Free The Vacationers: A Novel by Emma Straub Page B

the conversation so he could extricate his husband as quickly as possible. He didn’t care how much it cost to call New York, or what time it was. They were getting on the phone.
    “Rich Mary! You should see her now! Her face is like the surface of a balloon. It used to have angles and now it’s all”—here Franny made a sucking noise—“
smooth
. And they’re not even married anymore. I think she used all of her divorce money to get someone to put a vacuum cleaner on her face.” Franny turned off the oven, satisfied.
    “Some people,” Charles said, shaking his head and laughing, though Lawrence knew that both Franny and Charles had had needles injected into their foreheads in order to make wrinkles disappear. They’d gone to the same dermatologist. Vanity was a problem only when it was someone else’s. Lawrence wondered what the cutoff was: knives, maybe, or general anesthesia.
    “Honey,” Lawrence said, standing up, “can I talk to you for a second?”
    Before Charles could respond, Jim hurried in through the back door, his hair plastered to the side of his head like a Ken doll’s. He hunched over, his towel wrapped around his wet shoulders.
    “How’s the water?” Charles asked. Franny crossed her arms and leaned back against the fridge.
    “Fine,” Jim said. He shook his head to one side, clearing out a clogged ear.
    “How’s life at
Gallant
?” Lawrence asked out of habit, wanting to be polite but really just trying to get out of the room as quickly as possible, but as soon as the syllables were out of his mouth, he remembered. Lawrence felt Charles grab his knee and give it a hard squeeze, too tight to be flirty. “I mean, how is it being at home?” Lawrence felt his face begin to flush. All he knew was that Jim had been “let go”; Charles hadn’t wanted to say more.
    “Well,” Jim said, standing up straight again. He looked toward Franny, who hadn’t moved or smiled. “It’s a change, that’s for sure.” He narrowed his eyes at a spot on the ceiling, and Lawrence followed his gaze, finding nothing but a tiny crack in the white paint. “Think I’ll go shower off.”
    Lawrence, Charles, and Franny all stayed exactly where they were, like actors in a play the moment before the lights came on, until they heard the bathroom door click shut. Charles was out of his chair and across the room before Lawrence couldspeak again. Lawrence watched as his husband drew Franny into his arms. Her arms wrapped all the way around Charles’s back, where she clasped her own wrist, the way sixth-grade boys knotted their arms around their dance partners. Franny’s thick shoulders began to jerk up and down, though her crying didn’t make a sound. Lawrence wished he could see Charles’s face, but it was pointing in the other direction.
    “I’m really sorry,” Lawrence said. “I don’t know what happened,” meaning both that he didn’t know what had gone down at the magazine and that he didn’t know what had occurred in the three previous minutes. Neither Franny nor Charles made any sign that they had heard him. The kitchen smelled like warm food and tenderness. Lawrence knit his fingers together in his lap and waited for the moment to pass, which it did. Franny gave her head a shake and patted her damp cheeks with her fingers. Charles kissed her on the forehead and then returned to his chair. No one would have cried if they’d gone to Palm Springs and done nothing but had sex and read books for two weeks. Lawrence said a little prayer for the vacation he’d actually wanted, and then watched it—
poof
—float away. He needed Franny to stop crying, and then he needed his husband’s full attention, before someone else called the agency and claimed the child, before the open door was closed and their baby wasn’t their baby, before they were old and creaky and alone forever and ever, just the two of them and Charles’s paintings of other people’s children. He waited patiently, counting his