June
The thing nobody tells you about a grand gesture is the expiration date.
Ours lasted about four days after the wheels touched down at Teterboro. Four days of Matt looking at
me like he'd actually seen me in Athens, of his phone face-down at dinner, of him asking about my
morning like the answer mattered. And then Tanya's twenty-week scan came back with a shadow on it
that turned out to be nothing—absolutely nothing, a shadow in the literal sense, a positioning issue
resolved in forty minutes— and the gravitational pull of her crisis reasserted itself like it had never left.
Now it's been three weeks since Greece, and Tanya is five months along, and my husband has become
something between a crisis counselor and an on-call concierge for a woman who is not his wife.
"So Greece didn't really change anything," Priya says, spearing a piece of grilled octopus with the
kind of precision she used to reserve for red- penning essays.
We're at a little Greek place in the West Village, which is either poetic or masochistic, I can't decide. I
chose it. I told myself it was because the octopus is good, but honestly I think I wanted to see if saganaki
could taste like the Parthenon at sunrise. It doesn't. It tastes like cheese.
"It changed things," I say. "For four days." "Four days." Priya sets down her fork and looks at me the
way she used to look at students who were about to fail and didn't know it yet. "June."
"He remembered Athens. He remembered a sentence I said eight months ago. He went looking
through old emails to find it." I hear myself and wince, because I'm defending him with the same evidence
I'd use against him. He had to search for me, like I was an archived file.
"And then he spent the whole trip on the phone with Tanya." "Her fiancé was living a double life,
Priya. He had a whole other woman. Danielle. Who also didn't know." I tear a piece of pita I don't want.
"She's pregnant and alone and her entire future collapsed in one weekend. I can't begrudge her
needing I—"
"Matt," Priya finishes. "You can begrudge her needing Matt. You're allowed."
I don't answer, because the honest answer is that I've tried. I've begrudged it in the shower, in the car,
at two in the morning when his phone lights up the ceiling with her name. I've begrudged it so thoroughly
that the begrudging has worn a groove in me, and now it just runs on its own track, background noise.
"She goes to his office now," I say. "Did I tell you that? She just... stops by. Denise lets her up.
Denise, who guards his calendar like a state secret, waves Tanya Curtis through because Matt told her to.
Last week I brought him lunch and she was already there, sitting in his chair, crying about a crib she
couldn't assemble."
"His chair." "His chair. He was perched on the windowsill like a gargoyle, rubbing her shoulder." I
laugh, and it comes out uglier than I intend. "I stood in the doorway holding a forty-dollar sandwich and
felt like the other woman."
Priya reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, and her hand is warm and dry and utterly
steady, and I hate how much it undoes me.
"Here's what I don't understand," she says gently. "Rob's gone. The wedding's off. She's got
money—Rob was paying for everything, sure, but Matt's been covering things since the scandal broke,
hasn't he?"
"He set up an account for the baby. I found the paperwork on the counter." I pause. "He didn't hide it.
I almost wish he had. Hiding it would mean he knows it's a strange thing for a husband to do. Leaving it
out means it never occurred to him I'd have feelings about it."
"June." Priya's voice drops into the register she used to save for the parent-teacher conferences where
someone had to hear a hard truth. "She has money, she has family I—"
“Her sister’s in Portland and her mother is difficult, but present.” I've catalogued all of it, the whole
architecture of Tanya's isolation, because I needed to know whether it was real or constructed. The worst
part is that it's real. She genuinely has no one in this city permanently. She arranged her entire life around
a man who was arranging his around someone else, and now there's just... me and Matt. Her oldest friend
and his wife. That's the whole list.
"She has your husband," Priya says. "Yes," I say. "She does." We sit with that for a while. The waiter
clears our plates and Priya orders baklava for both of us without asking, because she's known me long
enough to know I won't order dessert for myself but will absolutely eat half of hers.
"Did you tell him?" she asks. "About the chair. The sandwich. Any of it?"
"What would I say? 'Please stop comforting your pregnant, abandoned childhood best friend'? I'd
sound like a villain in a movie. I'd be a villain in a movie."
"You'd sound like a wife." There's no answer to that, so I eat the baklava, and we talk about Diane's
daughter's college applications, and Priya doesn't push, because Priya knows exactly how long you can
hold a person underwater with the truth before they stop surfacing.
Matt called while I was walking home. I'd been saving the good news— well, the neutral news—for
the evening: he'd promised to be back by six, and I'd planned to cook the sea bass with the fennel he likes,
and I'd bought a bottle of that Assyrtiko we drank in Athens, because I am apparently the kind of person
who tries to bottle a four-day miracle and serve it with fish.
"June." His voice already has the apology folded into it. I know the sound. I could identify it from a
single syllable, the way you can identify a song from one note. "I'm not going to make it home. I'm so
sorry. Tanya has her anatomy scan—the follow-up, for the thing from before—and Rob was supposed to
go, and obviously he's not I—"
"Obviously." The word lands flat. "She asked me to take her. She's terrified it's going to be bad news
again and she doesn't want to hear it alone." He exhales, and I can picture him exactly—hand in his hair,
pacing his office, the skyline behind him. "I know I said six. I know. If you tell me no, I'll figure
something out. I will. But she's already at the clinic and she's shaking, June. She called me from the
parking garage."
And there it is. The trap with the velvet lining. Because somewhere in midtown there's a frightened
pregnant woman alone in a parking garage, and I am a person, an actual person with a working heart, and
the idea of saying let her shake makes me feel like something scraped off a shoe.
It's an intimate thing, though. That's the part I can't say out loud. A scan is not a ride to the airport. It's
a dark room and a screen and a beating heart on a monitor, and that's the kind of moment that belongs to a
mother and a father, or a mother and her person—and I am watching, in real time, as my husband
becomes her person, and everyone in volved gets to feel noble about it.
"Go," I say. "Of course. Go." "You're incredible. You know that? I love you. I'll make it up to I—"
"It's fine, Matt. Tell her I said good luck." I hang up before he can say the rest, and I stand on the sidewalk
outside our building while the doorman pretends not to have heard any of it.
At home, I put the Assyrtiko in the fridge next to the sea bass I'll cook tomorrow for one. I take out
the baby shower folder instead, because the Marlowe needs final numbers by Friday, and Tanya—poor,
abandoned, five-months-pregnant Tanya—still expects her shower to be perfect, and Matt still expects me
to deliver it.
Forty names. Aunt June—obviously. I work until midnight, and when the door finally opens I don't
look up, because I've learned that looking up is where the hoping starts, and hoping is how he ke eps me.
"How's the baby?" I ask the spreadsheet. "Perfect. Healthy. A girl." His voice goes soft in a way it
hasn't gone soft for me in months. "June. You should've seen her little hands."
I should have, I think, is exactly the right sentence. Just not the way he means it.
"That's wonderful," I say, and I smile at him, and somewhere in Athens there's a version of me still
standing on that hill in the gold light, waiting for a man who brought his body and left himself behind.
He's not coming back for her either.