Julia and Sunny
By Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, first published in Ploughshares
When a married couple announces that they are getting a divorce, their best friends who are also a couple are forced to confront what this configuration means for their social life.
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Plot Summary
Julia and Sunny are two middle-aged adults who met in medical school, got married, had a child named Coco, and are now getting divorced. When Julia reveals this news to her and Sunny’s best couple friends, who they’ve also known since medical school, the couple is shocked. To them, Julia and Sunny were the paragons of love and romance. Slowly, the couple witnesses how Julia’s life is changing in response to the encroaching divorce. She seems less depressed, starts dating a radiologist named Robert, and puts off the couples’ yearly retreat to a lake house. One day, she visits Disneyland with Coco and her couple friends. The couple’s son, Henry, steals Coco’s favorite blanket, which she refuses to go to sleep without. The couple panics; they try to send back the blanket via mail, but a series of delays and losses keep Coco separated from their blanket. Finally, the wife in the couple accidentally runs into Sunny at JFK airport. She notes that he looks as dashing as always and is relieved to see him. She hands him the blanket, which he thanks her for. However, as they walk away from one another, the wife turns back to look at Sunny, who’s thrown away his daughter’s blanket. She wonders if Sunny has always resented her and her husband but had never gotten to express that animosity until now. When the wife returns to her family home in Pasadena, she snuggles in with her husband and son, relieved to know that she’ll come across her friends once more in the future.
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