“Fran, that’s insane.” Augusta stared at her with disbelief. “You’re a couple.”
“But we don’t share accounts. He has his money, I have mine. It’s not fair for me to ask him.”
“Fran,” Augusta said firmly. “I know I’m the last person who should be giving advice on marriage right now, but from the outside it looks like you’re making life too complicated. RJ loves you. He wants to marry you. He’d be happy to share his money with you. You’ve been holding him at arm’s length for years—but why? Just let him help.”
“I don’t know if I want to,” Fran whispered. “Something happened in Hawaii.”
“What?” Augusta stared at Fran. Now that Augusta was looking closely, Fran seemed tired; the circles around her eyes were dark and puffy. Her T-shirt was an old one, her hair was in a messy ponytail, which was sort of par for the course, but all together Augusta saw that Fran was hanging on by a thread.
“I met someone,” Fran whispered. “His name is Cal. We didn’t kiss or anything, but I fell asleep in his bed.” She started to cry.
“Oh, Fran.” Augusta moved next to her and put her arm around her shoulders. “But you didn’t kiss him. You just slept!”
“I feel so guilty, but I don’t even know if it was a mistake, like, I might do it again. I felt something so intense with Cal. When I was with him, I felt like I was twenty again, just so easy and light. And I took pictures of us together and I can’t stand to delete them, and I hid them on my phone, and I just feel like the worst person in the world.”
“Honey. You’re not the worst person in the world. You’re just in this in-between thing where you don’t get what you need from RJ, but you aren’t allowed to get it anywhere else. You’re stuck.” Augusta rubbed Fran’s arm.
“I love RJ, but while I was in Hawaii a switch flipped for me. All these things I used to find cute and funny now feel childish and dumb. He’s loud and he’s messy and he’s just like another kid for me to take care of. He’s always been like this, but suddenly it just annoys the fuck out of me.”
“Living with a man is always kind of annoying.”
“But when I read the way Caroline Lash wrote about him—it was so mean, but something had a shimmer of truth. He just looked like such a jackass. It’s like the optical illusion of the vases that are also people’s faces—once you see it you can’t stop.”
“Yeah, Caroline’s story was…revealing.” Augusta frowned.
“I’m so sorry about everything,” Fran said. “I’m so sorry I told her about Colin. I was overwhelmed by what I did with Cal and I was having an emotional meltdown and I just sort of vomited it out. It was such a betrayal and I’m really, really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Augusta said, and held Fran close, and Fran started cryingeven harder, shoulders shaking until she calmed down, wiping her eyes and nose. Augusta kissed her cheek and Fran smiled at her sadly.
They moved on, feeding the children sandwiches, fixing hats, spearing straws into juice boxes, and helping locate towels, but Augusta kept thinking about Fran and Caroline. Fran had been nothing but kind to the girl. She’d been the most welcoming of the entire group, and this was how Caroline had repaid her. It made Augusta understand why her circle of friends was so tight and closed off, why Greenhead and Gloucester were too. Every time you opened yourself up to an outsider you made yourself vulnerable. There was safety in old friendships, even if those friendships were imperfect, in knowing the loyalty ran so deep. Caroline had elbowed her way into their lives and then pulled out a knife.
Caveman
Every day the children brought something disgusting home from camp: A plastic tub of slime that was studded with bits of dirt and hair, a dreamcatcher made of yarn and crusty sharp seagull feathers, a rock glitter-painted green, a robot constructed of empty toilet paper tubes from the bathrooms of strangers. Augusta pretended to admire it all and then ordered everyone into the bath, dumping in half a cup of strawberry-scented soap. She scrubbed their feet until the facecloth turned brown, she rubbed at blue marker on wrists and elbows, and she even tried to get at the dirt under their fingernails with a nailbrush until their screaming and crying became too operatic. They looked like they had been gardening, like they were potters, like they had been scratching their way through underground tunnels. They were horrifying, they were summer children.
When the email about head lice came from the camp nurse Augusta wrinkled her nose and felt sorry for the parents who had been so caught off guard. Didn’t they know to label their kids’ hats, to tie their daughters’ long hair into tight ponytails, to keep an eye out for telltale scratching? She ran a dutiful comb over Charlie and Jane, but apparently the main infester was a little girl named Scarlet who was in the tadpole group, and neither of Augusta’s children played with her. Augusta said a brief prayer of thanks for this small mercy amid the other chaos of disrupted summertime childcare.
Her babysitter, Zoey, had been a huge help since the end of the school year, and had sort of been absorbed into the family life. Augusta paid her to come three hours five days a week, from camp pickup through dinner, but Zoey ended up staying later most nights, lingering over olives and leftover grilled cheese, the kids eating popsicles in front of the iPad while Augusta folded laundry and talked about Zoey’s girlfriend. Zoey and Meg would be going to different colleges in the fall and couldn’t decide whether or not to stay together. Zoey wanted to see other people, but her girlfriend was going to school in Virginia and worried everyone there would be straight.
“You can’t stay with Meg just because she wants a safety net in case her school isn’t gay enough,” cautioned Augusta. “You need to meet as many people as you can in college. You should date twenty people before you get serious about anyone.”
“Is that what you did?” asked Zoey.
“Sort of?” Augusta tossed a pair of balled socks into the pile on the sofa. “We didn’t really ‘date’ in college, we mostly ‘hung out’ or ‘hooked up,’ but I learned a lot about myself and about what I did and didn’t want in a partner.” Augusta had gone out with the bratty son of a DC lawyer who spent more time with his weed dealer than with Augusta. She had gone out with a lacrosse-playing chem major who cheatedon her with his study partner. Her senior year she had gone out with the editor of the school paper, who laughed so hard at his own jokes he once gave himself the hiccups.
“Do you think if you dated more people, you still would have married Colin?” Zoey asked.
“Yes,” Augusta admitted. “I had been in love with Colin since I was a kid. I just didn’t imagine he’d ever pick me.” The first months of being with Colin were the happiest of Augusta’s whole life. It was unreal that anyone ever got to feel that way. It had been like drugs, or like taking off a bad bra at the end of a long day. She couldn’t have walked away, even if she had wanted to. Now that he was gone, she missed him so much she woke up crying in the night. She couldn’t eat. She was drinking too much. She had to watch a YouTube video to figure out how to override the settings on the air conditioning. Colin had been in charge of that.
“So why are you and Colin separated?” Zoey asked curiously.
“Because he lied to me,” answered Augusta. She didn’t know how much Zoey had heard about the story, they hadn’t discussed anything except for the fact that Colin had moved out.
“My dad cheated on my mom when I was younger,” Zoey said quietly. She had put olives on her fingers and was nibbling them off one at a time. “He moved out for a year and then she forgave him, and he moved back in.”
“When was that?”
“I was in seventh grade?”
