Chapter Twelve Daisy #2
He shrugged. “I don’t know what time you do dinner these days.” There it was. A touch of unearned defensiveness and just a little bit of resentment, breaking right on through his affable, lovable-dad thing.
She touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth and let it hold back the words that rose inside her. He said nothing. Like he was daring her. Challenging her.
“Why is that?” Her tongue didn’t hold. Neither did the words.
“You know what I mean,” he said, light and easy like he hadn’t started something on purpose.
I can only control myself.
“No, Jonathan, I don’t know what you mean.” She smiled. “I don’t gatekeep that information from you. You could have it if you wanted to. You could live in this house if you wanted to.”
“Is that right?” There was an edge to his voice now, and it scraped her raw.
“Not under the current circumstances. But nobody made you leave.”
He leveled his gaze at her. “You did, actually.”
Oh, she’d made a mistake. She’d set this up wrong.
“Let me revise that. Nobody made you cheat.”
“Daisy,” he said, in the low, conciliatory way he had always said her name when she was mad at him.
It was so intimate, so familiar. It spoke of years and years of knowing just how to calm her down, just how to make her melt.
She hated that he still had that knowledge.
That he knew how to placate her. That he knew how to kiss her.
Touch her. That he knew what she looked like naked.
That she knew what he looked like naked, and he was the only man she had ever seen . . .
She had been holding off a breakdown.
But she had quit the job, finally. She had really taken steps to separate herself from him, and here he was, standing there looking like her husband, when he just wasn’t. Wasn’t the man she had married. Wasn’t the man she had thought he was.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said.
“What, exactly?”
“Like this. It doesn’t have to be . . . toxic.”
“Toxic.” The word echoed inside her.
“You didn’t need to quit.”
“This is about me quitting as your bookkeeper?”
“Yes. I mean, no. It’s about our family. It’s about our kids. But no. I don’t want you to quit. I need you. It’s ours, Daisy.”
It’s ours. That was . . . She just couldn’t do this. She couldn’t take the lying. She couldn’t take him standing there all handsome and being this much of a liar. She just couldn’t. He didn’t see it as theirs; everything was his. Including her. That was why he was bringing this up.
No matter how much he stood there, nonconfrontational and smiling, he was mad. Furious at her for leaving.
“You need me. You need me to do math for you. You need me to tell you what time I feed your children dinner. You need me to balance the checkbook that you use to buy her jewelry.”
“Hey.” He looked back at the truck. “Leave her out of this.”
“I can’t, Jonathan. You brought her into it. You brought her into our life.”
“Relationships end, Daisy. I don’t know what you want me to do.”
I don’t either. Because I don’t want you back, because I could never take you back, not after that, not after her. But I just want to go back to the way things were before. She couldn’t say any of that, because it was too sad.
All of this was so sad. She felt . . .
I didn’t curse you earlier. And maybe I should have.
Because God, it was like none of this touched him. He was looking at her like she was the bad guy. Like she was the villain.
“You cheated on me,” she said.
“I don’t really want to have this conversation with you in the driveway. The kids are right in the house.”
There he was again, pretending to be the voice of reason.
Pretending to be reasonable. Like she was the one who was unreasonable.
Like she was the one who had caused this, when he’d said he hadn’t been happy for ten years.
She had never considered him a manipulative man.
She had never thought he was pulling the strings on her, like a puppet.
She’d loved him since she was sixteen years old.
She just didn’t know anymore if he had ever been the boy she thought she knew or if it had always been a lie.
He made her feel guilty. He made her feel like she was causing this.
Made her feel like she was the one ripping them apart when he was the one who had slept with somebody else.
Who had left her for somebody else. Who was buying that woman rings and . . .
“I’m going to need you to have some perspective,” he said. “Because when Amberly and I get married—”
She’d suspected it. But . . .
She looked back at the truck, where Amberly was now playing with her hair during the selfie, and saw a ring sparkling on her finger. She looked down at her own left hand.
She still had her ring on.
“You’re marrying her?”
“Yeah.”
“We aren’t divorced yet.”
“That isn’t going to take long, is it?”
“You haven’t told your mother, Jonathan.” Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might throw it up. “What are you thinking? You can tell her you left me on a Friday and marry Amberly on a Sunday?”
“I’m waiting for the right time.”
So many angry words boiled inside her, and she wanted to just let them all spill over. Screw control. Screw him.
“Why . . . why do you even want to get married to her?” It wasn’t the zinger she would have liked to get out.
But why? This was a new level of humiliation.
Because it was one thing if he wanted to go out and sleep around—that was insulting and unendurable, and she’d never have stayed with him—but at least that felt like it was about him.
It didn’t mean he was in love.
Him loving her, wanting to marry her, that . . .
That hurt.
“She wants to get married.”
“What . . . what does marriage even mean to you, Jonathan? Because our vows meant nothing.”
“That isn’t fair. We were married for twelve years, and I kept my vows for a long time. Don’t act like you didn’t have anything to do with the state of our marriage.”
“What was the state of our marriage? Enlighten me. Communicate with me. Because that’s one thing you never did, Jonathan.
You never told me what was going on with you.
I thought everything was fine,” she said, her voice breaking.
“If I didn’t . . . cook for you enough, or clean for you enough, or fuck you enough, I would never have known because you didn’t tell me. ”
He turned his head away, like even he couldn’t bear looking her in the eye now. “Don’t play the victim.”
“I am the victim. I am the victim of your endless bullshit. You can . . . you can go. We don’t need to talk.
We don’t need to rehash this. You’re marrying her.
Great. You don’t know the name of your kids’ pediatrician or their teachers.
You don’t know what time they eat dinner.
You won’t be here to tuck them in every night.
You sugared them up like a fun uncle instead of their dad and dropped them off with me.
I quit.” She looked him dead in the face.
“Everything. I quit, and I hope you get everything you deserve.”
She turned on her heel and went back into the house, slamming the door behind her.
She turned the lock, and when she heard him knock once behind her, she realized he still had a key.
She braced herself for him to use it. Part of her wished she had stayed outside and fought with him just to see if she could tempt him into it.
To see if she could entice him into a screaming match, because God knew it would be fun.
Because he always tried to pretend he was the reasonable one.
He always tried to act like he was the one holding everything together and she was the one letting their life fall apart like he hadn’t torn down their marriage. Like that hadn’t been everything.
It would be fun to see if she could make it so he couldn’t pretend to be rational anymore.
He didn’t use the key. He didn’t knock again. That was Jonathan all over. He just didn’t care enough. He never would.
He was never going to give her what she wanted. What she needed. He was never going to love her like she’d loved him. That was the bottom line. He didn’t love their life.
“I hope you get everything you deserve,” she whispered.
She thought about the spell bag she had burned, that she had committed to ash. She was going to do that spell again, but this time, she meant it, in every dark way possible.
She reached into her purse and took out her tarot cards, taking the lid off and revealing the Fool.
A man, walking, heedless of the world around him, careless, unconcerned.
She picked the card up and looked at the image, not breaking her focus.
“Jonathan McNamara,” she said in the silence of the room. “What you have sown, that will you also reap.”