Lu, in the kitchen, could hear the soft murmurings of Maggie playing a game of Sorry! with the boys upstairs. Maggie had come straight from the ferry—she’d been visiting her father. Lu had only asked her to come at the last minute, last night, after the fight with Jeremy, who had left again this morning.
She was working on a skillet cornbread, trying to figure out how to incorporate jalapeño peppers without making the bread too spicy to appeal to young palates. Honey would help. And definitely cheese. She chewed on her lip and wondered if she could simply swap out the ingredients from one of Dinner by Dad’s sweet cornbread recipes—maple cranberry, maybe. She had boiled the corn earlier that morning and now was slicing it from the cob. Very satisfying. She loved a task whose margins were clear: now the cob is clean, so now you are done.
“Sorry!” rang out from upstairs. It sounded like Chase. He was gloating, so he’d probably knocked one of Sebastian’s pieces off. She listened carefully to find out what would happen after that. Sebastian wasn’t good at losing. That was why Lu didn’t play board games! It wasn’t worth the headache, even though she knew that lessons about winning and losing were crucial for children to learn at a young age, etc. She found it much easier to take the boys outside and let them run off all of their joys and frustrations until they were just well-behaved, tired boys, just shells. Lovable shells, of course. But shells. It was the same principle she’d seen applied to dog-rearing. Although they didn’t have a dog themselves, their neighbors in Connecticut owned a fearsomely energetic border collie named Gus, and much of the neighbors’ time seemed to be spent getting Gus tired enough so that he behaved like a regular dog. (Why not, then, get a regular dog? That’s what she always wanted to ask the neighbors.)
“Sorry!” came again. This time it was Maggie, and the word sounded more gentle coming from her, as though she really did feel sorry. What a funny word: sorry. You could toss it around so casually when you accidentally cut somebody off in the grocery store or wanted the waitress to repeat the specials. Or you could scream it at someone, like she had last night at Jeremy, lying through both syllables.
“What do you want?” she’d screamed finally, once they’d allowed the fight to escalate to the level they both secretly wanted it to be.
“I want you to stop sneaking around behind my back! I want you to say you’re sorry! I want you to fire her.”
Oh, it had been awful, the rage she’d felt. She’d felt like she could hurt someone.
“Lu!” he said, when she didn’t answer. (His voice was so sharp!) “Did you hear me? I want you to fire her.”
Lu understood that on the surface the fight was about Maggie, but on a deeper, more insidious level it was about the baby. A third baby would require resources; Jeremy didn’t want those resources going somewhere else. Jeremy didn’t want Lu physically or emotionally separated from the boys because he wanted her in the maternal mind-set.
“Did you hear me, Lu?” His voice had turned gentler, but her ire was reaching toward the ceiling.
“I heard you,” she yelled. “Fine! Okay! I’m sorry!”
That was all he’d needed, it turned out, the word, not the actual meaning behind the word. How easy it was sometimes to fake it.
When Jeremy was sleeping she’d slipped out of bed to text Maggie. Can you come tomorrow too? Something came up.
Sebastian came down in tears, complaining that Chase had knocked back his blue piece with the red piece and he’d had to go all the way back to the blue circle at the start.
“But that’s how the game is played,” said Lu, though three-quarters of her mind was on the cornbread. (Was buttermilk absolutely necessary?) “If you landed on a space that Chase was on, you’d be able to do the exact same thing to him.”
Lu and her sister had played endless board games when they were little, because they were so often alone while their mother was at work. Clue. Risk. Yahtzee. Trouble. Pre-Internet, of course.
“Well, I didn’t like it,” said Sebastian. “Chase was being mean.”
Lu sighed, turning her attention from her cornbread to her son. Maybe Sorry! was too complex for a four-year-old. Sebastian was too little to understand how much of it was just due to chance. Also it took a long time to get through a complete game, if she recalled correctly, probably far too long for his teeny-tiny attention span. He did look despondent. “Maggie!” she called up the stairs. “I think maybe a different game, if that’s okay!” Then she thought for a fraction of a second and added, “Sorry!” She didn’t know if Maggie would get the joke but she had given herself a little chuckle.
“I want to stay with you,” Sebastian said.
Lu hesitated and looked around the kitchen. “Sure, yeah, okay,” she said finally. “You can help me measure.”
“No problem,” called Maggie. Lu could hear her making a game with Chase out of picking up the pieces and the cards and putting them back in the box, which was not something Lu would have thought to do. She would have left the pieces scattered upstairs and tripped over them later, crushing the cardboard box in the process.
“Sebastian, come play with us!” Maggie called. “You’ll love this game, I made it up!”
This seemed to pique Sebastian’s interest: he dropped the empty measuring cup he’d been holding and was gone without so much as a backward glance.
Was everyone better at mothering her own boys than Lu was?
Lu was in between years in law school when she met Jeremy, on Main Street in Hyannis, near the Puritan Clothing Shop. She’d been thrown from her bike because a man in a parked car had opened his door just as she flew past. She wasn’t hurt badly, but the shock of it had been something terrible, and she’d lain immobile on the street for a moment, trying to work out if she was going to cry or not.
The man from the car was kneeling beside her, but Jeremy, who’d been parking his car when the accident happened, pushed him aside, almost roughly. “I’m a doctor,” he’d said. (That was a lie, it turned out; he was a second-year medical student.)
“Don’t you worry,” Jeremy had said, once the driver had left them. “I’m in medical school. I can fix anything.”
“Well, I’m in law school,” she’d answered. “So don’t mess up. I can sue anyone.”
He had laughed at that. And while he was laughing he looked at her knee where the skin had shredded off, and then he swabbed at it with a square of sterile cotton that he seemed to have pulled out of thin air, and by the time he was finished she was perfectly bandaged and there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere. He’d wheeled her bike carefully from the street to the sidewalk and then he said, “You’re lucky you didn’t bang your noggin. You should have been wearing a helmet.”
“I know,” she said, touching her miraculously unharmed head, charmed by his use of the word noggin. “I know I should have been.”
What if Lu hadn’t fallen off of her bike that day—what if she hadn’t even gotten on her bike, or had a bike to begin with? Lu rewound the tape in her mind all the way back to when she was a girl of five, the training wheels just off her pink Barbie-themed bike. One thing happened, then another—a seemingly random series of events—and then there was your future, sealed to this other person’s for such a long time, maybe even forever.
Poor thing, she chided herself, your marriage isn’t what you expected it to be. She remembered a middle school joke where you would rub your thumb and forefinger together. What’s this? you’d say. It’s the world’s smallest violin, and it’s playing just for you! If her mother, her sister, any of the destitute people living in inner cities and third world countries could hear her, that’s what they’d do. They’d play the tiny violin. And she deserved it. Marital dissatisfaction is a problem of wealth and privilege, she reminded herself. You are lucky to have this problem, because you are lucky to have the leisure to worry about such things as you sit in the summer home that you did not arrange or pay for.
Even so! She thought about a cookbook with her name on it. She thought about the Pioneer Woman and her empire (a boutique hotel! a housewares line!) that had all started with a blog. And she couldn’t help it: She wanted. She wanted.
“What are you baking?” asked Maggie now. “It smells delicious!” Lu hadn’t actually begun baking anything yet, so that made her smile; either Maggie was having a Pavlovian response to the sight of the ingredients all laid out, or she was just really, really a nice kid. Her shirt said If History Repeats Itself, I’m Getting a Dinosaur.
“Cornbread.”
“I love cornbread!”
Lu thought about Jeremy saying, “She’s a stranger to me.” She thought about the cookbook proposal she was working on, and she thought about the money in her secret account.
“I’ll take you as many days next week as you’re free, by the way,” she said to Maggie.