The Divorce Party

“Where to?”

“You’ll love it.”

The last thing Maggie wants to do is go anywhere, even somewhere she’ll love. She wants to let the alcohol work its magic. She wants it to make her tired. She wants to sleep. But it makes Georgia look alive, the thought of getting out of here, and Maggie can’t handle stopping that. So she takes a deep breath. “Can I bring the absinthe?”

“I think we can make room.”

She ignores the spinning in her head as she starts to stand. “Then let’s go,” she says.

Gwyn

She is washing the dishes when Thomas comes into the kitchen in his wet suit, his surfboard in his hand. This isn’t an anomaly. It is his pattern: most afternoons, when he gets home from work, he goes for a run along the ocean’s edge, and, depending on the tide, he goes surfing. Sometimes, after, he also goes for a bike ride, even in the rain, even in the snow: anything to get outside for a while, get active. It was years into their marriage before Gwyn accepted that it was impossible to talk with him about important things—about anything, really—before he had that time alone, outside, to decompress. He was in a much better mood afterward, his face more open, accepting. In the space between work and the time he spent outside, she could have the best news in the world for him, and he wasn’t able to engage her, or hear it.

Thomas opens the oven, takes a look at the cake, the thick butter smell wafting through the air. “Is that red velvet cake?”

Gwyn flicks water at him. “Close it. It’s bad luck.”

“How do you figure?”

“You know how it’s bad luck to see the bride in the wedding gown before the wedding?”

“It’s bad luck to see the red velvet cake before the divorce party?”

“Exactly.”

He smiles, doing what she says, closing the oven tight. “I’ll take your word for it.”

She turns the water on stronger as he leans the surfboard against the wall, opening the refrigerator door, searching for a bottle of green tea to bring. She knows that is what he wants and says, “Second shelf.”

He bends to grab it. “I think the kids are okay with our plans for tonight,” he says. “We knew they wouldn’t be happy about the size, but it seems okay with them.”

“Really? You think so?”

Maybe she expects him to be mad at her, mad that she was fairly passive-aggressive during the conversation with their children—that she didn’t rise to the occasion the way she had said she would, been as smooth about it as she could have been. He doesn’t seem mad at all, though, which is almost worse. It feels like just another reminder that he barely sees her anymore.

He closes the fridge door, shakes the tea bottle in his left hand. “Georgia was upset,” he says. “But she’ll calm down.”

“We can hope.”

“Gwyn,” he says. “I think it’s hard for them to see us together. It will get better after a while.”

She looks up from her dishes. “How’s that, Thomas?”

“They’ll realize that we aren’t supposed to stay that way.”

She nods—trying to ignore the tightening in her chest—as he moves toward the other side of the sink, reaches toward the windowsill to turn on the small radio they keep there. “I just want to get the weather before I head out,” he says, tuning in to 1010, just as the weatherman is finishing up his report:

. . . Expect thunderstorms in early evening, growing in intensity throughout the night. Certainly not a repeat of the hurricane that greeted us back in 1938, on this very day, but certainly not the time to go walking along the beach.

“That’s not great for tonight,” Thomas says. He pulls off the bottle cap, takes a sip. “But I think we’ll be okay. The barn can handle it, right? I don’t think we should worry.”

That’s fine with her. With everything else she is trying to handle for this evening, the weather is the last thing she is going to concern herself with.

“Do you know how many times my father told me what happened to him during the hurricane?”

Do you know how many times you’ve told me? she wants to say. She could repeat the whole thing by heart, even what happened to them afterward: Champ fondly remembering how the town of Montauk got rebuilt in the aftermath, how he and Anna got involved in resurrecting this area from what it had faced.

“It was because of the hurricane that they decided to stay out here full time,” Thomas says. “Most people didn’t do that back then, didn’t consider that as an option. It’s weird to think about it, how they would have had a totally different life otherwise.”