Page 10 of The Husband Hour
“Well, you’d be more in the swing of things. Less isolated. It might be fun. Even in the winter, you’d have steady business.” Lauren could hear the subtext: And you might meet someone.
“Thanks, but I’m happy where I am,” she said evenly. She couldn’t get angry with her mother. After all, her mother never got impatient with her. Beth, on top of the long hours she had always put in at Adelman’s, helped run Lauren’s foundation. It was so much work, more than Lauren had imagined when she began with the simple idea of raising money to donate to various causes in Rory’s memory. Her favorite organization was Warrior Camp, a place for soldiers to heal from the trauma of combat. And yet, as passionate as she felt about this work, when she was invited to fund-raisers or meetings, she would not leave the island.
Her mother glanced at her father: Well, I tried.
Silence fell over the table. The only sound was Ethan crunching on the mini–pizza bagels. Things were always awkward when the whole family was together, but it felt especially weighted tonight, and Lauren remembered what Stephanie had said about her mother seeming upset about something—although she had put it a little more crudely, as Stephanie tended to do. She watched her mother, looking for a clue that something was wrong, and decided it was probably just Stephanie’s divorce setting her mother on edge. Of course her parents had to be upset about it, though they couldn’t have been any more surprised by it than Lauren was. After Stephanie had gotten pregnant by “some rando,” as she put it, and decided to keep the baby, there was probably little that could surprise them.
“Speaking of Simon Hanes,” her mother said suddenly, “his son Neil is here for the summer. I’m sure you two met at some point. Very good-looking young man.”
“I literally just ran into him a few hours ago,” Lauren said.
“You didn’t! What a coincidence!” her mother said, way too delighted.
“You should spend some time with him. Very ambitious young man. He’s a screenwriter now,” her father added. “Moved to LA after graduating from Penn.”
“Yeah, no, thanks,” Lauren said.
“I’ll spend some time with him,” said Stephanie.
“You’re not even divorced yet!” their father said.
“Oh, as if that’s the issue. I could be totally single, never married, and you’d still only think of setting him up with Lauren.”
Lauren glanced uneasily at Ethan. “Hon, can you get me a bottle of water from the fridge?” she asked, and he dutifully scooted away. She turned to Stephanie. “Why do you have to make everything about you?”
“Like you don’t? Your whole Jackie Kennedy routine is getting old.”
“Really? You’re criticizing my life?”
In that moment, it was hard to believe they had once been close. But they had. Lauren, dark-haired, dark-eyed, quiet and watchful; Stephanie, blond and blue-eyed, outgoing and a chatterbox. A year apart, their mother called them “the twins.”
Whatever shortcomings Lauren had, she knew her sister would fill the gap. And vice versa. When Stephanie was flailing in ninth-grade math—tripped up by quadratic functions in algebra—Lauren, a year younger, tutored her. Stephanie might have been the blonde, but Lauren was the golden child—well behaved, smart, caring.
Stephanie had set the course of their school years when, struggling academically, she’d fought her parents when they tried to switch her from public middle school to private school. Why didn’t she want to go to private school? “Because it sucks,” she told Lauren. And so when Lauren finished elementary school, she too chose public school.
“Baldwin Academy is so much calmer. More intimate. It’s a better fit for you,” her mother had argued. This was a time when Lauren was struggling a bit with her weight. The public-school kids could be cruel. Of course, private-school girls were no better. But when parents pay twenty grand a year, the administration has an incentive to enforce some semblance of decorum. Lauren didn’t care; she was going to school with her big sister.
She was less confident that she’d made the right decision when high school loomed. By that time, Lauren had grown to her full height, five foot six. Her high cheekbones and brown eyes had won her comparisons to the lead actress on her favorite show, Alias. She was finally pretty. Nowhere near Stephanie’s loud, flagrant beauty, but pretty enough. Still, starting high school was scary, and starting high school at a big place like Lower Merion was terrifying. So many things could go wrong. You could end up anonymous—a loser. You could end up harassed—tormented on the notorious Freshman Day, the first Friday the thirteenth of the school year. Rumor had it that some girls got their entire ponytails cut off, and some boys were stuffed into lockers.
On the first day, some of Lauren’s friends’ older siblings pretended they didn’t know the younger ones, warned them not to even acknowledge them in the halls. But the scheduling gods had smiled on Lauren and given her the same lunch period as Stephanie. Stephanie, her long blond hair loose and lustrous, her perfect body poured into jeans and a ribbed tank top from a recent shopping spree at Urban Outfitters, had put her arm around Lauren and taken her from table to table.
“This is my baby sister,” Steph had said, first to the sophomores, then to a few tables of juniors. “Don’t fuck with her.”
“Hey, baby sister,” a few boys had said mockingly.
But no one fucked with her. Not once; not ever.
As teenagers, the sisters never had a reason to be competitive. They didn’t want the same things.
At least, not until Rory.
Now, Stephanie pushed her chair away from the table.
“Where are you going?” her mother said.
“Out.”
Stephanie stormed off. Lauren sighed. Drama queen.
