The Husband Hour Read online

  “Sure,” Lauren said, closing the box. “Mom, just do me a favor? Don’t touch any of this stuff. I’ll take care of it.”

  “I don’t know why you always refuse my help,” Beth said, eyeing the ribbon of torn tape. “Going through all of that is probably not the best thing for you. I don’t want you getting mired in the past. Sweetheart, you need to move forward.” She teared up.

  Lauren shook her head, knowing her mother meant well but also knowing her mother could never understand. “I’ve moved forward as far as I want to, Mom.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Two Cents Plain, an ice cream parlor on Ventnor Avenue, was forty years old and hadn’t changed since Lauren and Stephanie used to go when they were around Ethan’s age. The black and white tiles on the floors and illustrated walls gave her a rush of happiness, and the simple joy Ethan got from his waffle cone with mint chocolate chip ice cream reminded her so much of how she used to feel at the shore all those summers ago.

  On the walk back, she held his sticky hand but he ran ahead when the Green Gable came into view. Stephanie was on the back deck sunning herself, and he raced toward his mother, calling out to her. Stephanie sat up in the chaise with a wave. Lauren fought the impulse to slink off to her room. Instead, she followed Ethan up through the gate to the pool.

  “Hey, big guy. I didn’t know where you went until Gran filled me in.” Stephanie eyed Lauren accusingly.

  “Sorry,” Lauren said. “We just got ice cream. Two Cents Plain. The place looks exactly the same.”

  Stephanie’s expression softened. “Did you have a good walk?” she asked Ethan.

  “Yeah. But I want to ride my bike next time.”

  “We can do that. Aunt Lauren and I used to bike to the place where we had cheesesteaks yesterday. Right, Laur?”

  Laur. She was startled by the casual shorthand, the way her sister used to speak to her.

  “Yeah,” Lauren said, searching for a way to continue the positive thread and coming up empty.

  “That’s far!” said Ethan.

  “We were a little older.” Steph pushed up her sunglasses and squinted at his face. “You’re getting red. Go to my bathroom and put on more sunblock.”

  Ethan scooted off, leaving Lauren and Stephanie in awkward silence.

  “He’s a great kid,” Lauren said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Look,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry I freaked on you the other night. I was just really upset about the idea of a film being made.”

  “Apology accepted. I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to upset you. Besides, we really should be coming together to deal with Mom and Dad. Not fighting each other.”

  For once, Stephanie was making a lot of sense.

  “You mean, the whole selling-the-house thing?”

  “Yes! Are they out of their minds?”

  “Um, clearly they are out of money.”

  “God, why does everything have to go to shit? Why can’t it be the way it was when we were kids? So simple. You know, I was at the Wawa this morning and these teenage girls were there. One was wearing an LM sweatshirt, and I realized it was prom weekend. I felt so old.”

  “You’re not old,” Lauren said.

  “Remember when I had the after-prom party here and the house got trashed?”

  Lauren smiled. Of course she remembered, though it was just one of many memories that had been hidden away in her mental vault for so long. Stephanie remembered it as the weekend she almost got banned from the Green Gable. Lauren remembered it for another reason.

  It was a long-standing Lower Merion High School tradition that everyone went to the shore following the senior prom. Once an informal, haphazard migration headed by whoever was willing to stay sober enough to drive on prom night—or who had parents willing to chauffeur—it became a school-sanctioned trip complete with buses leaving straight from the prom and making drop-offs at various Longport and Margate houses.

  Typically, this epic party night was the exclusive domain of seniors and their dates. But every year, juniors with enough social clout and access to beach houses were included in the after-prom weekend. In the spring of Lauren’s sophomore year, Stephanie was one of those chosen few.

  “And Mom’s okay with this?” Lauren had asked, perched on the edge of Stephanie’s bed, watching her paint her toenails deep burgundy.

  “Yeah. Totally.”

  “I just can’t believe Gran and Pops trust you with the house for a weekend.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on, Stephanie. You won’t even know half the kids that show up. It’s going to be like American Pie.”

  “It’s not going to be like American Pie,” Stephanie said. “It’s going to be way more epic. And you have to come.”

  Saturday night of the prom, just after midnight, the Green Gable filled up with drunken revelers. Lauren was pretty sure there were kids in the living room who didn’t even go to their school. Two girls in the pool were topless. There was a keg in the dining room and in the living room, and the kitchen counter was littered with bottles of Stoli, Ketel One, orange juice, and tequila. The soccer team did Jäger shots. Stephanie disappeared with her boyfriend du jour.

  Something broke in the living room. Lauren heard it over the music only because it happened right behind her. Someone yelled, “Party foul!”

  One of her grandmother’s glass zebras from the mantel.

  “Oh my God, be careful!” Lauren said, shooing people away, bending down to see if the piece could be salvaged. It was shattered.

  She realized she should lock her grandparents’ bedroom. There were more breakable things in there, and who knew how many people were milling around on the second floor. Why hadn’t she thought of this sooner? She rushed up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The problem was that the only way to lock the door was from the inside, so she locked herself in and then walked outside to the deck so she could take the stairs back down.

  Someone was on the deck. How could anyone be rude enough to go through the bedroom? Then she realized it was more likely the person had simply walked up the external stairs from the pool. That hardly made it better.

  “Hey—this is off-limits,” she said in the darkness to someone’s back. The guy ignored her, looking up at the sky. “Do you hear me?”

  Fine, so she was going to be that girl. Whatever. No one would remember in the morning except her.

  He turned around. “Oh. Sorry.”

  She gasped. Rory.

  “I didn’t know it was you,” she said.

  “Lauren?” He moved closer.

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? It’s my grandparents’ house.”

  The sky was clear, bright with stars and a three-quarter moon. He was beautiful in the shadows but, unlike most people, no more so than he was in broad daylight. She felt the night start to shift.

  “I mean here now—on prom weekend,” he said.

  “Oh. That’s a good question. I don’t know, actually. Did you go? To prom, I mean?”

  He nodded. “I went with my friend Heidi.”

  “Heidi McClusky?” She was captain of the girls’ lacrosse team. She’d be playing for Duke next year.

  “Yeah. She was going to skip it but I convinced her she should go, that we could have a good time.”

  “Did you?”

  “You know, it wasn’t bad. But we should have quit while we were ahead. Your house is getting trashed, you know.”

  “Oh God. Yeah, I do know. I came up here to lock the bedroom door.”

  “And barricade yourself in?”

  She laughed. “It’s tempting.”

  He looked up again. “It’s pretty nice up here, though. You can see every constellation. Want to take a walk on the beach?”

  She looked out at the ocean. “Now? We can’t. The beach is closed until six a.m.”

  He leaned over the ledge, following her gaze. “Some
rules are worth breaking. What do you say?”

  Across the street from her house, stairs led to the beach. But Rory didn’t bother with the stairs; he jumped over the low wooden balustrade dividing the end of the drive and the beach. He held out his hand and helped her down. It was only three feet high on the street side, but the sand had receded, so she misjudged her landing on the sand and he had to steady her.

  The physical contact was more shocking than her near fall. But he released his hold as soon as her footing was solid. She’d barely had time to process the fact that he’d put his arm around her waist, never mind enjoy it.

  It was darker than she’d anticipated. She felt like she was on completely foreign terrain, not the beach she’d walked on her entire life. Maybe it was because she knew they weren’t allowed to be out there. It felt risky, dangerous.

  They took off their shoes, and she followed Rory close to the water. The sand was wet and cold. In the dark, the roar of the waves sounded so much louder than it did during the day. She sensed the power of the ocean and, under the bright stars, felt her own insignificance.

  “Look that way—east.” Rory pointed out three particularly bright stars. “That’s Vega, Deneb, and Altair. The Summer Triangle. Do you see?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “So, you’re really into constellations.”

  “It’s not a constellation. It’s a star pattern called an asterism. But, yeah, I’m into astronomy. Do you ever go to the Franklin Institute?” he asked.

  The Franklin Institute was a science museum in Center City, Philadelphia. The last time she had been there was for an elementary-school field trip, and she told him that. “You should check out the planetarium. It’s fun when you’re a kid but I think now you can really appreciate how incredible it is.”

  “Oh, I remember that! Maybe I will.”

  “Maybe I’ll go with you,” he said. She was still looking at the stars but felt his eyes on her. Heart pounding, she turned to him.

  “I don’t know if I should hang out with you,” she said.

  “Really? Why not?” He was clearly surprised. It probably was a rare event for a girl to turn him down.

  “Don’t you remember the first time you saw me? It was upstairs at my house. You were just leaving my sister’s room.”

  “That wasn’t the first time I saw you,” he said. “I’d noticed you. And I’ve thought about you.”

  “Why?” she asked, barely breathing.

  “Not sure,” he said. “But I want to figure it out.”

  She knew she shouldn’t say the thing that was on her mind, the one thing that would ruin the moment, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  “You hooked up with my sister.”

  “Lauren,” he said, looking up at the sky and then back at her. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. But if you rule out any guy who’s ever hooked up with Stephanie, you’re going to have a very limited playing field. You might have to transfer to Wissahickon School District.”

  Her first instinct was to defend Stephanie, to say that was insulting and outrageous. But the truth of the matter was, she knew he was right. It was one of the things about Stephanie that was really starting to bother her. That, and the fact that her mother was somehow oblivious to all the nights when Stephanie sneaked out.

  Before she could figure out what to say, he took her hand. Startled, she looked up at him and he bent down and kissed her. After the initial shock, she leaned into him, worried if she was doing it right. He pulled her closer, and the smell of him, the feel of his mouth opening to hers, his arms around her, silenced the endless barrage of questions and doubt that played like a constant loop in her mind. There was only that moment, and it was a moment that divided her life into before and after.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Some people only see what they want to see.”

  Matt paused the video, then replayed Stephanie’s words from the audio file alone. He closed his eyes in the dark room. What was he missing?

  Frustrated, he stood up and paced away from the desk. He knew this was part of the process; every film was a puzzle that had to be painstakingly assembled.

  He opened the closet and felt around in the dark for the backpack on the floor. He pulled out a stack of blank index cards and a Sharpie. His stomach rumbled; he couldn’t remember if he’d had lunch and it would be a long time before he gave any thought to dinner. He turned on his bedside lamp and spread the index cards out on the floor. He scrolled through a few photos on his phone until he found the shot of his storyboard from the office. He’d taken it before he left New York just for reference, thinking it would be enough to get him through a week in Longport. Now, feeling the film slipping away from him, he wrote on an index card, Opening Image: Rory soaring toward the net, Kings vs. Flyers. On the second card, Entrance to LM, motto, coach VO.

  When he finished writing his notes on the fifty or so index cards, the board was re-created on the floor next to the bed. He’d make a quick trip to the convenience store, the one called Wawa, for Scotch tape to get them all up on the wall. And while he was out, he might as well stop into Robert’s for a liquid dinner.

  And if he ran into Stephanie Adelman? Well, that would just be a bonus.

  Lauren waited until her parents had gone into their bedroom for the night before climbing the stairs to the attic.

  She had tried telling herself to just go to sleep, not to give in to the pull of the memories. But there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. She had been so disciplined the past four years, never thinking about the boxes, never even tempted to look inside. Her mother accused her of not moving forward with her life, but truly, she had. Never looking back was her progress. At first, she felt like an alcoholic struggling not to take a drink; every day the effort not to wallow in her grief and her memories was as fresh and agonizing as if it were the first. But gradually, her tunnel vision, her focus on only the day in front of her, became easier, and eventually it was second nature.

  But the time for tunnel vision was over. With Matt poking around in the past, it was impossible not to think about the truth. About the story buried in these boxes.

  Lauren wrestled with the packing tape and heard something solid sliding along the bottom of the box, something small but weighty. Emboldened by the silence of the house, and by having come this far dipping a toe into the past, she reached inside and pulled out the first thing she touched. It was a paper napkin; Lauren handled it as carefully as if she were capturing a butterfly. Holding her breath, she smoothed it out on the floor. And Rory’s words, in stark black ink, a note intended for his older brother, Emerson, greeted her like a kiss: She’s my girlfriend. She stays.

  How could a simple note last longer than their marriage? Longer than Rory himself?

  In the beginning, after the night on the beach, things had grown slowly between them. She’d never planned for their relationship to be a big secret. But with everyone away for the summer—or, at the very least, not congregating every day at school—it was easy to fly under the radar.

  Lauren and Rory had a routine. They went to a movie or ate lunch at Boston Style Pizza. They talked about everything—her family, his family. Rory had been a surprise, born when Kay Kincaid turned forty. His father, a Vietnam veteran and a police officer, died of a heart attack when Rory was four. His older brother, Emerson, fifteen years his senior, was an instructor at West Point. Rory said, more than once, that Emerson was the closest thing to a father that he had, aside from his coaches. It was Emerson who had drilled into his mind the imperative to excel. Rory told her, “I don’t think I’d be happy if I wasn’t good at something. Great at something.”

  The week Emerson visited that summer, she didn’t get to see Rory at all. It hurt her feelings that he didn’t want to introduce her, but Rory told her it was for her own good. “He can be tough,” Rory said. “He wouldn’t approve of me being serious about a girl. I should be focusing on school and hockey right now.”

  All she’d hear
d was serious about a girl…

  And besides, she wasn’t exactly rushing to make things public in her own household. It shouldn’t matter about Stephanie—it couldn’t. That was so long ago. And it had been nothing, really. Still, she kept quiet. She snuck around. And with her parents working at the store long hours every day and Stephanie at their grandparents’ beach house for the summer, it was easy to be invisible.

  But then school started.

  The first hockey game of the new school year fell on a Thursday in late October. It was home ice, and Lauren, with her newly earned driver’s license, drove herself and a few friends to the game. Rory’s mother and Emerson in the stands, and being invisible to them felt terrible.

  The Skatium was unusually crowded that night. The hockey team had gotten so close to states the previous year that there was a surge in community interest in them. And it didn’t hurt that a month or so ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer had published an article about the best local high-school athletes. They ran a photo of Rory from the final game of last year. He was crouched in position for a face-off, his expression intensely focused. It was a gorgeous picture, even in the grainy black-and-white of newsprint. She bought three copies of the paper and put them on a shelf in the back of her closet.

  Lauren had watched him practice a few times over the summer, but this was the first game she’d been to since they’d become a couple. When he skated out onto the ice in the first moments of play, she felt a swell of pride that made her chest almost physically ache. It was strange to be surrounded by all those people watching him, hundreds of eyes on the boy she’d come to know so well.

  The crowd jumped to its feet. One minute and fifty seconds of play, and Rory had scored his first goal of the season. He made his signature gesture—lifted both hands into the air, then pulled his left arm in sharply at the elbow, his hand a fist. Score!

  She settled back in her seat and someone yanked on her ponytail. Hard.