The Divorce Party

“Maggie, you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“You’re not sober.”

Maggie gives her a look, and Georgia holds out the keys. Then, just as she is about to grab for them, Georgia pulls them back.

“What are you going to do? You have to tell me. Are you just going to drive out of town? I can’t let you do that. You can’t just drive away and leave my brother. And me. Forget my brother. You can’t just leave a pregnant girl by the lighthouse.”

“You have a point.”

“I think so.”

Maggie looks back and forth between Georgia and the car. “Well then, if you want to come with me, you’ll have to take me to her.”

“Who her?”

Maggie doesn’t say anything, just holds Georgia’s eyes.

“Ryan?” Georgia looks at her like she is crazy, and maybe she is. Maybe post-absinthe, and post-too-much-information, she really is. But that is where she is going.

“What makes you sure she is near here?” she says.

She wasn’t sure. But it would make sense, right? Another reason Nate dreaded coming home. The real reason. And seeing Georgia’s fearful look now, she knows it. Ryan is close enough that they can get to her.

“Fine,” Georgia says, pushing Maggie out of the way, getting in the driver’s seat herself. “For the record, though, I think this is going to end badly. Very badly.”

Maggie goes around to the passenger side before Georgia— or Maggie’s own better sense—can get it together, can change her mind.

“Well,” she says, “I guess we’re about to find out.”

Gwyn

It’s not that she is entirely unfamiliar with the Internet, but she never had occasion to learn about it in too much detail, to use it too regularly. So when she found out for certain about Thomas and Eve, it was Gwyn’s sister Jillian who did a Google search on Eve and sent Gwyn the results. (Who wants those kinds of results?) It isn’t a good thing to have too much information. No one probably thinks of that today, but Gwyn still thinks you are better off with less information. Especially because once you start to look for it, it is because you hope you won’t find it.

And then you do.

The Google search of Eve Stone revealed things that served only to make her more human, more real: Eve Stone. Full name: Natalie Eve Stone. Graduated from Pacific Valley High School in 1997. (No record of college.) Moved to Santa Barbara, California, where she lived on a street called Foothill Road, worked for a catering company, a dog-walking service, a restaurant called Firestone’s. She had another address, after that, in Oxnard— under Natalie Eve Stone—maybe there was a man she lived with there, a man who supported her, because there was no record of employment. No record of employment anywhere, again, until she landed on the east end of Long Island and opened Eve’s Kitchen.

It seems like she’s gone by Eve for a while now, maybe more than awhile now. Gwyn doesn’t know what made her decide to change it. The Internet didn’t tell her anything about that.

Or this: she was Thomas’s student. Eve was Thomas’s continuing education student—third on the wait list, the last one he let into the class. If Stephanie Golding hadn’t dropped out after the first class, Gwyn wouldn’t have this problem. She’d have other problems, certainly, but not this one. And the thing is, if it wasn’t actually happening to her, this problem could be out of a bad movie of the week. Where a man is supposed to be one thing. Like: bad. So they have the bad man screwing around with his student, just so the viewing audience can be clear. Hate this guy. He’s the jerk. Like it is ever that simple, for the people who actually have the job of hating him.

These things came back to her: The night after she went to the meditation center and she found her husband not present, she decided she needed to figure out the truth. She went back through it in her mind, when it all began, that first conversation with Thomas in the bathroom, which took place right after Thomas’s class on a Monday night. So the next Monday night she went to the college herself and saw Thomas and Eve outside of the library.

Fro

m the back, they didn’t look so ridiculous. From the back, she could see how he fooled himself that they belonged.

He was helping her load boxes into her van, his hand hovering right above her ass, reaching for her. Like he was the one with something to prove, like he was the one who was going to have to earn her. Like if he wasn’t the one reaching, Eve could just as easily move away from him.

He wanted to be the one reacting. Gwyn knew this, and it helped her figure out the rest of it—what her husband sees in Eve: Thomas is impressed by women who seem fearless, like they can do anything separate from him, like only if he is equally fearless, and lucky, and on task, is he going to be permitted to stay. If he was questioned about what he saw in her, Thomas would probably say that Eve is very sweet and unpretentious, easy to talk to. But he would be wrong to think his desire for her stemmed from any of that. Even though he admires those qualities, it is only in a distant way. They don’t penetrate for him.

A long time ago, he had to work for Gwyn. He worked to convince her that he could be who she needed him to be: that he could stand by her and be a good parent with her and build a home life with her. Now, he wants the opposite. To earn Eve— Eve with her whimsical spirit, her desire to remain unburdened, her desire to remain plucky, daring—Thomas gets to convince her that he can be as free as she is. He gets to convince himself.

“We have a problem,” Eve says now, still sitting on the steps.

Gwyn pretends not to hear her—or, rather, doesn’t acknowledge that she has heard her—choosing instead to take the heavy tray off Eve’s lap and move past her into the Buckleys’ kitchen, wind blowing behind her, letting Eve be the one who follows. This time.