Chapter 3 Season 19, Episode 8 “Your Rent Is Due!”
“Your Rent Is Due!”
When you throw your husband out, there’s supposed to be endless yelling, smashed dishware, and a hastily packed suitcase flung across a yard.
Instead we died quietly in the kitchen. I stood silent against the marble island, mesmerized by the shapes in the stone, all of which seemed to suddenly have teeth.
I eyed the kid I’d fallen in love with in the Caribbean over a decade prior, four years older than me and five inches shorter.
No one ever believed he was older, not with that trademark mischievous glint in his eye.
His neatly groomed hair was disheveled, a far cry from the ideal candidate, the photogenic father, the devoted husband, the man who was never flustered.
“Luke, these men meant nothing. It was a mistake. One I made more than once, yes, but it was still the same mistake, the same impulse. It was purely mechanics, never my heart or my mind, and I hate that you found out like this… but I will tell you whatever you want to know,” he continued, voice trembling in a way I’d never heard. “All that matters is you and the kids.”
I thought about our children, waiting in the playroom with the Secret Service agents.
Did they sense life would never be the same?
My mind raced through the hazy echoes of when the police arrived to tell Mitch about my mom, how I’d heard him collapse to the floor while I ate Frosted Flakes.
How quickly did I realize the only world I’d known had ended?
Today could never be undone. I was forever the fool who stood idly by while he’d run rampant.
How many sacrifices had I made for him? How many times had I kept quiet while he “did what was necessary” to secure the lifestyle he’d insisted on?
How had I blindly upheld the empty illusion—so perfect, so respectable, so palatable—and missed the rot beneath?
A year before, I’d lost Andie while chaperoning her class trip to the National Zoo.
He’d received his fifth death threat that morning.
“Why is it only the fringe on our side? Can’t one radical liberal plan a credible bombing?
” he’d emptily joked. Still, we’d gone about our day; him to the office, me to the animals.
Andie’s teacher made me accompany a sniffling boy to the bathroom, and when we returned, Andie had vanished.
I raced to security, a thunderous pounding in my head as I understood the lunatics had succeeded, striking where it would hurt most, the cosmic punishment for every wrong step we’d taken…
until I saw her by the pandas, totally unbothered.
“Where were you?!” I screamed, practically shaking her.
“The bathroom,” she whispered. “I don’t need help to pee.”
I’d been certain she was gone. How could I forget that? How had we returned to normal? We’d changed nothing, now here we were. Ruined.
My husband was still talking when his arm draped across my back. His forehead boldly pressed against my temple, and it finally hit me. He thought he would get away with this.
“You should say goodbye to the kids.”
His hands strained for my face. “Luke, no…”
I shrugged him off, recoiling from the marble island and its swirling teeth. “You can see them this weekend. Jenny will bring them wherever you are—”
“Please, I’ll do anything. Just say what you want!”
He stared at me desperately, like I still had something to give him. But never again. I would reclaim my life, starting with one sentence.
“I want a divorce, Barnes.”