10. Andrea
— ? —
Andrea
Kirk doesn’t give up.
The first bouquet arrives the morning after the video. Two dozen white roses, my favorites, with a card that says only I’m sorry in his familiar handwriting. I look at them for a long time before Melissa takes them to the trash.
“You don’t have to throw them away,” I say.
“Yes, I do.” She deposits them in the garbage with more force than necessary. “He doesn’t get to buy forgiveness.”
More flowers arrive. Every day. Different kinds: peonies, tulips, hydrangeas, a spray of wildflowers that pulls me straight back to our honeymoon in Provence. The cards change: I miss you. I was wrong. Please let me try.
I throw them all away. Or Melissa does. It stops mattering which of us reaches the trash can first.
Then the letters start.
Real letters. Handwritten. Pages and pages of his messy script, the kind of writing he only produces when a thing matters too much to type.
Andrea,
I’ve been thinking about the day we met. That coffee shop downtown, the one that doesn’t exist anymore. You were studying for finals, hunched over three textbooks with highlighters in six different colors, and I thought: There’s a person who takes things seriously.
I asked if I could sit at your table because the shop was crowded. That was a lie. There were plenty of other seats. I just wanted an excuse to talk to you.
You looked up at me like I was an inconvenience, and I fell in love on the spot.
I read the letter three times before I fold it up and put it in a drawer.
I read them at night, alone in Melissa’s guest room, with the door locked and the lights low.
His handwriting is messy. It always has been. He writes in a slant, pressing too hard on the pen, leaving indentations I can trace with my fingertips.
I run my fingers over the indentations, trying to feel him through the paper.
Stop it, I tell myself. He doesn’t deserve your touch anymore.
But my body doesn’t listen. My body reads his words about the day we met and remembers the first time he kissed me: the shock of it, the sweetness, the way I couldn’t stop smiling for three days afterward.
My body reads his apologies and remembers the weight of him above me, inside me, whispering my name like a prayer.
I press my thighs together and hate myself for it.
The next letter comes the following day.
I’ve been thinking about our first fight. Do you remember? You wanted to paint the bedroom yellow and I wanted blue, and that turned into a three-hour argument about whether I listened to you.
You were right. I didn’t listen. I’d grown up in a house where decisions were made for me, and I didn’t know how to be a partner. You taught me.
You taught me everything, Andrea. And I’m still learning.
There’s a letter about our first anniversary. He describes the dinner we had, a tiny Italian place that’s closed now, and the way I laughed at his terrible toast. He writes: I knew then that I wanted to make you laugh for the rest of my life.
I remember what happened after that dinner. The way he backed me against our apartment door, one hand working my zipper while his mouth devoured mine. The way he dropped to his knees right there in the entryway, too impatient to make it to the bedroom.
My face flushes. My skin stretches too tight over everything underneath it.
He threw you out, I remind myself. He called your baby a bastard.
But my body just remembers his hands. His mouth. The sounds he makes when he’s buried inside me.
More letters. Every day. He writes about our wedding: the napkin vows, the borrowed tie, how Margaret the justice of the peace sent us a Christmas card every year until she retired.
He writes about the moment he knew he wanted to marry me (our third date, when I laughed so hard at his terrible joke that I snorted coffee through my nose).
He writes about the near-divorce, the reconciliation, the night we burned those papers in the fireplace.
I watched the ashes float up the chimney and I thought: This is my second chance. I won’t waste it.
I wasted it.
Another letter, two days later, shorter than the rest.
Andrea. No memories today. Just this: I drove past the market this morning.
Saturday. Peach season’s ending. I bought four from the Henderson stand because leaving them there felt like a betrayal of an entire religion, and then I sat in my car in the parking lot and understood that I have no idea what to do with a peach.
You always handled the miracles. I just ate them.
I’m sorry it took losing you to see how much of my life arrived through your hands.
The peaches are on the counter. They’re yours. Everything is.
I read every letter. I cry over every letter. I fold them up and put them in a drawer.
And I hate myself for caring.
Melissa finds the drawer on a Tuesday.
She’s putting away laundry, because she does that, because she’s been mothering me for a month straight, and she slides open the nightstand drawer and goes still, and I look up from my book into the face of a woman holding a stack of folded letters and a great many opinions.
“So,” she says. “The trash can and I have been throwing away flowers all month, and meanwhile the correspondence has a filing system.”
“Mel.”
“I’m not mad.” She sits on the end of the bed, letters in her lap, handling them the way you’d handle evidence. “I’m recalibrating. Do you read them?”
“Yes.”
“More than once?”
“Melissa.”
“That’s a yes.” She looks down at the top one, at the slanted, too-hard handwriting visible through the fold. “Do they help, or do they hurt?”
The question sits between us on the quilt.
“Both,” I say finally. “They hurt because it’s him. The actual him. Not the stranger from the kitchen, the real one, the one who noticed everything for eight years and wrote it all down. And they help for exactly the same reason.” I close my book. “I know how that sounds.”
“It sounds like being married.” She squares the letters into a neat stack and puts them back in the drawer, and closes it with a care she doesn’t give her own belongings.
“For the record, I’m still team burn-his-life-down.
But I’ve been the only staff at this recovery for four weeks, and the patient sleeps better on letter days.
So.” She stands, scoops up the laundry basket, and pauses at the door.
“He gets to keep writing. That’s all he gets. The rest he earns standing up.”
“Deal.”
“And if you tell him the letters work, I will deny this conversation under oath.”
***
Clarence and Daniel take me to dinner that weekend. Somewhere quiet, away from the social circuit, where I can eat pasta and drink sparkling water and pretend to be a normal pregnant woman having dinner with friends.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do?” Daniel asks. “About Kirk?”
I stare at my plate. “No.”
“What does your gut say?”
“My gut says run. My gut says he believed his mother over me once, and he’ll do it again.”
“And your heart?”
I’m quiet for a long moment.
“My heart is stupid,” I finally admit. “My heart still loves him.”
“Hearts aren’t stupid.” Clarence reaches across the table to squeeze my hand. “They’re honest. The question is whether your head can live with what your heart wants.”
“I don’t know if I can trust him again. And I don’t know how to build a life with a man I don’t trust.”
“Maybe you don’t have to decide right now.” Daniel’s voice is gentle. “Maybe you just leave the door open and see what walks through it.”
“That’s very wise. Did you get that from a fortune cookie?”
“Yoga instructor, actually. But she probably got it from a fortune cookie.”
“Speaking of doors,” Clarence says, topping up my sparkling water with sommelier gravity, “an update from ours. Daniel’s mother has requested, formally, that you and the bump attend the wedding in the spring.
Her words: ‘the brave girl and the baby.’ You’ve never met her.
You’re already her favorite guest. Daniel and I rank somewhere behind you and the open bar. ”
“Accurate placement,” Daniel says.
After dinner, I walk through the park near Melissa’s apartment. It’s late, but the evening is warm, and I need to think without anyone watching.
I find a bench and sit, one hand resting on my belly. The baby flutters sometimes now, tiny movements I’m not sure are real or imagined.
“What do you think?” I murmur to the bump. “Should I let your dad try again?”
The baby doesn’t answer, obviously. But it feels good to ask.
A shadow falls over me.
I look up, expecting Clarence or Daniel or maybe a concerned stranger.
Ethel Graham stands three feet away, her face twisted with fury.
“You couldn’t just let him go, could you?” Her voice is low, venomous. “You had to sink your claws back in.”
I stand slowly, my hand still protective over my belly.
“Ethel. I have nothing to say to you.”
“You’ve ruined everything.” She steps closer. “Kirk won’t return my calls. William has filed for divorce. Everyone in our circle knows what I did, and you, you’re still standing there, playing the victim.”
“I am the victim. You manufactured evidence to destroy my marriage.”
“I tried to save my son from a mistake he made when he was too young to know better.” Her eyes blaze. “And you’ve turned him against his own family.”
“You did that yourself.” I hold my ground even though my knees are shaking. “I never asked him to choose. You made choosing necessary.”
“He’ll come back to me.” Her voice turns desperate, cracking at the edges. “He always comes back. I’m his mother.”
“You’re the woman who tried to take his child away from him.” I let it land. “You told him his baby wasn’t his. You made him believe I’d cheated when you knew, you knew, it was a lie.”
Ethel’s face contorts. For a moment, I think she might actually hit me.
“You should know your allies better, dear,” she says instead, recovering, circling.
“That Katherine you humiliated by association at the club. Those men you parade around with. Your own sister, who tells anyone who’ll listen how much this has cost her.
People have limits, Andrea. Nets fray. And when yours does, you’ll find that family, real family, blood and name, was the only rope that ever held anyone.
You burned yours the day you married above yourself. ”
“I married sideways,” I say. “You’re the only one who ever brought a ladder.”
Then she leans in close, close enough that I can smell her perfume, gardenias and old money, and her voice drops to a register I’ve never heard from her before.
“You think you’ve won because a room full of gossips turned on me.
Rooms turn back, dear. And here’s what you’ll never fix.
” Her smile is small and terrible. “He believed me. Whatever happens now, however this ends, you will spend the rest of your life knowing that when it counted, my voice was louder than yours. That doesn’t wash out. I made sure of it.”
She spins and stalks away, heels clicking on the pavement.
I sink back onto the bench, my heart pounding, and press both hands to my belly.
“It’s okay,” I whisper to the baby. “We’re okay.”
But my hands don’t stop shaking for a very long time, because the ugliest part of what she said is the part that might be true.