The Divorce Party

She nods. “I promise you.”

“Good,” he says, putting his mouth on her forehead. “Because my family has close to half a billion dollars.”

Gwyn

There are rumors, you know. There are always rumors. Rumors that people take as truth without ever getting to it.

You know, what the actual story is.

This bothers Gwyn. Rumors, half-truths. Like: with the cake, just as an example. The red velvet cake. The rumor with the red velvet cake is that it was invented—that the first one was made—at the restaurant in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City in the early 1900s. The story goes that the pastry chef there made a cake one night using red dye, and a hotel guest liked the cake so much that she asked for the recipe, only to find out at checkout that she had been billed several hundred dollars for it. When she tried to complain, the hotel refused to remove the charge. Looking to get even, she spread the recipe to all her friends, all over the country. And all her friends forwarded it on to all of their friends. . . .

The point is that it’s a charming story, but it’s crap. Gwyn knows this. She knows the real story of the red velvet cake, its real history, is less like a fun rumor and more like a warning. The real story, about anything, in Gwyn’s recent experience, is often more like a warning.

Of how things go wrong.

Of how they go.

She sighs—she is not normally a sigher, but she sighs— thinking about it. Then she checks the car clock: 9:15 A.M. Gwyn has been sitting here for a half hour already, in the small parking lot at the East Hampton airport, in her red Volvo wagon. Thomas was supposed to have landed by now. But, of course, he hasn’t. At these small airports, you can’t count on things to go as planned. And besides, Gwyn should be blaming herself, if anyone. She is the one who organized it so that Thomas would get back from his medical conference the morning of their party. It took quite a bit of finagling, in fact, to orchestrate it this way: an overnight flight from LAX to JFK; a second private flight out here. She wanted—no, she needed—Thomas to get back now, this late in the game, so she would know what to do with him, how to keep him busy, so that her plans for tonight stayed in motion, without disruption, exactly as she planned them.

She isn’t confident, though. Not about any of it going the way she needs it to. Except for the cake. She is confident about the cake. Because she is good at making it, and because it is Thomas’s favorite. It is his favorite thing that she makes for him. It was the first thing she ever made for him: their first date, the two of them sitting on the roof of her building in New York City. The only building she ever lived in in the city, on Riverside Drive. The best thing that it had going for it was its proximity to Columbia (where she had been enrolled at the Teachers College), and its roof—the piece of the river that the roof looked out over. Thomas brought a bottle of wine with him—a 1945 Château Mouton-Rothschild. And they sat on the roof until 2 A.M., eating the red velvet cake, sharing sips of the wine straight from the bottle.

Of course, the wine could have been from the corner deli for all she knew. She didn’t have any idea then that the wine was worth thousands and thousands of dollars. (Thomas didn’t either. He just grabbed a bottle from his father’s wine cellar before heading in to the city to see her.) Especially, at twenty-two, she wouldn’t have agreed to drink it if she had known.

But Gwyn knew the most important thing that first night, even if she hadn’t wanted to. Thomas got the last piece of cake. There was the sweet arguing back and forth—you take it, no you take it—but Thomas got it. It makes it fitting, then, that he will get the last piece now too.

Her phone rings, loud, too loud, even from the bottom of her bag. She searches for it, hoping it is Eve. Let it be Eve. This is the woman Gwyn has hired to cater tonight’s party. Eve Stone of Eve’s Kitchen. Quogue, New York.

Gwyn has been trying to reach her, all morning, to no avail, and a

ll she can think is that she has no idea how to do this.

She has no idea how to plan this divorce party tonight. She has been to a few divorce parties. And there are plenty of books she’s found that encourage the idea of having a healing divorce, of celebrating it—Filing Is Not Failing; The Last Dance You Can Dance; Good-bye Can Be Another Word for Hello! But they are for people who aren’t secretly laughing at the idea of a divorce party, people who buy into something Gwyn is only pretending to buy into.

That things can end well.

That things can—just—end.

She flips open her phone right after the fourth ring. “Eve?” she says. “Is that you?”

“Who’s Eve? No, Mom. It’s me.”

Me is Georgia. Gwyn’s daughter. Gwyn’s daughter who has no idea what is really happening with her parents. Not her daughter, not her son. Yes, they know their parents are getting divorced. She has been trying to shield them from the rest. Or, at least, this is what she’s told herself. But maybe her motives aren’t as pure as that. Maybe she hasn’t told them everything because, once she does, there is no going back. Once she’s said the words out loud, about what’s really going on, she can’t decide to believe something else.

“What’s going on, sweetheart?” Gwyn asks, adjusting the phone in her hand. “Is everything okay?”

"Defiine ‘okay.’ ”

“Are you in labor?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Good.” Gwyn nods. “That’s good.”

That is good. Even if Gwyn knows that Georgia gets annoyed every time she asks, it is a relief to her. Georgia has been in from L.A., staying with Gwyn for the last couple of weeks while her French boyfriend, Denis (pronounced, as Georgia loved to remind them, as if they’ve ever gotten it wrong, Den-ee), has been making a record with his band in Omaha, Nebraska. Twenty-five-year-old Georgia, who is eight and a half months pregnant. Eight and a half months pregnant with the baby of a man she has known for ten and a half months. Not the wisest course of action, if anyone asked Gwyn’s opinion on the matter. But no one did.

No one asked her opinion on Maggie either. Maggie, who Gwyn has only talked to on the phone, but who has a laugh that Gwyn likes, a laugh that Gwyn trusts, especially because she has learned, over time, that the way someone laughs often mirrors who they are. How they are. Maggie’s laugh is empathetic, giving. She’ll take either of those qualities for Nate. She’ll gladly take both.

“Mom.”