Chapter 54
This is crazy. This is batshit crazy, deranged, lady-on-the-verge-of-a-mental-breakdown behavior.
I have become the worst stereotype of a scorned woman.
If I can even be called one. What marks the rite of passage from girl to woman?
A certain age? A broken heart? A fed-upness?
A real bra? Using pads to catch post-period spotting instead of stuffing your underwear with wads of toilet paper?
I don’t know exactly what it takes to be considered a woman, but I know that right now, as I sit here in my parked car outside his house, baseball cap hooding my face, eating a jumbo bag of honey mustard Kettle Chips, I feel like one. Or at least angry enough to be one.
I didn’t even know it was his fucking birthday when I decided to drive over here.
And I didn’t even really decide to drive over here.
The thought no sooner entered my mind than my hands were on my steering wheel, zero lag time between thought and action.
I drove over in a trance, the traffic lights blurry as I manically considered what I believed to be genuine possibilities based solely on the one look we shared at the diner.
I can text him that I’m out front of his house and he’ll run into my arms. He’ll pour himself into me, oozing confessions between sloppy kisses—how much he’s missed me, how much he needs me, how much he can’t live without me.
But then, I saw it. The Happy Birthday banner hanging in his living room archway, the handful of guests milling about, sipping cocktails and eating cheese cubes and looking like the forty-something crowd that they are—people with mortgages, with kids, with good insurance and book clubs and tips on how to keep a ficus alive.
And him, in a Birthday Boy hat, holding a Corona and greeting guests.
I sat and I watched. And watched. And I’m still watching.
What for, I don’t know. Some masochistic instinct maybe, where I need to hurt to know I’m alive.
Or maybe it’s that I want evidence that he’s truly moved on so that I can too.
Or maybe I just want a little entertainment, watching middle-aged middle-class people in their Sunday best clink glasses as they share the highlights of their mundane lives, that dinner with their in-laws was canceled or that they got good news about the questionable forearm mole they just had removed.
I pluck a potato chip from the bag and pop it in my mouth.
I could tell Gwen. Or the whole party even.
I could run in and spill all the details of our affair.
Ruin a man’s life in a single speech. The thought of it makes my adrenaline spike.
Is this what power feels like? Barbed and vicious and belligerent?
But I won’t do that. I’d never do that. Because I don’t want to ruin this man’s life. I want to be in it. It’s a truth so opposite of power. So powerless.
I get to the jagged crumbs at the bottom of the potato chip bag and shake them into my mouth, then I tilt the bag up again and tap it to get all the seasoning, then scrape the seasoning with my fingernail to get even more of it, then turn the bag inside out and lick the remainder of it off the foil.
Surely all the answers are in this potato chip dust. I crumple up the bag and toss it at the foot of the passenger’s seat and for a split second I think Mr. Korgy’s looking at me, but when I look closer, I see that he’s just talking to a guest standing near the window.
He laughs at their probably mediocre joke. I turn on my engine and drive home.