SETTING A CUP OF coffee down on her desk, Rosalyn looked at the letter she was composing on the computer screen.
Dear George and Betsy,
I am writing about the application of the Conrad family for membership to our beloved club. . . .
It was a delicate matter. She had been left out of the loop this time, undoubtedly because of the inherent bias she carried toward this family of the boy who, for all intents and purposes, had molested her daughter. Still, she was on the committee. Her family had been members for generations, and she wasn’t going to go away.
She was reading it over when Barlow appeared, stomping in and now hovering over her shoulder. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Rosalyn quickly closed the file and turned to face him. “Just some odds and ends. Paperwork.”
Christ, it was hard to look at him now, to be cordial, knowing he was having an affair with Sara Livingston. It was bad enough Sara was a newcomer to their circle of friends, that she was on Rosalyn’s blow job committee, and was working on an article about the whole mess. But she was so young. Twenty-seven. They had friends with kids who were twenty-seven. Barlow was forty-five. It was disgusting, though it would be far easier to explain, to justify as a puerile midlife fantasy, than if he had chosen someone mature, for lack of a better description. All middle-aged men wanted to fuck someone young again. Wasn’t that what people thought? And that was exactly what they would think about Barlow, even if it was far from the truth.
The truth in this matter was that a great divide stood between her and her husband, one that had been growing for years, and in particular since he sold his business and inserted himself into their lives. And in spite of the social advantages to having his mistress be so young, it cut Rosalyn deeply.
Barlow sighed, his arms crossed as though he had cause to be self-righteous. “Have you checked in on Cait?”
With her eyebrows raised, Rosalyn shot it back at him. “Have you?”
Another sigh. “I just got back from dropping the boys. You’ve been home all day?”
“Yes, Barlow, I’ve been home. And I decided to give her some space. In case you didn’t notice, she wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the quality family time we’ve all had to endure for the past few days.”
Barlow was suddenly incensed. “Why would you say it like that? Brett seemed great, playing with the kids, taking Cait to a movie. I thought it was a nice weekend.”
Rosalyn bit her lip. A nice weekend. Interesting interpretation. What she had seen were two freewheeling teenage boys who got Caitlin stoned, then came home and roughhoused with the twins because they were stoned, then passed out in front of the TV, woke up, and raided the fridge. But Barlow would see only what he needed to.
“Okay, Barlow. It was a nice weekend.”
“All I’m saying is that maybe you should spend less time looking for some speaker to talk to us about sex and more time talking to Cait. We aren’t the teenagers here, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Rosalyn felt the blood rush to her face. No, but maybe that will be next for you . . . scoping out your daughter’s friends. Why had he done this, on top of everything? They hadn’t been intimate for months, she would give him that. But there were reasons. And this was marriage.
“Don’t tell me how to take care of our daughter. I’ve been doing it for fourteen years. You’ve been at it for six months.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. A fight was not possible today. She was at the breaking point, and if he pushed her into a corner, she wouldn’t be able to hold back. Caitlin. The Conrads. Barlow and Sara. Now Brett. And she felt like she hadn’t seen the twins and Mellie all weekend.
She shut down the computer with two clicks, then pushed out of the chair and away from Barlow. Her shoulder brushed his as she made her escape, and he did what he always did when she walked away, huffed loudly and watched her with dismay. There would be nothing inside him but a recognition of his own feelings and the self-pity they would evoke. And knowing this disgusted her further.
Rushing upstairs, she closed herself off within the confines of her sitting room and leaned against the wall. Where did a person go from here? She hadn’t felt this way for many years, since her return from Paris as a senior at the Academy. She had given in to the crushing wave of Wilshire conformity, and she had not come up from under its swell until she was away from it again. How ironic that even then, away at college, she had found a man who would bring her right back. But now the lives of five children were in her hands. She knew what to do with all of this, every little problem that was before her, and the plans were in place. She could lie down and die, let everything play out on its own, or scrape herself off this mental floor and stay the course. Her plans had never failed her before. Not ever.
She sat at her desk and pulled out the little box of engraved notecards. This was what she had left to do today, write the invitations to the dinner party. She took out her best pen, the one with the smooth black ink that rolled with perfection across the ivory pages.
Dear Sara and Nick . . .