26. Emily
— · —
Emily
Two weeks later I’m back at Mrs. Potts’s table with a cup of tea going cold in my hands.
She’s three doors down from the house I used to share with Henry, which means she sees most of what goes on up that end of the street, and she’s never minded telling me about it.
She was the one who sat right here while my mother stood in her living room calling me a mistake, and she’s the one who pointed at the door and threw her out.
After that there’s no version of the neighborhood gossip she’d keep from me.
Ciara’s the one who told me most of it, on the phone two nights ago. We talk now, every few days. She filed the morning after I left her kitchen.
“She filed already?” Mrs. Potts says when I tell her, delighted. “Good. Good for her.”
“John came home from work to bags of his clothes on the lawn and the locks changed.” I’m half smiling saying it, and I don’t feel bad about that. “She wouldn’t let him in. Said he stood out there an hour and she just watched him through the window.”
“And she actually went through with it.” Mrs. Potts shakes her head, delighted on my behalf even though she’s never met the woman. “Good. About time somebody in this story got what was coming to them.”
“He’s at some motel now. Calls her over and over, she says. She’s got a lawyer and she doesn’t pick up.” I turn my cup on the saucer. “She’s not the same since. There’s a spine in her I never saw before.”
“What about your mother?”
That’s the part I have to brace for, except when I reach for the feeling, it isn’t there.
“Ciara says she’s been turning up at John’s motel.
He won’t see her. Blames her for the whole thing falling apart, apparently.
Says if she’d been more careful, Ciara never would’ve found out, and he’d still have his house and his quiet little life on the side. ”
“So he’s not even sorry.”
“He’s not sorry he did it. He’s sorry it got expensive.”
“Men like that never are.” Mrs. Potts says it flat, like a fact she earned the hard way.
I wait for it to hurt, the part about my mother.
It doesn’t. She bet everything on a man who was never going to choose her, and she lost the whole pot.
Her best friend. Her fantasy. Both of us, Carmen and me, the daughter she had and the one she wanted.
And I sit here at this table and feel about as much for her as I’d feel reading it about a stranger. Maybe less.
“You’re quiet,” Mrs. Potts says.
“I keep waiting to feel bad for her.”
“And?”
“Nothing’s coming.”
She reaches over and pats my hand, once. “That’s not a flaw in you, sweetheart. She used it all up.”
I let that sit a moment, then I ask the thing I really came to hear. “And Henry? Him and Carmen?”
She lights up like I’ve handed her a present. I’ve stopped pretending to myself that I don’t want this part.
“Carmen moved in with him. Her and the baby both, into the house, right after you left.” She lowers her voice even though it’s just us, and tips her head up the street toward the place I used to live.
“It’s a disaster up there, Emily. Police came twice that I know of. Somebody on the street called them.”
“The police?”
“Screaming matches. Things breaking, by the sound of it.” She shakes her head. “And that baby cries half the night. You can hear it from the street some nights. Henry walks out to his car in the morning looking like he hasn’t slept since spring.”
I almost laugh. Henry told me, more than once, in that patient voice, that he didn’t want kids.
Too messy, too loud, too much work for too little back, like he was talking about a bad investment instead of a person.
He probably pictured something out of a commercial, a baby that sleeps through the night and smells like powder and sits there looking sweet.
Nobody told him they scream and don’t stop and don’t care whose night they’re ruining.
“He’s finding out what a baby actually is,” I say.
“Sounds like it.” She tuts. “He looks ten years older than he did at Christmas.”
“And Carmen?”
“Her I’ve barely laid eyes on. Once or twice, getting out of the car with the baby.” Mrs. Potts says it with something that’s almost, not quite, pity. “Whoever she was before, she looks half dead now. Gray around the eyes. Worn right through.”
I know exactly who she was before. All that shine, walking the halls in high school like the whole town owed her a look, calling me up for years just to rub whatever she’d booked in my face. Hard to square that girl with a woman Mrs. Potts can barely pick out of a car.
“Motherhood’s hard.”
“Harder with no help and a man who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, I’d think.” She says it dry, and goes back to her tea.
I wait to see if any pity turns up for Carmen, same as I did with my mother.
None does. She knew he was married. She sat across from me at family dinners and asked how I was holding up and then went home to my husband.
Whatever’s happening in that house now, she walked in with her eyes open, and I’m not going to lie awake feeling bad that she got exactly what she chased.
Henry’s alimony check cleared on the first, right on time. I don’t need it anymore, not with what I make now, so the whole thing goes straight into a savings account I named Thirty Bucks. Petty? Absolutely. I sleep great.
“Choices have consequences,” I say.
“That they do.” She picks up her cup, satisfied.
“You want to know the worst of it for them? They blew up your whole marriage to be together. Now they’ve got each other, and from the sound of it they can’t stand it.
” She sets the cup back down and studies me.
“And you. That man of yours. He treats you right?”
It surprises me, how fast the answer comes, how much I want to say it out loud.
“He’s good to me. Really good.” I turn the cup in my hands.
“You know what he did the other night? I had a rough day, I came home wrung out, and he didn’t ask me a single question.
Just put a blanket on me and made dinner and let me be quiet until I wanted to talk.
No lecture. No list of things I did to bring it on myself. ”
“That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“I didn’t know that. Not really.” I hear my own voice go thick and I let it.
“He acts like I’m doing him a favor just being there.
He remembers how I take my coffee. He fights with me about onions and then can’t keep his hands off me five minutes later.
I keep waiting for the catch, and there isn’t one.
He’s just good to me, all the way down.”
Mrs. Potts’s eyes have gone soft and wet. “Oh, sweetheart.”
“I didn’t think it came in that shape,” I say. “A man who’s just kind. I thought that was a thing they put in books to sell them.”
“It’s rarer than it ought to be.” She takes my hand. “But it’s real. And you deserve every bit of it. I hope you’re starting to know that.”
“I’m starting to.”
My mother is standing next to my car when I come out.
She looks worse than she did in Mrs. Potts’s living room. Smaller. Her coat hangs wrong and her roots are showing, and Daphne Anderson has never once in my life let her roots show. She’s been waiting out here, and I can tell from her face it’s been a while.
“Emily.” She starts toward me with her hands out. “Sweetheart, please. John won’t see me. Ciara won’t take my calls. I have nobody left, and I’ve been thinking, and a mother and a daughter shouldn’t...”
I unlock my car, get in, and pull the door shut on the rest of the sentence.
She’s still talking through the glass. I can see her mouth moving, see the exact second she realizes the window is never coming down.
I check my mirror, pull out, and drive past her without a single word, and the strangest part is how little it costs me.
For twenty-five years I’d have given anything to have her chase me.
Now she finally is, and all I feel is the road.
***
I take the long way home.
I tell myself it’s nothing, just a longer way around, but I know exactly what I’m doing when I turn onto the old street and slow down in front of the house.
My house, once. Henry’s now, his and Carmen’s.
I pull over a little ways down, past Mrs. Potts’s, and put the car in park, and sit there.
I don’t fully understand why, except that some part of me needs to see it with my own eyes.
Needs to know the door is really shut behind me.
There’s a light on in the front room, the one where I used to fold laundry and wait for him to come home. A shadow moves back and forth behind the curtain, the jerky kind of pacing you do when you can’t put a thing down and can’t fix it either.
Then the front door opens and Henry steps out.
It takes me a second to be sure it’s him.
He’s thinner than I’ve ever seen him, and not the good kind.
Greasy hair he hasn’t washed. Sweatpants and a shirt with something stained down the front.
This is the man who used to iron his jeans.
Who looked me up and down before we left the house and asked, in that mild disappointed way, if I was really going to wear that.
Standing on a stoop in clothes he slept in, looking like he crawled out from under something.
He pulls a cigarette out and lights it. Henry doesn’t smoke.
Henry gave me a lecture once about a coworker who smoked, about discipline and self-respect and what it says about a person.
And there he is on the steps, dragging on one like it’s the only thing holding him to the earth, staring out at nothing.
A window screeches up above him.
“Henry! The baby needs changing!”
“I just changed him!”
“Well he needs it again! What, are you deaf now too?”
He shuts his eyes. Takes one more pull, long and slow. Then he drops the cigarette, grinds it under his shoe, and goes back inside, and the door swings shut behind him.
I sit there with my hands in my lap and wait to feel something. Satisfaction, maybe. I came all this way for it. Or pity, the decent thing, the thing a better person would feel watching a man she once loved fall apart on a dirty stoop.
Neither one shows up.
He was my husband. I stood in a white dress and promised him everything.
For two years I lay awake next to him certain the problem was me, that if I just folded a little smaller, spent a little less, asked for a little nothing, he’d be happy and so would I.
Maybe I loved him. Maybe he loved me too, back at the start, in whatever way he had.
And now he’s a stranger in stained sweatpants fighting through a window about a dirty diaper, and the woman doing the yelling is the one he blew up both our lives for, and none of it, not one piece of it, is anything any of us pictured when we were standing at the start of it thinking we knew how it would go.
I start the car.
I don’t look back, and I don’t take the long way again. I just drive home, to the man who’s probably ruining dinner right now and will be thrilled to see me anyway.