6
Nancy might have had no problem walking right into my house without knocking, but I wasn’t comfortable doing the same.
Well, not comfortable doing the same anymore.
Though, to be perfectly fair, the very reason I didn’t feel comfortable just walking in should have led to me knocking on Larry’s office door. But I hadn’t expected to walk in on a similar scene in my husband’s workplace.
I rapped smartly and Nancy appeared a moment later, her eyes widening as she saw me. “Bev, I told her—” Shrieks emanated from behind her, and without even turning around, Nancy yelled, “If that’s broken, you’re not watching TV tonight!” She lowered her voice. “Your mother said you’d be okay with it if it happened.”
“Okay with what?”
Nancy blinked three times in rapid succession. “Larry is here.”
“Why isn’t he at work?”
In the six years we had been friends, I had never seen Nancy get flustered. Nancy was the woman who walked in and got things done, wherever she was. And it took me a moment to register that the change in her was my first time seeing her actually uncomfortable. Even the final time that I walked into her house unannounced, she just waved at me and continued what she was doing, calling out that she and Arnie would just be another couple minutes.
But Nancy bit her lip and looked away. “Arnie was home for lunch and called him when your mother brought the kids.” My shoulders dropped. “Bev, I told him not to. I really don’t want to be in the middle of this.”
I counted to ten in my head. “I don’t want you to be in the middle either. And I wish Larry had found someplace else to stay.” And I really wish he and my mother respected boundaries, I added silently. “I came to grab the kids. I’ll get them out of your hair.”
“Do you want to just leave them for a while? Then you don’t have to see him.”
It was tempting. But I also didn’t know what he was telling them and whether he had them each on a knee, spinning a sob story about how mean Mommy wouldn’t let him come home. If so, I hoped Nancy’s can-do attitude would extend to helping me dig a six-foot hole in the backyard.
“No. I’m going to take them home.” Except they couldn’t go home. I had been hoping I could have a cup of coffee with Nancy while the kids played before taking them out to kill some time.
Nancy wrung her hands, and I put a hand on her arm. “None of this is your fault. It’ll be fine. I promise.”
She nodded and pulled me in for a quick squeeze. Then I marched inside, heading toward the sound of voices in the den.
“Well, well, well,” I said, surveying the scene. Larry was on the floor opposite Robbie, a half-empty checkerboard between them as Debbie sat on his lap, chewing on a black game piece. It was the first time I had seen him play a game with Robbie in over two years, and I momentarily forgot why we were at Nancy’s house instead of ours, taking in the heartwarming scene. Maybe, I thought, observing how content the children looked, he should come home .
“Mommy!” Robbie screamed, launching himself at me and knocking everything off the board in the process.
“Mama!” Debbie cried around the checker in her mouth. “I pay keckers too!”
Robbie looked up, his arms still wrapped around my legs. “She’s not playing. She’s slobbering on all the pieces.”
“I pay!”
“No, you don’t!”
“Kids,” Larry said, rising and dusting off his pants. I glanced over my shoulder to see if Nancy had followed us into the room. She would take that as an insult. There wasn’t a speck of dust in her house. But she hadn’t come in. “Why don’t you go play with Eddie and Patty for a few minutes so your mother and I can talk.”
“But—”
“No buts, champ. We don’t talk back to adults, do we?”
Robbie’s little face fell. “No sir.”
If anything had thawed, seeing him on the floor with the kids, it froze back up at the look on Robbie’s face. And Larry didn’t even notice or care how disappointed he was!
Larry ruffled his hair. “Now take your sister to go find your friends.”
Robbie held out his hand to Debbie, who took it, the checker back in her mouth. He looked back once at Larry, who wasn’t watching them leave. Instead, he was looking at me smugly. The whole game was a show for me. No. He wasn’t coming home.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as soon as the kids were out of earshot.
He crossed his arms. “What did you do to your hair?”
“Cut it for myself, not for you for once. Now answer my question.”
“Suits you,” he said, reaching out to touch the bobbed ends. I backed away, and his face hardened. “I’m living here because my wife threw me out.”
“Why here ?”
“Well, I couldn’t exactly go stay with Linda as you suggested. She lives with her mother and sister.”
My stomach flipped over. Somehow every time he opened his mouth, the situation got worse. “You are truly disgusting, do you know that?”
“Bev, come on. It was just sex.” I glanced over my shoulder to make sure the kids weren’t peeking around the doorway. “I don’t love her. I love you. You know that. So let me come home already.”
“If you loved me, you’d know that there’s no such thing as”—I looked behind me again and lowered my voice—“‘just sex’ if it’s with anyone else.”
He shrugged. “Well, that’s what it was regardless. I don’t expect a woman to understand, but men have needs and—”
I held up a hand. “Yeah, and one of those needs is for you to stop talking before your children hear you say something that is going to cause permanent damage.”
“And you think their mother kicking their father out won’t achieve the same thing?”
I stared at him, wondering how I had ever thought I loved this man. Then I took a deep breath, because it was that or slap him. “No. I think our children will grow up learning to care about others instead of just themselves. Which is not the lesson they’d be learning with you in the house.”
His brows closed in, and his face darkened. “Beverly—”
“No. I’m going to find a lawyer this week. I’m not doing this. You can find someone else to handle your ‘needs.’”
I turned to walk out, but he grabbed my arm. “The department store called me because of how high the charges were. I was going to let the bill slide if I was coming home,” he said as I yanked my arm back and spun to look at him. “But if I’m not, it all goes back to the store.”
“That furniture is going nowhere.”
“Oh, it’s going somewhere all right. That’s the next thing—I can’t stay here forever, and I can’t afford both that house and someplace else to live, especially not the way you spend. So either I come home, or you’re going to need to find something smaller. An apartment in Silver Spring would do nicely.”
An apartment! I shook my head. I wasn’t leaving that house. “Get yourself an apartment. I’ll get a job.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “A job? Doing what? You’ve never worked a day in your life.”
“I’ve kept house and cooked and raised our children. That’s work.”
“But nothing that pays the bills. What are you going to do? Leave the kids with your mother and go be a domestic?”
I set my jaw. “Oh, you just wait.” I turned around again, swatting behind me in case he tried to grab me, and marched into the kitchen to get the kids.