If only he had stayed, he would not be dead.
Over the years, Augustus sometimes dallied with this girl or that, always someone in her early twenties （or sometimes not quite that） with long beautiful hair and lush breasts. I’m not sure, but I think it started during the years I was so desperate to get pregnant.
I looked the other way. I know how that sounds, but in the ways that mattered, our family was solid, our marital rituals still in place—Monday picnics and monthly dinner parties and tangled in sleep every night. Through those dire years when I wanted a baby so badly, I rarely wanted to have sex unless I was deliberately trying to get pregnant, so in some ways I was relieved not to have to meet all his needs. I was secure in being his wife, and the women never lasted more than a month or two.
When I gave up the dream of our child, we settled back into our previous love affair, and although I did sense his dalliances, none of them mattered. He was a big, lusty man and he liked new dishes now and then. I just didn’t pay attention to them.
When he met Christy, I didn’t even register her presence. She started at P&P as a bartender but worked herself up to assistant manager pretty quickly. She wasn’t his type. Although she was still young, in her twenties, she was tautly athletic, with short blonde hair she wore shorn on the sides. Her tattoos, weaving around her arms and even across her chest, spelled out a life lived hard and deep. Kara had a crush on her, though she pretended she didn’t.
I liked her, honestly. She was smart and tough, but also wounded. I recognized that haunted look in her eye, that aura you just can’t shake. I do my best to hide mine, but it’s there if you look. Shanti had it, too.
The brokenness should have tipped me off. Wounded women were catnip to Augustus. He loved the song “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” about a man rescuing a woman who’d fallen and needed help; he patched up her wings and sent her on her way.
He rescued us. All of us. He’d rescued me, teaching me how to love sex, how to build a family, but also how to take pride in myself and my accomplishments, how to stand up for myself and ask the world for what I wanted. Without Augustus, I could never have found the courage to buy the farm, to write the book, to do the 1,001 things I could do after he loved me.
Shanti, too, had been a rescue, the daughter of a woman who abused her until she ran away from home somewhere in Mississippi to the golden shores of California, then found a boyfriend to abuse her some more. Augustus had not been as successful healing her as he’d been with me. She couldn’t kick her addictions, and someone once commented it was because she’d never examined her ghosts and traumas, but I call bullshit. Only people without the kind of wounds she and I carried think you need to live it all over again. Not everything can be forgiven. Not everything can be healed.
By the time Christy arrived, Augustus had attained a certain amount of fame with the big foodie movement; with his good looks and good humor, he was a delightful guest judge on various shows, including more than one stint on Top Chef. I found myself in demand as a speaker at conferences devoted to food writing, cooking, and sustainable farming, and I traveled a lot. For the first time, my star was rising higher and faster than his, but we both reveled in the attention and the way all of it fed into our fortunes.
The farm and everything related to it, the cookbooks and merchandise and the website with the blog I wrote, the recipes that we generated, overtook Peaches and Pork in the aughts. Augustus was a more famous face, and his food was highly celebrated, but it was the farm side that became most lucrative.
And it was very lucrative. Mostly, I was working so hard I didn’t think about it a lot, but every so often, Augustus and I would sit by the pool with cocktails and ground ourselves in remembering where we’d come from.
Only he knew what that actually was for me. It wasn’t part of my public story in any way. I made sure of that. If you let people into the secrets of your life, the worst of it will always be at the forefront of their minds. I wasn’t about to let that happen to me.
Augustus knew, but I trusted him to keep it to himself.
One hot summer night, I came back from a long trip to Australia, a place we always said we’d visit together. I’d been invited to give a keynote on organic farming and sustainable restaurant practices. Although I’d spoken many places, going somewhere international was a first, and I was deeply excited about it. Augustus couldn’t get away from the restaurant, but I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity, and I went on my own.
I loved every second of it. Loved being by myself on the long flight, staying in a great hotel by myself, and after the conference, I traveled by myself to Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef. Honestly, I loved the freedom to do whatever I liked, never having to check in with anyone. I missed him, of course, but I didn’t call all that often because I was content and whole in myself, something that came to me very last. One night, I sat on a balcony and listened to a wild mass of birds chattering wildly and I did try to call Augustus to share it, but he didn’t answer.