Four Days of Marriage

Chapter 1: The Phone Call

The thing about Rick Mullins was that he'd gotten comfortable. Not happy—comfortable was different from happy, and Rick, at fifty-eight, had developed a philosopher's appreciation for the distinction. Happy was a state that required maintenance, like a swimming pool or a German car. Comfortable was a La-Z-Boy recliner that had molded itself to the exact topography of your body over a period of years. Comfortable was knowing that Tuesday night meant leftover Thai from the place on Kensington Avenue, that Wednesday was trash day, and that nobody was going to ask you why you were eating cereal for dinner at nine forty-five p.m. while listening to a podcast about the Zodiac Killer.

Rick's house—a three-bedroom ranch in Elmdale, Ohio, that he'd gotten in the divorce because Debra hadn't wanted it—reflected this philosophy. The living room furniture was mismatched in a way that suggested not eclectic taste but a series of unrelated Craigslist purchases made over half a decade. The refrigerator contained mustard, beer, a bag of baby carrots he'd bought with genuine optimism six weeks ago and never opened, and something in a Tupperware container that he'd decided, on balance, he was better off not investigating. The walls were bare except for a clock from Target and a framed photo of his kids that was now five years out of date.

It was a Tuesday evening in late September, and Rick was in his recliner—the good one, the one that had a cupholder built into the arm—when his phone rang. The screen said JIM, and Rick felt the little tug of guilt he always felt when his brother called, which was roughly once every two months. Not because he didn't love Jim. He did love Jim. Jim was his older brother by four years, a retired insurance executive living in San Diego with his wife Sheila, a man who had coached Rick's Little League team, loaned him money during the worst years, and once driven eleven hours straight to help Rick move into his first apartment. Jim was, by most objective measures, a good brother.

The guilt was about the lie.

"Ricky!" Jim's voice came through the speaker with the forced brightness of someone who was about to deliver bad news but wanted to establish a baseline of normalcy first. Rick recognized the tactic. Their father had used the same approach when he'd told them the family dog had been "promoted to a farm upstate."

"Hey, Jim. How's San Diego?"

"Beautiful. Seventy-two degrees. Sheila's doing her water aerobics. You know how she is about her water aerobics."

"I do." Rick did not, actually, but seven years of maintaining a fictional marriage had made him an expert at agreeable vagueness.

"Listen, Rick." The brightness dimmed. "I need to tell you something, and I want you to hear me out before you react."

Rick sat up straighter. The recliner protested with a mechanical groan. "Okay."

"I went to see Dr. Ramos last week. My internist. I've been having some—well, it doesn't matter what I've been having. The point is, they ran some tests, and the results came back, and it's—" Jim paused. Rick could hear him breathing. "It's not good, Ricky. It's not good at all."

The room seemed to contract. Rick's hand tightened on the phone. "What do you mean, not good?"

"I mean terminal. I mean they're talking about months, not years. I mean I'm sixty-two years old and I'm not going to see sixty-three."

"Jim—"

"I said hear me out. I'm not calling for sympathy. I'm calling because I want to come see you. Me and Sheila. I want to come to Elmdale, and I want to sit in your living room, and I want to have dinner with you and Debra and the kids, and I want it to be this weekend. This Friday. Four days from now."

Rick's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"I know it's short notice," Jim continued. "But when the doctor tells you your timeline's got an expiration date on it, you stop worrying about short notice. I've already looked at flights. There's a direct from San Diego to Columbus at six-fifteen a.m. on Friday. We'd be at your place by dinnertime."

"Jim, I—of course. Of course you can come. But we need to talk about your diagnosis. What exactly did they—"

"We'll talk about it when I get there. I don't want to do it over the phone. I want to do it with family. With you and Debra and the kids. All of us together. The way it should be."

And there it was. The lie, sitting in the middle of the conversation like a sinkhole that Rick had been driving around for seven years, and now Jim's car was headed straight for it.

You and Debra.

Rick and Debra Mullins had divorced seven years ago. The end of their marriage had not been dramatic. There had been no affair, no screaming matches, no thrown crockery. What there had been was a slow, grinding erosion of connection, like a riverbank losing an inch of soil per year until one day you looked up and the house was falling into the water. They had stopped talking about anything that mattered. They had stopped laughing at each other's jokes. They had developed the ability to be in the same room for hours without either of them registering the other's presence, like two ghosts haunting the same house but on different schedules.

The divorce had been amicable in the way that word is used by lawyers, meaning nobody had committed arson. They'd split assets. Debra had taken the savings; Rick had taken the house. They'd agreed on a co-parenting framework for Charlie and Kristen, who had been twenty-three and twenty at the time and hadn't needed co-parenting so much as two separate addresses to send Christmas cards to.

And Rick had never told Jim.

This was not, he understood, a normal thing to have failed to do. Most people managed to inform their immediate family members of major life events within a reasonable timeframe. But Jim was not most people. Jim was a man who had built his entire identity around the idea of family as a fortress—impenetrable, indivisible, sacred. Jim had bankrolled Rick during the divorce without knowing it was a divorce. Rick had told him the money was for "the house"—which was technically true, since he'd used it to buy Debra out of her share. Jim had also, years earlier, loaned a substantial sum for Charlie's college tuition—a loan that existed in a gray area between gift and obligation, the kind of arrangement that depended entirely on goodwill and the assumption that everyone involved was operating in good faith.

The first time Rick had considered telling Jim, he'd picked up the phone, dialed three digits, and hung up. The second time, he'd written an email, stared at it for forty minutes, and deleted it. By the third time, enough months had passed that the not-telling had calcified into its own kind of lie, and each additional month made the eventual telling worse. It was like a library book that was so overdue you couldn't face going back to the library. Except the library was your brother, and the book was your entire marriage.

So Rick had maintained the fiction. During their bimonthly phone calls, he'd mention Debra casually—"Debra's fine, she's busy with work"—and Jim, who had no reason to doubt him, would say something warm about how lucky Rick was and move on. It was remarkably easy to lie to someone who trusted you completely. That was the thing nobody told you about deception: the hardest part wasn't the lying. It was knowing you didn't deserve the trust.

"Rick? You still there?"

"I'm here. Friday. Yeah. That's—we'll be ready. I'll tell Debra."

"Give her my love. Tell her I can't wait to see her. And the kids—are Charlie and Kristen around? Can they come for the weekend?"

"I'll make sure of it."

"Good. Good." Jim's voice cracked, just slightly, just enough. "I love you, Ricky. I don't say that enough."

"I love you too, Jim."

Rick hung up the phone and sat in his recliner for a long time. The true-crime podcast was still playing through the Bluetooth speaker on the kitchen counter. A woman's voice was describing the forensic analysis of carpet fibers. Outside, a dog barked. The refrigerator hummed.

Then Rick said, to nobody, in the quiet of his mismatched living room: "I am so unbelievably screwed."

He picked up the phone and called Debra.