The parking lot—the most coveted parking in all of Rye, according to some—is mostly empty because of the weather. Natalie checks in with Deb at the front desk. A couple of diehards are swimming laps in the pool, and the cute teenage lifeguards look both bored and ready to blow the whistle at the first sign of lightning.
“Want anything?” Natalie asks, pointing to the snack bar.
“No, thank you. You?”
“Nope. Big breakfast at The Friendly Toast. I may never eat again.” She leads him to a table under the canopy, a coveted spot in the sun, really the only option in this rain. They look out at the ocean. They’re a couple of hours after high tide and the water is beginning to recede, but the waves are choppy and big.
“Is it possible that the kids grew?” asks Austin.
“Since Sunday?”
“Geez, it’s only been sinceSundaythat I haven’t seen them?” He shakes his head. “Feels like a month since you left.”
“Yeah, to me too,” she says. “Where do we start?” She wants to put her hands all over her husband. She wants to anchor him down to make sure he can’t go anywhere without her.
“You go first.”
“Okay.” She’s been giving this alotof thought, what she would say when she and Austin had a chance to talk it out. Natalie looks hard at the rock wall along the edge of the building, reinforced after the storm two and a half years ago that wreaked such damage along the shoreline. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how we got from where we were to here.” Deep breath, then the plunge. “I gave up a lot of things, Austin. I gave up a job I loved, a job I was really good at, a city I liked living in, to move up to the farm.”
“Yes,” says Austin. He takes her hand. “You did. But before that, I gave up my world to try to live in yours. I left Montana, and my family. I moved across the country, Natalie. I’d lived out west my entire life, and I left it behind because that’s how much I believed in us.”
He doesn’t say this with bitterness: it’s a fact, like that day’s price for milk or the size of a specific milking stall. She clocks the past tense:believed.Does he not believe any longer?
“But,” she says. She takes a breath, tries to absorb what Austin is saying before moving on to her own point. “I mean, you’re right.” Pause, breath. “But you’re the one who wanted to leave Boston—”
He closes her hand into a fist and squeezes it before letting it go. “We both wanted to leave Boston.”
“You first. I liked my job. You hated yours.”
“We were both worn out.”
“We were. Butyoufound the farm, and you wanted it so badly. We moved there for you. And I found a way to make it work, to make itprofitableeven, to help our family. I worked really hard on all of that. That magazine piece was supposed to be a big deal, our first big media hit! You should have known that. But I feel like you spit all over it and you didn’t realize. Or care. Even this week, when I tried to tell you, you didn’t care.”
Austin is perplexed, she can tell by his expression.It was just a joke,he’ll probably say.
“It was just a joke,” he says. Bingo, thinks Natalie. She really does know him so well. “I didn’t mean anything by it!”
She casts about in her mind for a Theresa-ism to help her through. The one about asking before you pet a strange dog won’t help, nor will a reminder not to put her drink down at a nightclub. She looks around. She was a little kid here, then a bigger kid, then a teenager. When you’re sixteen you’re allowed on the upper deck. Now the deck has couches but when Natalie was a teenager they made do with old lounge chairs. She feels Theresa, all the dinners they ate here, home-cooked food packed so carefully to enjoy among friends at these tables, bottles of wine poured into plastic goblets. The Third of July parties, the fireworks. Her eyes move over the red geraniums that line the pool. The red geraniums have been a part of the club as long as Natalie has been alive, and they will continue after she’s gone. No person is immutable, but these flowers are. She folds her hands on the table.
“Is there any chance,” she begins, “that you did know you were doing damage? Like, without one hundred percent consciously realizing it? And that you did it anyway.” Austin starts to protest and Natalie raises a finger. “Wait. Think about it, okay? Think about it before you answer. Not so we can fight about it, but so we can figure this out. I know you didn’t want that reporter nosing around our home. I know you don’t love having our kids on social media. Is there any chance that you knew you were sabotaging the article when you said what you said?”
She watches Austin sit with it. It’s hard for Natalie not to fill the silence; it’s always her instinct to do that. It’s almost impossible to let the quiet live and breathe, to be a black-and-white picture that Austin fills in with his own colors.
“Maybe,” he says finally. “Yeah, it’s possible.”
Natalie sucks in her breath. This is where a real fight could start. The triumphantly wronged party, the retreating of the person who committed the wrong. She makes herself pull back. She thinks about what her parents might have done if faced with a situation of equal import. Theresa and Calvin were married for such a long time; of course they hadn’t agreed on everything! But they treated the marriage with respect, no matter how angry they were. She wants that too.
“Why—” she starts to say. Then, “How—” Then, finally, “You...” She can’t get out a full sentence. So she takes a deep breath, lets it out. Another, then another.
Austin has his wrists resting on the tops of his knees, his hands clasped together. He seems to be considering the space between his feet. When he starts talking, he lifts his eyes to meet Natalie’s. “Okay, here it is. Yes, the answer is definitely yes. I did sabotage it, and I think I know why.”
“Why?” She wants to know, and she also doesn’t want to know.
“You aren’t going to want to hear this. But. I feel like you do a lot of what you do for the camera. Like, it’s not even real. Like you don’t love our life the way you used to. You just love how our life looks to the outside world.”
Natalie feels like his words have slapped her. She puts her hand to a cheek, almost expecting to feel some heat there. “What?How could you think that? Iloveour life. You know I do!”
Austin shakes his head. “When we started, when we got the farm, I know you did. I mean, I know you sacrificed for it, and it was hard, but you seemed really happy.”
