First Affair by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus

Author:Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

Chapter Seven

* * *

November 22

It had been fifteen days since the election. Rachelle had parked herself on my couch every night, waiting vigil beside me for his summon, the job offer—the together part. The phone had not rung once, but she never wavered in her belief that I was telling the truth, and I couldn’t even put my gratitude into words.

It was still early—she reassured me it was. And there were those back-to-back hurricanes on the Southern coast. But we didn’t know when to decide it was late. How would I know? And what would I do?

I was lying awake, staring through the gap in the eyelet curtains at the snow-dusted branches of the elm in my parents’ front yard. Which I once called the elm in my front yard, the one with the old tire swing long rotted and Erica’s initials gouged in the trunk. For years, I thought F.U. was her boyfriend.

The Hello Kitty clock ticked on aggressively. 8:35 a.m. I should have been downstairs already, cutting, peeling, making jokes while Erica camped on the den couch watching the parade and griping. Hung over. Then, in the last few years, because she wasn’t hung over. But I didn’t want to go to the game. I didn’t want to have dinner at three o’clock with Dad’s drunk relatives, didn’t want to listen to my uncles ribbing him, yet again, about his sobriety, about his wife and her education, her “shmancy desk job,” our “snooty” neighborhood.

It was our little house that pissed them off. The front and back yards. That Erica and I each had a bedroom. When the fighting started I always wished we could do the meal at one of their apartments, but their wives were embarrassed, I think. My aunts always said, “Oh, no, Betsy, you have the space.” And then Mom and I looked around at the square feet between the couch and the fireplace, the air between the hutch and the dining table, and we felt embarrassed. Not by what we had, but by the luxury of the emptiness around it.

My phone vibrated somewhere near my hip and I dug around in the bedspread to find it. “Been up since 5. Family holiday=oxymoron.” Mike. Thinking of me. While I hid in the same bed in which I’d once conjured a future for us. “PS. Coming to DC Jan 23.”

I stared at the sentence, feeling something. Like paper cuts.

“4 a conference,” he added. “Want to grab a drink? We can do that now, right?”

I erased the questions and rolled over twice until I’d pinned myself in the blanket. In a cold flush of surprise, I realized I didn’t want to see him. “Greg,” I said into my pillow to drown out the unsettling feeling. Conjuring his fingertips touching the lightning bolts, I said it again and then again, focusing on the click of the second “g” at the top of my throat.

“Fuck!” I heard Dad shout from his room as he headed out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck it all to hell.

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