Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny

Author:Katherine Heiny [Heiny, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

561

Just as Jane Austen believed that four people cannot comfortably walk abreast, Charlene believes that three people cannot amicably move one person’s belongings. Not when two of the people used to be married to each other. And especially not when one of those people had divorced the second person to marry the third person.

What’s more, Charlie’s husband, Forrest, had knee-replacement surgery six weeks ago and is still using a cane, and Forrest’s ex-wife, Barbara, has some mysterious but convenient ailment—sciatica? nerve damage?—that prevents her from lifting things, so Charlie will be the only able-bodied one working today. This is the true price of infidelity, she thinks: twenty years later you and your husband have to help his ex-wife move out of the former family home. On a Saturday. In January. In D.C. It is fifteen degrees below zero with a sharp wind slicing through the air.

The wind hits Charlie as soon as she steps out of her front door, chilling her through. She waits for Forrest to make his way past her, then locks the door and helps him down the driveway and into the car. She hurries around to the driver’s side, her breath pluming out in front of her like white feathers. Snow is piled high on either side of the damp asphalt driveway. The air is cold and flat and smells of nothing.

Charlie gets into the car on the driver’s side and starts the engine. “Tell me why we’re doing this again,” she says to Forrest.

He buckles his seat belt. “Because we’re all friends now.”

“Barbara and I are not friends,” Charlie says emphatically.

“Well, sort of friends,” he says. “Friendly.”

Charlie gives him a look as she backs the car out of the driveway. “She called me a cocksucking whore once.”

“But that was a long time ago,” Forrest says, smiling a little. “Now it’s like you’ve reached a détente. You’re more like North and South Korea.”

Charlie frowns. “Would South Korea help North Korea move, though?”

“Well, it’s more like premoving,” Forrest says. “Barbara just needs someone to help her pack up the more fragile stuff before the real movers come tomorrow.”

“But why us?” Charlie asks.

“I know it means a great deal to Stephen and Ross,” Forrest answers, and a little silence falls between them because, really, that says everything there is to say. Stephen and Ross are Forrest and Barbara’s twin sons, now all grown up and living in California. Forrest will do almost anything to stay in their good graces, and so will Charlie, actually, though she can’t help thinking that if it means so much to them, maybe they should come do it themselves.

The heater isn’t warming the car at all. Charlie blows on her fingers and wonders why Barbara and Forrest can’t be one of those acrimonious divorced couples who spit when they say each other’s names. They had done that for a while, in the beginning, with threats and insults and stormy phone calls. It had not been without certain satisfactions.

Charlie had met Barbara before she met Forrest, when she and Barbara had both volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline.

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