47

It took less than a day for me to understand I’d been foolish to believe in Ithaca Frank’s death and my new widowhood would be overshadowed by a shared vision of him as a cheater and fake, a vision, it turned out, no one would admit sharing with me now that he was dead, not even Pat Caldweel, who referred to him as “Poor Frank.” His debts had been forgiven when lightning struck. Now I was the only one who thought he was a dick. I considered telling Professor Caldweel about Lizzie, but then I’d have to tell her about the fight and about how I’d chased Frank out the door while the sirens wailed, and I worried she’d think I was lying about Lizzie, that I’d invented a dramatic reason for sending Frank to his death because I felt guilty for throwing him out after a fight about something stupid. I couldn’t tell anyone.

Joanie had left town to take a job in Ohio, Nat and Sam had broken up, and Todd was living with the woman who’d argued the flowers she smelled in her wine glass were white. When I ran into my friends, they looked weird, like people who resembled people I once knew, and they stared at Ava in her stroller like they’d never seen a baby before. Every time I was on campus I was sure people were whispering behind my back. I went to a playground hoping to meet other women with kids I might befriend and for my troubles received a tongue-lashing regarding my choice of disposable diapers from a fat hippie who drove a Range Rover and had to pause from her attack on me to stop her twin four-year-old boys from pissing off the top of the jungle gym. After that I spent my time with my landlady’s cats. She’d gone to Montreal for ten days to visit her octogenarian mother, and I had free roam of the house. There was no TV, but she had an amazing collection of 1970s and ’80s pop albums, so Ava and I passed our days listening to Queen and Rush and Duran Duran and Eurythmics and petting Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre, the two Siamese.

One afternoon, a week or so after I’d returned to Ithaca, I was at the co-op grocery, standing before a shelf of organic cat food trying to match the flavors on the list my landlady had left with the flavors on the cans, when behind me a boy’s voice said, “Hannah?”

I turned to find Kree Carey, dressed only in flip-flops and a green bathing suit he’d pulled down low on his hips to expose a wide white belt between trunks and tanned belly. He’d grown nearly a foot taller, and his hair was long and blond and pretty. Mark came down the aisle and pulled up his son’s pants like a bully giving a wedgie. “Jesus, Kree, what’s your plan? Expose yourself to the dog food?” He looked up at me and said, “Hannah?” just like Kree had.

I smiled and nodded to them. “Hello, Carey men.”

“Whose baby?” Kree asked, peeking into the sling at Ava.

“Mine.”

Mark looked taken aback.

“How’s Helena?”

Kree hooked his thumbs in his trunks and pulled them down farther than they had been before.

“Well,” Mark said, “here’s the thing, we’re no longer husband and wife, but we are committed parenting partners, so that’s good. She, you see, she, well, she …” Mark cut his eyes at Kree while the kid pretended to read the ingredients on a bag of kitten food. “She found the charms of another too much to resist.” It was a euphemism so clumsy it was lovely, one that seven-year-old Kree might not know the meaning of, but I guessed he had a pretty good idea based on the context—no longer husband and wife, but committed parenting partners.

“Where’s your—” Mark started to ask, then appeared to recognize how the question might sound if I didn’t subscribe to heteronormative contracts even as liberal as committed parenting partners.

“He found the charms of another too much to resist.”

Mark’s smile was sad, and when he invited me out to dinner the next night, I accepted without thinking.