Chapter Two Nora
Chapter Two
Nora
When you’re in need, ask the divine power in the universe. It will provide.
—Rules for Witches
Nora could only stare at Soraya, her mouth dropped open. “What?”
“You kicked David out?” Daisy asked.
“Yes. I did. Two weeks ago. He’s staying in a house his real estate company was selling, with our boys, and they just want to live with their dad because he’s better than me, apparently.” She blinked back tears as she took a sip of wine.
“What happened?” Nora asked.
Soraya was the perfect tradwife. The kind who deferred to her husband in everything, or at least that was what Nora had assumed based on knowing her in high school, plus what she posted on social media. She couldn’t fathom Soraya throwing her husband out.
Not without a very good reason. Nora didn’t know what even counted as a good reason to a woman like her.
Soraya set her wineglass on the table, her hand trembling slightly.
“We were . . . We were at church. We were at church, and he went into the bathroom during the sermon, and I was sitting there, and my phone vibrated. I thought I should check it, even though you’re not really supposed to have your phone on during the sermon, but I always think it might be one of the kids, so I pulled my phone out to check, and it was a picture of .
. .” She looked around and lowered her voice to a near-imperceptible whisper. “Of his penis.”
“What?” Nora gasped. “You kicked your husband out because he sent you dick pics during a sermon?”
“No. If he’d wanted to send me . . . I . . . If he wanted to do that, then I’d have been okay with it.” Soraya didn’t look okay—she looked perturbed—but Nora didn’t comment. “It’s that it was a penis photo that wasn’t meant for me.”
“How did you know it wasn’t for you?” Nora asked.
“Because he’s just never done anything like that before, and there’s something to be said for trying new things, but usually you don’t try new sexual things during the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Everyone has kinks,” Nora pointed out.
“Well, not David. Or at least I didn’t think so.”
Daisy put her hands flat on the table as if bracing herself. “Your husband misdirected a picture of his—”
“His cock.”
“Thank you, Nora,” Daisy said dryly. “He sent that to you from the church bathroom?”
“Yes.” Soraya spun her wineglass in a circle. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. I’ve never had a job. I’ve never had a job, and he’s not supporting me. The kids won’t talk to me, and they’re my whole life.”
“Why won’t they talk to you?” Daisy asked.
“I’m the bad guy,” she whispered. “I’m the one who kicked him out and broke up our family.”
“How did you break up the marriage?” Nora asked.
Soraya looked down at her hands. “I’m supposed to forgive him.
It’s supposed to be not that big of a deal.
Our pastor said because David repented, I .
. . I need to forgive him. He was supposed to install some software on the computer to keep him from going to websites he shouldn’t be on.
I don’t want software to keep my husband from looking at other women or trying to hook up with other women.
I just think it’s wrong. Shouldn’t it be enough that I don’t want him to? ”
Silence fell around the table. Nora took a sip of her beer.
Daisy looked like she was about to vibrate apart. “Jonathan left.”
Soraya and Nora turned to her. “What?” they said at the same time.
Daisy nodded. “Just . . . just like that. My high school sweetheart. Suddenly it’s .
. . You don’t know me, not really. We haven’t been happy for the last ten years.
Who hasn’t been happy for the last ten years?
I’ve been perfectly happy. I . . . I thought we had everything.
He said he needs more, that people aren’t meant to just meet someone and settle when they’re as young as we were, and he met her and found out he wanted all these different things. ”
“Her?”
“He moved into a new house with his new girlfriend.” Daisy picked her fork up and set it back down, then did it again, like she was trying to find the perfect place for it on the table where it might help ease her nerves.
“Hold on.” Nora pinched the bridge of her nose. “I haven’t heard rumors about any of this. About either of you.”
“Alexandra’s divorce and accident have been enough for the rumor mill,” Daisy said. “No one’s that interested in me.”
“We’ve still been going to church together as a family,” Soraya mumbled.
“Oh, Soraya.” Nora groaned.
“I’m an Enneagram Type Two.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Nora said.
“It’s—”
“Oh, I’m not asking.” Nora turned her focus to Daisy. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why haven’t you told anyone?”
Daisy’s eyes glistened. “Jonathan doesn’t want his mom to know yet, so he’s been really careful, because I think he wants to make it seem like Amberly was someone he met after we split up. But I know she’s living in that house with him.”
“Amberly?” Nora asked. “Is she a shih tzu? An infant?”
“Not canine. And she’s twenty-five.” Daisy blinked her tears back, her tone hard and bitter now.
“Which makes sense, you know, since the last time Jonathan was happy, we were twenty-five. So I guess he had to find a twenty-five-year-old who didn’t have stretch marks from bearing his children in order to be happy again.
” Daisy looked down at her hands. “He murdered our life. We had this really good life, and he just walked in one day and . . . blew it up. For himself. Nothing I said made any difference to him. I told him I didn’t want it.
I told him I wanted to work on it, that I didn’t care he slept with someone else. ”
Nora’s stomach twisted. “How can you not care about that?”
“Because I just wanted him to stop . . . saying those things. I just wanted it to go back to how it was. Before he said that. Before I knew it’s . . .”
“It really is like having your life murdered,” Soraya said, her tone soft. “No warning and no way to defend yourself, and when you know, you can’t go back and not know.”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “That’s awful. I can’t even imagine it.”
It was a stupid thing to say. Who wanted to hear that their life was so shitty you couldn’t even begin to imagine what they were living? Nora knew better than that. It was the kind of thing people used to say to her when she’d been a kid living in foster care.
I can’t imagine not having a family!
Good for you.
“I just mean,” she tried again, “I don’t want to be dismissive of what a big deal that is.”
“It’s fine.” Daisy took a deep breath. “So, how are you and Ben?”
The question Nora had dreaded didn’t seem so dreadful now.
“Fine,” she said, not sure why she wasn’t being totally honest.
But it was different from all this. It wasn’t church-bathroom dick pics and affairs with twenty-five-year-olds. He just needed a little bit of space. He was just finding himself.
Ben’s decisions had been more unilateral than she would have liked, but he hadn’t told her he’d had ten years of unhappiness, and he hadn’t left her for another woman. It was different.
“Fine?” Daisy pressed.
“Yes. Just . . . fine. I mean, you know how things are. They move in waves. Marriage is complicated. But you know, we’ve only been married for five years. There’s just not . . .” They were both looking at her like they could see through her. “I mean . . . we are a little bit separated right now.”
“You’re separated,” Daisy said.
“But you’re fine,” Soraya added.
“He needed some space.”
“Oh, space?” Daisy said. “That always means they’re sleeping with someone else.”
She didn’t have to spread her bitterness over to Nora.
“He’s not.” She did her best to affect a neutral expression.
“What happened to you guys is terrible, and I’m really sorry about it.
What happened to Alexandra is awful. I hate that everything unraveled for her when Christopher cheated, but it’s not the same.
He needs to go be by himself and deal with some things.
I love him, and he’s going to . . . find himself. ”
“When did he lose himself?” Soraya asked. Yet again, Nora couldn’t tell if she was being funny or tragically sincere.
“I just think . . .”
Suddenly she heard herself. Sitting there at this table with two other women whose marriages had come unglued, having come from the hospital room of a woman who had gone through a heinous separation.
She did sound naive. She did sound silly.
But they didn’t know Ben. Ben was fun and funny, and there was a reason he’d been voted Hemlock’s Favorite Dentist three years in a row. He wasn’t like a regular dentist; he was a cool dentist.
He had a twenty-sided die tattooed on his arm, and he liked to tell jokes with kids, and . . . and . . .
She knew him. He’d talked to her. She hadn’t liked everything he’d had to say, but they’d talked.
“It’s not ideal,” she finished.
“I’m Jonathan’s bookkeeper,” Daisy said. “That’s my job. I do all the financial stuff for the construction company. But I do more than that too. I collect the payments, and I organize everything. I make sure all his accounts are balanced and he isn’t going to overdraw. I’m still working for him.”
“That’s not okay,” Nora said. “Unless he pays really well.”
“We just share all the money.” Daisy’s lip trembled.
“Or at least we did. I don’t know what to do.
I hold his whole life together. Plus, if I don’t keep the job, I won’t have enough money to maintain the mortgage.
There aren’t any divorce papers; he just left.
I don’t have a timeline. I don’t know how much child support I’m going to get. ”
“I’m a freelance writer and artist,” Nora reminded her, and herself at the same time.
She’d never faced the potential reality of what life would look like without Ben’s dentist salary, but it suddenly felt very heavy.