Catching More Than Sparkles

Rhys

SITCOMS MAKE DIVORCE seem kind of funny.

Two people with their arms crossed, eyeing each other with exasperation and shaking their heads while one of them says something like, “Oh, you!” And the audience laughs, and we watch them reluctantly struggle to overcome some shared obstacle, and by the end of it they admit that even though they didn’t want to stay married to each other, they’re both still good people with good lives ahead of them.

My divorce was not taking the sitcom route.

It was barely the start of June, but it was already warm enough that I was glad I’d sprung for the indoor, temperature-controlled storage unit.

I had a few boxes of clothes and essentials to bring back to my parents’ house, but the rest was going in for safekeeping until I…

Figured out what the hell I was going to do with my life.

I had even more stuff back at the condo I’d shared with my ex for nearly five years.

Furniture, art, the fucking car I’d only just finished paying off.

But none of that could be touched at the moment, since she wouldn’t take my offer of splitting everything fifty-fifty, and insisted on having the lawyers work out who was entitled to what.

Evidently I needed to be punished, even though she’d been the one screwing around and having an affair.

At least we’d never had kids. That was the one thing I could be grateful for in the nightmare scenario.

Despite the air conditioning, my dad and brother, who’d graciously volunteered to help me out, already had sweat shimmering on their foreheads as we lugged out the boxes from the back of the moving truck.

I’d driven it across three states, from the bustling city where I’d attended university on a football scholarship all the way back to Cherryvale, the tiny town of about 3000 people I swore I’d never move back to.

“That’s the last of it,” my dad remarked proudly, once the last box neatly labeled storage had been hauled into the small unit.

The ones labeled keep were in the back of his SUV.

“Cheer up, Rhys,” he said, planting his sweaty hand on my shoulder blade and giving it a wet pat. “Your mom’s really glad you’re home.”

“Josie, too,” Benjamin piped up. “She’s excited to get to know you.”

Josie was Benjamin’s wife, and the soon-to-be mother of his first child. As his phrasing suggested, I barely knew her. I’d come back to Cherryvale once in the last decade, for their wedding.

“Where are they, anyway?” I wondered.

“They’re with Kendall,” Benjamin said. “They wouldn’t be much help with this, anyway.”

He didn’t have to elaborate on that statement.

Josie probably couldn’t lift much of anything in her current condition.

Kendall, my brother’s best friend since childhood and my parents’ honorary third son, was a scrawny stick figure with spaghetti arms. At least, he had been the last time I’d seen him, when he’d been the best man at my brother’s aforementioned wedding.

“They’re busy preparing your welcome home celebration,” Dad informed me, and I couldn’t suppress a groan.

“Dad, I’m fucking exhausted. I don’t want a celebration.”

“I know, I know,” he said, giving me another affectionate pat before pushing some hair back off his forehead.

It was fading into salt and pepper at the temples, but still pretty thick.

I hoped he’d passed that gene onto me. I was only 28, so I probably still had a few years before I’d need to worry about thinning hair, but I had enough problems in my life either way.

“You know how your mom is,” he added. “Try to grin and bear it.”

His statement was laced with apology, but the small grin on his face indicated how adorable he found my mom’s excitability. He always had. Happy wife, happy life. Guess that was where I’d gone wrong.

“It won’t be so bad,” Benjamin agreed. “And then you can just relax until the trip.”

Right. The trip. My parents owned a cabin on a river, where they usually spent a week in the summer and a week in the winter. They’d bought it at some point after I’d left for college, so I hadn’t gone yet. Benjamin, Josie, and Kendall had been on every single trip with them.

It was my own fault, because I’d been so hellbent on trying to make something of myself and escape the oppressive, smothering aura of this backwoods town, but I couldn’t help but feel like an outsider in my own family.

My parents had been nothing but supportive since I’d told them about the divorce, offering me a place to stay with no strings attached until I got back on my feet.

And everyone seemed thrilled to have me back.

Still, it was humiliating, crawling back for help after failing at everything I’d ever tried to do.

And Cherryvale was a cesspool of nonstop gossip and speculation.

I was sure everyone in town was foaming at the mouth to get a good look at me, the idiot who’d been scouted by the NFL in my senior season but had blown out my knee before playing a single game with them.

I hadn’t been able to hack it as a football player or a husband.

The three of us loaded into the car and made our way back to my parents’ house. My house, for what I hoped was the temporary time being. Dad and Benjamin yapped about the cabin the whole way, about how nice it would be to swim in the river, and how quiet it was in the woods.

When we pulled up to the house, I was struck with a wave of nausea before I could even wrench open the door and get out.

This was all really happening. The last five years of my life weren’t an incredibly detailed and extensive nightmare.

I was being forced to move back home while getting a divorce from my wife, who’d been having an affair with my direct supervisor at the corporate business owned by her father, which I’d been forced to pivot into a career at, after tearing my ACL in college and destroying my dreams of being a professional athlete.

That about summed it up. I’d never even wanted to work there in the first place.

George, her father, had practically insisted on it once my football career was out of the question.

And then Graham, the power-tripping middle management asshole who had been directly above me in the chain of command had fired me for seemingly no reason.

I’d later discovered the reason had been because Hailey had asked him to.

“You okay?” Benjamin asked in concern when I stumbled out of the passenger seat.

“Yeah,” I lied. I could feel myself breaking out in a cold sweat and I was slightly worried I might actually throw up. “I just need a minute.”

“You go on inside,” my dad suggested, his dark brows furrowing together when he got a look at me. “We’ll get the boxes up to your room.”

“Thanks.” I barely managed to get the word out before dashing through the front door and down the hall into the bathroom, grateful that my mom, Josie, and Kendall were fussing in the kitchen and hadn’t been able to see me.

I smacked at the handles on the sink until cold water streamed out of the faucet.

Splashing it up onto my face to cool me down, I forced myself to take deep breaths in and out.

When the threat of vomit started to ebb, I opened my eyes to find myself face-to-face with my unhappy reflection. I looked as haunted as I felt. Great.

My knuckles turned white as I gripped the porcelain edge of the sink and ordered myself to relax. It was a family fucking dinner. I wasn’t marching into battle. The most painful thing I’d have to endure would be my mother clucking her tongue about how tired I looked.

Part of me was tired of talking about it and just wanted to cover my head with a pillow and sleep through the rest of the proceedings.

I realized now that my family probably hadn’t been the biggest fan of Hailey, solely based on the fact that we bickered a lot and I had been pretty miserable for the majority of the marriage.

But they were too nice to really say too much about her.

Well, that was fine. I’d already had a beer-fueled bitch-fest with my buddies back home. Probably not the healthiest coping mechanism, but… Sue me. Shockingly, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with how everything had turned out.

When I suitably composed myself and cautiously creaked open the bathroom door, my dad and brother were just coming down the stairs, finished hauling the boxes up to my room. They steered me into the kitchen where the others were waiting.

The smell of a garlicky pasta sauce permeated the air as I walked in, and my stomach gave a rumbling growl as I realized I was starving.

My mom immediately wrapped me up in a big hug, cooing and fussing over me, followed by Josie giving me a sweetly awkward side hug to avoid crushing her massively round belly against me.

I’d only ever seen her in a fancy wedding dress caked in formal makeup, but I could see now even with her loose sweats and auburn hair piled up into a messy bun on top of her head, she was pretty.

Probably too pretty for my goofball brother, but she seemed thrilled to be with him. Good for them.

As my mom chattered on about the dinner they’d made for me and how she hoped my long drive hadn’t been too bad, I watched Kendall Austin turn around from where he’d been arranging a tray of cookies into an artful design.

My brows popped up in shock; I couldn’t help it.

He looked so different from how I remembered.

But when that familiarly easy smile slid across his pink lips, showing pearly white teeth with a crooked incisor his family had been too poor to fix with braces, I was smacked with a sensation of nostalgia very different to the nausea I’d experienced in the car.