The Divorce Party

“Whoa! Collision time.” The girl pulls Maggie up to standing. “Are you okay?”

Maggie nods. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I shouldn’t have snuck up on you. Are you Ryan?”

“No. I am definitely not Ryan.” She pauses, looks at the girl, who is looking back at her confused, holding an apron in her hands—an apron she brought from somewhere else, the word Maid vaguely visible. “You’re the one covering for Lev tonight?”

“I’m Molly Barton.” She smiles, and holds out her hand.

She unties her apron, and hands it to her, starts to walk away. “It’s nice to meet you, Molly,” she says.

“Thanks, wait . . .” Molly calls after her. “Are you coming back?”

“Not if I can help it,” she says.

And she doesn’t turn around. She is going to walk out this door, and say good-bye to Georgia and find a bus stop. She is going to go anywhere but here. Only when she steps back outside, she sees him standing there, his arms crossed, waiting for her, or just waiting. In a wet suit, a UVA sweat shirt thrown over it. That dark hair on top of his head.

“Nate,” she says. She says it out loud, in spite of herself.

“I thought you could use a ride.”

Gwyn

They are setting up.

Trucks and florists and chair-rental people and alcohol suppliers and waitstaff, piling into her driveway, parking diagonally, parking straight, making a mess of everything. Some of them are already in uniform, most in T-shirts and jeans, moving tables and lanterns and vases and linens and cases of alcohol and cases of wooden candlestick holders into the center of the barn, working hard to get everything party ready against the brewing wind.

If Gwyn chose to hire a full-service caterer, one company could have handled all of this business. There would be a supervisor. And it wouldn’t be so scattered, so able to fall short in one arena, so overwhelming in another. And yet that wasn’t an option. Or at least, not the most important one for Gwyn to take.

So here she sits in the nook of the wraparound veranda porch, watching as too many people from Doug’s Alcohol and Spirits, Island Florists, Sanford’s Rentals, and Hamptons Staffing make their way across the door walk—that small space of land between the house and the barn—trying to go over her list for the evening of everything that needs to be handled.

Their guests will start arriving around eight for an elongated cocktail hour, complete with heavy hors d’oeuvres, good vodka, too much talk about too many things that don’t matter. She wishes instantly that Jillian would be among them, wishes she hadn’t asked her not to come.

But why not? I want to be there, Jillian said on the phone.

Because if you’re there, Gwyn said, it’s real.

And if I’m not? Jillian asked.

Maybe it’s something else.

It could be something else, could just be an anniversary party that Gwyn is watching come together—that Gwyn would assume she is watching come together if she didn’t know the rest of the story. If she didn’t know that, at 9:30, instead of toasting their future, she and Thomas would toast their past, cut their cake, and go their own ways. Marriage over, integrity intact. Like the books suggest. Good for the family unit, good for closure. And simple. Right? If only Gwyn was feeling simple, if only that still seemed possible. A simple ending. A new beginning.

She hears someone coming up behind her, and turns to see Thomas standing above her, wearing khaki shorts and no shirt, just out of the shower. His hair wet. A glass of lemonade in his hand.

“You’re back?” she says.

“I’m back.”

“I didn’t hear you come back.”

She looks up at him, reaching for the lemonade. He hands it to her, and sits down next to her, and they watch together. She isn’t particularly in the mood to talk to him, or be with him, even, but she doesn’t want him to go over toward the Buckleys’ place. Not that he would. Why would he? But still. It would be bad for him to go anywhere near the house and find Eve’s van in the garage, Eve working inside. There is something exhilarating, though, at the possibility he might. There is something exhilarating to Gwyn in that for once she is standing between the two of them, she is the one in control.

She takes a long sip of the lemonade, the cool drink reminding her how thirsty she is, the last of the pot just now leaving her body. “Where’s Nate?” she asks. “Inside somewhere?”

Thomas shakes his head, putting his hands on his knees. “I’m not sure. The phone rang. And he ran to get it. I think it was Georgia. He went out front

to talk to her, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying.”