The Transformation of Things (5 page)

For a long time I told myself that the only reason Kelly stayed with him, the only reason she married him, was because Dave had gotten my mother’s approval, and that was something, maybe the last part of my mother, that she couldn’t let go of.

Yet here they still were, thirteen years of marriage later, and you could tell by the way they looked at each other, the way they touched each other in seemingly insignificant moments, that they really did love each other.

And sometimes, that was reason enough for me to hate my sister.

I took my time, taking a shower, getting dressed, hoping that Will might have gone out. But he hadn’t. He was there, sitting
at the kitchen table again, head in his hands, just like he’d been two days earlier. He looked up when he heard me walk into the room. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s all over.” He had tears in his eyes, which I saw him trying to blink away, as if he hoped I wouldn’t notice. I pretended not to.

“Oh, thank God. They’re dropping the charges.” I sat down next to him, the sudden absence of his burden making me feel light, ethereal, almost dizzy, again. I leaned in to hug him, but he shook me off.

“No,” he said. “Danny struck a deal with the prosecutor.”

“What kind of deal?”

“I’ll resign,” he said, refusing to look me in the eye. “And be permanently disbarred.”

“I don’t understand. You’re innocent,” I said.
Resign. Disbarred.
These didn’t feel like words that were even in Will’s vocabulary.

He shook his head. “I’m a judge,” he said. “Was. I was a judge,” he corrected himself. “I know better than anyone that innocent doesn’t always mean something.”

I was shocked to hear Will so cynical, Will, who usually talked about the law as if it was glamorous dinner party fodder. “It does to you,” I pushed.

He shook his head. “It’s complicated, Jen.” He sighed. “Danny says this is the only option, and I trust him.” He paused, then said quietly, “I can’t risk it. Waiting it out. Going to prison.” His voice cracked on the word
prison.

“No,” I said. “Of course you can’t.” But I wanted him to fight, wanted him to wait it out. Innocent people didn’t just roll over and play dead. Innocent people fought.

“I know it’s hard for you to understand,” he said, as if for the first time in a long time, he actually did know what I was thinking. He looked at me, then looked down at the floor, the
bamboo shiny and unflawed. “If you want to leave me I … I …” He held his hands up in the air, not sure how to continue the sentiment.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I huffed. “Do you want me to leave you?” A part of me hoped he would take the bait, the bait he never took, that we could fight, get angry, yell, have makeup sex that felt real and passionate.

“No,” he said quietly. “Of course not.”

“Well, why did you say it?” I egged him on.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just … I don’t know.” He paused. “If you need me I’ll be in the study.”

“The study?” I heard my voice rise.

“Danny faxed me the papers,” he said, and then turned and walked toward the study, as if he hadn’t even noticed, as if my annoyance hadn’t hit him at all.

Five

T
he
Deerfield Daily
did a stellar job of reporting it all, every last-minute detail, in a front-page article replete with enough definitions and fact boxes to make your head spin.
Resignation—notification of leaving a job. Disbarment—taking away officially the right of an attorney to practice law.

Seeing it in print made it feel oddly real, as if the conversation with Will had only been a dream, something that couldn’t have possibly happened until I read someone else’s third-person account of the events.

After I read it, I waited for the phone to ring, for people to call and console me, but only Kelly did. “What are you going to do now?” she asked, and being completely unable to answer her, I lied and said I was in the middle of baking a pie and had to call her back, though I knew I wouldn’t do it right away.

What I already knew for sure was this: It only takes a
moment for your life to change forever. This was something I’d been keenly aware of since the age of thirteen.

All it took was one little thing, one rogue cancer cell that breaks into a lymph node, something microscopic, invisible at first. Until it multiplies, grows, a tumor on your liver and then one on your lungs, until it has gone from a stage one disaster to a stage four catastrophe—a stage from which there is no going back.

So in the quiet of my kitchen, staring at the article that shattered everything I’d thought to be true about Will, I sat there and waited calmly for the rest of my world to explode.

It was Lisa who knocked on my door, the next morning.

When I opened the door, I saw her standing there on the porch, with what looked like a smooshed pineapple upside-down cake in an aluminum pie tin. Four years later, and Lisa had not been able to up the presentation one bit.

“For you.” She handed me the cake.

“You want to come in and have some coffee and a slice?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I shouldn’t. I’m supposed to be making the boys’ Halloween costumes today. And that piece of crap sewing machine is not cooperating.” I was sure it was not a piece of crap sewing machine at all, but a top of the line one that Lisa didn’t really know how to use.

“I’m impressed,” I said, and I really was. “You’re making their costumes.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah well. Chance and Chester wanted to be Peanut Butter and Jelly, and there’s no store in the freakin’ world that sells that. Believe me, I looked.”

I nodded, and I waited for her to say it. Whatever it was
she’d come here to say. She didn’t normally just drop cakes by my house.

“Look,” she finally said. “Oh shit. I feel like such an asshole.”

“Just say it,” I said, dreading whatever it was all the same.

“Bethany’s going to run the auction this year.”

“Okay.” I nodded. And though I probably should’ve been expecting it, I still wanted to yell or scream or throw the cake in her face, but my body, my head felt numb and incredibly listless, so I just stood still.

“And. The ladies don’t think you should … Well, they don’t want you to be in the lunch club anymore. And please, please, please don’t hate me. I’m just the messenger.”

I wondered if Lisa had argued, if she’d stood up for me, and though I wanted to believe she had, I thought she probably hadn’t. Lisa and I were friends, but deep down I knew our friendship was secondary to her role in Deerfield. After all, she’d had that first, before she’d even known me.

“You could leave him, you know. No one would blame you if you did.”

I shook my head. Despite the way the threads of our marriage had come apart lately, I could not imagine walking away, walking out the door for an auction, a lunch club. Her suggestion made me angrier than when Will had suggested it yesterday, because with Will, I’d known deep down that he hadn’t really meant it, that he hadn’t really wanted me to leave. But with her, it seemed like she genuinely thought I should or I might. I glared at her. “He’s innocent, Lisa.”

She cocked her head to the side, and she put on her serious prosecutor face. “It was just easier to believe before he resigned. And got disbarred,” she said. “I mean, that’s some serious shit, that permanent disbarment.”

“Thanks for the cake.” I held it up and pasted on a fake smile, an I-don’t-want-to-discuss-this-with-you-you-crappy-little-friend smile. Then I closed the door, before she could say another word.

“Who was at the door?” Will asked. He emerged from his study, clad in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, his face stubbly from a week without shaving, his hair rumpled and uncombed.

“No one,” I said, walking toward the trash can and dumping the cake in, tin and all. “Maybe we should move,” I said. “Start over somewhere else, where no one’s ever heard of us.”

“I’m not going to hide,” he said, as if it would be the act of hiding that would actually make him look guilty. “Besides,” he said, “in this market, we’d never sell the house.”

I turned to face him, looked him solidly in the eye, and said, “What now then?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and then he turned and went back in his study without saying another word.

That night, as I got ready for bed, my hands felt shaky, my heart felt like it was pounding too fast, out of control, and my head was throbbing worse than it ever had. I took my herbs with a full glass of water, and then I brushed my teeth and got into bed and waited. Waited to feel calm.

Will always knew what to do, always had a plan. The fact that now he didn’t almost scared me more than anything else that had happened in the past week.

But after a few minutes, I did feel more relaxed. My body felt limp and warm and soft. My headache dulled to a mild twinge just above my eyebrows.
Ethel knows her stuff,
I thought, feeling a true sense of tranquillity from the calming herb for the first time.

Just on the brink of sleep, I thought about Lisa’s messed-up
pineapple cake rotting in my trash can. I wondered if Will would remember to take out the trash, or if I would go down, find it there in the morning, and be forced to rehash my horrible moments on the porch.

I was standing in Lisa’s kitchen. I recognized it from having had Ladies Lunch Club here—the pale green color, the thick maple cabinets that nearly reached the ceiling, the custom slate tile backsplash that matched the slate tile floor. I was walking around, from refrigerator to counter and back again, taking out ingredients, squinting to read the recipe without my glasses. Glasses? I didn’t wear reading glasses.

But yes, I did. I picked them up. Lisa’s reading glasses—red-rimmed and oval, on a diamond chain that Barry had bought for Mother’s Day. I put them on, and I could see.

I read the recipe for the cake. It was my mother-in-law’s recipe. I thought, That bitch is freakin’ Betty Crocker, and every time she looks at my cakes she grimaces. So my cakes look like shit? Big freakin’ deal. They still taste good.

I measured out the ingredients, just so, dumped them in a bowl, melted butter at the bottom of the glass pan, added brown sugar, pineapple, cake batter, and then voilà, put it in the oven for thirty minutes. A cake for Jen, I thought. And now I could be freakin’ Marie Antoinette. Let her eat cake.

I went to the bathroom, and then I stared at myself in the mirror, tried hard to make myself smile. Even smiling, I looked pale, listless, ghostlike.

The phone rang. I walked slowly to get it. Something told me it could be Chance and Chester’s school. Maybe they were hurt. Or sick. But the fog in my brain made it hard to worry, to think or feel. Everything was dulled and blurry. It felt hard to move, as if the air were thicker than water. And I was tired. So, so tired.

I picked up the phone, on the fifth ring.

The lady on the other end informed me that Chester had forgotten his lunch.

Of course I’ll bring it down, I said, with the fake joy of someone who loved this fucked-up life, the life of someone who baked and sewed and cleaned and took care of everyone. My voice sounded ethereal, estranged, as if it was not coming from me at all but from somewhere just a little distance away, like the radio on the kitchen counter.

I lay down on the couch and thought about getting Chester’s lunch, but I knew I had to wait for the cake anyway, and I was tired, so I threw a blanket over myself and closed my eyes.

Eventually I heard the buzzer for the cake, from far, far away, as if it was cutting through something like ice, to make its way toward me.

I woke up sweating, tangled up in the sheets, breathing shallow, rapid breaths. “Jen, what is it?” Will whispered. He sounded absolutely awake, and I wondered if he hadn’t even fallen asleep yet, though it seemed to be almost dawn.

“Lisa’s kitchen,” I said.

“You were dreaming.”

“But it felt so real.” I thought about the feeling of fog, the
deep and overwhelming sensation of trying to rise above a sea that was slowly pulling me under, and I could still feel it, still feel her.

“You should write it down,” Will said. “Isn’t that what writers do with dreams? Keep a dream journal or something?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

But after I watched him roll over and close his eyes, I got out of bed, went into the computer room, and rifled through the drawers until I found an old reporter’s notebook.