Chapter 15
Chapter 15
My laptop will be ready at noon, so I decide to kill time by having breakfast in Ghost. There’s a cute café around the corner from Main Street. Austin and I used to talk about trying it, because every time we walked by, it smelled so enticing. Like fresh baked bread. We were also taken with the name. Hugs with Mugs. But we never made it past the door. The wait was always too long.
Today is no different. The place is swamped, with a line out the door. It’s a sea of plaid shirts. Who knew everyone in this town loved breakfast so much? I write my name on the list and find an unoccupied corner in which to wait, because it’s too cold to stand outside.
The restaurant is larger than it looks from the street. There’s a to-go counter where customers can pick up a coffee drink and a pastry. Everything looks so mouthwatering; I’m tempted to try one of the cinnamon rolls or a morning bun while I wait for my name to be called. But the line at the to-go counter is also insane.
The Hugs with Mugs theme is everywhere in the form of giant hearts painted on the walls and rows of mugs hanging from hooks on the wainscoting chair rail. The idea being to choose one before being served. There’s no rhyme or reason to the mugs, just a random collection of cups in various colors, shapes, and sizes. Some of them have names on them, and I wonder if they’re reserved for regulars.
The hostess, a young woman with a pierced eyebrow and dreadlocks, says there’s a seat available at the counter if I don’t want to wait. It’s a cramped spot in the corner. but I take it, grabbing a mug with a bright yellow smiley face on the way.
The proprietors haven’t gotten around to taking down the Halloween decorations. There are still plastic cobwebs and fake bats and spiders above the backbar. The menu is huge, at least twelve pages, and I flip through it, trying to decide what to eat. A server fills my smiley-face cup, then dances away to fill a request for more syrup from a diner on the other end of the counter.
The elderly man next to me pays his bill and leaves. Next thing I know, Sadie’s sitting beside me.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she says. “Actually, I saw you through the window.”
“Don’t you have to open up Flower Power?”
“Not for another hour. But I thought I’d get a jump on things.”
I hand her my menu, because she doesn’t have one. “What’s good here?”
“Everything. Well, not everything. Stay away from the black bean chili omelet, it’ll give you the trots.”
“Good to know,” I say.
“The pancakes are out of this world and probably what they’re most known for.”
I’d noted that there were at least a dozen different versions on the menu.
“I’m getting a carrot-cake muffin and a side of scrambled eggs,” Sadie says. “It’s my go-to.”
She does just that when the server comes to take our orders. Despite Sadie’s recommendation, I get the cinnamon swirl French toast.
Since my last breakfast with Dad, I’ve never eaten pancakes again.
“You want to talk about it?” I cut to the chase, because I can sense it; a good therapist always can. She wants to finish what she started last night.
“Talk about what?”
I turn in my stool and hold eye contact with her. “Whatever’s going on with you and your husband.”
She takes a long sip of her coffee and stares at me over the rim of the cup. It’s got a peace sign on it. “Oh, that.” She lets out a long breath. “He’s been seeing another woman for at least two years, as far as I can tell. Truthfully, I don’t know why he hasn’t left me yet. I guess it’s the kids.”
“How do you know this?” It’s not really important how she knows, but to have the full picture, I need the backstory. The who, what, when, where, and why. It just makes it easier to put everything into perspective.
“What? That he’s been seeing her for at least two years?” She shrugs. “I have the password to his phone. You’d think if a man was going to carry on a secret affair, he’d change his stupid password. But not Frank. Who knows, maybe he wanted me to find out?
“Anyway, his phone was going off one day like a rocket. Every five seconds or so, it would vibrate with a new incoming text. He’s a Caltrans employee and works a lot of nights and was sleeping. I figured if someone needed to get a hold of him so badly that they were texting every few seconds, it had to be important.
“Instead of waking him up, I took the liberty of looking myself. It was her. She was pissed that he’d broken a date with her over the weekend. It had been our twentieth wedding anniversary, and I’d twisted his arm to take me out to a nice restaurant, a place where they didn’t have chicken fingers on the menu. That’s why he broke their date, because he was out with his wife. Can you imagine that she actually had the nerve to be angry about that?”
Sadie falls quiet as I’m served a heaping plate of French toast and she a plate of eggs. Her muffin is the size of a human head.
“They don’t mess around here as far as portion sizes, do they?”
She nods.
“What happened then?” I ask. “Did you confront him?”
“No. I took his phone to the bathroom, locked the door, and read two years of texts. Two years of him lying to me.”
“And how did that make you feel?” I realize I’ve slipped back into marriage-counselor mode and question whether Sadie just wants a friend. Because then the response should’ve simply been I’m sorry.
“A lot of things,” she says, seemingly unoffended by my clinical approach. “Hate, betrayal, broken. But mostly fear. This is going to sound pathetic, absolutely pitiful, but I was afraid he was going to leave me.”
“Because you love him?”
She lets out a raspy, bitter laugh. “I hate his guts. No, love has nothing to do with it. Do you know how much I make at Flower Power?”
I shake my head.
“A little more than minimum wage. Do you know how much it costs to raise a family, put a roof over your kids’ heads, feed them, buy them expensive tennis shoes because that’s what all their friends are wearing? Frank and I barely make it on both our salaries. How are we supposed to do it if we have to support two households instead of one? Add to that that I really love my life and don’t want to lose it. My house, my neighborhood, my job, my friends. It’s all I have, and if Frank leaves me, I can pretty much kiss it all goodbye.”
Nothing Sadie has said surprises me. One of the top reasons unhappy couples stay together is for financial reasons.
“So how do you manage, knowing your husband is cheating?” I ask the question without judgment. Neutral.
“I pretend he’s not and continue to live my beautiful life. That doesn’t mean I don’t fantasize that I’ll win the lottery and leave him. Or that I don’t wonder what it would be like to fall in love again, to be with someone who wants me as much as I want him.” She takes a bite of her carrot-cake muffin. “Do you think it’s wrong, like I’m living a lie and setting a bad example for my children?”
“There is no right or wrong, Sadie. Only you can know what’s best for you. But has it ever occurred to you that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing? In other words, there are other options besides staying with a cheating husband in exchange for the life you want, or leaving him and losing that life. For example, you could try to fix the marriage; you could both try to love each other again.”
“How?” Her eyes flicker with something akin to hope.
“First, you can acknowledge to him that you know about this other woman. And then the two of you can get yourself to a good family therapist.”
“You?” she says.
“I don’t see patients anymore, Sadie. But I can recommend someone, someone really good.”
“What if he doesn’t want to stop seeing her? What if telling him I know gives him what he needs to leave me? Where would I be then?”
“I guess it’s a chance you’ll have to take if you want to save your marriage. Because, Sadie, make no mistake about it. What you have now is not a marriage.”
I think about Sadie’s dilemma for the rest of the day, about marriage, about how fragile relationships are, and the extraordinary lengths couples will go to save them, even when they’re unsalvageable. I think about all the times couples came to me, fighting to stay together when it was plain to see that their expiration date was looming. I think about Austin and me, about how I thought he would give me security, and in the end, he pulled the rug right out from under me.
Yet, there’s a part of me that still hasn’t given up on love, even if Austin is out of the picture.
I take the long way back from the computer store and wind up at Knox’s, telling myself that we still have an unresolved bill from the work he did. He greets me at the door, Bailey beside him, barking up a storm. All it takes is a brief sniff of my outreached hand for the dog to quiet down and wander back inside the house.
“We have to square up,” I tell Knox, waving my checkbook in the air. “Or would you prefer Venmo?”
Knox scrubs his hands through his wet hair. “Do we have to do this now? I just woke up.”
It’s then that I notice that all he has on is a towel wrapped around his waist. I turn, so I’m not staring directly at his bare chest, even though that’s all I want to do. Stare at his chest.
“And you’re a farmer’s son?” I say, hoping that if I talk, he won’t see my reaction to his nearly naked body. “It’s almost suppertime.”
“I was writing all night and all morning. I have a full rough draft now.”
“Seriously? That’s fantastic, Knox.” I brush past him, uninvited, and head to the kitchen. “I’ll make you coffee.”
“Let me get dressed.” He climbs the stairs and vanishes down the hallway.
There’s a bag of coffee beans on the kitchen counter, and I measure out enough for a full pot, then flip on the grinder. I should probably let Knox do it, because his coffee is better than mine. But he’s done it for me so many times, it’s only fair that I return the favor.
“If I’d known about your book, I would’ve brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate.”
Knox is back and rummaging through the fridge. He holds up a bottle of prosecco. “Best I can do.”
“It’ll work,” I say, finding two flutes in one of the cupboards and pouring us each a glass. “Prost!” I clink mine to his.
“Prost.”
For the next sixty minutes, we drink prosecco and coffee and talk about his rough draft and all the ways he intends to massage it to make it his final draft. I don’t know anything about plant-based biofuels, but Knox is apparently one of the foremost authorities on it in the country.
I get up to pour him another cup of coffee. “I saw your ex last night.” I debate on how much to tell him and decide that in the short time I’ve known him, there have been no secrets between us. Why start now? “According to Sadie, Ginger, and Amanda, Sienna’s marriage is on the rocks. Of course, that could just be idle gossip. No one knows the truth about a marriage except the two people in it.”
“It’s not just idle gossip,” Knox says. “Sienna’s miserable. And Brody is a son of a bitch.”
“How do you know? I mean that Sienna is miserable. I assume Brody is just a son of a bitch in general.”
Knox’s lips hitch up. “Yeah, he is. I used to love that about him. Not so much in this context, though. Sienna told me herself.”
“That she’s miserable, or that Brody is a son of a bitch?”
“Both. But the latter went without saying.”
“She just came over and told you that her marriage was in crisis and that she was miserable?” In my business, I don’t find too many people willing to admit that they made a terrible mistake, that they chose the wrong partner. If anything, they fill Facebook and Instagram with false pictures of their so-called happy lives.
“We talk.”
It’s all I can do to stop myself from saying, “When?” But I’m afraid that it’s overstepping. Or worse, that I sound jealous, even territorial. Instead, I ask, “Are you feeling a sense of schadenfreude?”
“Not really. I’m sorry she’s unhappy. Does it change the fact that I’m still angry at her? No.”
“No?” I hitch my brows.
He laughs. “Like I told you before, she and I were done even before we were done.”
“So, you’d never take her back? You’d never try to make a go of it, even though you once loved her. And I’m assuming, judging by the fact that you listened to one of my TED Talks, that you loved her very much.”
“I did, but I wouldn’t,” he says emphatically. “Sometimes it takes distance to see all the things you weren’t getting from a person, all the things she wasn’t giving. Sometimes it takes distance to even know you need those things to be happy. Healthy. And then it hits you. It wasn’t her I wanted, it was the picture of the life I thought she represented.”
“Do you still want that life?”
He nods. “The picture of that life never went away. Who I’m destined to share it with is the murky part.” He looks at me, really looks. “If only we all had a crystal ball, right?”
“If only.”
And then he does the last thing I expect him to.
He pulls me up from the kitchen chair, takes me in his arms, and kisses me, his lips moving over mine heatedly, desperately, more passionately than I’ve ever been kissed before. And as I stand there, wrapped in his arms, I can feel that the kiss is a prelude to something else. Something more meaningful than just sex and even more significant than his heart. It’s a prelude to that picture, the picture of the life he wants.