The Friends We Keep(65)

“Me neither.” Maggie gave a tight smile.

One of the ladies looked at her watch. “We’re ready to sit down when you are.”

“Great,” said Emily. “Let’s serve the first course in about ten minutes.”



* * *



? ? ?

Maggie had lost count of how much she had had to drink. In the old days she refused to drink in front of Ben, lest it encourage him or pull him off the wagon. These days she didn’t care; it was easier to get through a night like this when she had something to take the edge off.

There was a new woman in town who apparently sold marijuana edibles. They were all the rage among the yummy mummies, according to Karen, who said she’d long ago eschewed the witching hour glass of wine for a gummy bear or a pot lollipop.

Karen had bought some lollipops and given a couple to Maggie, but she hadn’t tried them. Her only experience with weed had been long ago at university, and all she could remember was falling asleep.

Her drug of choice, if you could call it that, was red wine, and tonight she had had just enough to be able to ignore Ben, who was laughing so hard, he was wheezing. But everyone around the table, apart from Maggie, seemed hooked on every word of the funny story he was telling.

“. . . so the woman in the comments section said how horrific foxes were, and that no one would be saying that if a fox had massacred their chickens and turkeys, and a man wrote underneath . . .” Ben couldn’t speak for a few moments, loose with laughter as he wiped the tears from his eyes. “‘My chickens are cunts.’”

The table exploded into raucous laughter, except for Maggie, who managed a wry smile. She had laughed out loud when she read the original David Sedaris story, but it wasn’t quite as funny for her, coming from the mouth of her husband, who, at that moment, was shaking with laughter so much that he spilled his red wine.

Maggie looked around the table, at everyone having a great time, all of them adoring Ben, whose introvert tendencies went AWOL when he drank. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and as she passed Ben’s chair, he reached for her.

“My beautiful wife,” he crooned, holding out his hand as she sidestepped his grasp.

“Sorry!” she lied. “Desperate for the loo.”



* * *



? ? ?

By half past eleven, Maggie was done. James had broken out his vintage whiskey collection, and Maggie didn’t want to watch her husband get legless.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Too much red wine and a bit headachy,” she said, kissing Emily and thanking her.

“I’ll put Pete in charge of getting Ben home safely.” Karen put her arms around Maggie and gave her a tight hug. “Not that he’s much better. Boys will be boys, eh?” She laughed as Maggie attempted a smile.

“You don’t need to put Pete in charge of Ben. It’s fifty yards away!” said Emily, who was herself a bit tipsy. “I’m so glad we did this. Your husband is hilarious. We ought to do this much more often. How long has it been since we got together? I think it’s been years! We definitely won’t leave it this long again!” She gave Maggie another hug before Maggie stepped out the door, grateful for the cold air as she walked home.

She fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, but woke up, sometime later, thinking she had heard a bang. She turned the light on in the hallway and called out.

“Hello? Ben?” There was no answer. She walked downstairs, seeing the front door was wide open, and the grandfather clock in the hallway said it was twenty past one. She closed the door and locked it, knowing that the bang must have been Ben.

She found him in his office, his “nightcap” spilled all over the floor, Ben slumped against his desk, blacked out, with vomit on his shirt.

Maggie stood in the doorway, looking at her husband. In the old days she would have forced him awake, taken off his clothes and thrown them straight in the wash, scrubbed the carpet clean, and helped him upstairs to bed. She would have been furious, upset, would have insisted they have “a talk” in the morning, when he was sober.

This time she felt nothing. She backed out of the room, turned off the lights, and closed the door. Let Ben clean up his mess when he finally woke up.





PART III


   present day





twenty-nine


- 2019 -



Maggie paused in the hallway, where silver-framed photographs clustered on a polished walnut table, and picked up her wedding photo. There they were, her little group, Evvie and Topher, she and Ben looking so young, so unprepared for what the future would bring. She should have put the photograph away after the funeral, but she felt too guilty. Her penance was keeping the photograph out, pretending that their marriage had been perfect, that Ben had been perfect, even now, three years after his death.

Much of the time Maggie still couldn’t believe Ben was dead. Oh, what irony, that he was on his way out to try to surprise her in a last-ditch bid to save the marriage, just as Maggie had decided to leave. They had been unhappy for so many years, this house that they had both once loved feeling like a prison, a constant reminder of what they didn’t have, neither children nor, as time went on, anything that bound them together, until the wedge between them became insurmountable.

Ben dealt with it by falling off the wagon more times than Maggie could remember. She knew each time he had started drinking again, and every muscle in her body would tense as he lay beside her snoring, as the same old patterns started again, her monitoring the alcohol everywhere in the house, him lying about where he had been and what he had been doing.