There are six of us. We are three couples and all close friends. One couple has a waterfront house on the eastern shore of Lake Evient with a long view of the lake and the sunset behind the distant hills. The other two live closer to town center, in coveted neighborhoods, in quality houses, one a gleaming white Dutch Colonial with green shutters, the other an historic Prairie-style house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Almost twenty years ago, Shauna and Nick moved from Vermont when the Wright house went up for sale, and Shauna, who had studied architecture and once flirted with entering that profession, dreamed of living in a house designed by the famous architect, and not many made it to the open market.
Shortly after the move, Shauna met Kate Shacket when they each dropped her toddler off at the YMCA day care so they could steal an hour to exercise, and then Kate introduced Shauna to her pal Jessica, who she knew from story hour at the Lake Evient Public Library.
The three moms formed a tight group, regularly arranging playdates for their kids, who at that age mostly parallel played, but the moms got a chance to hang out together, and one weekend Jessica and Frank Perrone invited our families for a barbecue, and the guys—different from each other as mountains from seas—bonded over a few generous pours of whiskey, sports talk, and their roles as dads to young children.
For years now our families have been getting together to watch movies and the big games and to celebrate birthdays, holidays, graduations, and anniversaries. Name a milestone, and we gathered for it. Any reason to get together, we liked to say, or no reason at all. Simply because we could genuinely say we loved each other.
We took turns hosting, although Frank and Jessica took more turns than the rest of us. They were natural hosts—magnanimous, welcoming, excellent cooks. They were our social glue. They initiated most of the plans. Plus, having the lakefront house made for lively swimming parties when our kids were young, and ice skating in the winter if the lake froze smoothly and wasn’t covered in snow. Now that our kids were older with one moved out, three in college, and one still unsure about what’s next (it’s called a gap year now), and all of them busy creating their own lives and having established their own friend groups and not the ones their parents had constructed for them, our get-togethers have changed in tone and substance. The kids of whatever family was hosting, if they were around, might say hi or grab a bite to eat before dashing out, leaving the adults in charge of themselves. That meant more drinking, drug use in the open, older music choices, and menus geared toward grown-up tastes, although Jess still made mac and cheese because we all loved her recipe. And now that our lives weren’t entirely consumed by parenting, kids, and schools, our conversation was different too. We talked about current events, relationships, life philosophies, health issues, careers, and occasionally dabbled in gossip and rumor-spreading—but this last purely for entertainment purposes.
Admittedly, when the tenor of our get-togethers shifted, we discovered that maybe we didn’t have as much in common beyond the bonds the kids naturally created for us. We didn’t all have the same political beliefs, for example. We weren’t all as interested in pop culture. We didn’t all have the same level of empathy toward other people. We had varying levels of resilience when facing challenges. Some of us didn’t appreciate the way James could relentlessly tease, which he considered a sign of his affection for us. Some of us envied the way Nick and Shauna lived such a cushy life but didn’t have to work as hard as the rest of us for it. Kate Shacket—she was too perfect. Jessica Perrone—she was too pretty. Nonetheless, we remained dedicated to each other, because of course there were going to be differences among us, even if from the outside we appeared rather homogenous.
The reality is, we had made our beds, so to speak, and they were comfortable enough that we were damn well going to sleep in them. It’s almost impossible to make new friends once you reach middle age.
Two of us were on second marriages, although the first marriages ended long before the six of us knew each other. One of our marriages was currently in choppy water, which distressed all of us and impacted group dynamics. We never knew if we were going to get the Nick and Shauna who were affectionate or antagonistic with each other.
One of us endured a long stretch of unemployment, and for a while we did our best to boost his spirits via positive affirmations and keeping cynical or negative thoughts to ourselves, one of those thoughts being that maybe James lost his job for a reason, and maybe that reason is why he hadn’t latched on with a new company, something to do with a personality that could be direct and aggressive at times and other times remote and disinterested. Not that we would say this to James. We didn’t directly talk about his unemployment status or character quirks, unless he wasn’t there. But James didn’t need much emotional support, even if we wanted to provide it, and he seemed at ease with having lost a high-paying position in the tech industry and becoming a handyman instead.
Three of us had no parents still living. Jessica’s mother suffered from dementia and lived in a nursing home inside a locked memory unit in Portus Bay at the other end of Lake Evient; dutiful daughter visited her mother every Sunday, and loyal son-in-law Frank paid the exorbitant cost (going on four years now) of keeping Jessica’s mom cared for and safe because she had no other assets, and the Medicaid facilities were like dungeons.
Among us we had five children ranging in age from eighteen to twenty. One of our children—Nick and Shauna’s son, Jayden—was a hockey phenom and hadn’t lived at home since age seventeen when he began billeting with another hockey family in Madison, Wisconsin, so he could play juniors in the USHL, benefit from better coaching, and possibly get the attention of NHL scouts, which he did, but he hasn’t been drafted yet, and now at age twenty had finished his last year of eligibility in the junior leagues and enrolled at Boston University where he earned a full scholarship to play on their D1 hockey team. Jayden was single-minded in his passion for hockey, NHL-bound or not. Nick and Shauna were grateful for a return to the Northeast for their son—Boston was a six-hour drive from Lake Evient compared to thirteen-hour drive or an inconvenient flight with a long layover to reach Madison, and Nick and Shauna attended as many games as they could while Jayden played juniors, which entailed dead-of-winter winter trips to Madison, Muskegon, Cedar Rapids, Sioux City, Omaha, and other such tourist meccas in the United States Hockey League.
James and Kate’s younger daughter, Claire, had always gotten the lead in the high school plays and had just left for her first year at Pace University where she planned to major in theater arts. Her older sister, Hannah, a math whiz, was beginning her second year at MIT. Maybe she and Jayden would become closer friends now that they were both in the Boston area, but unlikely—they’d never been close as kids.
Sydney Perrone had been co-captain of the high school varsity volleyball team, which enamored her to Shauna, who had played the sport in college. They also had their height in common: both were over five foot ten. Sydney was planning an ill-defined gap year after graduating from high school. Her twin brother, Anthony, was a sensitive poet type and volunteered as a writing tutor at the high school. He had headed off to Brown University, a fine liberal arts landing spot for a literary fella.
Can we parents take a modicum of credit for how well our children were navigating the transition into adulthood? I think we can.
Definitely one and possibly two of the six of us have substance use issues, depending on who was opining or being honest or how we felt on any given day or the morning after one of our get-togethers. Weed, pills, coke (special occasions only, if Nick could safely get it from his contact)—the usual choices for (mostly) responsible adults, plus an open spigot of alcohol. We usually enjoyed a featured “cocktail of the night” that either Jessica or Nick mixed. They were the two of us who had worked as bartenders in our younger days, so we had several cocktail experts among us.
The last time the six of us got together (sadly, it was months ago, for numerous reasons), Nick made the Vesper, a variation on the martini using both gin (three parts) and vodka (one part), plus Lillet Blanc. Shaken not stirred, the way James Bond ordered it. Lemon twist as garnish. It was the perfect tie-in because we were watching Casino Royale for movie night, a tradition started when the kids were young and we would park them in front of the screen so we could have a few minutes to ourselves. Turned out the adults liked movies too.
We still had adult movie night twice, maybe three times a year, and to select a movie when among us existed a wide range of tastes, we each would write down the titles of two films and put them in a hat—a bell-shaped cloche, belonging to Jessica. She was the only one of us who could look good in that kind of hat. No one admitted adding Casino Royale to the mix. We weren’t required to reveal which titles were ours, but it was pretty easy to figure out. That’s how well we knew each other. We even started trying to fool one another, which increased the variety of film titles in the hat and added a guessing game among us.
It was Kate who’d put in Carrie, and she was not the kind of person who liked horror, but she did like female protagonists who faced extreme pressure and underwent significant transformation. We all agreed Carrie White fit that description. Kate herself was a female protagonist type (sans the horror), holding down an executive position in finance at Evient Health Partners while being a loving mother to two daughters and a supportive spouse to James after he lost his job and began reinventing himself.
Frank had thrown in the chick-flick title The Devil Wears Prada, which fooled no one. He had a thing for Emily Blunt, which didn’t bother Jessica because she’d been told by both acquaintances and strangers that she bore a resemblance to the famous movie actress, and if there was a loyal person among us, it was Frank.
James was responsible for making us sit through one of the Star Wars films, but no one could remember which one.
The “artistic” one among us, Nick, had added the French film, The Return of Martin Guerre, not even trying to trick us, and we all ended up loving that film when it got chosen.
After Casino Royale was picked from the hat, we debated whether we should watch the 1967 James Bond-parody film Casino Royale or the 2006 spy thriller by the same name starring a very in-form Daniel Craig in his first appearance as James Bond. The modern version won out in a lopsided vote.
Once a movie began, we sometimes paid little attention to it. We turned the volume loud enough so you could hear the dialog if you were interested, and we kept the subtitles on, but often we talked over the action. Maybe we were discussing a scene from the movie, but just as likely not.
As for the Vesper, this variation on the martini was invented by Ian Fleming for his 1954 novel. James Bond named the drink following his encounter with a beautiful and mysterious woman named Vesper Lynd. Nick mixed us all the cocktail, Kate set out snacks for grazing, and we arranged ourselves on the couches and comfy chairs in front of the big screen in James and Kate’s family room.
It was still the opening scene, just three minutes in, when Frank said, “My glass is already half empty.”
“Think of it as half full,” Shauna said. She was definitely in the glass half full camp. She might even believe it was three-quarters full, despite evidence to the contrary. That’s how much positivity she exuded these days.
While the movie continued to play, we got into a discussion about the glass being half full vs. half empty.
Jessica said how you see the glass represented your view on life, positive or negative. Nick asked how she saw it.
“Half empty, with a leak.”
Her response elicited a good laugh from our group, but that was Jessica for you, prone to bouts of melancholy despite her outward cheerfulness.
“I’ll say it’s half empty but easily refillable,” Frank said, one hand on Jessica’s knee and the other holding up his glass as if to examine its volume.
Nick said he didn’t like the half-full or half-empty choice because your point of view can be more nuanced than that and can change depending on your mood. He said he was definitely not a half-full kind of guy (no one would call Nick an optimist), but he didn’t consider himself a devoted pessimist either, so he couldn’t say the glass was half empty. He came up with his own take: “I’m a third full kind of guy.”
“You have to choose between half full or half empty. That’s the whole point of it.”
“Relax, it’s just a game.”
“I don’t think there’s any rules.”
“Who’s that character?” Kate had turned her attention to the movie. She hadn’t opined on the glass half empty or half full discussion.
“That’s Vesper Lynd, she’s the British agent assigned to help Bond. She’s the one the drink is named after.”
“Don’t trust her, James! She’s a double agent.”
“Hey, don’t give away the plot.”
“She’s not a double agent.”
“It’s not complicated,” Nick said. “Every one of these movies is the same.”
“You’re the one who added this title to the hat.”
“Me? I didn’t do it. It had to be Frank.”
“I say Shauna.”
“You’ve got to be joking!”
“Hey, quiet, here’s the scene.”
James Bond: I think I’ll call it a Vesper.
Vesper Lynd: Because of the bitter aftertaste?
James Bond: No, because once you’ve tasted it, that’s all you want to drink.
“It’s all I want to drink,” Frank said. “I thought you were making us another round, Nick. A full glass, please. None of this halfway or third full business.”
Nick headed for the kitchen to mix more cocktails. Jessica said she’d help and followed him.
Nick scooped ice cubes into the pitcher and poured the gin and vodka. Jessica added the Lillet Blanc.
“Look,” Jess said, nodding toward the window facing the Shacket’s backyard.
Claire Shacket was sitting on a plank swing that hung from the high limb of an oak tree. Her current boyfriend, whose name neither Nick nor Jess could remember, stood behind her, with the back of Claire’s head pressed against him. His hands were wrapped around her from behind, his wrists draping her shoulders, his hands reaching almost as far as her breasts.
Claire rocked slightly on the swing and her boyfriend swayed against her in rhythm.
“Tell me those two aren’t having sex,” Nick said.
“And have no place to go because their parents are home entertaining their friends.”
The boyfriend said something to Claire and she turned her head and gazed up at him.
“I wonder what they’re saying.”
“Maybe: ‘I can’t wait to put my hands all over your body’.”
“I remember that feeling.”
“You don’t feel it anymore?”
It was a bold question because we never talked about our sex lives with each other, and it was left unanswered.
They finished mixing the drinks together. Jess carried the pitcher into the other room. She topped off Frank’s glass first.
“Cheers, sweetheart,” he said, raising his glass to her and then to his lips.
Frank was an interventional cardiologist. He knew all about the hereditary and lifestyle factors that might contribute to coronary artery disease, yet he consumed his cocktails and ate just as many ribs and sausages and cake slices as the rest of us, was a large-framed man getting larger, and didn’t blink an eye when we held our hot dog taste-off last year, with Hebrew National all-beef franks the winner and Wardynski’s a close second. But now he’s dealing with some health complications—heart issues of all things, and is trying to lead a cleaner lifestyle.
James was once a remotely employed project manager for Google whose position was eliminated in a company reorganization eleven months ago. He was the victim of a numbers game. Although, there had been workplace rumors that he had behaved inappropriately toward a female colleague. James denied. James was flabbergasted. More on that later. After losing his job, he seemed intent on finding a new position, similar or better, with another tech company that would allow him to work remotely as Google had, but nothing materialized and he wondered if he’d been backchannel blacklisted, or shut out because he was a middle-aged white dude, and tech, like every other industry, was getting younger and more diverse, and much of the work now was being performed by AI. Recently, he had taken handyman jobs to fill his time and he discovered he enjoyed the work. He’d always been a tool guy and good at that kind of thing, and the demand for anyone competent kept him busy. He fixed leaky pipes, installed windows, straightened doors, repaired damaged siding. He’s also been working out like a madman at the Y and had gotten jacked, making Nick look puny and Frank like a slob by comparison.
Nick Henning authored a dystopian/sci-fi thriller series of books featuring a mystical rainmaker who leads an underground rebel group against an authoritarian state that controls all water in a parched, climate-changed future. The series has done well enough and was even optioned for the screen after the second book was published, although there’d been no whiff of production yet and might never be. Nick longed to write more serious, literary novels. His first book had been in that vein and had sold decently upon publication until one reviewer pointed out his use of a racist trope (the lone black character was a villain), which sparked a firestorm among internet book influencers, and his publisher invoked an escape clause in their contract. Nick had been canceled. Afterward, he floundered for too many years searching for his lost confidence and creativity, until he hit on the rainmaker idea while trying for a more commercial angle, spent two years writing the book, and found a new publisher in the sci-fi genre.
We all admired Kate because she was smart, organized, successful, compassionate, curious, practical, and beautiful—she was the complete package. A problem solver at home and at work. Never got rattled. Bit of a talker. Very opinionated. Got more done in a day than some of us did in a week. In addition to admiring her, we hated her (ha-ha, not really) for being what the rest of us weren’t.
Jessica worked at the Lake Evient Public Library three mornings a week at the front desk. She was the mother of the twins, Anthony and Sydney. She and Frank had agreed that two was the right number of children for them, but for Jessica twins didn’t entirely count as two: it was only one pregnancy, one labor and delivery (a long one), and one shared passage through infancy, toddlerhood, elementary school, and into the teen years. Even though Frank and Jess had both a boy and a girl, and the kids were incredible, they were enough, they were all any parents could ask for, still Jess felt a little cheated. Or if not cheated, then tricked. Not at first. Not when she was overwhelmed as a new mother with an infant on each breast. Not when she had two toddlers and tandem tantrums to deal with. But as the twins got older and began forging their own identities and independence, Jess found herself pining for another child. Jess felt time slipping past and the end of her natural childbearing years closing in, and, truth be told, she was experiencing an unexpected disenchantment. No one reason in particular, just time and routine and minor road-not-taken yearnings (and who knows where those roads might have led), and not serious, but it heightened in Jessica a sense of longing which she attributed to wanting another child.
Frank had no objections—he was entirely cemented in as a family man and provider—but Jessica didn’t get pregnant again, and neither she nor Frank wanted to go the adoption or fertility treatment route. Eventually, they gave up on the idea of having another child.
For a while, Shauna helped out at a gift shop that a friend owned in town, then she studied to be a real estate agent but never took the certification exam, followed by a stint as a fundraiser for the National Eating Disorder Association. Nothing lasted. She was caught emotionally unprepared (as was Nick) when Jayden left home just after turning seventeen. She busied herself spending months learning glass staining and soldering techniques so she could do the work herself to replicate and replace two windows—light screens, Wright called them—that were damaged when a tree limb in the backyard broke off and struck the house. Because Nick was useless with a tool in his hands other than a typewriter or keyboard, James helped her with the installations. Shauna was a consummate drifter in search of her life’s passion, but under no financial constraints because her grandfather had founded the premier outdoor clothing brand Platte Outfitters. That’s why she could afford a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and why Nick’s modest income didn’t matter, and why we all had fleeces, jackets, sweatshirts, t-shirts, hiking socks, and gloves with the Platte logo on them. But Shauna Platte was as down-to-earth as anyone, or had been until she became more like an electrified earth goddess after recovering from the lightning strike.
What a life-changer that was. We’d heard the story often enough we could almost believe it happened to us. Like James, Shauna was a fitness buff, and she had been running along the bike path lining the shore of the lake, picking up her pace to get home because the skies were darkening and she’d heard distant rumbles of thunder.
There was no sudden crack, no boom. One moment she was mid-stride, ponytail swinging, and the next her world became pure white light and she was bashed by a train of fire. She experienced a roaring, searing explosion from the inside out, the smell and taste sharp and metallic, like a mouthful of pennies. She woke up in the wet grass, her left shoe blown off and a blackened smoking ruin, rain pouring down as if to douse her. Her heart stuttered and lurched, beat savagely and then hardly and all, finally relearning its rhythm. A bystander called 911. One of her eardrums was damaged, leading to the need for a hearing aid, and she was marked with something called Lichtenberg figures, which were fern-like reddish patterns caused by capillaries rupturing as electricity passed over the skin. The marks took a long time to fade.
Once Shauna recovered, she was completely changed, she was New Shauna. She’d literally undergone some kind of shock treatment. Gone was the dry and snarky sense of humor, and in place was an attitude of incessant and earnest appreciation for her life having been spared.
We were all thankful she hadn’t been killed, and we couldn’t imagine the trauma of her experience, but boy, did Shauna evangelize about gratitude, and she got gentle-handsy when talking intently to you—a palm laid over your wrist, a hand reassuringly on your shoulder. And not all of us liked to be touched in that way. She embraced the concept of emotional intelligence and took on the role of an unappointed expert in dealing with feelings and emotions, which must be dealt with and cannot be ignored or repressed if you are going to live a fulfilling, mindful, healthy life. So Shauna said.
Oh, and the platitudes: Your mind will always believe everything you tell it. Feed it hope. Feed it truth. Feed it love.
Understanding yourself is power. Loving yourself is freedom. Forgiving yourself is peace. Being yourself is bliss.
Sorry, Shauna, but we no longer recognized you. What happened to the off-color jokes, the snap-to-judgments, the witty hot takes? When did everything become deep and serious? You used to be so funny and fun to be with. That was the real dagger: Shauna’s sense of humor was gone.
Shauna’s new persona eventually led to eye rolling and even jokes being cracked in her presence when we were together. Some of us defended her: Shauna’s philosophy was constructive, the points she made were sound. We should be grateful for what we have. We should revel in life. No argument about that. And it wasn’t that we weren’t thankful to be alive and mostly healthy and definitely economically advantaged, and it wasn’t that we weren’t all relieved Shauna survived and recovered. It’s that we didn’t need to be reminded about our privilege and good fortune every damn minute when we were just trying to get through each day and be reasonably content with our lives, said one of us to Shauna. She got pretty pissed. But we all said stupid things sometimes, especially after a few drinks. The words were out of our mouths before we realized what we’d said.
This looseness of appropriate filters has led to occasional bruised feelings and a cooling off period or two, but that openness among us also applied to the love and devotion we held for each other as well, and always brought us back. We did in fact celebrate and support each other, and said things like I appreciate you and I’m here for you and I’m grateful you’re my friend. Even the guys got in on the heartfelt action, like the time Frank confided in Nick and asked for his help in writing a love letter to Jessica for their twentieth anniversary, or the time James broke down in actual tears lamenting that his beloved Buffalo Bills were never going to win a Super Bowl after getting bounced once again in the divisional round of the playoffs. Or the time we all reassured Nick when he was lamenting that he was not taken seriously as a writer because his books were genre thrillers.
We did stand up for each other. We did celebrate each other. But somewhat sadly, we haven’t celebrated each other recently. Frank has let his foot off the gas after suffering chest pains and having two stents installed in his coronary arteries, an ironic twist for a cardiologist. Shauna has been out of town a lot, traveling to Big Sur in California for extended stays at one of those “consciousness” centers where she practiced spiritualism. Kate had recently been promoted to executive vice president at Evient Health Partners and was busier than ever.
Due to all the changes affecting our friend group, we weren’t sure our summer soiree was going to happen this year. The annual event, in late August before the kids started back at school, has always been the pinnacle of our get-togethers: the most celebratory, the most fun, beginning in the afternoon and not ending until long after dark. We spent weeks ironing out the menu and planning the games that never got dull for us: conversational games like Truth or Lie, Hot Seat, or Most Likely To; plus yard games such as croquet or badminton or cornhole, and raft and inner tube races if it was a hot day and we got into the water.
So we were excited when Jess reached out and said she and Frank wanted to host the soiree. Maybe she shouldn’t have. Maybe we all should have let our group organically decompose as it seemed to be doing slowly over time.
I guess we weren’t ready for that to happen. I guess we still wanted to cling to each other.
With the kids now scattered and already off to their respective colleges (except Sydney), it ended up being one of our adults-only gatherings, and none of us could have predicted what would happen that night. And what happened depends on who you’re talking to: Jessica has a different version of events than Nick. Kate didn’t see things the same as James. And Shauna, as usual, has her own point of view.
Now that time has passed, we’ve all agreed to talk about that day in an attempt to answer your questions, and our own questions, because we all accept this is an essential step in understanding and coming to terms. So we’ll tell you, as best we can.
