The Neighbor's Secret(25)

FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER

Lena didn’t care about the girls. Her attitude toward Tim’s affairs had evolved through the years. What started out tender had callused.

She cared about the scene he was making at her party, though.

He was at the far end of the lawn, by the lilac bushes, broadcasting in a drunken foghorn voice to an audience of twenty-somethings that the beaches in Mauritius were otherworldly.

Oh, Tim, you urbane sophisticate, you.

Lena tried to figure out which young woman he was trying to impress. The well-endowed blonde, probably.

“The opposite of you,” Mel had once pointed out helpfully, after Lena had described Tim’s type.

Thankfully, Rachel appeared oblivious. She was distracted by something tonight. Lena suspected a crush on Jett the rented bartender, who was stringy-haired and too-cool.

Rachel had beamed when he’d showed up, and declared herself his assistant. Just a second ago, Lena had overheard Rachel telling Jett a made-up a story about partying with friends. A familiar note of worry had vibrated in Lena’s stomach: Was Rachel still that desperate to impress?

Tomorrow, Lena would have a talk with Rachel about dissembling, but tonight, Jett was a harmless distraction. He was visibly disinterested in Rachel, which left Lena free to spend time with Gary Neary.

Someone in Tim’s group shattered a glass on the ground. Incoming! There were shrieks of laughter.

Lena looked again to Rachel, who had propped her chin on her fists to watch Jett sloppily pour a vodka tonic.

Yes, tomorrow she and Rachel would have a nice long talk.

“I should probably clean up the broken glass,” Lena said to Gary Neary, who had returned with two mojitos.

“Not your job.” He handed a glass to Lena. “Have you seen my son? He’s supposed to swing by to meet you.”

“I’d love that,” Lena said.

As a technical matter, Lena already knew Gary’s son, just as she’d known Gary: for years, just another person in their small town.

But everything felt different now.

A few weeks earlier, when his divorce settlement had finalized, Gary had moved to Cottonwood Estates, into the small gray cape on Wildcat Court. Lena had whipped up a batch of raspberry-mocha brownies and knocked on Gary’s door, because this was the type of neighborly gesture that was reflexive to her, and also because she wanted to talk to as many divorced people as she possibly could.

She had long fantasized about divorcing Tim but had always felt trapped. Alma didn’t believe in quitting a marriage, and Rachel was generally horrible with change.

After Alma died, when Rachel entered high school, Lena realized that she no longer had to shield her so protectively. They had been curled up in Lena’s bed one night, watching the Pride and Prejudice miniseries, when they’d heard Tim’s sloppy footsteps down the hall. He’d stopped, one hand on the wall in the bedroom doorway.

“Alma’s girls,” he said. He was smiling and Lena registered the expression on Rachel’s face: hopeful, surprised.

“You both got her jowls,” he said, with a helpful swipe under his chin. “Alma’s masculine jowls. Such a Mack truck of a lady.”

Rachel’s skin had flushed but she’d held her head high.

“Just think,” she’d said, her voice wavering the tiniest bit, “if it weren’t for Uncle Ernie, that would be my male role model.”

She’d turned the volume up so loud that Tim had walked away.

Tim wouldn’t leave as easily as that, Lena knew, but at the insistence of her family lawyer, he’d signed a prenup, and she was starting to feel strong enough for a fight. By the time Gary Neary moved into the neighborhood, Lena had already scheduled a few appointments with divorce lawyers and had started to taste her freedom.

Pace yourself, Lena thought as she waited on Gary’s front step, brownie pan in hand. Don’t bring up his divorce right away, no matter how inappropriately on fire you are about the topic.

When he opened the front door, something about the twinkle in his hazel eyes rendered her momentarily speechless.

Zing.

He had felt it, too.

Gary Neary, tall and rangy with bushy gray hair, was not half as handsome as Tim. He had an angular face and comically deep crow’s-feet and a large nose, and giant, outsized grapefruit calves from all the cycling he did. Beauty was symmetry, they said, and Gary Neary’s face might have been the least symmetrical Lena had ever seen.

But he had listened to her with his whole body, which Lena had never experienced before. It felt like being struck by lightning.

In the weeks before tonight’s party, Gary had been Lena’s savored secret. Even though Lena freely complained to Melanie about Tim, she had kept quiet about Gary. It was too new, too first-blush. She had been happy to wait for it to unfold like fate.

For a few more hours, Lena would honestly believe that life made sense in its own funny way, that its primary lessons were about perseverance and patience. Because she had suffered through a bad marriage and learned she deserved more, Lena had earned True Love.

By the next day, she would understand that this line of thinking was mythology—trying to see the narrative in a series of thoroughly meaningless acts.

It had been real with Gary, though. After the accident, even with everything else she had to grieve, Lena’s heart still made space to mourn him. But just because something was real, just because you might deserve it, didn’t mean you got it.