The Half Moon

by Mary Beth Keane

In his own house, he kept the TV on nonstop for company. When his friends came by, they let themselves in through the back slider, something they would never do if Jess were around. It was a shock at first. With adulthood and marriage came a turning in toward one’s own unit, but now, it seemed, he was everyone’s worry, and part of him suspected these friends, grown men, all in their mid-forties, loved the excuse to leave their families on a Saturday afternoon and claim they were checking on Malcolm.

In a lineup of kneecaps or elbows, he could pick out Jess’s from a group of a thousand. From fifty yards away he could tell her exact thought by the set of her shoulders.

Cobie, who hated the suburbs, who as a rule did not transfer from one form of transportation to another, made an exception for Jess and joked that this guy would have no power over her, that she was already annoyed at his existence, this person who was pulling Jess away from the city all of a sudden.

No, it was something else about home that was strangling her, the notion that what’s important to one person must be important to everyone.

But then he didn’t act like a person who was worried. She heard him humming under his breath when he dragged the garden hose around the yard, and his pleasantness, his general good mood, grated on her as if he’d been clanging symbols and yodeling.

Malcolm noticed that Neil hadn’t had a drink. “You think he’s on the wagon?” he asked. Later, Jess found out that he didn’t drink that day because his kids were with him, and he said it shocked him, upon moving to the suburbs, how often people strapped children into the backseats of their cars and crossed their fingers. “It’s only three turns!” they joked. “All back roads!” When he said that, Jess wondered what she and Malcolm would have been like if they’d gotten so lucky. Would they have been careful like Neil or would they have been like most and have no idea how lucky they were?

When she asked whether he was happy, he acted as if he didn’t understand the question, like he didn’t even know how being happy or unhappy was relevant to a life like theirs. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I mean, you always seem upbeat but are you really? Do you ever want something else?” “Something else?” he asked. “What are my choices?” She saw that he’d never asked himself that question, or if he had, he’d refused to answer. She saw him wondering if what she was really asking was whether she was happy.

Dr. Hanley was starting to help a little. The Half Moon’s balance sheet made gentle swings back and forth between red and black each month, but never too widely, never too far. Jess started to wonder if maybe it was possible to dance at the edge of a precipice and keep dancing for the rest of your life.

While Jess tried to make herself essential to the firm, he was where he’d always been, at the Half Moon, trying to make sure everyone was having a good time, but also feeling a little stuck for the first time, like he’d eliminated options at some point without even realizing it. John was still there, but other bartenders had moved away, gone back to school, become electricians or stockbrokers or pharmaceutical sales reps. Were other careers better? No, but they had things that Malcolm never cared about before, things that used to make him want to fall asleep from boredom whenever they came up: health care FSAs, 401(k)s.

As she got to know him better, she got a strong impression of habits that would reveal themselves more fully with time. “His ways,” her mother would say. Neil’s ways were to press the door closed behind him until it clicked and then press a moment longer to be sure; to immediately look around with an eye out for what needed to be tidied; to lick his thumb and rub a spot on the mudroom wainscoting that only he could see; to carefully place his briefcase on the end of the bench and then look to see where Jess placed hers. These small things, she knew, were the end of a vein that ran strong and deep through the bedrock of his personality.

She was forgetful at times, sure, but she was seventy-two. Malcolm searched on the internet, but it led him nowhere except to wonder what exactly a doctor could do for her anyway. There was no medicine that would help long-term. Everything he read online about signs of memory loss—or not loss, exactly, more like confusion—all had to do with prevention. A diet and exercise program she should have been on since she was thirty.

To consider anyone with money a species slightly different from their own. Anyone in their crew could make a billion, but they’d still understand what it meant to worry. It was present in them no matter where they ended up, just the same as their eye color, their height; the patina of a childhood made up of hand-me-down sneakers and overhearing their parents discuss layoffs, strikes; buying the expiration day meat and their mothers saying it was fine as long as it was cooked to well-done. When people were raised without that worry, you could feel it just by standing near them; something about the way they spoke and moved. It couldn’t be learned.

The oldest one was still a little reserved, but the younger girl and the baby climbed up to sit on her lap even when there was an entire empty couch available. “Sorry,” Neil said, and told them to give her some space. But it was a heady thing, having these small people place a portion of their love and trust at her feet. They didn’t hold anything back to protect themselves.

She’d always been a doer, that was one of the things he loved about her. She was a worker, a problem solver. If someone got dumped, then she set them up with someone new. If someone needed a job, then she asked around until that person got one. She paid attention to how things were done so that she’d know how to do them herself. When they bought their house and had zero money to spare after the down payment, she took classes at Home Depot to learn how to tile, how to grout. When they were short on food at Siobhán’s baby shower, it was Jess who took everything to the kitchen, cut what they had in half, and rearranged it on more platters so it seemed as if it had doubled. “It was just like the loaves and the fishes,” Siobhán said when she recounted it for Malcolm later. “A miracle.” She felt stuck in her job, so she left. She felt stuck in her marriage, apparently, so she left that, too.

would come around eventually, but Jess wasn’t so sure. Some friends—two to be exact—reached out to say they hoped she was okay and if she ever wanted to talk. Jenny, whose birthday Jess had been celebrating the night she and Malcolm met all those years ago, was one of them. She was divorced now, living in Toms River, and emailed to say that people having opinions about what happened even though they didn’t have the first clue would be the hardest part, but that Jess should just remember that they don’t know anything, it was no one’s business but hers.

He remembered being a kid, all the things he felt capable of, all the streets and avenues that branched away from his body, all the possibilities. But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for a while, but you couldn’t go down two streets at once. The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.