Seventeen
Seventeen
OCTOBER 2021
I’ve been holding it together, but I’m about to break. It’s not just the schedule, which is relentless. Or the scrutiny of my every movement, which is constant. It’s the worry that fills my mind, building each day as we get closer and closer to the election. Have I done enough to win? Who am I disappointing today? Am I the right person for this job?
This is what I think about when I’m brushing my teeth and when I should be sleeping, my mind churning with a million what-ifs. It’s exhausting, physically and mentally. And I did it to myself.
But at this moment, it’s my feet that are truly at their breaking point. I cannot walk another step in these heels. In my office across the campaign headquarters there’s a pair of flats hiding under the desk. Twenty more feet, and then I’m in the promised land.
“Turn around,” Mara instructs, blocking my path. “I need you to head out for another stop.”
“No,” I say, my eyes fluttering as I exhale. I take off the four-inch heels that allow me to make eye contact with most of the population and walk barefoot into my office. “I am done for the day.”
Mara follows, doling out instructions to the campaign staff as she stares into her phone. “You are almost done for the day. I need one more thing from you and then I’ll leave you alone for the night. Or part of the night. We need to be on the road tomorrow at four in the morning.”
“Mara,” I moan. “I have nothing more to give.”
She shrugs, her lack of sympathy unsurprising. I signed up for this and Mara knows it. We got a slight bump in the polls after the second debate. Then, when Grant and Cecilia announced their separation, it became a bigger bump. Although Mara has been quick to point out that the dissolution of Grant’s marriage hasn’t impacted his campaign enough. “It’s because he’s a man,” Mara has said too many times.
Maybe voters care more about Grant’s qualifications than his personal life and that’s why his divorce isn’t destroying his campaign the way Mara feels it should. But more likely, Mara is right. Men can escape consequences women will always bear.
It’s probably a good thing Mara has kept me so busy, because otherwise my mind wanders too often to Grant. I know he’s always feared spending life alone.
I overhear a staffer ask if Dean is going to be attending our event tomorrow morning.
“No, he can’t,” I quickly reply.
Her face tenses. Dean’s presence is important, she harps, especially now that Cecilia is off the campaign trail. I agree. I need Dean. Except it feels like he resents this election. We speak every day. I tell him good morning and ask if he had butter or cream cheese on his bagel. When I’m home, he hands me my reading glasses and tells me good night when he turns off his lamp. There’s an undeniable chill in the air or simmering grievances, it’s hard to say. We discuss mundane logistics, but we don’t talk about anything of substance. He says he needs to focus on curriculum changes instead of campaign activities. I tell him I understand completely even though I miss my husband. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so broken if he were by my side.
I’ve been attending all of my public appearances alone. The official statement is that Dean’s classes resumed and he can’t attend campaign events. He’s a dedicated high school teacher. It’s an excuse that seems to be generally accepted.
I finally make it into my office and toss my heels in the corner. Mara trails behind, walking comfortably in a pair of brown loafers that I’ve never envied until this moment.
“The article on the first spouses is set to run at the end of the week,” Mara says. “Since Cecilia is out, it’s a huge opportunity for us. Dean comes off great, personable, funny, humble.”
“That’s good news,” I say, as I crawl under my desk in search of my flats.
“Yes, but he never gave the magazine your mother’s recipe. I need you to send it in.”
“Why? Can’t they run the article without the recipe?” I pick up my heels and throw them into the trash can. I’m never wearing them again.
Mara walks over and retrieves the heels as I slip into comfortable running shoes. “No. It’s the whole point of the article. We need the recipe and you need these shoes for tomorrow.”
“I’m not wearing those shoes tomorrow. I’ll be lucky if I can walk tomorrow. And if Dean didn’t send the recipe, there’s a reason. He probably couldn’t find my mother’s cookbook.”
“Ask him. Or make up a recipe. I don’t care. Just give me something to send to this reporter.”
“Does this really matter?” I sigh, shoving the heels into my bag and grabbing my coat to leave.
“Yes. Voters need to like you. People with family recipes are likable.”
“Fine. But after I sort out this recipe thing, I’m taking the rest of the night off.”
Mara nods. “I’ll pick you up at four in the morning. We have to be in Virginia Beach for breakfast.”
“Do not come to my house a minute earlier than four, Mara,” I shout, as I walk toward the door.
“Wear the heels,” Mara yells in response.
By the time I am home, my exhaustion has reached a peak. I walk through the front door and glance in the mirror hanging in the hallway. I’m a mess. The hair that earlier today had been pulled into a neat, tight bun is now hanging wildly, strings having slipped free. The basic makeup I applied this morning is gone, washed away by the day’s effort.
I want to collapse in my bed, but I know Mara will show up on my doorstep if I don’t send her this silly recipe. I walk into our garage and it’s a mess, even more so than usual. Boxes are open, their contents spread across the concrete floor. I can’t remember the last time I was in here.
I start digging through the piles, hoping to find the faded blue cover of the cookbook that sat on my mother’s kitchen counter her entire life. It should have been in the box that I packed for the hospital. When her breast cancer advanced and we were told she had days left, my mother asked me to bring her favorite things. We both knew she wasn’t going to be cooking from a hospital bed, but the cookbook was a familiar comfort. In those final days, when she was so weak, she’d still have energy to flip through recipes and reminisce about her favorite meals. After she died, I packed up the cookbook and put it away. I never tried to cook any of those meals she loved, because my memory of her efforts was too perfect.
“Looking for something?” Dean’s voice interrupts my nostalgia. I look across the chilly garage and smile at my husband. But he doesn’t smile back.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I say, pulling myself away from boxes and stepping toward Dean.
“I was working with the debate team tonight,” Dean says. “I didn’t think you’d be home.”
Dean’s eyes barely look up from the floor. I nervously fidget with the items in the open box. Why aren’t we running into each other’s arms? Why don’t we know each other’s schedules? Why aren’t we together each night instead of two trains running in different directions? I want to scream these questions, but I swallow them down. Instead, I explain, “Mara needs my mother’s recipe for that article. Did you find it?”
Dean shoves his hands into his pockets. “Yeah, I found it,” he says.
“Did you forget to send it to the reporter?”
“I sent what I found to Mara.” He walks over to a box in the corner and lifts the cardboard flap. I immediately recognize the cookbook with its fraying edges and dog-eared pages. Dean hands it to me and says, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” Then he walks away.
I stare at the cookbook, unsure why Dean is acting so strange. He always keeps his promises, but Mara said she never got the recipe.
I slowly open the front page and see my mother’s familiar handwriting. It’s been decades since I’ve looked at these pages. My mother wrote down a few of her favorite recipes for Dean, and that’s what he always used when he would cook one of her meals. Her cookbook was more of an artifact, something I put away in a box, its mere existence providing more comfort than the recipes inside did.
As I start turning the pages, I realize that this isn’t just my mother’s cookbook. It’s her treasure box. Tucked within the pages are notes from my grandmother, a card I made as a child, a rose petal pressed between wax paper.
My fingers flip through the pages as my heart aches with longing. I miss my mother and her calm practicality. I wonder what she’d think of me now. I wonder what advice she’d give. I wonder if she’d be proud.
Then I see it. My heart stops as I see the photograph tucked tightly in the pages, my young face smiling back at me. The photograph of Grant with his arm around my shoulders, a rip down the middle taped back together. For some reason, my mother smoothed out the crumpled, discarded picture that I clung to throughout that summer and thought was long gone. My mother kept it hidden in her most sacred place. And Dean must have found it. My stomach drops.
Dean did send Mara what he found. Except it wasn’t a recipe.
I walk inside my house, the sky already dark on this late fall evening, to find him sitting at the kitchen table. He’s cracking his knuckles and his leg is bouncing up and down. When he looks up, I see the red rims to his eyes and the stubble on his face. He immediately looks away.
I sit at the table and place the photograph between us. “Did you send Mara the picture?”
He nods.
“Why?” I ask softly.
“Why didn’t you tell me about him, Tess?” Dean answers defensively.
Dean pounds the table, an uncharacteristic but justified reaction. I’m in no position to ask any questions. I should be pouring out explanations. I’ve opened my mouth a dozen times, ready to tell Dean the whole story, but every time I begin to explain my relationship with Grant, the words lodge in my throat, unable to escape.
It’s the one thing we’ve never shared. Dean tells me when I have spinach in my teeth and he tells me when I look beautiful. He tells me when I’m being unfairly judgmental of his students’ wardrobe choices and when I’m being fairly judgmental of his uncle’s sexist comments. We usually fall asleep relaying all the minute details of our days. He’s always thought that we told each other everything, but I left out a critical piece: the conversation I’ve been avoiding for most of my adult life.
“I was afraid,” I answer.
“Of what?”
“What you would think of me.”
“Why would I care about your teenage boyfriend?” he asks, incredulous.
“You wouldn’t. But you’d care about the rest.”
Dean swallows. “What else have you been lying about? I didn’t think we hid things from each other.”
I exhale and admit, “We don’t. I should have told you about Grant.”
“Start now,” Dean instructs.
I pace the kitchen as I reveal these long-buried cracks of my past. “I met Grant the summer before my senior year of high school,” I begin. “I worked for his mother. Manual labor in her gardens.”
I try to say it casually, as if this were a banal moment of life, unworthy of mention until now. But Dean is not dumb. I spin my wedding band as I wonder if his trust in me will allow him to accept a simple story full of omissions.
Dean points to the picture of Grant and me, seemingly calculating his every move. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I should have. I was embarrassed. How does it look for me to have been an employee of the opposing candidate?”
Dean leans forward. “Maybe you don’t announce it publicly. But why not tell me?”
“I should have,” I whisper.
Dean stares through me. He isn’t pushing, and that is almost more unsettling. My husband walks over to the window and I see his back muscles tense through his thin cotton shirt. I want to jump inside his head so that I can rehearse answers to his questions. But I can’t.
“Why did you send the photo to Mara?” I ask.
“I waited,” Dean says. “I found the picture, and I asked you questions about Grant. Every day, I asked you how you felt about the person you were running against. I gave you dozens of chances to talk. But you never did.”
Our entire relationship, Dean’s waited for me to do the right thing. Sometimes looking into Dean’s face would be all the encouragement I’d need. My first year on the town council, I knew a staffer was falsifying expenses. But I also knew it was minor stuff. I liked this person. I told her I knew and I told her to stop. I thought that was enough. But Dean’s perspective was more black-and-white than that. “You have to report what you know,” he kept saying. I finally went to Accounting. It turned out those fake expenses were only a fraction of her theft. It was a huge scandal for the town and it would have continued undetected for years if I hadn’t made that report. I beat myself up about it, knowing that I shouldn’t have waited to inform Accounting. Dean could have rubbed it in my face that he was right. But he didn’t. I’ll never forget what he said to me. “You did the right thing in the end. I trust that you’ll always get there, Tess. I know what kind of person you are.”
I’m pretty sure Dean’s been waiting for me to do the right thing. But maybe our problem is that our versions of right diverged. Because even though it may be misguided, I still feel like my relationship with Grant is my own secret. Even now, I’m fighting to keep it private, from the person I promised to share my life with.
Dean walks into the living room and sits on the couch. His face is neutral. He is leaning forward, elbows balanced on his thighs, gesturing for me to sit next to him. I accept the invitation.
“I’m going to give you one chance, Tess. I need you to tell me everything about your relationship with Grant. Otherwise, I don’t know where we stand.”
I stare at the ceiling as I pick at my nails, a nervous habit I’ve never been able to shake. Dean reaches for my hand to steady the anxious movements.
“Start with the photo, Tess. Explain the picture.”
My voice is quiet and it’s hard to look Dean in the eyes, but in this moment, I’m determined to tell him everything. I start at the beginning. “I dated Grant that summer.”
“I figured as much. But why the secrecy, Tess? I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me this.”
I take a deep breath as I try to explain to Dean, and maybe to myself too, the deep wounds that summer inflicted. “Our relationship ended badly. After Grant, it was hard for me to trust anyone, especially someone in a relationship. In order to move on from everything that happened, I had to put it away. I don’t let myself open the box of how I felt losing …”
I trail off, realizing what I almost said. But Dean finishes my sentence for me. “How you felt losing him.”
I nod. “I was disposable. That’s what I learned in my relationship with Grant. It wasn’t until I met you that I felt deserving of love. You never asked me to do anything I didn’t want to do. You respected me and my mind. Being with you was like trying on a new coat and I didn’t want to take it off.”
Dean’s face is tense as he asks, “But were you pretending with me? It feels hard to know what’s hidden, Tess. Do I know you?”
“Yes. What we have is real love.” I try to convince him. I try to convince myself.
“Not much about us feels honest right now, Tess.” When he finally speaks, Dean asks, “Did you love him?”
“As much as a seventeen-year-old girl can love someone.” I don’t know why I qualify my answer, because it isn’t true. I exhale and correct myself, because Dean deserves complete honesty. “That’s not right. I loved him. He was my first love.”
This is when Dean stands up and walks away. I know his reactions are only going to get worse and I hate hurting him in the process.
I follow after Dean, my words pleading for him to turn around. “I should have mentioned our relationship earlier. This thing has spiraled out of control.” I swallow away my tears and look up, surprised by the intensity of Dean’s stare.
“Do you still love him?”
It’s a hard question to answer. But I promised him the truth. “Yes. But I love you more.” My cheeks are wet as my eyes search for Dean’s. I need him to look at me.
But instead, he’s staring off into the distance as he says, “I don’t know if that matters anymore, Tess.”
“Dean, of course it matters. It is the only thing that matters. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Grant, but you are the most important thing in my life.”
Dean finally looks in my direction. His face shows no emotion as he asks, “Why did things end badly between you and Grant? What happened?”
I swallow, because this is the question I was hoping to avoid. “It doesn’t matter, Dean. We were kids and it’s long over.”
“If Grant didn’t still matter, you wouldn’t have hidden your past,” Dean says.
“I love you. I love us,” I plead.
“It’s not enough!” Dean shouts.
My heart scrambles. It has to be enough. I have to find a way to show Dean that it’s enough. “Tell me what you need,” I beg.
“Tess, all I’ve ever wanted is for you to be the best version of yourself. I can’t tell you what to do. I can’t demand something out of you. But I think we both know we haven’t seen that person in a long time.”
“I should have told you about Grant. I never made good decisions when it came to him. I’m sorry Dean.”
“I wish I could believe you,” he says.
“You can. You know me, Dean. Please let me earn back your trust.” I reach out for his hand, but he pulls it away.
Dean’s arms are crossed, his jaw tight as he says, “You’re still lying, Tess. Apparently, you’ve lied to me all along. About the most important part of our marriage.”
Dean slumps onto our couch. “I don’t care about some relationship you had decades ago. I could even get past the fact that you hid it.” He takes a breath and continues. “What I can’t get over is that even now, you’re not telling me the truth.”
Dean pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket. He places it on our coffee table as he says, “This was in your mother’s things too.”
I walk slowly, my breath hitching as my eyes focus on the blurry picture on the table, a black-and-white image that forever changed my heart. I pick up the ultrasound photo and feel a wave of sorrow as I study the faint outline of a tiny nose and two clenched fists.
“In all the years we’ve been together, how many times have we talked about starting a family?” Dean asks. “How many times have I asked you to consider a child? Even when I begged, you wouldn’t give an explanation beyond I’m not cut out to be a mother .”
It’s how I’ve always felt, but Dean wanted more information. He asked questions that were too painful for me to answer. I shut down every discussion with curt answers and frustration that I was even being asked for explanations.
“I kept pushing because it never made sense,” Dean continues. “Your entire face lights up around kids. Children follow you at parties. You’d be the best mom, and yet you wouldn’t even consider having a child with me.”
Sometimes I feel like motherhood is an assumption women have to rebut. Just because I like kids doesn’t mean I want kids of my own. I resent needing to provide an explanation. But this isn’t a stranger asking these questions. This is my husband. I committed to sharing a life with Dean and I never shared my real reasons.
“You were pregnant once,” Dean says, pointing to the ultrasound. “And you never told me.”
I stare at the grainy photo printed on slick paper from the doctor’s office. Dean’s angry words echo, rightfully so, because everything he’s saying is true, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the image in my hands.
“Did you have a child with Grant Alexander?” Dean asks, his voice rising to match his frustration.
“I can’t talk about that time.”
“Why?” His shout makes me flinch.
“Because other than my mother, no one else knows what happened,” I whisper. “I’ve kept this part of me hidden for so long.”
Dean’s lip curls. “You kept this from Grant too? Does he even know he has a child?”
I swallow slowly. “That’s a conversation I need to have with Grant.”
Dean stands. “He has some power over you that I don’t understand. I’ve begged for answers for years. And even now, you don’t care enough about us to be honest.”
I open my mouth to explain, but no words materialize. I can’t imagine telling Dean what happened before telling Grant. Dean is right. The power or love or guilt that Grant holds over me seems stronger than my now crumbling marriage. I had dozens of chances over the years to tell Dean everything. But I never prioritized the truth for my husband over the pain of revisiting my past with Grant.
Dean walks toward the front door. “I’ve given you so many chances, but I’m done giving you any more. I’m done with the secrets and the lies, Tess. That’s not love.” The door slams as he leaves. I fear he won’t ever be back.
The empty room echoes. I could chase after Dean, beg, plead for him to come home, to come back to me. But I knew then and I know now that there are consequences for every choice. I’m all alone and it’s exactly what I deserve.