16. Willow
— ? —
Willow
Three weeks home, and the house has learned a new language, three weeks of careful, of nothing.
Civility with all the warmth boiled out of it, meals through Mrs. Potts, his footsteps stopping outside my door every night and never knocking.
We are two people conducting a marriage through an intermediary in a house the size of a hotel, and this is worse than the kitchen, because at least the kitchen was honest.
Today it cracks.
He comes home at five from the appointment he goes to every Thursday now, the one he doesn’t talk about because condition three means he doesn’t talk about anything.
Therapy. Mrs. Potts told me, not him. Ten years of me begging him to talk to someone, and it took burning our marriage down to get him into a chair.
He looks wrung out when he comes in. Raw around the eyes, jaw tight, the look of a man who spent an hour having his skin peeled back, and I’m standing in the kitchen for once, actually keeping down some toast, and the sight of him standing there all penitent and exhausted lights a fuse in me I didn’t know was lit.
“How’s pretending to be a person going?”
He stops. Mrs. Potts, wisely, evaporates.
“Willow.”
“No, really. Does the therapist know she’s working with fiction? Does she know the whole backstory, or just the sad parts that make you sympathetic?”
“She knows all of it.” His voice stays quiet. “That’s rather the point of paying her.”
“All of it.” I set down the toast. The fuse is burning fast now and I don’t want to stop it. “So she knows you called your pregnant wife a whore over a text message. She knows you decided twelve years of me weighed less than one dinner receipt.”
“It wasn’t one text.”
The words come out of him low and hoarse, and the room changes temperature.
“What?”
“It wasn’t one text, and it wasn’t a receipt, and if we’re doing this, then we’re doing all of it, because I’m done managing which parts of the truth you have.
” He sets his keys down slowly, deliberately, a man laying down a weapon.
“The night before your dinner with Glenn, I saw the text on your phone. Dinner again tonight. And I didn’t ask you about it.
I looked through our cloud account instead, weeks of messages, and I still didn’t ask you.
And the next day I left work early and I followed you. ”
The kitchen goes very still.
“You followed me.”
“I followed you to the restaurant. I took a table in the back where you couldn’t see me, and I sat in the dark, and I watched you hold his hands.
I watched you move your chair around the table and put your arms around him.
I watched you pay for his dinner and take his keys and drive him home, and I drove home and poured a drink and decided I knew what it meant. ”
I can’t breathe.
Three weeks I’ve spent imagining how he knew. A text, a rumor, gossip from some charity wife. Not this. Never this.
“You saw ONE text and built a whole affair out of it. You went through my messages. You FOLLOWED me. You sat in a restaurant in the dark and you watched me comfort a widower and decided I was a whore.”
“Yes.”
The word arrives with no defense attached, and its bareness makes me angrier than any excuse would have.
“That’s it? Yes?”
“Yes. That’s what I did. Every part of it, exactly like that.” His hands are flat on the counter, white at the knuckles, and he doesn’t look away from me, doesn’t soften it, doesn’t reach for a single mitigating word. “You wanted honesty. This is what it looks like. It’s ugly.”
“Get out.” My voice is shaking. The toast is a rock in my stomach. “Get out of this kitchen right now.”
“No.”
The word stops me cold. Three weeks of yes, whatever you want, condition three. And now, over this, of all things: no.
“What did you just say to me?”
“No. Not this time.” He comes around the counter, not close, but closer, and there’s a terrible steadiness on him, a man walking into weather.
“You think crackers fix this? You think ginger tea and a brass bell fix this? They’re not an apology.
They’re just all I know how to do yet. But you deserve to scream at the actual crime, not the sanitized version, so there it is.
All of it. Scream at me. I’ll take all of it. ”
“I trusted you with twelve YEARS…”
“I know.”
“I gave up my FAMILY…”
“I know.”
“And you sat in the dark and watched me like I was a suspect, like I was a stranger, like I was…” My voice breaks apart in the middle.
“I was buying a pregnancy test, Corey. That afternoon, while you were following me, I was doing math in a parking lot because I was so happy I was scared to believe it. And you were three tables away deciding I was a whore.”
Something in his face comes apart. He doesn’t hide it or fix it, he just stands there and lets me see it, and for the first time since the kitchen, since the hospital, since any of it, we are looking at each other without furniture in between.
“Scream,” he says quietly. “I can take it. What I can’t take is the quiet.”
And I open my mouth to do exactly that, to take him apart, to finally spend three weeks of stockpiled rage, when the doorbell rings.
We both freeze.