Chapter 32 Mariah
Vince and I were permitted by the courts to mediate virtually.
The first thing he said to me was, “You look good. Are you planning to stay in Georgetown?”
I hadn’t seen him since that day he handed me the divorce papers. He was wearing some kind of bronzer on his skin that made him look greenish in the lighting. His hair wasn’t as gray at the temples. Hair dye? He looked awful.
“I’m not sure about my plans.”
He nodded. “Hendley’s such a small town. There are lots of restaurants in the low country.”
“You don’t need to concern yourself with my job prospects, Vince.”
“Excuse us.” My attorney muted the microphone. “I think it’s best if you don’t engage in small talk. He’s bound to say something to make you angry.”
The mediator’s face appeared on the screen. She introduced herself and stated the reasons the parties were present and that mediation was required for divorces in South Carolina. After ascertaining that divorce was the wish of both parties, she quickly moved on to property because there was nothing else. Since Vince was the plaintiff, his lawyer began. He started by listing the assets, which included the Clark family land, the house, personal property, our vehicles, and of course Clark’s Diner and financial holdings from Clark’s merchandise.
By the time we were done, between the mediator’s questions and the lawyers’ back-and-forth, we came to the end of the meeting. Vince was offering me a hundred thousand dollars, of which he’d already given me ten, and seventy percent of all royalties for existing contracts with Target stores.
In his words he was doing this to finish the business without angry feelings. I suppose he meant without angry feelings on his part, because surely he wasn’t talking about mine. One of the things I’d learned in therapy was not to let other people decide how I should feel.
A month ago, I would have taken this offer. I would have felt sorry for myself, unworthy, and I would have let him rob me, but I was no longer that woman. If Clark’s Diner was a glass, I had filled it with blood, sweat, and tears.
“My client is not willing to accept this offer. She has documentation that she turned Clark’s Diner into a regional brand. Does your client have a more reasonable offer for us to consider?”
Vince’s attorney looked at Vince. They hadn’t discussed it. I almost laughed at the lunacy.
Whatever that crap was Vince had on his face looked like it was gonna slide down onto his dress shirt. Vince had known me for nearly all of my adult life, and he fully expected me to accept his offer because that was what I’d always done. But I’d changed. I was a powerful woman, and now I was harnessing that power and using it. Therapy was the truth.
“We’re done until we hear back from the plaintiff,” my attorney said, and the mediator went through the steps to end the mediation.
She was just about to end the Zoom when Vince barked, “What do you want, Mariah?” His lawyer tried to stop him, but Vince continued. “You must have a figure in mind.”
The mediator reminded him the session was over, but I was as rebellious as Vince. “I do have something in mind. You can wait for the paperwork. You know, how you gave me the paperwork.”
“I’m willing to settle this divorce with irreconcilable differences. Don’t make me bring up the ugly issues,” Vince said.
“What, your heavy-handed-with-salt girlfriend?”
“No, the real reason I don’t want to be married to you anymore.” He shook his head. “You know what that is, and quite frankly, no one is more unfaithful than you, Mariah, and you know it.”
“We’re done now,” Vince’s attorney said.
The mediator added, “I’ll be in touch with a summary.”
The Zoom camera went off. Seconds later, a FaceTime call rang in from my attorney. “Well, that went well,” I said.
“Reasonably, but is there something I don’t know?”
“There is something. Something I didn’t think that he would use,” I replied.
My attorney sighed and said, “Let’s discuss it.”
***
I walked into Dr. Johnson’s building still carrying the irritation that the drive over had not fully taken away. I purposely scheduled therapy to follow mediation because I assumed I was going to need to talk to somebody about it, and I’d been right.
We opened with Dr. Johnson’s questions about my week, and then she moved to the mediation and my feelings.
“I’m angry. I’ve seen movies and read books about how couples become during divorces, but you hope you’re never in this situation. I feel like Vince is stabbing me in the back over and over again, and I can’t get the knife out.” The first of my tears spilled. “What makes him think he has the right to have everything?”
“Is this taking of everything a part of his personality?”
“Oh yeah. I mean, he’s a jerk. I think even he knows that, but he wasn’t that way in the beginning.”
“What was he like?”
“He considered my feelings. My thoughts and opinions. He told me he was lucky to have me—he’d married up.”
“How did you feel when he said those things?”
“I felt lucky. I thought I was lucky to find someone who wanted to spend his life with me.”
“Why was that luck?”
“Because.” I curled my fingers around the chair’s cold steel arms. Hot tears burned the back of my eyes. I swallowed, pushing my emotions back down into my belly.
Dr. Johnson sat back. She waited a beat before she pressed me. “Because what?”
“Because I’m always surprised when people love me.” I wiped my nose. “I didn’t have anyone to love me when I was a child. My father put his wife first, and she didn’t love me. My grandparents were far away. I know it’s juvenile to say this, but that felt like a betrayal. I needed them.”
“Cousins?”
“Not really, and the few I had lived here. My father traveled a lot for his job, so we didn’t get to Georgetown often... only for some holidays.”
“What about Sabrina?”
“Six years is a big gap between children. I told you, Lorraine pitted us against each other so much and for so long that I didn’t connect with her, but...” I paused. “We had a breakthrough the other day. A good one. I offered to pay for an attorney for her. She’s being sued for custody of my niece.”
Dr. Johnson smiled a little. “That sounds great.”
“It is. We hugged. I know that I have a lot of work to do. I’m not romanticizing one conversation, but Sabrina is not my enemy.”
Dr. Johnson’s lips ticked up. “I’m glad to hear that.”
The smile dropped from my lips. “But I do have an enemy,” I said. “Vince.”
“How did mediation go?”
“I want more of what I built, and he doesn’t like it. I’m fighting him.”
“Good. You sound proud of that.”
“I am. He’s cheating. I can get evidence. That’ll help my case.”
Dr. Johnson got a look on her face that I’d seen a hundred times. She was about to probe. “You haven’t really mentioned his infidelity much. You’ve talked more about the money. The loss of the television show.”
“That matters to me more.”
“Why not your marriage?”
“Because it changed a long time ago.”
Dr. Johnson cocked her head. “How did it change?”
I looked up at the clock to the left of her. I had twenty minutes left in this session. I was tired of talking, but even I had to admit talking was helping. This process... it was working, so I answered. “We were a couple in love, and then we became a couple falling out of love. His mother got sick. It took a year for her to die. And then it was just him and me again, and we didn’t have anything left.”
Dr. Johnson made some notes and then looked at me again. “There’s something you’re not telling me about your marriage. Why did you fall out of love? What changed it?”
“Me, I suppose.” I hesitated, took a deep breath, and grappled with my thoughts before admitting them out loud. “I didn’t want to have children.”
“Okay. That’s something to talk about.”
“I never wanted to have children. Vince did from the beginning. After we got married, I turned the diner into our child. Keeping it out of bankruptcy was a whole thing.
“I worked sixteen-hour days. Once it became financially sound, I started trying to figure out ways to market it outside of Hendley. It only took a few years before I had a publicist pitching it to food shows. Do you know we have merchandise in Target?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“We do.” I raised my hand and pointed at my chest. “I did that.” I sighed. “But the whole time, Vince wanted us to start a family. He was happy about the business, but he wanted children more than he wanted to be with me.”
“What were the conversations about children like?”
“Well, at first I said we were young and let’s wait, and then later I pretended I was trying. Vince wasn’t as daft as I thought he was. Married people have sex, and a lot of times children result, so when they don’t, there’s usually a reason. He found out I was using birth control. When he confronted me about it, I told him I was never having a child.”
I inhaled deeply and let it out, processing the memory in my mind as I was telling it. “The way he looked at me... I’ll never forget it. There was a cellular shift in his affection for me. Then his mother died, and he was done. She hadn’t had grandchildren, and that was my fault.”
Dr. Johnson gave me a minute to process through that. Tears ran down my face again. I cried every week in this place. I used to hate it, but now it felt good.
“Why didn’t you want to have children?”
A heaviness came down on me like I’d been drugged. I could barely lift my head. “For the same reason other women don’t want to have children.”
“I want to hear your reason, Mariah. Why didn’t you want to have children?”
“Vince told his mother about the birth control, and she threw it in my face... her disappointment in me. How could I rob them of this? What kind of woman deceives her husband? She wanted grandchildren. But this is my body.”
“It certainly is. But you’re avoiding answering about why you didn’t want children.”
“Oh, I hate this. I’m answering you. What do you want from me?”
“Mariah, healing won’t start until you figure out what’s actually hurting you. You can’t recover until you know what you’re recovering from.”
I still sat there, not responding. The fear was so deeply imbedded in my body that it was intertwined with my arteries and veins. This is what I’d been avoiding. This question was why I didn’t want therapy.
Dr. Johnson’s voice sliced through my self-analysis. “I’m trying to help you see where you need to get. I want to know if you have unhealthy thoughts about childbearing. Is the reason you don’t want children because you’re afraid that what happened to your mother is going to happen to you?”
“Of course I am!” I snapped, and then I sobbed like I was emotionally unstable, one minute, two, three minutes of nonstop crying with hyperventilating in between. At some point, Dr. Johnson stood and handed me a wad of tissue and then returned to her chair. When I finally calmed, I said, “You lose a mother to childbirth, and the idea of being pregnant and delivering a baby is horrifying.” I reached for more tissue, but I didn’t have any more tears. “Having babies is natural. It’s supposed to be beautiful. But it’s not always beautiful.” I was crying again. I thought that was done. “You know the scariest part isn’t dying, Dr. Johnson. I’ve died in my mind a hundred times.” I covered my hands with my face and then dropped them. “The scary part is leaving a baby alone in the world without a mother. Who they stay behind with is not always someone who makes the right choices. People don’t always do what’s best.”
Dr. Johnson was looking at me with deep compassion. Her normally stoic face and composure were broken by my brokenness.
“My father didn’t handle things right. He married the first woman he met, and she was looking for a husband, not a six-year-old. And I felt that.” I pointed at my chest. “Every day I felt her resentment until the day I left for college. That was the happiest day of that witch’s life.”
“But it wasn’t like that for Sabrina?”
“Nooo. Lorraine couldn’t have kids of her own, so she worshiped Sabrina. Sabrina was like a new penny. Pretty and shiny. No attitude. She could pretend that Sabrina was hers because she was a little light-skinned baby. I was too dark for her perfect picture. I stood out among the four of us like a sore black thumb.”
I rolled my head back to release the ache and stood.
“How could my father marry a woman like that? He should have chosen better. Or not at all.” I wiped my nose and tossed the tissue in the trash. “I won’t have a child and leave them behind.”
Dr. Johnson nodded. Now she understood, and on a deeper level, so did I.