whispered aloud when she read that, and it stopped her breath to think what she must have gone through to have gained that wisdom. And where had Jess been for her? Nowhere. Jenny had gotten pregnant so young. They’d drifted apart.