Kay sat on the toilet, turned on her phone. Michael was online. She Facetimed him.
“Finally,” he said.
He sat at the table. She could glimpse her kitchen, the oven, the array of cereal boxes, Freya’s Cheerios, Tom’s Rice Crispies. They couldn’t possibly eat the same cereal, could they? Michael adjusted the screen, adjusted his chair, getting comfy. “The kids are over with Mark and Gretchen.”
“How are they?”
Michael had complete control of himself. “Okay, fine.”
“So what did Freya say happened?”
“Tom did.”
“Tom?” She kept a neutral tone.
“He phoned me. He can, you know.”
“Yes, I do know.” Of course I know. I do know. I clean his foreskin.
“He said you forgot to collect them at camp.”
“I was late.”
“A number of times.”
“That’s what this is about? My being late?”
“What do you think it’s about, Kay?”
“For me, or for you?”
He sighed, he was a sighing mother-fucker. “If you’re not going to be honest, there’s no point in this conversation.”
“Honest? And this coming from you?”
“Here we go.”
“Okay, here’s what this is about, Michael. It’s about us getting a divorce, and you want to control custody.”
“Freya said you called her a bitch, and you said ‘fuck you’ to her.”
“So it was Freya.”
“Did you?”
“I’d burnt my hand and they were laughing at me.” Kay held up her hand in its dismantling wrapping. “I screwed up, absolutely. I apologized.”
“Freya says you smelled of wine.”
“Really?”
“She said there was an empty bottle on the floor.”
“At no point have I put our children in danger. I would never do that.”
“They nearly drowned.”
“Oh my God, Michael. If you were around more, you might fail too from time to time. But you get to be the hero, swanning in, swanning out.”
Suddenly, he held up his phone, a blurry image that took a moment to clarify. It was Ben in the shower.
Kay felt sick, heat rushing to her face that she hoped the early morning light might hide. Heat bloomed out from her face and down her neck. She could feel it prick her armpits. But she composed herself. “Freya had no right to snoop on my phone.”
“Some… dude?” Michael raised his eyebrow. “Some plumber guy?”
“He’s not a plumber.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“You left, Michael. You were supposed to spend the summer with us, a family, that was the plan. And you left. So maybe this is either our kids being manipulative because they are hurt and confused by your abandonment, or—”
“Are you making an excuse for this?”
“Or—or—it’s you feeling guilty because of your affair with Barbara.”
“My affair? I’m having an affair with Barbara? You’re crazy.”
“I’ve known for ages.”
“I was coming back, Kay—”
Coming back because he was summoned by his children. He’d ride in, heroically, to rescue them from their crazy, wanton mother.
Kay hung up, leaned back against the tank. She wished Michael dead, not a petulant, childish fairy wish, but the hammer-swinging kind. She wished he would spontaneously self-combust, the dry tinder of his hypocrisy igniting with a bang. She hated him, and in the sucking, delirious whirlpool of her hate she hated her children.
The hate felt good, to finally let it out, embrace it, smear it all over herself, roll around in it. Not pushing it back, not shaming it, not pretending. Oh, no, she was swinging the hammer, swing away, swing away. The hate was delicious. It smelled good. It was like baked goods or sex—it filled her up, filled all the empty corners, all the withered recesses. She was smooth and plump with hate.
She saw them, how they’d be sitting around the table—the table where she had laid meal after meal after meal and listened to This chicken tastes weird and I don’t like broccoli and Michael working his phone like a masturbating teenager—they’d be sitting there contemplating their mother/wife’s craziness, sad for her, worried, pitying, blaming.
And their warm puddle of self-satisfied, self-absolving blame would expand out from the kitchen, under the door, out to Mark and Gretchen, to Barb, to friends, neighbors, school parents, a contaminating slick. Did you hear? Whisper, whisper! She was screwing the plumber with the kids in the next room! She had some kind of breakdown, if people still call it that these days. She was never very friendly.
But then, like the insistent whine of a mosquito, she heard Michael—what he’d been saying, echoing back to her because she hadn’t been listening: I was coming back, Kay.
For them, for them! She insisted, as she flipped through the days, how long it had taken him to get to Côte d’Ivoire, how long it would have taken him to get back to Vermont, and what airport he’d been in when he’d Facetimed her two days ago.
Of course, this was his plan, to lay full blame on her and exculpate himself. I was coming back, Kay. Exactly what he would say. He’d done the right thing. He’d been honorable. And then his daughter sent him a photo of her mother’s lover, a naked man with a large semi-erect penis in the shower. You could see Tom’s dinosaur soap on the edge of the bath.