Chapter 2
The bed is too big. That’s the first thing I think when I wake up, which is ridiculous because it’s the same bed it was yesterday.
Same mattress, same navy blue sheets, same dip on his side where the springs gave out two years ago and neither of us got around to replacing them.
Nothing changed about the bed. Everything changed about who’s in it.
I lie here for a minute and let myself feel it.
Not the sadness. That hasn’t shown up yet, and I’m starting to wonder if it’s lost or just late.
What I feel is the strange, ringing quiet of a house with one person in it.
The coffee maker isn’t going because Drew always started it first and he’s not here.
His phone alarm didn’t go off this morning because he’s not here.
There’s no shower running, no cabinet opening, no shaver buzzing because he’s not here.
I get up and start my own coffee. I stand at the counter where I stood last night and drink it black because we’re out of the creamer I like, and he was supposed to pick some up on his way home last night.
The dishwasher repair guy comes at nine.
Four hundred and twelve dollars. I write the check and sign my married name and wonder how many more times I’ll do that before it isn’t mine anymore.
By noon the town has the story.
I don’t know who started it. Maybe Drew told someone, or maybe Sabrina did, or maybe it’s just the kind of place where a man’s truck parked outside the old Merrill house overnight does the talking for everyone.
By the time I walk into the little market on Main Street for creamer, the cashier gives me a look so full of pity that I almost set it down and walk out.
I don’t. I buy the creamer, but I also buy eggs and bread and a bag of apples I don’t need, because the longer I stay the more normal I look.
I keep my face still and my shoulders back, and I don’t give a single person in that store anything to work with.
Nobody asks, and I don’t offer. I load the bags into my car and sit here for two full minutes before I trust myself to drive.
At home, I put the groceries away and catch myself sorting Drew’s protein bars because they’re a jumbled mess in the cabinet. I stop and look at what I’m doing. Then I throw the bars in the trash and close the lid.
My doorbell camera alerts me to motion outside, so I pull up the app and look to see who or what it is. His mother’s car is in the driveway.
Brenda George drives a green Chevy she’s had since before Drew graduated college.
She is not a woman who calls ahead. She is a woman who shows up, and today she’s shown up in the same cardigan she wears to church with her purse over one arm and a casserole dish in the other, standing on my porch like she has something to say and drove here to say it.
My first thought is that she’s here for his things.
My second is that she’s here to tell me what I did wrong, what I should have done differently, how a wife holds onto her husband when the road gets rough.
I’ve read enough about situations like mine to know that the mother almost always picks her son even when the relationship has been cordial if not warm the entire marriage.
Biology and loyalty and the stubborn refusal to believe the boy she raised could do something this ugly.
I open the door ready for it.
“My son is an idiot,” Brenda says. “I brought you a casserole.”
I stand here with my hand on the door.
“Can I come in?” she asks.
I let her in because at least she doesn’t seem hostile.
She walks past me into the kitchen, sets the casserole on the counter, and turns around.
Her eyes are red at the edges. She’s been crying, but she’s finished now, and what’s left on her face is the clean, hard anger of a woman who raised someone better than this.
“He called me this morning,” she says. “Told me what he did. Told me about Sabrina Keller like I should be happy for him. Like I should understand.” She opens a cabinet, takes out two coffee mugs, and pours without asking.
She’s been in this kitchen almost as many times as I have.
“I told him he should be ashamed of himself.”
I sit down because my legs have made the decision for me. “You didn’t have to come over here, Brenda.”
“Yes, I did.” She sits across from me and slides my mug over.
“Because I know how this goes. The whole town is going to look at you like you’re the sad wife who got left, and half of them are going to whisper about what you could have done to keep him…
I know because it’s what happened to me, and I’m not going to be one of those people.
” She wraps both hands around her mug. “You were the best thing that ever happened to my son, and he’s just too stupid to know it. ”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve been braced all morning for the wrong conversations, for pity, for blame, for the gentle suggestion that maybe if I’d tried harder. I wasn’t braced for his own mother sitting in my kitchen telling me I deserved better than her son.
“I don’t want you to think you have to choose sides,” I say. My voice is careful. I mean it. Whatever Drew did to me, she’s still his mother and I won’t be the person who uses that. I won’t try to drive a wedge between them.
“I’m not choosing sides. I’m choosing right over wrong.” She looks at me straight. “He had a good woman and a good life, and he threw it away for a girl who left him once already.”
We sit here for a while and drink coffee.
She doesn’t push me to talk about my feelings or cry on her shoulder or make a plan.
She just sits with me, solid and angry on my behalf, and it’s the first thing all day that almost breaks me.
The pity in the grocery store I could handle.
The cashier’s look, the quiet parking lot, the protein bars in the trash.
But someone being furious for me, not at me, almost takes my knees out.
I hold it together. Barely, but I do.
Before she leaves she puts her hand on mine and says, “You call me if you need anything. I mean it. Not because you’re married to my son. Because I like you, and I liked who you were before him, and I’ll like who you are after.”
I walk her to the door. She hugs me, firm, the way she always has. She doesn’t linger. She gets in the green Chevy and pulls out, and I close the door and stand against it and let out a breath I think I’ve been holding since last night.
The casserole sits on the counter. I eat some of it standing up, because I forgot lunch and my body has decided to keep being a body whether I’m paying attention or not.
In the afternoon, I take a walk. Not for the air.
For the motion, because if I sit in this house any longer I might lose my mind altogether.
I walk down Oak. Past the hardware store, past the pharmacy, past the diner where I can see two women in a booth glance at me through the window and then glance at each other. I keep going.
Three blocks down, at the corner of Oak and Vine, there’s a storefront that’s been empty for two years.
Bare windows, dusty floor, and a For Lease sign that’s been sun-bleached so long the phone number is barely readable.
It used to be a gift shop. Before that, a consignment place that lasted about eight months.
I’ve walked past it a hundred times and never looked twice.
I look twice today though. I don’t know why.
Something about the empty windows and the good light and the way the space sits right on the corner where foot traffic splits two directions.
I stand here long enough that I notice the brass mail slot in the door, the wide front counter visible through the glass, the way the ceiling looks high enough to feel open without being cold.
I’m thinking about the flower arrangements I used to do for friends’ weddings before Drew and I got serious.
I’m thinking about the way I gave that up piece by piece because the marriage needed managing and managing it was a full-time job.
I’m definitely thinking about the fact that this corner gets morning light from both sides.
I look at it one more time. Then, I keep walking.
A truck pulls up to the hardware store as I pass it again on the way home. A man gets out, mid-thirties maybe, work boots and a flannel with the sleeves pushed up. He lifts a stack of lumber from the truck bed like it weighs nothing and catches me looking.
“Sorry,” he says. “Blocking the sidewalk?”
“No, you’re fine.”
He nods. Tips the lumber against his shoulder and heads inside. That’s the whole interaction. Four sentences and a nod. But he looked at me like I was a person standing on a sidewalk, not a woman whose husband just left her. He looked at me like I was no one’s story but my own.
I walk home and end up eating more of Brenda’s casserole. I sit at the kitchen table and make a list on the back of the mortgage envelope, because I finally opened it, and it’s nothing, just a rate adjustment notice. I’m almost mad at how small it is after how large I let it feel.
The list is short. Lawyer. Bank accounts. A conversation about the house that I’m not ready to have but will have to have anyway.
I don’t add the storefront on Oak and Vine. Not yet. It’s just a building with good light and a faded sign.
But I think about it the whole rest of the day.