Class(93)

Matt picked up on the third ring. “Where the hell are you?” he said. She hadn’t even said hello, and he was already screaming at her.

Karen couldn’t entirely blame him. “I’ll explain in a second,” she said. “But please tell me about Ruby first.”

“She swung off the monkey bars and landed on a fucking bike rack—don’t ask me how. But she’s in horrible pain and asking for Mommy.”

“Oh my God, my poor baby,” said Karen. She started to choke up. “I’m going to get the next flight out of here. I just don’t know when that will be. There aren’t that many flights.” A mosquito landed on her arm, and she swatted it away.

“Out of Miami? You can’t get a fucking plane out of Miami?” cried Matt. “Or are you even in Miami? I called you like six times and you never answered. I even called the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne, and they said no one with that name ever checked in.”

Her time was up. Karen saw that now. Matt would hate her forever, but at least she’d be telling the truth. She took a deep breath and found that she felt strangely undaunted by the task ahead. Maybe it was because, in that moment, her husband knew so little about what was actually going on in her life that he might as well have been a stranger. He wasn’t the only one she’d pushed away. When your whole life was a lie, you had no choice but to keep others at bay, lest they get too close and learn the truth. Karen saw that now too—that she’d become an island unto herself. “I’m—I’m actually in the Grenadines,” she told him. “I never went to any conference in Miami.”

There was silence. In the distance, she could hear the ocean swelling, then receding. “You’re having an affair,” Matt said. When Karen didn’t deny it, he burst out laughing. And Karen experienced the honking guffaws that came out of his mouth as more excruciating than any amount of yelling could ever be. He laughed as if her very existence were a joke and therefore not even worthy of anger. Maybe he was right.

“Yes,” Karen finally answered and gulped out, “with Clay Phipps, the hedge-fund guy.” Clay himself was only fifty yards from her, but their association had already begun to seem unreal. “He invited me away for the weekend and I accepted. Before this weekend, we’d slept together only one other time. I tried to put a stop to it after that night. But then at some point I stopped trying…If you want to leave me, I understand. Though I hope you don’t.”

He was laughing again. Then he let loose an exaggerated sigh and announced, “Classy, KK. A really classy conclusion to our decade of marriage. In the meantime, while you’re busy sucking off your billionaire friend in Tahiti, or wherever you are, our daughter had a bad accident. So can you please come home and comfort her?”

Karen cringed at Matt’s crudity. But she deserved it, didn’t she? “Of course. I’m packing right now,” she told him in a whisper.

There was never even a discussion about whether Clay would take Karen back to the city a day early in his own Jetstream. He never even offered. He didn’t offer to help pay for her return flight either. Apparently, they didn’t have that kind of relationship. And the revelation—both of Clay’s stinginess and his selfishness—came as a shocking corrective to the fantasies of domestic harmony that Karen had been busy weaving for the previous twenty-four hours. Angry and worried, she packed her bags and, with a forced smile, said, “Thanks” and “It was fun.”

“I hope your daughter is all right,” Clay told her on her way out, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. But even as he wished her well, he continued to sound hurt. As if Karen were walking out on him. Maybe she was.



Karen took a taxi to the island’s tiny airport and paid an astronomical sum for a one-way ticket on a hopper to Barbados. Fittingly, it was the most nauseating flight of her life. As the plane shook and bounced up and down and from side to side, Karen gripped the seat in front of her, half convinced that she was about to fall out of the sky. When they landed, she felt lucky to be alive.

In Barbados she bought another exorbitantly priced one-way ticket—this one to home. The flight wasn’t due to leave for another two hours. But at least it was a proper plane with an aisle and seats on either side of it…

It was close to midnight when Karen finally landed in the city. She took a taxi straight to the hospital. She found her daughter still awake and lying prostrate on a bed watching her favorite vaguely inappropriate tween Nickelodeon sitcom, her leg elevated and bandaged all the way up to the thigh. There was a giant laceration on the side of her face. “Mommy,” Ruby murmured in a slurred voice.

“My poor baby!” cried Karen, throwing her arms around her daughter. Matt was in a chair at the side of Ruby’s bed, looking at his phone. He didn’t say hello when Karen walked in. Karen didn’t say hello to him either. But after five minutes, she turned to him and said, “Thank you for taking care of Ruby. If you want to go home and get some sleep, I can handle things from here.”

“What a kind offer,” he answered in a deadpan voice. But he accepted it. He buckled his messenger bag, gave Ruby a kiss good-bye on the forehead, told her he loved her, and walked out.

Not feeling that she could abandon her daughter again, not even to go to the hospital commissary, Karen had a candy bar from a nearby vending machine for dinner. Under any other circumstances, the very idea would have nauseated her. But in that moment, high-fructose corn syrup seemed like the least of her problems. Besides, she hadn’t eaten since lunch.