Chapter 9
NINE
LENNON
The hotel clerk runs my card a second time.
I know she already ran it once. I watched her do it. But she’s being professional about this, giving me the dignity of a second attempt, and I am choosing to believe in the second attempt with everything I have because the alternative is—
The machine beeps.
She turns the little screen toward me so I can see the word myself, which I appreciate less than she probably intends.
Declined.
“I have another one,” I say.
I have three other ones. I go through all of them with the focused calm of someone defusing a bomb, and the clerk runs each one twice without being asked because she is, genuinely, a kind person.
Each time the machine makes its small verdict sound I hand her the next card and do not think about the fact that Jake set up every single one of these accounts and I don’t know what my own recovery questions are.
Nor do I think about waking up this morning on a stranger’s chest feeling, for the first time in recent memory, like everything might actually be okay.
No, not a stranger. Jake’s brother’s chest.
Stop thinking about it.
“Ma’am.” The clerk’s voice has changed register. She’s not being unkind but she’s being clear, the way people get when they’ve decided the kindness portion of a situation has concluded. “I’m going to have to ask—”
“One second.” I’m already on my phone, logging into the bank app, because there’s money in these accounts, I know there’s money, Jake has a good job and I have my business income and we’ve been saving for years, so this is clearly some kind of—
Fraudulent Activity Detected.
The screen refreshes. Same message.
I try the next account.
Fraudulent Activity Detected.
The next one.
I look up. The security guard has materialized at the edge of my peripheral vision with the practiced casualness of someone who does this regularly and has learned that making it obvious too early only makes things worse.
Oh my god.
They think I’m—
I give what I intend to be a reassuring wave. It comes out as something closer to a flap, and then I walk back to my car with the specific speed of someone who is not running.
Then I sit in the driver’s seat and I lock the doors.
I check every bank account.
Every account.
Like, even the ones for my business that is entirely my own that I started with my own two hands.
I put the phone face-down on the passenger seat and I look at the hotel through the windshield.
This is Jake, who set up all the accounts because it would be easier, and Jake, who handled the business paperwork because I was having particularly bad migraines the month I was setting up the LLC.
He didn’t think I ought to be exerting myself so much setting up a business at all, so I was touched when he went and did all the bank account setup for me.
He was so helpful.
In fact, he’s just been helpfully taking care of things for so long that I stopped noticing which things he was taking care of. Or the fact that it was everything.
And I didn’t notice that I had no idea where things like account numbers are actually stored, or… you know, whose name was actually on all the accounts… until right now.
Sitting here in this very parking lot.
My breathing gets shorter.
But no… This all just has to be some big misunderstanding. Jake’s a good man.
… Isn’t he?
I pick up my phone and text my best friend, Brianna.
[LENNON: Can I come over? It’s important.]
The three dots appear immediately.
[brIANNA: Of course. Everything okay?]
I look at the hotel.
[LENNON: No,]
I type back.
[But it will be.]
I believe this, actually. I believe it the way I’ve believed things my whole life—with the specific stubbornness of someone who has learned that believing hard enough is sometimes the only available way to get through tough times.
Maybe Kathy got to Jake and convinced him to pull this jackass move. But it’ll all work out. I have to believe that.
Right now I just need my best friend in all the world. She’ll help make it better. Or at least she’ll give me a place to crash tonight that’s not in close proximity to my ex-husband’s brother… whose dick I accidentally fell on top of last night.
Not thinking about it!
I put the car in gear and drive the three blocks to Brianna’s house. We thought it was so great when we found a house in the same neighborhood as theirs.
We became BFFs my junior year in high school after we met in youth group, our husbands were best friends, and wouldn’t it be so convenient for the barbeques now, and later when I had kids?
That’s what Jake was always saying—our kids could grow up together.
Which always made me want to scream—there are no fucking kids!
When I get there, Brianna opens the door and then opens her arms.
I walk into them, and for about thirty seconds everything is exactly what I needed.
There’s the familiar smell of Brianna’s fabric softener, her hand rubbing up and down my back, and the familiar sound of her kids shrieking somewhere deeper in the house.
“Oh honey,” she says into my hair. “It’s going to be okay.”
I pull back to look at her face and tell her what happened. Yes, it’ll be the first conversation in ten years of friendship where I say the actual true things instead of the manageable version of them, because if I can’t do that now, the day after I left my husband, then when—
“Whatever you did,” Brianna says before I can get a word out, “I know Jake will take you back.”
I go very still.
She’s already turning toward the sound of fresh shrieking, holding up one finger, and she disappears around the corner. I stand in the entryway, and I hear her voice shift into the mom-frequency she uses for the girls, firm and patient.
I sigh and look at the family photos on the wall.
There’s me and Jake, smiling at Bri and Jared’s wedding. Me and Bri, at mine. Both of us younger and smiling with all the confidence of young people so sure of the path ahead of them and what’s coming along down it. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes—
I follow the sound of Bri’s voice to the playroom and sit on the floor next to Livi, Bri’s four-and-a-half-year-old, who is building something with blocks that her three-year-old sister keeps knocking over.
I start stacking while Brianna manages the situation, and I think about—
Well, I’m back to not thinking about anything.
I stack blocks.
Livi knocks them down this time.
I stack them again.
Brianna settles onto the floor across from me.
“It’s not about taking me back,” I say, quietly enough that the girls don’t register it over their own noise. “I left him, Bri. I left because it’s been wrong for a long time and I couldn’t stay anymore.”
“Lenny.” Her voice is heavy with patience. Just like she uses with the rambunctious girls. “You know I know how hard things have been. But Jake loves you. He was literally just telling Jared last night how much he—”
“Jake locked me out of all our bank accounts this morning.”
She blinks.
“Every card was declined. I can’t get into anything.” I keep my voice even. “That’s my money too. I worked for it.”
“I’m sure it’s just—”
“It’s not a glitch, Bri.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Livi’s tower collapses and I start rebuilding it without looking up, my hands moving automatically while I wait to hear what my best friend is going to say.
Because I need her to say something that makes sense of that and the man I thought I knew.
She and Jared have been our best friends almost since we met.
“Look. Lenny. You know you can get a little—” she starts, and stops.
I can get a little what?
I look up sharply only to find she has the expression of someone choosing their words with great care.
“You know… Dramatic sometimes. But Jake knows that about you and loves you anyway.”
The tower falls down.
I look at the blocks on the floor.
Dramatic. She means the migraines, I think.
I probably called her too many times crying about the pain I was in, because it seemed enormous when it all began.
Chronic illness felt shocking when we were all so young and carefree, and when none of the tests could turn up anything concrete about what was causing the occasional flare-ups of crushing migraines, nausea, and fatigue…
Well, everyone just got tired of hearing about it after a while. But that’s kinda what makes chronic illnesses feel extra debilitating… because you feel so damn isolated.
That just left Jake… and a whole host of other reasons not to leave him, as ruthlessly mercenary as that felt.
But how could I leave when sometimes I was literally in such pain and so exhausted, I could barely haul myself to the toilet to get sick into? I told myself it was a tactical exchange—he seemed to want me around, and I needed him, so…
But laughably, because sometimes I was upright and not complaining, the times I was so ill and daring to talk about it just seemed like being dramatic to Bri.
Or maybe she means all the times I’ve been too loud or worse, the all-damning and all-encompassing too much, when I forget that my sole focus is meant to be on behaving normally. Aka, like everybody else.
We live in suburbia and we’re meant to be gingerbread men and women, stamp-like mirrors of one another, who fit perfectly into our cardboard cut-out homes that are the same five floorplans on rotation throughout the neighborhood.
Sometimes at parties, you get a weird déjà vu of stepping into your exact house but filled with someone else’s things and decorations.
All of us examining each other’s kitchen amenities like, oh, how lovely, you went for the pot-filler option.
“We’ve all been through it sometimes, babe,” Bri continues, and she puts her hand on my forearm. Her voice is warm. It’s genuinely warm, that’s the thing. She thinks she’s being kind. “You can just get a little cray cray, you know? But Jake’s always been so patient with you.”
I look at her hand on my arm.