Cord ran to find a dish towel, realizing in moments that his dog had eaten every last handmade noodle. And in the kitchen, all that remained of the “Marry Me?” torte were a few wet crumbs. Cord’s buzzer rang, and Giovanni’s rich voice came over the intercom. “You gave me a key!” Giovanni sang. “I’m letting myself in!”
As he surveyed the wreckage of his careful plans, Cord jammed his fists into his eyes, breathing in deeply. From the bedroom, his beloved dog continued to retch.
Giovanni burst into the apartment, a bottle of Italian lemonade in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other. “Thank God it’s Friday!” he cried, but then he halted. Bewilderment transformed his young and lovely face. “Honey?” he said.
Cord swiped the tears from his eyes. Giovanni came close, wrapped Cord in his arms, and rested his head against Cord’s chest. Franklin slunk into the kitchen and collapsed at their feet. “What is it?” said Giovanni. “Honey, what is it?”
“It’s…” said Cord. How could he possibly express all the feelings crashing around inside him? His knowledge that he would be abandoned, coupled with the fierce desire to hang on to love…his sense that something was wrong and that he had to fix it, but had no idea what it even was? His yearning to be drunk and how much he missed his mother and the way Giovanni’s smile changed the color of everything, brightening his days as if a heavy curtain had finally been lifted…
“What?” said Giovanni.
“It’s that I love you,” whispered Cord.
REGAN SLOWED HER WALMART shopping cart and allowed herself to touch a bag of rat poison. What drink would mask the taste of a RatX pellet? A strong cinnamon latte from Starbucks? She imagined the first sip, the strychnine convulsions beginning…But no: She’d already run that scenario. As appealing as it was, rat poison wasn’t going to play out. And Regan was in for the long game.
After her Walmart errands, Regan headed to her favorite spot, Monet’s Playhouse at the Oglethorpe Mall. When she had begun painting pottery, Regan had pretended she was waiting for a friend, or creating a gift for a child’s birthday. She’d even dragged her daughters along a few times, enduring their fidgety annoyance to get her fix. But she was beyond the subterfuge now. Kendall, the Monet’s Playhouse manager, knew and accepted Regan, who perhaps kept them afloat.
“Oh, hey, Mrs. Willingham,” said Kendall, as Regan perused the ceramic figurines.
“Good morning, Kendall,” said Regan.
“You doing good?” said Kendall.
Regan nodded, smiling, not correcting Kendall’s grammar. She picked up a large white dinosaur bank. She could paint it turquoise, or green.
“There’s a monkey bank, too,” said Kendall. “And one there with two cats snuggled up.”
Regan nodded. She knew about the monkey bank: she had three of them in her secret pottery cupboard at home. She had four dinosaurs, too, and countess salt and pepper shakers, plates, platters, and ceramic wine goblets. Clearly, her Monet’s Playhouse purchases were not items she’d actually use. But sitting inside the cheerful studio made her calm. In Monet’s Playhouse, Regan could ignore the desperate sense that her life was a car that had hit a wall, crumpled, and remained still and broken, no air bags deploying, no metaphorical ambulance en route. No: Her life had sailed over the guardrail into the air, then landed in an ocean of dread and ennui, sinking slowly, its inhabitant (Regan) running out of time, gasping, her metaphorical seatbelt (a symbol for marriage if ever there was one) jammed and holding her tight against her seat, ensuring her flailing, watery demise.
Regan listened to Kendall’s boy-band playlist as she squeezed paint onto a clean palette. She selected brushes of various sizes.
Regan had thought she’d be an artist once. Sometimes, when she opened her secret pottery cupboard, sitting cross-legged on the floor and admiring her glossy creations, she felt as if perhaps she was an artist. Sure, she’d jettisoned her schooling to hold on to Matt, to make a generous, lush life that was the opposite of her penny-pinching childhood. But Regan went to the mall every few days and painted, feeling as if she were under a happy spell, making something from generic molds, something that hadn’t existed before and wouldn’t exist without her careful, constant work. And wasn’t that the point of art? (And, come to think of it, motherhood? Life itself?)
When Regan had finished painting the dinosaur bank, she gave it to Kendall for firing and set down her credit card.
After Monet’s Playhouse, Regan walked around the mall, searching for things she could acquire that would make her feel less like a goldfish trapped in a Ziploc bag. She caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window. She was no longer adorable. She hid her formerly size-six body under size-fourteen dresses. Her thighs rubbed together when she walked. She’d had babies, she’d nursed babies, and she tried to be proud of the havoc this had wreaked on her body. Regan loved preparing—and enjoying—good food. Her mother had spent her life on one diet or another and Regan was trying to set a healthier example for her girls. Still, being invisible instead of cute kind of sucked.
In front of a travel agency, Regan stared at a poster of a chaise longue and sun umbrella. The tagline read Get away…to anywhere but here!
Regan put her hand to her throat. She felt choked with yearning. “I want to get away,” she said, gazing at the pink chair, the fruity drink beside it. Rat poison, pillow suffocation, cutting the brakes on the Tundra truck…but none of these plans would result in what she most desired, which was to be free.
Regan made herself walk past the travel agency without going inside. She was due to volunteer in the gymnasium at Savannah Country Day in a half hour. It was an expensive school, but every time Regan drove up to the campus and saw her children in their smart uniforms, she felt a surge of accomplishment. Her father had been a lawyer, but after he died, money was tight. Charlotte had kept them afloat by getting her real estate license.
Charlotte had been a mediocre realtor. Once in a while, she’d sell a big house to a retiree from somewhere expensive or for a friend from church, and these sales supported them during Regan’s high school years. Regan could remember lean times, too: Charlotte hunched over a stack of bills wearing her CVS reading glasses and pecking at a calculator. There were weekends when Charlotte brought Regan and her homework to her open houses, pasting on a smile when lookie-loos meandered in. At those times, Regan was touched by her mother’s effort, but it was hard to see Charlotte later in these evenings: exhausted, worried, eating a sad McDonald’s cheeseburger for dinner.
Somehow, Charlotte had found enough money for Cord and Lee to finish up at Savannah Country Day, then hightail it out of town to college. But Regan was sent to public school in her sister’s hand-me-down sweater sets. Her art teacher called her gifted, but there was no money for “extras,” such as art classes at the Telfair or SCAD.