Spoonbenders

“The gender gap struck a nerve. The manager you interviewed with, Bob Sloane? Already gone. Technically he’s on leave, but that’s just until they finish the paperwork.”

“Wow.”

“I still don’t think they’re going to hire you, though,” he said.

“Thank you for being honest.”

“I’m trying.”

Do not kiss him, she thought. Kissing him would ruin everything.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’ve been trying to call. Did you get any of my messages?”

She looked away, embarrassed. “A few.”

“And you haven’t been online, either. You didn’t leave me any choice. I had to come.”

“I told you we were done.”

“But that’s all you said! You were so mad after the interview. You started packing, and all you’d say was that it wasn’t going to work out, we didn’t have a future, and you had to leave.”

“Because it’s true,” she said. “We’re just messing around. You’re not leaving Phoenix. You can’t. I don’t blame you for that.”

“So come to me.”

“I’ve got a job here,” she said.

“Aldi’s?”

She didn’t like the way he said that, even though she usually said the name with the same tone of disbelief: Aldi’s? “No. I’ve got a job offer with a company. As a—” It sounded ridiculous to say chief financial officer. “As head of finance.”

“Really? Irene, that’s great!”

“And I want to do it.”

“Of course you do,” he said. “I mean—” He took a breath. “I’m really happy for you.”

He was telling the truth. Even though it meant that she was choosing the job over him.

“I just want you to be happy,” he said. “You deserve to be happy.”

Also the truth. And she felt horrible.

“What we had was fun,” she said. “Those nights in Hotel Land—I loved that. But it wasn’t real life. It wasn’t serious.”

“I thought it was pretty damn serious,” he said.

“You need to find someone who can be with you and Jun. And I need someone who can handle me and Matty. This was never going to work out.” She kissed his cheek. “I enjoyed every minute of it, but it’s over.”

“Over?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She kissed his cheek again. “So sorry.”

FRANKIE

Frankie had become a ghost to his wife. Loretta made up her hair as he talked, did her makeup. Ignored him as he dressed. Then she walked straight through him—or near enough.

He followed her downstairs. She said hello to Teddy, asked about the men in the living room (“Radon testing,” Teddy told her). She poured herself a cup of coffee and then walked out to the backyard.

The entire time, she’d never looked at Frankie, even as he said, over and over again, “Loretta, I’m sorry.”

Buddy had turned the back patio into an outdoor kitchen. Ground lamb sat out in big stainless steel bowls, and a plate held a mound of freshly chopped mint. God he loved Mom’s lamb sausage. Buddy was at the grill, wrapping potatoes in aluminum foil. Loretta thanked him for the breakfast rolls. He nodded and kept working.

Loretta lit a cigarette—her first, and favorite, smoke of the day. He stood beside her and they pretended to watch the kids playing. The medium-sized Pusateri boy had lost his Super Soaker and climbed a tree, and the younger ones were trying to shoot their smaller water pistols at him. Luckily they were ignoring the orange canister that sat on the lawn only a few feet away from the tree. Left over from one of Buddy’s projects no doubt. And knowing Buddy, it could have held anything, from compressed air to mustard gas.

After two minutes, Frankie broke—and broke the silence. “Come on, sweetie,” he said. “Please say something.”

If she’d just talk to him, he had a chance of winning her back. She’d been mad at him in the past—God yes, a hundred times—though never as completely, as thoroughly as she was now. But if she listened to him, he could find a crack in her anger, and slip in a few words. He could crowbar his way into her heart.

His greatest fear had always been exile. The day Loretta decided she’d had enough and left him, taking her love, and the girls, away from him. He knew that on his own he was nothing. Less than nothing: A subtraction. A black hole. A taker. If all that taking served no purpose, if he couldn’t turn around and pour it all back into his family, he was lost.

He said, “I did this for you, you know.”

That got her. She looked at him, and her disgust sliced through the smoke.

“For you and the girls,” he said.

“You lost the house,” she said. “For us.”

She spoke! He tried not to show his relief. “That’s true,” he said. “But the reason—”

“You made your children homeless.”

“Temporarily,” he said. “I’m going to make this right.”

She shook her head, her eyes on the middle distance. Took a drag on the cigarette. Exhaled. He’d become invisible again.

“Loretta…”

“No one would blame me if I left,” she said quietly. “When you went bankrupt and lost the business, my friends said I should leave. When you spent a year pretending to run a casino in our garage, I said nothing. I stayed silent even when you dropped a safe on my car.”

“The casino thing was only a few months,” he said. “And the safe was an accident.”