He doesn’t take it, but he wobbles a little, and Aimee realizes he’s drunk. It’s not the first time she’s seen him this way. Last winter break, when the three families went to Vermont together, Anton drank so many IPAs that he passed out in the snow outside the Alchemist Brewery in Stowe.
“Listen—about before, you know with Lisa…” His voice trails off. He witnessed the worst of Lisa’s nasty comments about Aimee’s parenting.
Aimee waves her hand. She doesn’t want Anton getting involved. She can handle Lisa. “I’m fine. No hurt feelings here.”
“Yeah, that’s not it,” he says, irritated, vibrating with nervous energy. He glances behind him as if to make sure no one is listening and turns back.
“Anton?” Gwen calls from the foyer.
“I think Gwen’s looking for you.” Aimee puts her hand on his arm, gently nudging him in the direction of the front door.
Gwen appears. “There you are! Didn’t you hear me calling? We have to go. The boys are really tired.” The tension in her voice is evident. Gwen doesn’t like to let the ugly parts show. It’s all about control with her. Tidy house. Twins in matching clothes. Job at a prestigious PR firm with high-powered clients. The only thing that refuses to bend to her will is Anton.
He’s a hot mess.
And tonight, he is messier than usual.
Gwen maneuvers around her husband and gives Aimee a hug.
“Thanks for bringing the potato salad,” Aimee says. “Here’s the book I told you about. It just ended up making me feel guilty, but maybe you’ll get more out of it.”
Gwen takes the book and turns to go, but Anton doesn’t follow her. Not right away. He leans into Aimee, as if for a goodbye hug, but instead he hovers, his mouth inches from her ear.
Aimee can feel his hot breath on her neck, smell the bourbon. The intimacy of someone else’s husband so close unnerves her. She instinctively pulls back, but not before he whispers something in her ear.
“You deserve to know.”
2
NOW
Gwen marches her boys to their house next door while Anton trails behind. Inside, the boys kick off their shoes and run upstairs. Anton enters, stepping over the mess on his way to the kitchen while she bends down to pick it up. She misses the mudroom in their old house, outside Boston. She never wanted to leave, but after what Anton did, she had no choice.
“I’ll get them in pj’s and their teeth brushed,” she calls to Anton as she begins to climb the stairs. “When I call you, come up and read a story.”
She doesn’t wait for a response. She’s not supposed to do this. Treat him like an incompetent employee. Bark demands at him. She learned that at marriage counseling. That was where she learned that it was her fault he had cheated. She hademasculatedhim. She had made him feel small.
She has tried in the past few years to be a different kind of wife, and most of the time she succeeds. But sometimes, when he does something to embarrass her, like get drunk in front of their friends and then come home and ignore the mess right in front of him, she can’t help herself. She reverts to her old ways.
Gwen is very good at corralling the boys. She’s always considered herself one of those moms who has no problems with boundaries and routines. She feels she could handle an entire squad of children and had always wanted that. That had been the plan. Enough kids to fill a baseball team. It was only her and her sister, older by five years, growing up. It was lonely in their large, beautiful house outside Richmond. Her parents had bought her a horse named Shadow, whom she rode throughouthigh school. But a horse is no substitute for the love of a close-knit family.
But she lost so much blood during delivery of the twins, she almost died. Another pregnancy was too risky. Besides, her marriage might not survive the stress of another child.
Rafi and George share a room even though there are two more spare bedrooms. They are inseparable. No matter how much they fight, they always find their way back to each other. It felt like a gift from the universe when they moved here a year ago and it turned out the family next door had twin boys, too. Another mother who would get it, that feeling of observing an alien culture developing before your own eyes. Sometimes the boys let her in, but other times Gwen is acutely aware of being on the outside. Rafi and George share a special language, a shorthand, with each other. Their large brown eyes contain a multitude of meanings decipherable only by a pair of matching eyes. Sometimes she feels lonely in her own family. She is more than a little jealous that Aimee also has a daughter. All she has to turn to in her loneliness is her dog, Sababa.
The boys climb into their bunk bed, George into the single above and Rafi in the double below, although she knows there’s a good chance that in the middle of the night George will find his way into his brother’s bed. She often finds them together in the bottom bunk in the morning, a tangle of blankets and limbs.
“Daddy will come read you a story,” she says.
“First do tuck-tuck,” George says.
“Okay.” Gwen begins the ritual of tucking the blankets around his slim body, stepping on the lower bunk so she can reach and press the fabric up against him, saying “tuck” with every push.
As she continues, her mind flits back to Aimee’s laundry room. What was going on back there? Was Anton hitting on Aimee? Would he do that? Anger surges through her. Sometimes she feels she could kill him.
“Tuck, tuck, tuck.”
The rage burbles up inside her. Things have been off for at least a month, maybe even all the way back to the beginning of the summer. But she doesn’t want to believe that it could be happening all over again.