The cancer memoir was divisive from the start. Most declared it to be the world’s greatest love story, but a small and extremely vocal cadre dismissed it as treacly garbage.
Jen Chun-Pagano led the Treacly Garbage group, whose main complaint was that the wife didn’t seem like a real person.
But she is a real person, insisted the Greatest Love Story contingent. It’s a memoir.
“What pediatrician do you know who rides a motorcycle,” Priya said, “and swigs absinthe straight from the bottle? She’s a fantasy.”
Jen pumped her arms. Yes! Exactly, and Janine scolded them both for picking apart a man’s memories of his dead wife, because some things should be sacred, and yes, the author had gotten remarried suspiciously quickly after his wife’s death, but who was the Cottonwood Book Club to tell him how to grieve?
“Is it me or is everyone a little intense tonight?” Annie asked Deb Gallegos under her breath.
“Maybe it’s the absinthe.”
“I thought absinthe was illegal?”
“Not the domestic stuff. You can order it online.”
“It just didn’t seem real to me.”
“The absinthe?”
“No. The marriage. I don’t know any couple that adoring,” Annie said.
“Really? Not Mike?” Deb said hopefully. “He seems like he’d be so attentive in bed. He’s not afraid to emote. And those biceps. He could probably support you in any—”
“Ugh. Deb.”
Deb winked exaggeratedly and fanned her hand in front of her face.
The way the women drooled over Mike was objectifying and inappropriate and felt disrespectful to Annie. She’d complained about it to him, pointed out that they certainly didn’t talk that way about any of the older husbands.
Mike had seemed confident that it had less to do with age or profession than his undeniable sex appeal. He was probably right, even if sex was way down on Annie’s list these days, usually after grocery shopping.
It was that way for everyone, she suspected. It had to be: Deb Gallegos’s whole act about how the kids were always walking in on her and Salvador was a pile of baloney. Or at least an exaggeration.
“Where do they think they’re going?” Annie pointed out the front window at Sierra and Laurel, who were supposed to be studying together in Sierra’s room, but were instead, for some reason, walking down the driveway to the street, purses slung over their shoulders.
Deb and Annie exchanged a bemused look.
Deb knocked twice on the window, and with a crook of her index finger, beckoned them inside.
“Can we go to the mall?” Sierra said, once the girls were back in the entryway. Laurel could barely make eye contact with Annie.
“Nice of you to ask now,” Deb said with a snort, “after you’ve left.”
“I sent you a text,” Sierra said. “We just didn’t want to bother you.”
“You can’t just skip off shopping,” Annie said, incredulous. “Without permission.”
Laurel shifted her weight from one foot to the other, chewed a cuticle, obviously chagrined.
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing that project on, um—?” Annie looked at Deb.
“Mesopotamian trade,” Deb said.
“We finished,” Laurel said. “Haley’s mom can pick us up at the Cottonwood sign in fifteen minutes, and drive us home.”
“It’s a school night, though,” Annie said.
“We really need a break,” Laurel said. Her voice squeaked as she said it and Sierra nodded wide-eyed.
“We really, really do.”
Annie and Deb locked eyes for a silent conversation.
“Home by eight thirty,” Annie said.
The girls nodded and opened the door, darted out before minds were changed.
“Wait,” Annie shouted after them, “don’t you need money?”
They skipped down the hill, heads together, giggling.
What was that quote about a little rebellion being a good thing? Maybe Annie should be happy.
“Is school more intense this year?” she asked Deb.
Last week, Beth the librarian had stopped by Annie’s small office, a comically high stack of science textbooks in her arms. “Laurel’s interlibrary loans came in,” she said. At home, Laurel had accepted the books with a terse nod.
“Seems the same as always,” Deb said. “But if Laurel thinks it’s too intense it probably is.”
“You know the part,” Janine’s slurred voice broke through from the other side of the room, “the part, where they’re tangled in the sheets and the way he touched her, the way he touched her.”
Drawn back into her living room, Deb sighed again. “The lovemaking was beautiful.”
Annie could feel the sick swirling in the back of her throat.
“I have an announcement.” She rapped her fist on the doorframe until everyone turned around. “Lena Meeker is coming to book club next month.”
There was a shocked silence, followed by hushed murmurs between the women.
“I’ve seen her car,” Janine was saying. “But I’ve never actually met her.”
“That’s a lovely gesture.” Harriet Nessel nodded her approval in Annie’s direction. “Inviting Lena.”
“I’m so glad she didn’t come tonight,” Priya said. “Can you imagine if she had to read this month’s book? An ode to a beloved dead partner?”
Harriet Nessel shifted on the sofa. Next to her, Priya pounced.
“What’s that face, Harriet?”
“I didn’t make a face.”
“You did. You guys saw it, right?”
Harriet pursed her lips, which emphasized the vertical lines under her nose. “It’s not really my place.”
“Spill the tea.”
Harriet’s palms skimmed over her legal pad.
“I have no idea what she thinks of him now,” she said finally, “but even before Tim killed that young man, I’m not so sure it was paradise at the Meekers’ house.”
FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER
Lena didn’t care about the girls. Her attitude toward Tim’s affairs had evolved through the years. What started out tender had callused.
She cared about the scene he was making at her party, though.
He was at the far end of the lawn, by the lilac bushes, broadcasting in a drunken foghorn voice to an audience of twenty-somethings that the beaches in Mauritius were otherworldly.
Oh, Tim, you urbane sophisticate, you.
Lena tried to figure out which young woman he was trying to impress. The well-endowed blonde, probably.
“The opposite of you,” Mel had once pointed out helpfully, after Lena had described Tim’s type.
Thankfully, Rachel appeared oblivious. She was distracted by something tonight. Lena suspected a crush on Jett the rented bartender, who was stringy-haired and too-cool.
Rachel had beamed when he’d showed up, and declared herself his assistant. Just a second ago, Lena had overheard Rachel telling Jett a made-up a story about partying with friends. A familiar note of worry had vibrated in Lena’s stomach: Was Rachel still that desperate to impress?
Tomorrow, Lena would have a talk with Rachel about dissembling, but tonight, Jett was a harmless distraction. He was visibly disinterested in Rachel, which left Lena free to spend time with Gary Neary.
Someone in Tim’s group shattered a glass on the ground. Incoming! There were shrieks of laughter.
Lena looked again to Rachel, who had propped her chin on her fists to watch Jett sloppily pour a vodka tonic.
Yes, tomorrow she and Rachel would have a nice long talk.
“I should probably clean up the broken glass,” Lena said to Gary Neary, who had returned with two mojitos.
“Not your job.” He handed a glass to Lena. “Have you seen my son? He’s supposed to swing by to meet you.”
“I’d love that,” Lena said.
As a technical matter, Lena already knew Gary’s son, just as she’d known Gary: for years, just another person in their small town.
But everything felt different now.
A few weeks earlier, when his divorce settlement had finalized, Gary had moved to Cottonwood Estates, into the small gray cape on Wildcat Court. Lena had whipped up a batch of raspberry-mocha brownies and knocked on Gary’s door, because this was the type of neighborly gesture that was reflexive to her, and also because she wanted to talk to as many divorced people as she possibly could.
She had long fantasized about divorcing Tim but had always felt trapped. Alma didn’t believe in quitting a marriage, and Rachel was generally horrible with change.
After Alma died, when Rachel entered high school, Lena realized that she no longer had to shield her so protectively. They had been curled up in Lena’s bed one night, watching the Pride and Prejudice miniseries, when they’d heard Tim’s sloppy footsteps down the hall. He’d stopped, one hand on the wall in the bedroom doorway.
“Alma’s girls,” he said. He was smiling and Lena registered the expression on Rachel’s face: hopeful, surprised.
“You both got her jowls,” he said, with a helpful swipe under his chin. “Alma’s masculine jowls. Such a Mack truck of a lady.”
Rachel’s skin had flushed but she’d held her head high.
“Just think,” she’d said, her voice wavering the tiniest bit, “if it weren’t for Uncle Ernie, that would be my male role model.”
She’d turned the volume up so loud that Tim had walked away.
Tim wouldn’t leave as easily as that, Lena knew, but at the insistence of her family lawyer, he’d signed a prenup, and she was starting to feel strong enough for a fight. By the time Gary Neary moved into the neighborhood, Lena had already scheduled a few appointments with divorce lawyers and had started to taste her freedom.
Pace yourself, Lena thought as she waited on Gary’s front step, brownie pan in hand. Don’t bring up his divorce right away, no matter how inappropriately on fire you are about the topic.
When he opened the front door, something about the twinkle in his hazel eyes rendered her momentarily speechless.
Zing.
He had felt it, too.
Gary Neary, tall and rangy with bushy gray hair, was not half as handsome as Tim. He had an angular face and comically deep crow’s-feet and a large nose, and giant, outsized grapefruit calves from all the cycling he did. Beauty was symmetry, they said, and Gary Neary’s face might have been the least symmetrical Lena had ever seen.
But he had listened to her with his whole body, which Lena had never experienced before. It felt like being struck by lightning.
In the weeks before tonight’s party, Gary had been Lena’s savored secret. Even though Lena freely complained to Melanie about Tim, she had kept quiet about Gary. It was too new, too first-blush. She had been happy to wait for it to unfold like fate.
For a few more hours, Lena would honestly believe that life made sense in its own funny way, that its primary lessons were about perseverance and patience. Because she had suffered through a bad marriage and learned she deserved more, Lena had earned True Love.
By the next day, she would understand that this line of thinking was mythology—trying to see the narrative in a series of thoroughly meaningless acts.
It had been real with Gary, though. After the accident, even with everything else she had to grieve, Lena’s heart still made space to mourn him. But just because something was real, just because you might deserve it, didn’t mean you got it.
Every time she thought of telling Melanie what had almost transpired, Lena would imagine the silence on the other end of the phone.
Gary Neary and you? It defied belief.
And what was there to even divulge?
It had been nothing: a few weeks flirtation, and then one night of distraction, which had caused Lena to take her eyes off the ball completely.
It had been everything.
There was a parallel universe where Lena and Gary had a condo on a West Coast beach, and went for long sunset walks and hosted slightly awkward blended-family dinners. Sometimes, in the moments before sleep, Lena allowed herself to visit.
In the real world, Gary Neary was gone. And even if some magician were to bend the rules of time and space and deliver him to her, Lena was certain that Gary would take one look at Lena and run as fast as he could in the opposite direction.