Page 22 of The Wife

“They only went after me because of Luis,” Spencer said.

“Who’s Luis?”

“He’s a Mexican kid in our class. They were telling him that his parents work for free and that they’re taking jobs from all the people who were born here and that they don’t speak English right and stuff. So when I was captain of the kickball team, I picked Luis first and refused to pick any of them. It matters a lot when you get picked.”

My six-year-old son, after everything he had been through, had stuck up for another kid.

“Besides,” he added, “it’s not their beeswax.” He sounded exactly like my mother.

“True, but it’s yours. I didn’t want you to think that you have to keep a secret or tell a lie. All I ask is that if you tell anyone, make sure that I know too, okay?”

I’d been home for five years by then, and in that time I had told only one person where I’d been those years, and that was Susanna. If Spencer’s decisions were going to change that, I needed to be prepared.

“It’s not a secret or a lie,” Spencer said. “It’s not anything, because I don’t remember not living here. And I don’t care where the other half of me came from. I’m a Mullen. I’m from you. And Grandma and Granddaddy.” He added with a smile, “And I was about to kick those kids’ asses before Granddaddy saved them.”

Seven years later, as he carried a plate of eggs and the jar of salsa to the table, Spencer looked over my shoulder and caught me reading a website called Rate My Professors on my iPad, where there’s a chili pepper next to my husband’s name, indicating “hotness.”

Spencer had to know why I was looking. It was now day two, and thePosthad a follow-up story. With nothing new to report, they ran a “Who is Jason Powell?” piece, complete with quotes from online student reviews.“Distractingly smoking.” “Seems like he might be gettable.” “Sexy AF. I’d let him teach me anything he wants!”

We’ve all read this book and seen this movie before: a potentially great man struck down by the lingering shadows of a scandal. Would-be presidents tarnished by extramarital affairs. Celebrities unable to find work after tape recordings emerge of their most hateful comments. Businesses boycotted for being on the wrong side of the cultural tide.

I imagined Jason floating beside the other castaways. I pictured unsold copies of his book being returned to the warehouse, the loss of clients at his consulting company, and the university trying to strip him of tenure. What would happen to Spencer and me? What would everyone say about us?

But if Spencer was worried, he wasn’t letting on. “Dad’s innocent,” he said. “Everyone else will realize that soon enough. And then everything will go back to normal.” There was not a shade of doubt in his voice.

I squeezed his hand and said “I know,” then waited until he left for school to continue reading.

I was alone when I heard a knock at the door an hour later.

I looked through the peephole to see my mother glaring at our hideous brass knocker, the one I called the Vomiting Gargoyle, the one I’d meant to replace since we first closed on the house three years earlier. It took me a second to process that she was actually there, standing on my stoop. Ginny Mullen does not show up on doorsteps in Greenwich Village.

I could count on one hand the number of times she had visited me in the city. Though they weren’t officially related to any of the original Bonacker families of the seventeenth century, she and my father were born and bred Islanders, with at least four generations settled in the Springs on both sides. But where their great-grandfathers were able to work with pride as fishermen and farmers, my parents worked service jobs (handyman for Dad, housework for Mom) for wealthy summer vacationers in the hopes of squirreling away enough money to make it through the rest of the year. My mother associated the city with the people who treated her as something less than human. She famously declined the opportunity to accompany my sixth-grade class to a Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, explaining that all of New York City smelled of sweat, urine, garbage, and dirty money. When I told her I was marrying Jason, she told me, in this order, that she was happy for me, that Jason was a good man, and that “you better not let my grandson turn into a little asshole.”

As I untumbled all the locks, I had no doubt that her sudden appearance in the city was directly connected to the unreturned messages she had left on my phone since Jason became viral fodder the previous morning.

“Hey Mom,” I said as I swung the door open. “What are you doing here? Did you take the train?”

She was in the foyer before I finished my questions. “No, I had Jeeves the butler hire a goddamned limousine.”

“Why did you come all the way into the city?”

“Oh, please, Angela, you’re not the center of the universe. I have an appointment. A specialist. Figured I should at least stop by and see my daughter while they’re ripping off my Obamacare.”

For a second, I wasn’t sure what to believe. Was she lying about the doctor’s appointment to check on me, or had she been calling about a health problem, only to have her only child ignore her calls?

“What kind of specialist? What’s wrong?”

“I’m old,” she said, the words themselves serving as a shrug. I took her response as confirmation that nothing serious was wrong with her health. She was only sixty-five and had never referred to herself as “old” until my father died five years ago. The medical appointment was either fabricated or minor.

“I take it you heard about the incident with Jason and his student?” I led the way into the kitchen and popped a Nespresso pod into the machine, waiting for her to mock the absence of a real pot of coffee.

“So did he do it?”

“Of course not, Mom. He made an innocent comment about her being too young to get married. She took it to be a pass, and then everything got exaggerated.”

Mom took the tiny cup of caffeine from me, complete with an eye roll, then made her way to the refrigerator for a dash of the whole milk I keep around for Spencer.

“Even innocent comments can be loaded,” she said. “In my day, it was called innuendo.”

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