Three
Three
We’re getting divorced.”
Around the table, metal utensils drop onto porcelain plates, like fallen soldiers. No one moves or blinks, the meal suddenly forgotten. A blackfly, who has invited himself to the gathering by way of the open sunroom sliders, makes a home in the bread basket.
“Someone please say something,” Ellie pleads, beads of sweat sliding down the back of her neck like rambunctious children on a waterslide. “Dad, can we turn down the AC?” She twists her arm at an unnatural angle, wipes her hand across her upper spine. “Honestly, I feel like I’m suffocating.”
Frank, still decked out in his grocery store T-shirt, shoots Jonah a look of fury, then storms away from the table and practically punches the thermostat.
“Mom? Maggie?” Ellie wipes her hairline with a paper napkin. “Can one of you please speak?”
“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Bunny finally cries out and, in desperate need of a task, begins to clear the dinner plates. “I need to call Father Joe.” She’s frantically scraping tangles of pasta into the salad bowl, much to Maggie’s disappointment. The vegetables were the only thing she could eat. “Frank! Frank!” She piles the empty dinner plates into a wobbly, oil-slicked stack. “Where’s my phone, Frank?”
The air conditioner clicks. An arctic blast blows like a storm through the wall vents.
“What did you do?” Frank presses, his aging eyes dead set on Jonah’s face. His head is all thin white hairs, which right now look like wisps of angry smoke. “What did you do ?”
“Dad!” Ellie exclaims, her heartbeat like a knife stabbing her in the neck. “Please calm down!” Across the table, Maggie releases a loud sigh and then, without any comment, drifts toward the sunroom and disappears, alone, outside. “Jonah didn’t do anything!” Ellie keeps her gaze cast on the sliders, hoping to get a look at Maggie. But all she sees in the glass is a reflection of the scene—the nightmare—she’s currently stuck in. She turns away from the door and meets Jonah’s eyes, hoping a brief glance between them will show her parents that this is a decision made in solidarity. “And, to be clear,” she continues, “neither did I.”
The news officially delivered—this announcement that has weighed on them as heavy as lead for weeks—Ellie and Jonah look away from each other and both tilt their heads down, like two embarrassed children who have been caught doing something bad.
“This is ridiculous,” Bunny declares, her tone shifting. She swats away the fly. Her gold cross pendant sways on her chest. “You’re not getting divorced,” she decides, as if it is her choice.
“I don’t understand, sweetheart,” Frank admits, patting his shirt in search of his reading glasses, even though a second pair is propped up on his head. He slides them from his neckline and onto the bridge of his nose, like his nonprescription drugstore readers will help him see this situation more clearly. “If he didn’t do anything wrong”—he offers Jonah one more threatening sneer (or as threatening as an eightysomething retiree can get)—“and neither did you, then why would you get divorced? Why now? You’ve been married more than twenty years.”
Bunny begins to cart the plates back into the kitchen. “They’re not getting divorced, Frank!” she shouts out, setting the dirtied dinnerware into the sink with a noisy clank .
How could she ever explain it? The invisible fractures that have slipped into their marriage.
What had started as arguments about her second act—Ellie perpetually flip-flopping and full of doubt about what she ought to do once Maggie left, and Jonah constantly frustrated with his wife (“It’s not up to me! I’m not the one telling you anything needs to change!”)—evolved into more significant debates when their daughter officially began to apply to colleges. Disagreements about how far was too far. Quips about how they’d fill their extra shared time and space once she was gone. Ellie, feeling embittered and adrift, found herself privately (and constantly) questioning if she’d made the right choice by dedicating herself to everyone else, only to be left feeling like she lacked real purpose in the end.
It was a few weeks before Maggie headed north that Ellie and Jonah both finally erupted. They’d been out earlier for dinner with some other couples—all their kids recent graduates of the local high school. It had started out nice. But by the time they arrived home, Ellie felt tense. She might as well have been twenty-two again, listening to everyone excitedly rattle off plans for the next decade, while she pushed a piece of chicken around her plate, feeling lost in plain sight. She took her grievances out on Jonah, choosing to snap at him about the recycling bin, of all things (“If you would just flatten the boxes!”), though, of course, that wasn’t really it.
Finally, Jonah had had enough. He slammed a balled-up fist against the kitchen table. The wooden legs shook. “What is all this”—he waved a hand around the room—“these last few months, and this constant back-and-forth! What is it all really about? Whatever it is, just say it!” He squeezed the sides of his face with his hands. “What do you—what do you want, Ellie?”
“I—I don’t know what I want!” she shouted, but it was a lie, and they both knew it.
“That’s not true. You know what you want. And so do I.” He took a breath, licked his bottom lip to buy himself a second. “But I can’t give it to you, Ellie. No one can.”
“I don’t want to let her go,” Ellie whispered.
“You’re not,” Jonah pointed out, and when he did, something between them shifted. “But I can feel it, Ellie.”
“Feel what?”
“The fact that you’re starting to let go of me instead,” he said.
Back in the dining room, everyone is waiting for someone else to say something.
“Look,” Jonah finally announces, and for the first time since they set foot on the plane earlier this morning, a look of real heartache washes across his sculpted, cleanly shaven face. “This isn’t the way either of us thought our story would end,” he explains, repeating the lines the two of them prepared back at home, their sad, poorly crafted script. He looks at Ellie, nods. “But this is what we’ve both decided is best.”
“This isn’t best!” Bunny exclaims as she rushes back to the dining table, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “What’s best is that you uphold your vows and stay married.” A devout Catholic, she quickly makes the sign of the cross over her chest.
Frank settles back into his chair, sips from his perspiring glass of iced tea. He looks at Ellie, then at Jonah, then back at Ellie, unsure where to steady his gaze. “What happened?”
Ellie and Jonah both sigh in unison. Jonah gives Ellie a look, an invitation for her to be the one to speak.
“We just—” Ellie exhales again, longer and heavier now. How is she supposed to describe it? The answer is so sad, so boring. No juicy cheating scandal. No lies. No hidden money or secret credit card accounts. “We just fell out of love, I guess.”
“Oh, baloney!” Bunny starts to pull her china coffee mugs out from the hutch. She’s shaking her head a hundred miles per hour. “You think marriage is about love ?”
“Um, yes.” Ellie watches her mother set the table for dessert, as if nothing has happened, like her daughter has simply made some throwaway comment about the weather and has not announced the death of her current life. She looks away from Bunny and glances down at her own hands, sweaty and shaky and, weirdly, aging (Who knew how much hands could age?). Her thin, understated gold wedding band—the one she’s hardly removed since the day she first slipped it on at twenty-eight—still hugs her finger. She hasn’t had the heart yet to remove it. “I’d definitely like to think that,” Ellie adds.
In the period that followed Maggie’s departure, their disagreements became as predictable as the sun rising. They had an empty nest, which was terrible and sorrowful, but was also meant to be freeing. They were supposed to glide gracefully into their next act, start going dancing, like one of those happy, gray-haired couples having the time of their lives in pharmaceutical ads. Instead, they fought about everything. The television volume (always too loud or too low for one of them, like characters in some dysfunctional fairy tale). The toilet seat (constantly left up) and the hair in the shower drain (constantly left behind). The groceries and their excess food waste (Did they buy the spring mix just to throw it away?). The way the other person drove or perpetually watched murder documentaries or never emptied the bathroom trash. The way one of them snored or chewed or breathed. Their marriage felt exhausting. It was like running a marathon, only when you reached the finish line, instead of someone handing you a medal, your spouse was there to shout about how the dishwasher was broken again.
Ellie, who no longer needed to fill her days volunteering at the high school’s front desk or organizing bake sales for the varsity soccer team or helping to oversee book drives or attending dozens of morning meetings to help plan the prom, found herself with something she hadn’t had in years: unstructured time, alone, to think. About her choices and contributions. About what they’d amounted to in the end. No, she hadn’t cured diseases or landed rockets, but she’d made an impact. Her life—her choices—had been simple. But all those years, Ellie had been doing something important. Hadn’t she?
Ellie pushes her chair away from the table. “I’ll be back,” she says and makes her way toward the sunroom. Before she closes the glass slider behind her, she turns back. When she does, she sees Jonah helping Bunny slice up a yellow loaf of pound cake. Ellie swings open the screen door. “I need to go find Maggie.”
And then, alone, she walks out into a blue-tinged evening.
Maggie is seated on the edge of the diving board, her flowy white skirt hem flirting with the pool’s surface. Behind her, the tropical sun has started to set. The sky is a layer cake of colors. A band of blue. Slivers of bright orange. A thick layer of purple and another of pink. Her feet hang over, trailing through the water, just like when she was a kid, back when she was still too young and afraid to actually dive off the board, and so instead she’d perch there and imagine.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she announces as soon as Ellie pushes open the pool area’s safety gate. Maggie doesn’t look up when she speaks, just sits and stares at the reflection of the palm trees rippling around her unpainted toenails.
“Maggie,” Ellie begins, approaching her daughter from the opposite side of the pool deck. She arrives at the deep end of the water, then sits on the back of the diving board, enough for them to be close, but not so much for Maggie to feel like her mother’s proximity is an invasion or emotional threat. “We wanted to tell you sooner, but this obviously isn’t something we’d call and drop on you while you’re up at school.” Another bad script. “We thought it was important for all of us to be together so we can talk and try our best to work through this as a family.”
“Ha!” The girl laughs—laughs!—but not because anything Ellie has said is funny. “A family! Great word choice, Mom.”
“This isn’t what your father and I had planned, Maggie!” Ellie shouts, not meaning for her voice to escalate, though she can’t help it. She feels like a can of one of her planet-destroying seltzers, all shaken up and ready to burst. Nearby, she notices Shelia—sans diving cap—out on a walk with a man—Her husband? Her friend?—on the pebbled walkway. Shelia waves, craning her neck to see what’s happening, as if Ellie and Maggie are an interesting news clip on TV. Ellie waves back—a courtesy—and instantly lowers her voice. This is the last thing she needs—her parents’ neighbors talking. She’d never hear the end of it. “Trust me, Maggie,” she whispers. “No one is more surprised by this news than your father and me.”
Looking back on it, over the last two years, Ellie feels her whole life has become an onslaught of surprising news.
“So, as I’m sure you know,” the high school guidance counselor had said one autumn morning early in senior year, “Maggie has edited her list from twelve down to eight schools.”
Ellie and Maggie sat opposite the counselor.
“What happened to the other four?” Ellie posed.
Maggie, wearing a preppy crewneck sweater, shrugged. “I made a few changes.”
Ellie waved a hand at the counselor, who passed her the sheet. “You pulled off all the state schools?” Her breath felt short. “You’re not even going to apply to one or two, just in case?”
“In case of what?” Maggie asked, her gaze out the window.
“In case you decide—Can you look at me while I talk, please?—in case you decide to go back to your original plan,” Ellie offered.
Maggie swiveled her face. “Do you mean your plan?”
“What?” Ellie scoffed as the counselor looked on awkwardly. “I never said you had to stay close to home. That was what you always told me you wanted.”
Maggie offered an uncharacteristic eye roll. “Only because it was what I knew you wanted me to do.”
The counselor stood from her desk chair. “Maybe I should—”
“Maggie, I don’t understand,” Ellie said. “You’ve always said you wanted to study someplace nearby.” She peered at the paper. “Colorado isn’t exactly a hop, skip, and a jump from here.”
“Mom, no one in my class is staying around here,” Maggie insisted, shooting her counselor a look.
The counselor hesitated, then lowered herself back into her chair. “Many kids are—”
“I don’t care what the other kids are doing,” Ellie snapped. “I care about what you’re doing, Maggie.” She glanced back at the paper. “I mean, since when are you longing to go to—to—Texas?”
“Look, all my friends are going away,” Maggie insisted. “And I want to go away, too.”
“Does your father know about these changes?” Ellie asked, already sensing the answer.
Maggie balled up her sleeves, looked at the floor. “I mean, a little.”
“A little?” Ellie squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Maggie, I just don’t understand why you’ve had such a sudden—and drastic—change of heart. Is someone telling you that staying close to home isn’t a good choice?”
In the hallway, the school bell rang.
“We should probably wrap this up,” the counselor suggested, standing again.
“It’s not sudden, Mom,” Maggie said, and Ellie couldn’t tell if it was a lie. “I just don’t want to get stuck here forever when there’s a whole world out there. I want to get out, see things, figure out who I really am.” She kicked her foot across the floor, like she once did when she was small. “I mean, I—I can’t stay here just for you. Right?”
Now, Maggie pulls up her skirt and stands. Barefoot, she pushes past her mother and moves onto the concrete. “So, what?” With a hand on her hip, her whole posture communicates nothing but sass. She’s an adult, and yet currently looks to Ellie almost exactly the way she did as a preschooler, back when she was first beginning to unlock her own personality. “Are you going to date or something?”
“Date?” Ellie shudders—literally shudders—at the thought. She has absolutely no interest in this sort of thing. “No! Do you think that’s what this is about? Dad and I are splitting up so we can go date other people again?”
In all the arguments and conversations Jonah and Ellie have had about their split—talks that stretched through entire nights and still weren’t done by daybreak, the two of them reviewing every imaginable bit and piece of this new life they were claiming—she had not yet put serious thought into this concept. But now—Maggie in front of her, jutting out her hip and flailing her arms as she works to make some point, like she has any idea whatsoever what it takes to make a marriage work—Ellie thinks briefly of the idea. Will she date? What will she wear? Where will she go? And with whom? What on earth will she say? Will she need to invest in different— better —underwear?
But it isn’t only the thought of dating that leaves Ellie with a slightly queasy feeling; it’s the consideration of what could come after several successful dates. A relationship. Oh God. The thought of having to learn the ways someone lives his life all over again—how a person takes his coffee, or how many bed pillows he requires to comfortably sleep—feels like enough to make her break out in a flush of hives. No. Ellie will be fine alone. Dating is definitely out of the picture.
“So, what am I supposed to do?” Maggie plops herself down onto one of the slatted pool chairs, her arms two lean sticks set in her lap. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Maggie doesn’t need to say it—this one unspeakable thing. The fact that, because of the circumstances through which they acquired their home, it’s only right for Jonah to be the one to move out and sign a lease on some sad little apartment elsewhere in town.
Unlike dating, Ellie has thought about this part a lot. Their home—that midsize white Craftsman with black shutters and a covered porch, the one her parents had “sold” (at her mother’s insistence) to her and Jonah for $11.11 ( for good luck! ); the home where Ellie grew up, and where Maggie grew up, and where now no one else will ever grow up, it seems—will not feel the same. Half of Jonah’s belongings are already gone, packed up in a storage unit, where they will remain while he stays at an extended-stay hotel and looks for an apartment. A chunk of Maggie’s possessions, which she’s taken up to school, are also gone, her bedroom pared down and always looking too sparse and clean and empty, boxes of her childhood memories tucked away in the basement, the one part of the house no one ever has a real need to frequent.
“You’ll come home,” Ellie finally responds to Maggie’s question. “Back to the house and your old bed,” she adds, even though she knows she doesn’t have a real say. Maggie is an adult, and so custody will not be a legal part of the split. Instead, she will get to decide who she wants to visit (or not visit) when she returns home on summer breaks and at the holidays. Their recent interactions having been so strained, Ellie has started to believe her daughter will elect to sleep on a pullout sofa over at her dad’s. “But we have plenty of time to think about all this, Mags,” Ellie concludes. “You’ll only be home for a week after exams before you’re away all summer, and then back at school again in the fall.”
Much to Ellie’s chagrin, Maggie and three of her college friends have decided to do that thing—that ridiculous thing —some undergrads choose to do: to pack up enormous hiking packs with months’ worth of (vegan!) granola bars and specialty socks and head overseas to sleep in hostels. Like so many things with her daughter, there’s not much Ellie can say. Maggie took a part-time job off campus and saved up for the trip herself. She’s over eighteen. She doesn’t need her mother’s permission (or credit card) to book a flight. It doesn’t help that Jonah, who took a similar trip the summer after his sophomore year, keeps telling Maggie it’s a great idea.
“Yeah,” Maggie says and rolls her yellow-flecked eyes at her mother’s comment. “Sure.”
“Isn’t that the plan?” Ellie asks. “Aren’t you still going on your trip? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’d be fine if you didn’t go. I don’t understand why on earth you’d want to—”
“You wouldn’t, Mom,” Maggie interjects, her tone suddenly condescending. “Understand, I mean. You just—you just wouldn’t get it.”
After college, Ellie moved her belongings back into her childhood bedroom (the one that would later belong to Maggie) like she’d never left. Unlike her friends, she didn’t have a strong desire to go after a certain career. She needed a job—she knew that—and so she’d applied at a few small publishers in the city, not because she longed to work for them, but because she had a degree in English, and she didn’t know what else to do. For two years, she climbed aboard that terrible commuter train every weekday morning before sunrise (the parking fees were outrageous, and so Frank dropped her off on his way to the deli, even though it made her feel childish) and then, too afraid to ride the subway, she walked all the way to her small, loft-style office on West Eighteenth Street.
The company published calendars (still relevant at the time) and fine art books, neither of which Ellie had a passion for or knew a thing about. But she had a desk, and that was something, and a cutout photo of Joan Didion taped to her space-age-looking computer, which felt possibly important, too. During her company’s weekly Wednesday meetings, while every other employee her age took copious notes about who knew what, Ellie drew lines of scribbly illustrations over and over in her notepad and tried to understand why they were planning another photography book dedicated to horses. She hated her boss, a woman named Andrea (who insisted everyone pronounce it “On-drea-ah,” like that was a real thing), and her yappy dog she always brought to the office, the one who often peed on the floor right next to Ellie’s desk.
Ellie was not cut out for a big city or an office-based career, even though she felt as if that was what women like her—members of a generation who’d been brought up to believe they could have or be anything, girls who’d been granted the great privilege of attending good colleges and earning reputable degrees—were supposed to do. But the longer she stayed there, scraping by on her sad little salary, half of which went toward her silly commute, the more Ellie knew she didn’t really want any part of it.
Shortly after she left that position, Ellie took a job at the bookstore in town and then signed a lease on a small, two-bedroom apartment a few blocks away from her parents. Her postgraduate life was simple, more a cozy romance than a splashy bestseller. And what was so wrong with that?
Apparently, everything.
It didn’t take long into her adulthood for Ellie to learn that being a woman is inherently problematic. If you want something too much and then work and sacrifice too hard for it, you’re selfish. If you don’t want anything exclusively for yourself, you lack aspiration. As Ellie came to grasp a few years later—after she’d met Jonah and had Maggie, whom she’d left her bookstore job (too many nights and weekends) to raise—if you are content to be a mother and a wife, you are old fashioned, and that, she quickly came to understand, meant “bad.”
Much like strong fictional characters, people expected you to have an interesting backstory, a healthy motivation for, well, something. According to the world—and, more recently, her own daughter—raising a family didn’t quite count. It wasn’t enough. The impact of your output was too weak. Other than the people inside your household, your efforts didn’t have real reach.
That winter, after Maggie headed north for her second semester, Ellie sat in the kitchen and browsed job listings on her laptop, wondering if she’d feel better about her life if she launched herself into a fast-paced career. It was overwhelming. Not only the job descriptions (so much jargon—so many adjectives) but how much the world had changed. Who was she kidding? She didn’t even understand how to download the software needed to upload her sad, fluffed-up résumé. She still had an AOL email address, for Christ’s sake.
“Why are you doing this, Ellie?” Jonah had asked her in bed that night. “You don’t need to get a job. I support you if you want one, but we’ve learned how to live comfortably on our current budget over the years. We’re fine.”
“You don’t understand,” Ellie said, holding a book she’d been pretending to read. “I’ve spent the last nearly twenty years focused on the two of you.” She set it on her nightstand. “I need to finally find a way to focus just on me. To finally do something that matters.”
“Come on. You don’t really feel that way.” He paused, waiting. “Do you?”
But Ellie didn’t quite know how she felt. She clicked off the lamp and went to bed.
The next day, at her monthly book club meeting, the other women—their children finally receiving their own college acceptance letters—shifted away from the novel yet again. They were nervous, naturally, about their kids traveling so far from the nest, but also excited. One woman described how she and her husband browsed travel websites every night. Another said she and her spouse had started to frequent the animal shelter as they prepared to fill the new quiet in their home with a barking puppy. Someone else explained that she and her husband planned to list the house and downsize to a condo, the idea that they’d grow even closer with less space.
“Are we still happy?” Ellie asked Jonah that night.
Jonah sighed and clicked off the TV. “Is that question meant for you, or for me?”
A thought kept flashing through Ellie’s mind. She could see it, like bulbs on a sign, but couldn’t articulate it. Still, she felt it. Every time Maggie rushed her off the phone. Every time she and Jonah bickered about anything and everything. Maggie had finally moved on. Jonah, in his own way, had, too, every morning when he walked out the door to continue to pursue parts of his life that did not involve his wife. And what of Ellie? She’d given up so much of herself over the years that she wasn’t even sure which parts of her were left.
That’s when it hit her. Maybe, like her family, Ellie needed to move on, too.
Back in the pool area, Maggie—apparently having said what she needed to say—begins to walk back toward the fence. Ellie follows her. All around the complex, the vintage-looking lampposts that line the walkways turn on as quickly as if someone has snapped.
“Maggie, stop,” Ellie demands. Maggie pauses and slowly turns around. “We’re still a family,” Ellie adds. “We’re still us.”
Maggie shakes her mane of long hair and briefly closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she releases an exasperated sigh. “I’m not a little kid, Mom,” she points out, like Ellie needs the reminder. For a split second, Ellie allows herself to envision her daughter as exactly this—a little girl—anyway. Braided pigtails. A constellation of freckles along her nose and cheeks. Some plush toy forever in her tiny hands. “I’m nineteen. I know what’s happening.”
Ellie shakes away her vision, seeing the girl—the woman —again in the present day. Ellie wishes she could go back in time to talk in greater depth with Maggie about how this transition—moving away, acclimating to a roster of demanding classes, forming a new community—has been for her. She’s asked, of course, during their phone calls. But if Ellie is honest with herself, she was often distracted. Behind the scenes, her marriage was falling apart. “Maggie, are you—”
“Am I what, Mom?” her daughter challenges.
Ellie pauses, considering the right way to ask. “Are you ... I don’t know, Mags ... are you okay?”
“Okay?” Maggie’s eyes widen, suddenly as round as the moon, which has faintly begun to appear in the sky. “Yeah, Mom,” she says, though it’s not sincere. “I’m just dandy.”
Without another word, Maggie pivots and forcefully pushes her way beyond the pool gate. She hurries past a coral-hued hibiscus bush, then a fragrant magnolia, and disappears.
“Beauuutiful night!” Shelia announces as she and her gentleman friend round a corner, her wave as eager and energetic as a schoolgirl’s. “Crystal clear!”
But for Ellie, nothing about this too-warm night is clear or beautiful. She nods her agreement anyway and waves back. Right as she does, a bulb on the lamppost beside her flickers—so desperate to hold on—and then dies.
It just dies.
“I think you’re making a mistake.”
Ellie is seated on a rattan chair in the sunroom, watching the final shards of sun leave the sky. She has a plate of pound cake—only a single bite taken from it—balanced on her lap.
“You and Jonah,” Bunny clarifies and closes the glass slider behind her. She’s changed into her cotton pajamas and lightweight robe, the whole matching set printed with a punchy floral and flamingo motif ( Florida! ). “This is not the right choice, Ellie.” She takes a seat beside her daughter and breathes deeply, mustering up the courage for whatever she’s about to say next. “This is a bad choice, in fact,” she bravely admits, then leans back, satisfied that she’s said it.
Above them, the palm-leaf ceiling fan whirs, moving the warm air around and around. Outside the room’s screened walls, there is the sound of insects.
“Mom.” Ellie briefly looks inside the house. Maggie, Jonah, and Frank are all on the couch, watching a game show, and looking like someone has died. Ellie swivels back to face the yard, the one her parents daydreamed about for decades. It occurs to Ellie that, in all their years together, she and Jonah have never seriously talked about their retirement. They’ve saved for it, sure. But they’ve never fantasized about it together—where they’d move or who they’d become during that stage in their lives. The absence of this conversation, Ellie now realizes, should have been a red flag. “Can we not do this, please? Not yet. I’m just ...”
But Ellie fails to finish her statement because, honestly, she doesn’t really know. What is she? Sad? Overwhelmed? Relieved? Worried? Anxious? It’s like she sneezed— Achoo! —and every emotion she’s ever felt has come to life inside her all at once.
Ellie was the one to say the word “divorce” first. She wasn’t even fully sure that divorce was what she’d meant.
She was crouched on their bedroom floor, sorting laundry and feeling fed up and full of resentment and sadness and regret, when she said it. All those years of dedicating herself to her marriage and her home and her family, and for what? Look at the reward: a husband with whom she argued about nothing and a daughter who could hardly stand the sound of her mother’s voice, let alone her opinion.
Ellie didn’t know how divorce might solve her problems. She only knew she couldn’t escape the idea that, for once, she needed to see who she was apart from her family—the one she’d given all of herself to—and to discover who she might be when given the chance to stand on—to focus exclusively on—her own two feet.
“You know, Jo,” she’d said that evening, the d-word having just escaped her lips. “I keep wondering about who I might have become if I’d made other choices for myself. If anything I’ve actually done for this family, or this house, has really mattered.” She shrugged, feeling defeated. “It’s not like my commitment to this marriage—to our life—has changed the world, you know?” A pair of pilled athletic socks dangled from her fingers as she cried. “It’s just—sometimes I think about what life might have looked like if I’d never agreed to have coffee with you that first day.” She could have stopped, tossed the socks in the hamper, and left the room. But she didn’t. “Lately, I think about the lives we might have lived—the people we might have become—if we’d never met. If the world would be different. Or if we would be different. If anything would have actually changed at all.” She looked down at the drips of her tears on the wood floor. “Sometimes I think about what might have happened if we’d never actually been married at all.”
Jonah stood at the bedroom door, his arms crossed over his chest. He bit his bottom lip hard. “So, you’ve finally figured out what you want then, huh?” His complexion grew splotchy with emotion. “This is it?”
“I—I don’t know!” Ellie, frustrated and confused and full of envy and sadness and still crying, threw the sock. “I just don’t want to live like this anymore. Us, always fighting. Me, always doing the laundry, and pretending the world is going to change as a result!”
But it was too late for her to backpedal. She’d been the one to click on the ignition, and now the car was in motion, heading right toward a crash. Once a word like that was out there, you couldn’t just reach a hand into the air and take it back.
Jonah opened his mouth to speak again. Ellie thought he’d say this was foolish. Of course they weren’t getting divorced. But he didn’t. Which made her think that maybe it was what he wanted, too.
“Well then,” he said, his voice flat. “I guess that’s that.”
And then he stepped out into the hallway and slammed the door.
In the sunroom, Bunny’s gaze is cast on some indeterminate something out in the yard. “I’m sorry about what I said,” Bunny admits. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Thank you, Mom.” Ellie, grateful for this small serving of relief, lifts a bite of cake to her mouth. “I know it may seem like a bad choice right now, but it’s not a—”
“No, no,” Bunny immediately interjects. “Not about it being a bad choice. This is a terrible choice, Ellie. A horrible one.” The bite of cake untouched, Ellie drops her fork back onto her plate. “I meant about calling Father Joe.”
“You can call Father Joe, Mom.” Ellie—tired in a way she’s never been tired before—sets the plate on an end table. For as far back as she can remember, her mother has been religious. Church every Sunday (and, since she’s been retired, most weekday mornings, too). A crucifix hanging above the front door. Her small gold cross around her neck, even when she sleeps. Bunny believes in angels, protective spirits that watch over and help guide her. Every time the clock strikes 11:11, Bunny insists that everyone stop and say a prayer or make a wish. Ellie has never much bought into these things. She’s more like Frank in this way, going along with it all for Bunny’s sake. Ellie and Jonah were married in a church (mostly due to Bunny’s insistence). They had Maggie baptized and always took her to Mass on holidays. But that was it. They were lite-Catholics, like their faith was on a diet and therefore could only consume so much holiness in a given time frame. Maybe, Ellie considers now, this is another piece of their problems. “It’s fine, Mom,” Ellie continues. “Really. I’m not offended if you want to tell him that we’re—”
“What?” Bunny practically explodes. “I’m not telling my priest you’re getting divorced! He’ll never look at me in church again!”
With this comment, Ellie decides it’s time to go back inside. “I think I need to go to bed.” She wants to take a shower, finally change out of her travel clothes. She lifts her plate, tugs the slider back open, and then winces, knowing instantly that she’s jerked the door handle too hard.
“What now ?” Bunny asks, noting her daughter’s pained expression.
“It’s my back,” Ellie answers. “I tweaked something in it earlier at the airport.”
“Oh Lord. I’ll get the heating pad.” Bunny stands. “I’ll leave it in the front room—” She stops, a realization rushing over her like a forceful wind. “W-will you ...,” she stammers. “Will he—”
“He’s going to sleep on the couch with Maggie,” Ellie explains. “We already talked about it.”
“Great. Just great.” Bunny locks the screen door and pulls her robe tighter. She makes the sign of the cross over her body, like she does every night before she closes up the house—a prayer, or a wish, maybe, that everyone inside stays safe. “I guess you don’t need me, then.” Bunny clicks off the ceiling fan light. The room goes dark. “It sounds like you two have everything planned.”