Thirty-Nine
Yesterday
It had been a chance encounter. Two years earlier.
Brent Chartwell had been taking his classic Barracuda for a spin. The last time he’d taken it for a drive, the front wheel
alignment had felt off, the car dragging to the right when he briefly relaxed his grip on the steering wheel, even when the
road was dead flat. He wanted to see whether he’d been imagining it. If the alignment was indeed off, it would cause uneven
wear on the front tires, and he didn’t want that.
Damned if it wasn’t still doing it, so he drove straight on to a mechanic he’d trusted in the past with his baby. He didn’t
have an appointment, and if Harry couldn’t take him right away, he’d leave the car there and take an Uber home.
When he went into the small office, there was a woman at the counter in the middle of a conversation with Harry.
“But can’t it be, like, patched or something?” she asked. “I have to get an entire new muffler?”
“Be like trying to hold a piece of wet toast together with jam,” Harry said. “It’s shot. It’s all gotta be replaced or you’re
gonna go down the street sounding like a Sherman tank.”
“How much is that going to cost?”
Harry told her.
The woman bit her lip and shook her head slowly. “Do they have to be new parts? Do you have any older parts that would work
for now?”
“Look,” Harry said, his voice not without sympathy, “I’ll give you a break on the labor, but there’s nothing I can do on the parts. You wanna think about it?”
She nodded, and as she turned to leave, quickly wiping a single tear from her cheek, Brent got a good look at her.
I know her, he thought, but he couldn’t place from where.
Instead of asking Harry about his wheel alignment, he followed the woman to her car, an older-model Toyota. She was about
to get inside when Brent said, “Excuse me.”
She stopped, looked at him blankly, said, “What?”
“I’m sorry, you just, when I saw you, I thought, I know you from someplace but I can’t quite—”
“Oh my god,” she said, looking at him. “You’re Brent Chartwell.”
He smiled. “Yes, that’s right. So we have met somewhere, and now you have me at a disadvantage because I can’t—”
“Leah,” she said. “Leah Kennard.”
It took him a moment. Then it was his turn to say, “Oh for heaven’s sake.”
And then he closed the distance between them and gave her a quick hug. “I knew it was you. I mean, I didn’t know it was you, but I knew—”
She laughed, though her cheek was still wet from that tear. “I get it! How have you been? How’s— How’s the family?”
What a loaded word, coming from her. This woman who made it possible for Catherine and him to start one.
“We’re good, we’re fine. And I guess . . . I don’t know whether anyone ever told you, but after all we went through, wouldn’t
you know it, but Catherine became pregnant.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am, it’s true. So, two boys. Both grown up now, of course. Holden—your contribution, to put it mildly—and his younger brother,
Reece.”
“So you didn’t name him Tom,” she said, a sad smile.
“No.”
“I understand, that’s okay. I just had to ask. And I have to apologize for that scene in there. This car, it’s all I can do to keep it together, and what they want to repair it, I just can’t—”
“Do you have time for a drink or something?”
That was how it started. Innocently enough. Coffee, a shared muffin, catching up. Who could have predicted how it would change
his life, how it would change both their lives. And now here he was two years later, and he had come to care deeply about her, this woman who was the mother
of his older son. Not only did he care for her emotionally, he had been, to some extent, caring for her financially.
Leah had been through some tough times, Brent soon learned. She was in the process of getting out of a difficult relationship.
She’d lost one job, found another, then lost it, and was currently out of work, although not long after their first meeting
she would get a job working reception in a medical clinic.
After that first coffee, he went back to the car repair shop and paid for her new muffler. “Least I can do,” he’d told her.
“It’s nothing compared to bringing a life into the world for us.”
“I was compensated for that,” she said, insisting she would pay him back for the muffler. He said she could make it up to
him if she let him take her to lunch.
One thing, as they say, led to another. Within two weeks, the relationship had become intimate. They would meet at her house,
never his. There were no risks having sex at her place, given that she lived alone, although there had been a run-in with
her former boyfriend when he’d come by, trying to patch things up.
She had so many questions about Holden. What he was like as a child, what his interests were, how he did in school. She wanted
pictures. Brent still had plenty from when you took in a roll of film to be developed and got back an envelope stuffed with
prints. “We have hundreds of pics we’ve never bothered to put in an album,” he told her. “I can slip a few out of there. Catherine
will never notice they’re missing.”
Unbeknownst to Brent, Leah would take those pictures and edit them with a pair of scissors, cutting out other family members, leaving just Holden. She displayed them in a small album that she kept next to her bed.
They had been having their secret rendezvous for the better part of a year when Brent told Leah that Catherine had figured
out what was going on.
“Oh no,” Leah said.
“It’s okay,” Brent told her. “Honestly, it makes my life easier. I mean, I’ll still keep the other phone, just for our exchanges,
but the truth is, Catherine and I live pretty much separate lives these days. We long ago reached a kind of, I don’t know,
accommodation. A way to carry on. She has her interests, I have mine. We live under the same roof, we keep tabs on each other,
we probably still care about each other at some level, but it’s not . . . I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Why haven’t you ever divorced, or gotten a separation?”
“I guess we’re bound together by our pasts,” he said, offering little more by way of an explanation, and Leah didn’t push.
“What about now?” Leah asked. “I mean, what sort of future do we have? Do things just keep going on the way they’ve been going?”
Brent had no answer for that. He knew Leah wanted more of a commitment. She’d reached a time in her life where she craved
stability, and an affair with a married man didn’t offer that.
Was leaving Catherine even an option? The very thought filled him with dread. Not so much the emotional toll it would take,
although that would be considerable, but it was all the other issues. The house, their assets. Trying to explain it to their
grown sons.
Given how much this issue was on Leah’s mind, he shouldn’t have been surprised when she rang his doorbell this Friday morning.
“Leah,” he said when he saw her standing on the front stoop. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk,” she said. “I remembered you saying today was Catherine’s arts group lunch or whatever. Don’t worry, I
parked down the street.”
“You’ve caught me by surprise.” Leah had never been to his home. He was unsure how to handle her presence here.
“Are you going to let me just stand out here?” she asked.
Leaving her on the doorstep where neighbors might see her was not an option. Brent opened the door wide, admitting her, then
closed it.
She stepped inside, scanned the spacious living room, the art on the walls, the high-end furniture. “You have a lovely home.”
The observation embarrassed him. He might have lived many years in anguish, but his creature comforts far outstripped hers.
She shook her head. “This won’t take long.”
He motioned for her to settle into a living room chair but she held her spot near the door.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
But he knew.
“I can’t do this any longer,” she said. “I can’t be . . . that woman. The one on the side, the one whose bills you pay, the
one who’s sitting around waiting, wondering if this is the day you’ll decide to come over, but never spend the night. I have
to be able to look myself in the mirror. I didn’t have much before I met you, but I had my self-respect. I need that back.”
“Leah, Leah, come on. It’s not like that. I care about—”
“I need more than care. I can’t survive on care.” Her eyes were welling up. “You say you care about me, but I love you. And that can’t work one way. If it’s one way, then I’m out.”
Brent perched himself on the stairs, looking down at his feet, thinking.
“Say something,” Leah said. “Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. If you have nothing to say then I’ll just—”
“I’ll leave her,” he said, raising his head and looking at Leah.
“What?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll end it.” He managed a broken smile. “I’ll leave her.”
Leah had her hand over her mouth, afraid to be happy. She managed to say, “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Don’t tease
me. Don’t give me false hope.”
He stood, took her in his arms, put his mouth to her ear, and whispered, “I mean it. I love you. I want to be happy again.”
And then his mouth was on hers, and within minutes, they were upstairs in the master bedroom, the first time they had ever
made love here, and maybe, Brent thought, it would be the last, because when Catherine came home he would tell her. He would
tell her he was leaving her, that he would move out, that he would give her the house, that he would give her whatever she
wanted because all he needed was his freedom. And he’d assure her the dark secret that had somehow bound them together long
past their marriage’s expiry date would never come to light.
Maybe, just maybe, she’d been longing to start over too.
That could be a naive hope, but in this moment, he was a little starry-eyed, not seeing how difficult the path ahead would
likely be.
But fuck it, damn the torpedoes.
It was not a furious bout of lovemaking. They were, after all, not kids anymore. But it was tender and heartfelt and it marked
what they believed was a new beginning.
And then Brent heard something downstairs.
He sat up in bed, held his breath, listened.
“Christ,” he said. “The front door. Catherine’s back.”
She wasn’t.