Chapter 2 #2
I moved into his downtown Nashville condo.
It had too many rooms and not enough bookshelves and a walk-in closet where his jerseys hung in order by season because I’d organized them that way.
I told the MFA I was taking a leave of absence — just one semester, just until I settled in.
The novel went into the desk drawer. Not abandoned.
Paused. There’s a difference, I told myself.
There’s a difference between stopping and waiting.
But the semester became a year. And the year became another. And the novel stayed in the drawer while I became the person who ran Cade Calloway’s life.
I was good at it. That was the thing nobody tells you about sacrifice — it’s easier when you’re good at the thing you’re sacrificing for.
And I was very good. I managed his schedule, his press, his travel, his moods after a loss, his diet during playoffs, his mother’s expectations, his agent’s calls.
I handled the dry cleaning and the bills and the dinner reservations and the birthday cards for teammates’ wives.
I packed his bags for road trips — three suits, two casual, sneakers and dress shoes, his lucky socks that I washed by hand because the machine shrank them once and he didn’t speak to me for an hour, which he later apologized for and I later forgave because that was the pattern: his carelessness, my competence, his apology, my grace.
I planned the charity events where I stood beside him in a dress that cost more than my MFA tuition and smiled until my face ached.
I learned the names of every front-office employee, every coach’s wife, every beat reporter who covered the team.
I knew which restaurants in Nashville had a private room.
I knew which hotels in every away city had the best mattresses.
I knew what Cade needed before he knew he needed it, because knowing was my job and I did my job well.
The schedule on the wall came down. The one with the color-coded chapters and the workshop deadlines.
I replaced it with a calendar of his games and media appearances and team events, and I don’t remember making the decision.
It just happened. The way water finds the path of least resistance, my ambition found the shape of his career and filled it.
Dr. Linden emailed me once, a year in. Any progress on the novel?
The pages you left are still the best first fifty I’ve read in this program.
Come back when you’re ready. I meant to reply.
I opened the email and started typing and got halfway through a sentence about how busy things had been and how I’d get back to it soon, and then Cade called from the arena because he’d left his phone charger in the car and could I bring it before practice, and I closed the email and drove to the arena and never went back to the reply.
The gala was in March. A team fundraiser at the Grand Hyatt — black tie, two hundred guests, a silent auction where people bid on signed pucks and private-box tickets. I wore a green dress. Cade wore a suit and his championship ring from two years ago and the grin that worked on everyone.
We stood near the bar and talked to the team’s general manager and his wife.
I was good at this too. I knew the GM’s wife’s name was Karen.
I knew their daughter had just been accepted to Stanford.
I knew the GM was worried about the salary cap and that his wife was allergic to shellfish and that their anniversary was coming up and they hadn’t decided where to go.
I knew all of this because I listened. Because listening was the invisible work that held Cade’s world together, and I had become very, very good at invisible work.
A reporter from the local sports desk approached — young, polished, a recorder in one hand and a smile that was all ambition. She’d been working the room, grabbing quotes from players and their partners for a feature about the team’s community involvement.
“Mr. Calloway, great season so far. And you must be —” She turned to me. Pen ready. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met. What do you do?”
It was a simple question. The simplest question in the world.
And I opened my mouth to answer it — to say I’m a writer, actually, I have an MFA from Vanderbilt and I’m working on a novel, even though I hadn’t touched the novel in eighteen months and the MFA was a leave of absence that had quietly become a departure — but Cade got there first.
He put his arm around my waist. He smiled. He said:
“She’s my wife.”
Three words. He meant them as a compliment. I could see it in his face — the pride, the warmth, the genuine belief that this was the best thing he could say about me. She’s my wife. Not she’s a writer. Not she has her own work. Not ask her — she’s more interesting than I am.
She’s my wife.
The reporter wrote it down. Karen smiled. The GM nodded. And I stood there in my green dress with my husband’s arm around my waist and felt something close very quietly inside me — the way a door closes when there’s no wind, just the weight of the house settling.
I smiled. I was good at smiling.
That night I went home and opened the desk drawer and looked at the fifty pages in the manila folder. The ink on Dr. Linden’s green-pen notes had faded a little. The pages smelled like wood and dust, the way paper smells when it’s been sitting too long.
I closed the drawer. The pages made a small sound — paper settling against paper, like a sigh.
Not because I’d given up. Because I’d been given up on, and I hadn’t noticed. Three words at a time. She’s my wife. Over and over, until the woman who had a voice and was told not to lose it became the woman who ran a hockey player’s schedule and was very, very good at invisible work.
I was twenty-five. I had a color-coded calendar on the wall and a diamond ring on my finger and a novel in a desk drawer that I would not touch again for two years, four months, and eleven days.
Not until a night in June when I would drive myself to a hospital and learn what it costs to wait for a window in someone else’s schedule.
But I didn’t know that yet. I was twenty-five, and I was choosing love over ambition, and I was certain — the way Cade was certain, full speed, no hesitation — that I would come back to the fifty pages when the time was right.
The time is never right. That’s the thing they don’t tell you. You make the time or you lose it. And I lost it with a smile on my face and a green dress in the closet and a husband who loved me the way you love a thing you own without realizing you own it.
She’s my wife.
Three words. The first erasure. The quiet one that made all the others possible.