PERRI HAD ALWAYS LOVED BREAKFAST. It was her favorite meal of the day. When Mike traveled for business, she’d treat herself by eating cereal for dinner after the kids went to sleep. Now she lay sprawled on her hotel bed, feasting on room-service waffles (at four o’clock in the afternoon, no less) and trying not to fret about the fact that Gus had discouraged her from returning home. What accounted for Gus’s negativity? Seeking distraction from her worries, Perri flipped on the TV. The Real Housewives of New Jersey were having some kind of altercation. As Teresa overturned a table onto Danielle, Perri felt a momentary jolt of smugness in the knowledge that the lives of reality TV stars were infinitely tackier and more dysfunctional than hers would ever be.
However, the sound of her ringing phone—and the sight of the name “Sims, Michael” flashing across its screen—undermined that certitude, reminding Perri that she’d dumped her husband and kids so she could have sex with a vascular surgeon in South Beach. She dreaded the thought of the conversation to come. But if there was any hope of repairing the damage, it needed to be had. It was why she’d left Mike a teary message, twenty minutes earlier, apologizing in a general way and asking that he call her. “Hello?” she said in a mealy voice.
“You went down to Florida to have an affair. Is that it?” he barked.
“WHAT?! Who said that?”
“I have my sources.”
Perri was aghast and inflamed. So it had taken Gus not even five minutes to betray her? There was no other explanation. She wanted to break one of Gus’s legs. “Well, your sources are wrong,” she told him.
“Yeah, right,” said Mike.
A sob climbed the length of Perri’s throat, and she felt powerless to keep it inside. “It’s already over,” she said. “And nothing even happened. But I’m sorry anyway. I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.”
“So, who was it?” asked Mike, seemingly unswayed by his wife’s display of abjection. “Some pool boy you met down there? The sixteen-year-old with the handlebar mustache from the office?”
Remorse mingled with rage. “What do you care?” cried Perri. “It’s not like you want me anymore!”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes.” He hadn’t denied it, had he?
“So you had to go fuck someone else?”
Perri felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “I didn’t f-word anyone.” It pained her in particular to have to use the word as a verb, even in an abbreviated form, but she saw no other way to counteract the charge. “And for the record, I’m lying in bed alone right now eating waffles. Okay?”
“Well, good for you. I hope you have a lovely and romantic getaway. And at the end of it, do everyone a favor and don’t come back.”
Was he serious? “Mike! PLEASE!” Perri was crying so hard now that she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. What had she done? And how had they arrived at this point? Hadn’t they loved each other only a short time ago? She could no longer even remember what she was doing in Florida.
“Please, what?” he said.
“Forgive me!”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“Mike, we’ve been married for—” she began. But the line had already gone dead.
As the tears rolled down her cheeks, Perri redialed her home number. She stopped after the fourth digit, realizing there was no point. Mike wouldn’t pick up. Besides, there was an even more urgent call she needed to make just then—to her youngest sister, Gus, to tell her that she was never speaking to her again for as long as she lived.
Gus and Perri had never really had a big blowout before. True, Perri had been less than amused when her sister had shown up for her wedding twelve years earlier wearing a light blue men’s tuxedo. Perri had begged Gus to wear a dress, even offering to buy her one of her choice at Nordstrom’s, no expense barred—to no avail. But the whole incident had been more of an eye roller than anything else. This time was different.
“What’s up?” asked Gus.
“This is Perri,” she began in a shaky voice, “and I just want you to know that I’m never speaking to you again.”
“I spoke to you in confidence this morning, and you betrayed me. You told Mike every single thing I told you. You told him I had an affair, too. Which, by the way, is patently false. But what do you care about the truth?”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said.
“That’s the best you can do?” said Perri. “Invoke the name of a God you don’t believe in?”
Gus sighed heavily. “Perri, I swear—I didn’t mean to say anything. Jeff dragged the whole thing out of me, and then he swore he wouldn’t tell Mike. I’m seriously going to kill him.”
“Do what you like!” Perri shot back. “It won’t make a difference to me, since our relationship is OVER, a relationship that, by the way, I once considered among the most treasured entities in my life.”
“Perri—PLEASE!” Gus let out a gasping little yowl.
Perri’s first instinct was to comfort her sister, just as she’d done so many times before. In order not to do so, she had to remind herself that she was the victim, not the other way around. Perri wasn’t going to let Gus off the hook without further berating, either. “When I think of all the times I was there to hold your hand,” she went on, “like when you thought you needed a sex change, freshman year of college.” Perri paused to catch her breath and wipe the spittle that had found its way onto her chin.
“You’ve been a great sister,” moaned Gus. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Please don’t cut me off.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” cried Perri. “You sold me out. I turned to you in a vulnerable moment, mistakenly believing you’d have more compassion than Pia would. It turns out I was wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong.”
There was a pause. Then, in a newly defiant voice, Gus announced, “I’m not the sister who’s getting cozy with your husband the second you leave.”
“Ex-cuse me?!” cried Perri.
“Let’s just say that a certain two people spent a lot of time in the bathroom together with the door closed the night after you left.”
Perri was momentarily speechless. What in the world was Gus trying to imply? Had her husband been unfaithful, too?! “And which two people would that be?” she asked.
“You figure it out. One of their names starts with O—and the other with M.”
For a full minute, Perri was speechless. Was Gus serious? It sounded implausible. But what if it wasn’t? What if her husband had spent the previous twelve years believing he’d married the wrong sister? And what if Olympia, consummate flirt and known saboteur of others’ marriages, had tried to sabotage Perri’s marriage too? Perri’s thoughts turned to the entirely inappropriate outfit that Olympia had worn to her wedding, which had basically consisted of two pasties attached to a loincloth. “Good-bye, Augusta,” Perri said finally. “I hope you have a nice life. You won’t be hearing from me again.”
“Perri—WAIT!” cried Gus.
But Perri had already hung up, just as her husband had hung up on her, ten minutes before. As far as she was concerned, both sisters were now lost to her. She picked the phone back up and dialed Olympia’s number to inform her that she, too, had become a nonperson.