“We’ve been seeing each other on and off since 1989.”
I almost spit my black-eyed-pea cake right across the table. I didn’t want to, but I laughed incredulously. “So the reason he looks at you like you’re on fire is because youareon fire.”
Sally looked down at her hands. “I’m so ashamed.”
“Does Doug know?”
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “Doug has known forever.”
“And he’s okay with it?”
Mom rolled her eyes. “The whole thing is utterly absurd.”
I shook my head and put my hand on the table. “Wait a minute. Is that why Doug didn’t come with us to the beach? Because you were sneaking out with Kyle?”
Sally scrunched her nose in a gesture that revealed everything.
I stared at her in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You mean to tell me that the man you have been seeing on the side since before I even existed—who your husband knows about—is dating your sister?”
Sally nodded. “Kyle told me that he had had enough and that I had to choose. Of course, I don’t want to break up my marriage, so I chose Doug.” She inhaled. “It has been like living without water, but I chose to stick it out.”
“So he—very maturely—chose to start ‘dating’ Lauren,” Mom said, making air quotes.
My phone rang. It was Ben, and, even though I missed him like crazy and wanted to talk to him, this was like one of those really great stories inUs Weeklythat you don’t want to read while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store but you can’t possibly resist.
“How could you even want to be with someone who would do that to you?” Mom asked, shaking her head. “You’re a grown-up, and they’re playing this ridiculously childish game with you.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Forget wanting to be with him. How could you be married to a man who was okay to sit back and let you have an affair for your entire life together?”
Sally leaned back heavily on the bench and sighed. As if Mom and I had never even asked her a question, she said, “What if Momma knows?”
Mom shook her head.
“Lovey knows everything,” I said.
Sally gave me a downtrodden look.
“What?” I asked. “She does. She knows everything; she just has the decency not to say it.”
Mom gasped. “That comment on the beach!”
I nodded furiously.
“Oh, God,” Sally said, laying her head on the table. “About how she was so glad I married Doug and not Kyle.” She sat back up. “I’ve been worrying about Lauren telling her, when, in reality, she has known the entire time.”
“Wait,” Mom said. “So you think Lauren knows?”
Sally laughed cruelly. “Hell yeah, she knows. She’s playing the most vicious game of chicken with me that I’ve ever encountered.”
“Ohhhh,” Mom said knowingly. “So her parading around bragging about how rich and charming and funny he is is her seeing how long it takes to break you.”
“This is the most dysfunctional thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
I was sort of impressed, though. I mean, here was this squeaky-clean woman that you would never imagine had even had sex were it not for the children to prove it. And yet, here she was, gallivanting all over the state in the midst of a totally torrid affair for decades without anyone being the wiser. I looked at her milky skin, relatively wrinkle-free and, despite the circumstances, generally unworried in appearance. I thought of Ben, of the physical pull my body felt toward his, of the gnawing feeling in the back of my mind I always had knowing that I was away from him. I craved his touch and his attention. And so, in that way, I could relate to what Sally was going through.
I just had no idea that it could still be happening to a sixty-year-old.
I shook my head again. “So what are you going to do?”
