The Husband Hour Read online

  Thwap-thwap—the beat of her sneakers against the wooden boards. The steady pounding of her heart. A familiar rush of energy, almost a giddiness, carried her down the wooden steps to the cul-de-sac in front of her house.

  She jogged slowly in a circle, sweat cooling against her neck, then, dizzy, she bent over, hands on her knees, her head down. She looked up at the sound of tires on gravel, a car turning onto her block. Her stomach sank.

  What were her parents doing here?

  Her parents were devoted summer weekenders. Starting Memorial Day weekend and going through Labor Day, they showed up Thursday afternoon and left Sunday night. It was a shock to her system after months of solitude, but she adjusted to it by the middle of the summer and sometimes felt almost sad to see them drift back into their Philadelphia routine. She never visited them in Philadelphia at the old stone house where she’d grown up. She never left the island. This was a real issue only once a year, when her sister had a birthday party for her son, Ethan. Lauren felt guilty for being an absentee aunt.

  “Honey! I thought you agreed to cut down on the running. You’re getting way too thin,” her mother said, slamming the car door and rushing over to her.

  “I’ll get the bags,” her father said.

  “I’m fine, Mom. What are you guys doing here?”

  Her mother looked at her strangely. “It’s Memorial Day weekend, hon.”

  Was it? Lauren could have sworn that was next weekend.

  She glanced at her sports watch. She had to shower and get to work. The Thursday before Memorial Day, the breakfast crowd would be lining up at the restaurant door.

  “We’re getting an early start,” her mother said, looking tense.

  “Any particular reason why?”

  “Oh, just lots to do. I want to get the house ready, clean out the guest bedrooms…”

  Lauren looked at her sharply. “The guest bedrooms? Why?”

  “Your sister is coming.”

  Matt Brio climbed the three flights of stairs to the editing suite in Williamsburg, carrying doughnuts. He was unhappy to find himself out of breath by the second floor. That’s what you get for editing a film 24/7, he told himself. And he didn’t see that changing any time in the near future.

  On a Thursday at noon, his suite mates were all plugged into their headsets and staring at their computer screens. Matt made a cup of coffee at the community Keurig machine and booted up his machine. Fuck coffee—he needed a drink.

  He set the box of doughnuts next to his computer. He figured if he was asking someone for a six-figure check, the least he could do was provide refreshments.

  “I’m going to be in Brooklyn anyway, so it’s a good time to stop by,” Craig Mason had said, just like that. As if Matt hadn’t been asking him to look at his reel for six months.

  The Rory Kincaid project had been a rough road. Matt sometimes wondered if he had bad karma due to how he’d handled things at the beginning. When it became his passion project, he dropped out of a film he had committed to directing. As a result, he ruined his relationship with Andrew Dobson, the producer who had backed his first two films. Matt’s reputation took a hit, and he suspected that was why he had failed to get a solid financial investment for the Rory Kincaid story; it had nothing to do with the merit of the project. So Matt put his own money into making the movie. Four years later, the money was gone, and he needed a financial lifeline.

  But it wasn’t enough just to finance a movie and get it made; you had to be able to market it. Next winter would be the five-year anniversary of Rory Kincaid’s death. It felt crucial to secure distribution by that milestone.

  He put on his headphones and clicked open a video of seventeen-year-old Rory Kincaid scoring a hat-trick goal for his high-school team. As the puck slid into the net, Rory reacted with his signature gesture, lifting both hands into the air, then pulling his left arm sharply in, bent at the elbow, his fist tight: score. Next, footage of commentators on CNN: “We have breaking news that former NHL star Rory Kincaid, who walked away from a reported seven-figure contract with the LA Kings to enlist in the military, has been killed in the line of duty.” Matt clicked through to footage of the memorial service. He moved forward through the frames, pausing on the widow standing against a backdrop of American flags next to a blown-up portrait of Rory in his U.S. Rangers uniform. The guy was so ruggedly handsome, he was like the person central casting sent over when you asked for “hero.”

  Officers in full military dress flanked the flag-draped coffin in a procession out of the Staples Center. Behind them, the grieving widow walked as if she were wading through water.

  A tap on his shoulder. Startled, he turned around. Craig Mason.

  Craig Mason was a former Wall Street banker now in his mid-fifties and on his second career. “Second life” was how he had put it to Matt when they’d first met for drinks six months earlier.

  “Hey, man,” Matt said, quickly closing the file and standing up. “Let me just find another chair.”

  “Didn’t realize it was such tight real estate in here. Maybe we should have met at my office.”

  “Not a problem,” Matt said, sliding a chair in front of his work space. Craig was busy looking at the two dozen index cards arranged on the corkboard above Matt’s desk that mapped out all the beats of the film American Hero: The Rory Kincaid Story.

  Craig slid into the seat next to him.

  “Doughnut?” Matt offered casually. As if he weren’t at the absolute end of the line.

  Craig shook his head. “My new girlfriend is a Pilates instructor. The pressure is on. So, how much are we looking at?”

  “Just the selects,” Matt said. “Some of the interviews, to give you a sense of where I’m at since we last spoke.”

  “Sounds good,” Craig said.

  Their first meeting, Craig had told Matt that he was at a stage of life where he wanted to do something “meaningful” with his hard-earned and considerable fortune. But Matt soon realized that even people with money to burn don’t want to burn it.

  Still, there was glamour in feature films, and the promise of social progress with documentaries. For people like Craig Mason, that sometimes made films worth the gamble. He’d invested in two features and bought himself a ride to the award-season parties and red carpets. He’d put money into one documentary about clean water because that was his pet cause. But on that project, Craig had learned that documentaries don’t make money.

  One of Matt’s buddies on the clean-water doc introduced Craig to Matt. But Craig was in no rush to fund a second documentary. During their initial meeting about American Hero, both of them drinking martinis at a gastro pub on the Upper East Side, Craig told Matt, “I’m just not feeling it on this one. I don’t see the urgency.”

  American Hero was originally an examination of why some people answer the call to serve their country, and others don’t—viewed through the lens of the life of Rory Kincaid. But the film had morphed, changed, like a breathing entity. All Matt’s films felt alive to him, growing under his care and guidance. But none as much as this one.

  He handed Craig headphones and they both plugged in so they wouldn’t disturb the other filmmakers in the room. Matt clicked on a file. He pressed Play, and an image of the entrance to Rory’s Pennsylvania high school, Lower Merion, filled the screen against the sound of the roar of a crowd. The camera closed in on the school’s motto carved in stone: ENTER TO LEARN, GO FORTH TO SERVE. Then a still photo of Rory, all blazing dark eyes, looking right at the camera. Then footage of the high-school coach. “How many thousands upon thousands of kids have walked through the doors of this school over the years, and how many have actually taken that motto to heart?” And then, video of Rory as a young teenager on the ice, racing toward the net. Voice-over, a woman: “Generations of Kincaids have served. World War Two. Korea. Vietnam. My older son, Emerson, served in the First Gulf War.” This from a sit-down with Rory’s mother that he’d luckily gotten before she passed away. Then the film cut
to her. “Rory had a gift. He could skate fast and get the puck in the net. It’s as simple as that.” She pulled out a photo album and flipped through pictures of Rory as a boy, several of him on the ice, a few of him running around with a Rottweiler. “He named him Polaris,” she said. “What kind of name is that for a dog from a six-year-old boy? But he loved the stars.”

  Footage of Rory playing for the Kings. And then a press conference, Rory in a blue button-down shirt, his hair wet. “No game is perfect, no player is perfect,” Rory said. “We look at our athletes as heroes.” And then that wry smile, the one that always suggested that what he was saying was just the tip of the iceberg. “I have different heroes.”

  Next, military footage. Soldiers in the Middle East. A clip of news anchors announcing that hockey star Rory Kincaid was walking away to enlist in the military. “A remarkable move from a remarkable young man,” one of them said. And then the secretary of defense, flanked by American flags, speaking at a press conference: “Corporal Kincaid sacrificed himself in the name of liberty and justice around the world.”

  Game footage: Rory’s rookie season, the Kings against the Chicago Blackhawks. Rory takes a rough hit against the boards and goes down on the ice. Five games later, a stick against the jaw takes him down. October 2010, a fight with a Blackhawks defenseman. February 2011, a fight with Philadelphia Flyers’ Chris Pronger, and he’s out for weeks. Cut to his sports agent sitting behind a desk in his fancy Los Angeles office saying, “Rory’s career in the NHL was over.”

  Craig leaned forward. “Where are you going with this?”

  Matt paused the footage. “You want urgency? Fine. How about this: Rory Kincaid wasn’t a perfect example of selfless heroism. He didn’t walk away from the NHL—he limped away. Rory Kincaid was damaged goods. And it could have been prevented.”

  Chapter Four

  Lauren smiled at customers waiting to get into Nora’s Café as she breezed past them to start her shift. She was early for work and still the line stretched to the end of the block.

  Summer had unofficially arrived and, with it, the shoobies—people who came to the shore only during the summer. They got their name from their unfortunate habit of wearing shoes to walk to the beach when any local worth his or her salt could go barefoot for blocks.

  She’d barely have time to run upstairs and change into her uniform, a navy skirt and a pale yellow polo shirt. The building had a second floor with an office, a storage area, and a changing room for the staff. Most of them barely used it, but because Lauren liked to run to and from work, it felt like her personal locker room. She kept her running clothes, sneakers, and a stash of Gatorade in one of the closets.

  “Morning, Nora,” she called to her boss, a sixty-something redhead manning the door and putting names on the wait list. Lauren didn’t bother offering to take over the task; Nora liked greeting her customers, especially the first few weekends of the summer.

  Lauren signed in on the same clipboard Nora had kept by the kitchen since she’d opened her doors in 2005. Everything was done manually. Lauren took the customers’ orders on an old-fashioned ticket pad, each stub three deep: one for the kitchen, one for Lauren, one for clocking out at the end of the day. It wasn’t that Nora couldn’t afford to upgrade to a computer system, and she was certainly savvy enough to find one that would suit the restaurant. She simply went through life with the attitude of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  But four and a half years ago, Nora had recognized that Lauren was broken. That first winter, Lauren would sit for hours in the café, morning after morning, nursing a coffee. Sometimes she had constructive thoughts, ideas about starting a foundation in Rory’s memory. But most days, she just stared out the window.

  Nora didn’t pretend not to know who she was, but she also didn’t watch her from a safe distance and whisper to the other employees. Both scenarios had happened endlessly in Lauren’s final weeks in Los Angeles.

  Nora had simply brought Lauren a plate of eggs and bacon and said, “On the house.”

  Lauren had looked at her suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Because you’ve had a rough few months, and I know what that’s like.” Then she pointed to a painted sign above the table that read AIN’T NO PROBLEM BACON CAN’T CURE.

  Lauren couldn’t help but smile. Was the word cure a pun on cured meat, or was she giving the sign too much credit? Either way, she thanked the woman. And it took a few weeks before Nora would accept any money from her for food. It took about a month for Nora to offer her a job.

  Lauren glanced at the chalkboard to get a sense of the day’s specials and realized it hadn’t been updated. She called out to Nora for a rundown.

  “Goldenberry pancakes, a hot quinoa bowl, a kale–goat cheese omelet,” she said. “I only got half the goat cheese I ordered so be prepared to eighty-six it because of this rush.”

  Nora prided herself on an organic menu constructed around as many “super-foods” as possible.

  Lauren jotted the specials on her ticket pad, grabbed a piece of chalk and updated the board, and then started taking table orders. She loved the chaotic rhythm of the restaurant. For hours at a stretch, she didn’t have time to think. She barely had time to breathe. When she was really in a groove, it was almost like running.

  Lauren was in the zone during the crush of lunch when Nora summoned her to the front counter.

  “You have a visitor,” she said in the same moment that Lauren saw the hard-to-miss blonde in cutoffs and mirrored aviator sunglasses.

  Lauren fortified herself with a deep breath and marched over to the sister she hadn’t seen since Labor Day weekend, which had been Stephanie’s last visit to the shore.

  “Hey,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Didn’t Mom tell you I was coming?”

  “Yes, but I mean here. At the café.” She glanced around. “I’m working.”

  “Yeah, I know, Lauren. You’re always working or running or some shit and I need to talk to you away from Mom.”

  Lauren sighed. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Mom has a bug up her butt about something. Did she say anything to you?”

  Concerned, Lauren thought back over the most recent phone conversations she’d had with their mother but didn’t see any red flags. “No. I can’t think of anything. Let’s just…see how things go this weekend. Where’s Ethan?”

  “At the house with Mom.”

  “And Brett?”

  Lauren barely knew Stephanie’s husband of a year and a half; he and Stephanie had eloped after dating for two months.

  “He’s not coming.”

  “Okay, well. I’ll see you later.” She turned around and eyed her tables.

  “One more thing: I need to stay here for a few weeks. Maybe a month.”

  Lauren turned back to her. “At the shore?”

  “Yeah. At the house.”

  No. This could not be happening. Summer weekends, she could tolerate. But weeks at a stretch?

  “Stephanie, I know it’s beach season and the house is technically a beach house but it’s my home. If I lived in Philly, you wouldn’t just show up and say, ‘I’m moving in for the summer.’”

  “At this point, I would. I’m getting divorced, and I have nowhere else to stay.”

  Divorced. Lauren couldn’t even begin to act surprised.

  “What about Mom and Dad’s?”

  Stephanie shook her head. “That’s a no-go.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure. It was actually Mom’s idea that I stay here this summer.”

  What? “I can’t deal with this right now, okay? Just—go. I’ll see you back at the house.”

  Lauren made a beeline for the kitchen. She wanted to be consumed by the heat, the clanking of dishes, the controlled chaos. She wished the lunch hour would stretch on forever.

  Summer hadn’t even started, and it couldn’t get any worse.

  Matt knew he had Craig’s attent
ion. He fast-forwarded the reel to his latest interview and paused it.

  “Last week I spoke to a former assistant coach with the Flyers who’s at Villanova now.”

  Matt hit Play, and the Hatfield Ice Arena, home ice to the Villanova men’s ice hockey team, filled the screen. The coach, John Tramm, sat on a bench, the empty rink in the background.

  “I can’t talk specifically to Kincaid’s situation because I didn’t know the guy,” Tramm said.

  “Of course. I’m just trying to establish the overall climate in the NHL,” Matt said.

  “The time period you’re looking at—Kincaid’s two seasons—were right before things began to change.”

  “What changed?”

  “Starting in, maybe it was spring 2011, if a guy took a hit to the head, he’d be removed from the game and evaluated by a doctor.”

  Matt leaned forward. “Are you saying that prior to 2011, that’s not how players were treated?”

  “There was no hard-and-fast protocol for players who took a hit to the head. So they’d sit on the bench and the team trainer would evaluate them. And there is the expectation for the player to just shake it off. Hockey culture demands resilience. Guys feel pressure to prove their toughness, and, frankly, they know they can be replaced. Especially the rookies.”

  “I understand there’s a class-action lawsuit by about a hundred retired players,” Matt said.

  Tramm nodded. “Yes. The lawsuit is in light of the new research about CTE.”

  Matt knew all about CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disorder. Matt still couldn’t believe that he’d found a head-injury angle on the Rory Kincaid story. At first, he’d doubted himself. He thought he was projecting. He’d been obsessed with head-injury consequences for over a decade, ever since his older brother came back from Afghanistan. Everyone knew it was a problem for wounded warriors. And people knew it was a problem for pro athletes. But in Rory Kincaid, he might have found an intersection, a perfect storm that had taken down America’s golden boy.