Elin Hilderbrand - Here’s to Us

“We haven’t had sex in three months,” Joel said. “She’s never home. We have no quality of life.”

Three months? Angie thought. So… Joel and Dory had gone at it in bed, even after things had started between him and Angie? Angie touched the tender blister that had formed on her hand. Joel probably felt okay telling her now because it was accompanied by the news of his imminent departure.

“Why tonight?” Angie asked. “Did something happen?”

“She’s been acting funny,” Joel said. “Like she might already know. I want to leave before I get caught. There is a difference, you know.”

“I know,” Angie said. For the past four months, she had lived in mortal fear of getting caught, not only by Dory, but also by Deacon. Deacon would not have approved of Angie dating Joel, and that was the understatement of the year. Deacon would have gone profane Dr. Seuss-Apeshit batshit catshit bullshit-if he’d found out that Joel and his daughter were sleeping together. His first objection would have been that Joel was married. His second objection would have been that Joel worked at the restaurant, and if things went belly-up, it would be awkward for everyone. There would probably have been a third objection, that Joel wasn’t good enough, somehow. He was too old (at forty, fourteen years older than Angie)-and, Deacon might have argued, Joel was also a morally bankrupt snake charmer who had taken advantage not only of Angie’s youth but also of her naïveté in the ways of love. Deacon knew Joel too well; they had gotten drunk together too many times and revealed too many flaws. If Deacon had found out, he might have tried to punish Angie somehow-stopped writing her slush checks or, worse, taken her off the fire. Those worries were gone now, of course; they had been replaced by the red, raw sadness at his absence.

“Besides,” Joel said, “I want to take care of you.”

Joel wanted to “take care” of her-the words were like a narcotic. And just as he said this, their song came on: “Colder Weather,” by the Zac Brown Band. Angie had been endeavoring to keep one foot on the ground when it came to Joel. Men never actually left their wives; that was an urban myth. But with that one simple line-I want to take care of you-Joel Tersigni had executed a Karate Kid-like move and swept her leg. She fell. There was, she feared, no way back.

There were no parking spots on Seventy-Third Street.

“Should I drive around?” Joel asked. “And come up?”

Instinctively, Angie shook her head. She was leaving the next day for Nantucket. The whole family was gathering. They were going to spread Deacon’s ashes. Angie was going to spend three days under the same roof as her mother for the first time in a very, very long time. It was too much, all of a sudden.

“Should I forget about leaving her?” Joel asked. “Do you not love me?”

“Of course I love you,” Angie said quickly. She told Joel this all the time; she told him way too often. Belinda would have advised her to create some doubt, cultivate some mystery. But Angie operated without guile. She had waited a long time to find a friend of her heart, someone she could tell everything. “But it’s late, and I’m beat.”

“Sleep in tomorrow,” Joel said.

He never really listened unless she was saying exactly what he wanted to hear.

“I have to pack,” she said.

He gave her a blank look.

“I’m going to Nantucket?” she said. “Remember? I’ll be back Tuesday.”

“That’s even more reason why I should come up,” he said. “How am I going to last four days without your body?”

She wished he had said “you” instead of “your body.” But then she remembered back six weeks ago: As soon as Joel had learned that Deacon was dead, he drove into the city to see Angie. He had held her, absorbed her shaking; he had brought her a cognac; he had drawn her a bath and sat on the bathroom floor, holding her hand. He had answered her phone and the knocks of her concerned (nosy) neighbors, telling everyone kindly yet firmly that Angie wasn’t ready to see anyone. He had stood by as she snapped her precious collection of wooden spoons in half-some of them more than a hundred years old-until they lay on her kitchen floor like so much kindling, and then he swept the pieces up with a broom and dustpan. He went down to the corner store for cigarettes and then somehow managed to open the giant window that had been stuck since Angie moved in so that she could smoke without leaving the apartment. He watched her pull apart the loops of her whisk until it looked like some awful, postmodern flower. He didn’t tell her she was acting crazy, he didn’t tell her she should quit smoking, he didn’t ask why she wasn’t crying. Joel Tersigni had done everything right, every single thing, except he still went home to Dory each night. But now, that would end. He was leaving.

“Drive around,” Angie said. “I’ll wait for you upstairs.”

She had a long list of tasks to tackle before she flew to Nantucket in the morning, and yet she found herself distracted by the blushing-pink envelope sitting on top of her in-box. It was a birthday card from Deacon that had arrived promptly on May 2; despite the many ways he’d failed her, he always remembered her birthday. Laurel had been too busy to open it on May 2 or the days following, and then on May 6, Deacon was dead, and Laurel was afraid to open it because when she did, it would be the last time she heard from him, and she wasn’t ready for that.

She tore her eyes from the envelope; she would open it later today, she decided. Tomorrow, she was traveling back in time. She hadn’t been to Nantucket since she and Deacon had split so many years ago.

Across from Laurel sat a woman named Ursula, who had three school-aged grandchildren. Ursula and the kids were homeless and waiting for Laurel to find them a placement. Ursula’s daughter, Suzanne, the children’s mother, was a drug addict who had robbed Ursula of all her worldly goods and then forged her rent checks, getting them evicted from the Silverhead projects, which was virtually impossible.

Ursula picked up the framed photograph on Laurel’s desk.

“This your boyfriend?” Ursula asked.

The first time a client had asked Laurel this, she’d blanched, but it happened so often now that Laurel had grown used to it.

“My son, actually,” Laurel said. The photo was of her and Hayes on the floor of the Knicks game, a slice of Carmelo Anthony’s jersey and powerful arm visible in the frame.

“Your son?” Ursula said. “He look old enough to be with you. I thought maybe you was one of them cougars.”

“No,” Laurel said. She was allergic to that term.

“You got a husband?” Ursula asked.

Laurel stared at her computer screen. There was a hotel on 162nd Street where she could put Ursula and the kids for three nights. That would have to do, and it would be better than a shelter.

“Not presently,” Laurel said.

“But you were married?” Ursula asked.

“A long time ago,” Laurel said. She smiled at Ursula in a way that, she hoped, put the topic to bed.

“But you divorced now?” Ursula asked.

“Yes. Divorced.” She didn’t dare mention that her ex-husband was none other than Chef Deacon Thorpe. One thing about Laurel’s clients: they watched a lot of TV. Ursula might have been a devoted Deacon fan, one of millions who had sobbed upon hearing the shocking news of his death.

“Your husband cheat on you?” Ursula asked.

Laurel said, “I can put you in a unit at the Bronx Arms Hotel until Saturday, two double beds and a cot. How does that sound?”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Ursula said. “All men cheat. That what they do.”

Laurel had five other families to place before the end of the day, but the unfortunate conversation with Ursula kept Laurel preoccupied.

All men cheat. That what they do.

Laurel ordered herself to stop thinking about Deacon. This had happened nearly every day for the past six weeks: he took up residence in her mind and refused to leave, like a squatter.

She opened the birthday card. It was Snoopy dancing with his nose in the air, and a message that said, Someone Special Is Having a Birthday! On the inside of the card, in his nearly illegible scrawl, the card was signed, Forever love, D.

Forever love: high school, Hayes, culinary school, the first TV show, divorce. Most people would stop there, Laurel realized, but her relationship with Deacon, no matter how bad it got-and it had gotten really bad those first few years with Belinda-had always been set on a foundation of unconditional love, laid at a tender age. Her love had been a staple for him, like flour or salt in his pantry. When he moved back to New York and Belinda was away on location, Laurel occasionally met Deacon at Raindance for a drink. Those nights had always ended chastely, but Laurel loved that Deacon kept them hidden from Belinda. And then, years later, when Deacon and Belinda had the big fight and Belinda stormed off to Los Angeles in anger, who had Deacon called?

Laurel.

She and Deacon had spent five days together in the Virgin Islands. This was a secret Laurel guarded with her life. Nobody knew-not Buck, not Hayes, nobody. Laurel pictured the secret as an obsidian marble, dense and black, nestled in a remote pocket of her brain. Every once in a while, it slipped out and rolled around, and Laurel would remember the sun in St. John, the sailing, the sex.

Later still, once Deacon was married to Scarlett and the father of a baby again, he and Laurel had settled into that place where all divorced couples would like to eventually end up-a place of peace and, yes, love, and appreciation for each other, and gratitude for the past they’d shared, and respect for the things they’d learned and the ways they’d grown side by side. Laurel had always had a bit of the Pollyanna in her, she supposed, which made coming to a place of true forgiveness with Deacon easier. In the past ten years, Laurel and Deacon had talked once a week, they had seen each other on holidays with Hayes, they had served as each other’s emotional backstop. When Laurel had ended her last relationship-with Michael Beale, a public defender she’d met through work-she had called Deacon to vent. And, only a couple weeks before he died, Deacon had called Laurel and told her the whole sordid story about the stripper and the Saab and leaving Ellery at school until it was so late that the headmistress was forced to contact Buck.

Deacon had told Laurel then that he would stop drinking. Laurel told him that his best bet was a program-she had seen it with clients too many times to count-and that there were fifteen daily AA meetings within a four-block radius of his apartment on Hudson Street. You just walk in, Laurel said. I’ll go with you.

Nah, Deacon had said. I’m going to lone-wolf it.

That won’t work, Laurel had thought but not said out loud. She had learned that coercion didn’t work with addicts. Deacon would go when he was ready; he would go when he’d hit rock bottom.

When Buck called to say Deacon had died of a heart attack, she had immediately thought: Cocaine. But the tox report came back squeaky clean. Deacon had apparently been on the back deck of American Paradise, smoking a cigarette, drinking a Diet Coke, and watching the sun go down, when his heart quit.

She read the card again: Forever love, D. And then, although she really didn’t have time, Laurel dropped her face into her hands, and she cried.

Sula’s brothers wanted to take him spear fishing; the Australians wanted him to surf the left break on the far side of the reef. Hayes wanted to lie in the yellow sand with Sula and shoot up. The dope was plentiful on Nusa Lembongan; there was a drug lord on the other side of the island who intercepted shipments from Lombok to Java and skimmed off the top. The drug lord wanted American dollars; Hayes wanted to stay high for the rest of his natural life.

His father had been dead for a month and a half. He’d had a massive coronary, a phrase Hayes found chilling. The death had been sudden, unexpected, violent.

Hayes’s mother was destroyed; his sister Angie had been rendered bloodless, limbless, blind, deaf, and dumb; and Buck had called insisting he needed to talk to everyone “as a family” about “Deacon’s affairs.” At first, Hayes had thought Buck was referring to Deacon’s actual affairs, which seemed indiscreet, but then Hayes decided he meant the will, money, and stuff, which might have been a beacon of hope except for the ominous tone of Buck’s voice. Scarlett was still in Savannah, apparently-at least, that was what Hayes thought Buck had said. The reception had been poor.