5. Margo #3
Then Sandy’s eyes land on the flowers, and everything about Dorothy is instantly forgotten.
“Are those flowers? Who are they for?” She gasps and grabs his sleeve. “Are they for Mommy? Daddy got Mommy flowers!”
The question does what my husband’s return couldn’t, it pulls the whole afternoon down to the two dozen roses in his hand and the fact that I can’t stand the sight of them.
Sebastian straightens and holds them out to me, hopeful, careful, certain this is the one thing today he’s gotten right.
“They’re for you,” he says. “The ship’s florist didn’t have much to work with but there were roses on hand, so…” He shifts the bouquet, searching my face for a reaction he isn’t finding. “I know it’s not much, but I wanted…”
“I don’t like roses.”
The words come out flat and quiet. I hold his eyes, and I don’t blink or soften.
“You should know that.”
Sebastian stops. His mouth is still half-open around whatever he was going to say, and I watch it die there. Sandy’s head swivels between us, back and forth, reading a weather she doesn’t have words for yet.
“Margo, I…” He swallows. “I just thought, after last night, I wanted to at least…”
“I know.”
I do know. That’s the thing that hollows me out, standing here on this deck with my mother-in-law’s perfume still hanging in the air and my husband holding flowers which I’ve told him a dozen times remind me of a funeral.
Because the Sebastian I married would have known.
He’d have remembered the church, the smell, the parking lot, the whole ugly story I told him once with my head in his lap. This Sebastian forgot, and he forgot in the exact week his mother sat beside me and kept talking about another woman who deserves him more than me.
It shouldn’t gut me. After all, it’s just flowers.
But after everything, it does, and I refuse to let him see it.
“Let’s not talk about this now.” I dart my eyes toward Sandy, just once, and he follows the look and understands. “Not here.”
Sandy is still watching me, her small face gone uncertain, the excitement over the flowers curdling into a thing she’s too young to name.
“Are you mad, Mommy?”
And there it is, the thing that pulls me back from the edge every single time. I crouch down and smooth her hair and I give her the smile I have gotten very, very good at, the one that costs me everything and shows none of it.
“No, baby. I’m not mad. Mommy’s just tired.”
She searches my face and whatever she finds there is enough, because her shoulders come down and she believes me.
Sebastian stands over both of us holding his rejected roses, and when I glance up at him his face has gone quiet and stricken, the dread of a man who can feel the ground moving and can’t tell which way to run.
“Margo,” he says again, low.
“DOLPHINS!”
Sandy shrieks it loud enough to turn heads three lounge chairs away, ripping her hand from mine and tearing back toward the railing, flowers and adult misery instantly forgotten.
Out past the bow, dark shapes cut the gold water, three, four of them, rolling and diving in the ship’s wake exactly as promised.
“Mommy, come see! Come see!”
I go to her. I don’t look back at Sebastian, and I don’t take the roses, and I walk past him close enough to touch but don’t, and I hear him stay exactly where he is, marooned in the middle of the deck with his useless, unwanted flowers and no idea what to do with his hands.
At the railing, Sandy is vibrating with joy, pointing at each dolphin as it breaks the surface, narrating their every move. I put my hand on her back and I look out at the water and I let my mother-in-law’s voice finish settling into me like silt.
‘He can’t afford you right now. You were a diversion. Therese understands what the name requires.’
The terrible part isn’t that Dorothy is cruel because I’ve always known Dorothy is cruel.
The terrible part is how much of it landed, how neatly it fit the shape of the last two days, how I stood there and couldn’t find the sentence that proved her wrong.
And the man who’s supposed to defend and protect me against his mother just by loving me right, is standing behind me holding the wrong flowers.
I don’t want to hate him.
But a cold, quiet certainty, settles in my chest one grain at a time, that I cannot keep doing this. That loving him has become a thing that costs more than I have left to spend.
Sandy looks up at me then, sun in her hair, cheeks flushed, and she beams, a full-body childlike beam, delighted with the dolphins, the day, and me.
“Aren’t they the best, Mommy?”
“The best,” I agree, and I mean it as I memorize the exact shape of that smile.
Because that smile is the whole reason. That smile is what I’m protecting. Not the marriage, not the money, not the family name, not the version of the future I let myself believe in on a beach with sand in his knees.
Her. Only her.
I look back out at the water, at the dolphins running free alongside two billion dollars of steel that can’t catch them and doesn’t try, and I make my decision.
Quiet. Final. The kind you don’t take back.
Tomorrow.
I’m done.