Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

Without a word, she grabbed her purse and went and sat alone in the car. Through the large restaurant window, she could see Walt and Nora and Louisa. They were eating, but not talking. All of them silently passing platters and chewing while looking down at their plates. She tried to imagine she’d gone somewhere, just disappeared without a trace, and this was their life now. A husband without a wife, daughters without a mother. The tableau was so unbalanced and incomplete and sad .

Walt said something and the girls shook their heads. They each took a little more food from the big platter in the center. They kept looking over at the other side of the room, away from the window, all of them. She wondered if someone they knew was sitting over there or if they needed the waitress for drink refills or take-out cartons. The staff at this place had a habit of disappearing when you needed something. Nora probably wanted more fortune cookies. Walt leaned across the table and took one hand of each daughter. He said something to them. She squinted and leaned forward, as if she might be able to read his lips. She wondered what he was saying. The girls were looking at him and nodding. Then smiling. Then they all turned and looked across the room again and she realized what they were doing; they were looking toward the door. They were looking for her.

It was a Tuesday, which meant Jack opened the shop a little early after having been closed on Sundays and Mondays. Tuesdays were the days that most of the decorators made their rounds because the stores weren’t full of weekend amateurs or tourists, but the morning had been slow. So what else was new? Jack was sitting at a small desk in the back of the shop. He’d been making a few calls, writing e-mails. The front door opened and the little bell rang announcing someone’s arrival. Jack stood and couldn’t quite make out the person in the door; the sun was shining through the transom and hitting him square in the eyes.

“Jack?”

“Yes.” He squinted and moved out of the light and let his eyes adjust. “Melody?”

“Hi,” she said, a little meekly. “I brought you some lunch.”

“SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT,”Jack said. “You’ve brought me these delightful sandwiches and cookies and even an overpriced bottle of sparkling water because you want my advice on having a lesbian daughter?”

Melody sighed and picked some kind of dark wilted lettuce off her sandwich. Why was it so hard to find just a plain turkey sandwich? “What is this stuff?” she said, sniffing it. “Arugula. Ugh. Whatever happened to good old iceberg lettuce?” She put the sandwich down and looked at Jack. “I don’t want advice exactly. I just. I don’t know what I want, to be honest. I guess I’m a little scared.”

“Of having a gay child?”

“No! Of being a crappy parent.”

“Because she’s a lesbian?”

“I’m not trying to be an asshole, Jack. I’ve never cared that you were gay. You know that. None of us did. You were the one who didn’t invite anyone to your wedding, which is a shame because we all would have liked being there. It might have been nice for your nieces, too, to see their two gay uncles marry.”

“Well, now they have a front seat for the groundbreaking divorce.”

Melody put her sandwich down. “Seriously?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But why? There’s no chance of putting things back together? What happened?”

“I did a very dumb thing. Can we talk about something else?”

“Sure.” They were sitting at the counter at the front of the shop, next to the jewelry display. “This is nice,” Melody said, picking up a red leather box with a vintage watch inside.

“Yes, it is nice. It’s the watch I gave Walker as a wedding gift.”

“He gave it back?”

“Actually, he sold it back to the person I bought it from who alerted me and I reacquired it.”

“I’m sorry. That sounds upsetting.”

“It was. Very. Especially since he sold the watch to buy combs for my long hair and without knowing what he had done I sold my hair to buy a leather case for this watch.”

Melody smiled at him and put the watch back on the counter. “We’re selling our house.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. She really didn’t want to cry again in front of Jack.

“Our house is on the market, too.”

“They say it’s picking up, the market,” Melody said, mouthing Walt’s words.

“Fuck the market,” Jack said.

“Yeah.” They both sat chewing their turkey sandwiches for a few minutes, avoiding looking at each other. Then Melody said, “Remember those friends you had in high school?”

“God, is this going to be a lunch of examination and remembrances ? Because I’m not in the mood.”

“No. I have a point.”

“Which friends?”

“All those boys.”

“Again, I’ll need you to be more specific.”

“All those boys that summer. The ones from the pool club. Remember? You’d bring them home and hang out in back under the trees.”

Jack’s eyes lit up. He did remember. The summer before he left for college, he’d brazenly brought home a series of beautiful boys from the family beach club, all of whom worked at the restaurant, clearing tables and refilling water glasses. (The coveted waitstaff jobs in the dining room were doled out to the collegiate sons and daughters of the membership who pocketed the tip money they didn’t really need to fuel their alcohol or drug habits — or both.) Even then, Melody knew there was something different about how Jack and his friends would pull their chaise longues to the far end of the yard and slather each other’s backs with Hawaiian Tropic, misting themselves occasionally with her mother’s little plant atomizer, the pretty brass one meant for the African violets on the sill of the summer porch. Melody would try to find an excuse to wander over whenever she could, offering glasses of lemonade or Fudgsicles from the freezer. The boys would stop laughing and talking as she made her way across the lawn, squinting to see what she had in her hands.

“Want one?” she’d ask. She always brought an extra for herself, hoping to be invited to join them. But Jack always grabbed whatever she had and shooed her away.

“I remember very well,” Jack said to Melody. “The good old days under the pine trees. When life was so much simpler and merry and gay .”

“They were gay, right.”

“Not all of them. Some of them. Enough.”

“Why didn’t they like me?”

“What?”

“They never liked me, those gay boys.” Melody was trying to keep her voice light, casual. “I was always trying to hang around and you all were always trying to get me to go away.”

“You were a little girl.”

“So? I brought you guys stuff. I brought you drinks and ice cream and all I wanted was to maybe play cards or listen to you talk or anything . But you and your friends never liked me. So I was wondering why. If it was something specific.”

Jack sat back and crossed his arms, grinning at Melody like she was telling a particularly excellent joke. He started to laugh, but her expression became so raw, so Melody-walking-wounded that he stopped. “Mel,” he said, putting a hand over hers. “They didn’t hate you. You were adorable, stumbling over the grass in your saggy two-piece bathing suit, carrying a pitcher of warm lemonade or melting Popsicles that tasted like freezer burn. You were adorable.”

Melody stared down at her half-eaten sandwich. She couldn’t look at Jack. She was mortified now that she’d brought the whole thing up and mortified to hear his take on her pilgrimages across the grass and particularly mortified that hearing him say “you were adorable” made her so happy.