All of Us and Everything Read Free Page B

it as a Statement of Personal Honesty, the factless variety, which she preferred.
    It was a true Statement. Atty
did
feel unmoored—that disorienting moment in childhood when you realize that you’ve reached up and grabbed the wrong father’s hand and a stranger looks down at you and says, “Are you lost?” When this happened to Atty once at a Memorial Day parade, she’d gotten so embarrassed she turned it on the man. “I’m not lost! Let go of me, creeper!” And then she’d walked off and started crying. Doug found her in seconds.
    Esme barely registered her daughter typing away with her thumbs. She irrationally assumed that Atty was going to look up the headmaster’s story on the Internet—as if she could find out if it was a hoax or an overseas scam—
I’m stuck in Paris. A female dentist stole all of my credit cards and identification. Can you please wire money?
    Part of Esme knew the story was possibly true. One of Doug’s molars had been killing him. She’d encouraged him to get it checked out. They were in Paris. Socialized medicine and all…
    Esme stood up. Her arms hung at her sides. They felt loose, almost unattached from her body. She felt armless. She walked to the bay window. It was dark and rainy. The storm was coming.
    “He’s no longer an employee of the school,” Todd went on.
    “You fired him?” Esme asked.
    “He quit.”
    This was a very bad sign. “He quit? But he doesn’t have another job…” She shook her head. “He’s not the kind to run off. He has a really strong TIAA-CREF account. He’s not like this.”
    “He told me that he has a plan.”
    “You talked to him?”
    “Well, yes. It’s how I knew he quit.”
    Somehow she thought it had been handled by rumors and hearsay, as so many things were handled on campus. But, no. Doug had called the headmaster. And with this small detail, she knew that her marriage was over. She quickly blamed her mother-in-law. That side of the family was so uppity and elitist that there had been marriages between first cousins that had resulted in poor teeth, which meant Doug had to go to a dentist in Paris in the first place.
    And then she thought, irrationally, that maybe her marriage was ending to make room for Ru’s. Augusta had told Esme the news one week ago today. What if there was a kind of curse—the family of three daughters and one mother could only contain one real marriage at a time. Esme’s brain used the caveat
real
because Liv’s marriages—all three of them—had always felt fragile and dubious—mainly because Liv so loudly insisted that these loves were great, sweeping epic loves that none of the other women in the family could really grasp. What was there to grasp? Liv married for money and did it well.
    Once Esme had flitted through all the blame she could muster, she wanted to feel something. A deep splitting ache in her chest. But she wasn’t sure she loved Doug. Countless times, she’d imagined him leaving her, her leaving him, his sudden death. Awful things, but in truth she was not sure she’d ever loved him. She knew she’d never loved him the way she did her first love, Darwin Webber, who disappeared from college, not even leaving her a note. (And he was still nowhere to be found. She’d Googled him a bunch of times and he had no Internet footprint—not even a death notice.) She’d met Doug a year later, and having given up on the idea that she could love anyone again, she opted instead for what felt like a good partnership. (Was she just in the earliest stage of grief?)
    “Do the kids on the trip know?” Atty asked.
    Esme turned and looked at her.
    “I mean, Maeve Brown is on that trip, and Piper Weir and George and Kate and Stew,” Atty rattled off. “What about the other chaperones? Jesus!” She rotated the small stud earring on one of her earlobes the way she’d been taught to do in the months that followed getting her ears pierced—when she was eight years old. Esme wondered if she was