Chapter 7 #2
The real trouble was that the only man she actually wanted was Cody. And when she’d had that momentary thought that she might just swan into that bar, the man that she had imagined grabbing hold of… Well, it was her boss.
And that was its own whole problem.
“Well. Raincheck on hooking up with a stranger then.”
“Sure.” They wandered up one of the narrow side streets, which was much darker than the main street, lit up only by porch lights, rather than the jaunty street lights that were positioned every few feet on the main drag.
Cara’s house was little and perfect. Painted white with green shutters and little flower boxes underneath the windows, very similar to her bakery.
“I just planted those,” she said. “To go with Juniper & Sage.”
“Well, it’s perfect,” she said.
They walked up the little stone path to the front door, and Cara unlocked the door, letting them both inside.
It felt so much more settled than her apartment, but then, Cara hadn’t had very many belongings that she brought with her.
Her place had come furnished, because it had been owned by an older woman who had gone into a nursing home, and had left most of her furniture behind.
It was perfect for Cara, who was grandmacore in the extreme, so the lace, old-fashioned furniture and garlands over the doorway were perfectly suited to her taste.
“I love it,” Marlowe said.
“So do I,” Cara said happily. “Now, we are in the safe bubble of my home, so go ahead and rant away.”
Well, now that Marlowe had permission.
That was how they spent the next hour. Drinking wine, eating chocolate cake, and talking smack about Aiden.
“You should call him,” Cara said.
“I don’t have anything to say to him.”
“I get that. Except, you can’t let him get away with all of this.”
“I’m trying to go with dignity.”
“Dignity? Who cares about dignity? You don’t owe him dignity.”
Maybe she didn’t. But explosions of emotion felt powerlessly close to the kind of drunken behavior her parents had engaged in before her mother had left.
The kinds of volatile relationships her dad had with all of the women who had come after.
Drunken fights were part of Marlowe’s least happy memories.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to replicate them.
“Don’t I owe myself dignity?”
“No. You’re allowed to react however you want. I might call and yell at him. And I’m allowed to. Because I’m his sister, and I’m very disappointed in him. Because I took care of our mother, and it was too difficult for him. How nice that it got to be too difficult for him.”
Guilt nudged Marlowe’s ribs. “I’m sorry, Cara. We both should’ve helped you more.”
“No. You had your work out of town, and I get that. He was the one who should’ve made more of an effort. She was our mother.”
“But she was like a mother to me, too.”
“She loved you like a daughter. You came to visit more than he did, anyway. If he had done this before she died, it would’ve killed her.”
She nodded slowly. It would have. She would’ve been so disappointed in her only son for the way that he had treated Marlowe.
Aiden and Cara’s family had always been so fascinating to Marlowe because they cared about things like that.
Appearances, right and wrong, looking a certain way for the neighbors, and it wasn’t half as shallow as it appeared.
It was this deep commitment to a way of life.
To the concept of nuclear family, being close to your neighbors, and keeping wedding vows.
Whatever the truth of her in-laws’ marriage, whatever her mother-in-law felt about anything, or her father-in-law, though she had never known him well, no one would ever know.
If they had held any resentment, they had died with it. And they would’ve been proud of that fact.
It made her wonder if that was why Aiden was so determined not to live with regrets.
Maybe he thought his parents hadn’t actually been happy.
In many ways, Marlowe agreed, people shouldn’t just be committed to that suburban fantasy for the sake of it, not now.
But also, she had lived a life where people hadn’t cared about their responsibilities.
Hadn’t cared about taking care of the children they’d given birth to, hadn’t cared about maintaining their home, hadn’t cared about being even a slightly reasonable version of themselves for the people who lived with them.
She couldn’t say that that was better.
There was value in pushing back against things that no longer needed to exist. But when it was just a cloak for selfishness, then it lost its moral superiority.
Or maybe that was just her opinion, as the discarded wife.
“I think you should call him and demand the money back for the car. Or at least half of it. He can’t just take all that money. He has to give it back to you.”
“What if he spent it?”
“Then you need to divorce him, and you need to take all of the things he does have.”
“I don’t even know if I want to do that.”
“Why aren’t you angry?” Cara asked, looking flabbergasted.
She was angry. She was. It was just that anger had always been so toxic around her, and in her life, and it wasn’t something that she wanted to surrender to.
She could understand Cara’s feelings. She envied them, in fact.
Because Cara seemed to have a direct line to the most pure, wonderful anger, and Marlowe just didn’t have that.
She felt sad.
She had shut off her anger so long ago.
Because it scared her.
“You know what my dad would do,” Marlowe said.
“What is that?”
“Make a scene. Show up outside his window, throw some beer bottles at the side of the house. Of course, my dad never lived across the country from any of his… Lovers, or whatever they were. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to do that.”
“Well, I think that you’re owed a chance to at least share a piece of your mind. It sounds to me like when you last talked to him, he was just dumping his stuff on you.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. And that little particular fire in the middle of Marlowe’s chest. Because she hadn’t gotten to say her piece.
She hadn’t had a chance to say what all of this was doing to her.
She hadn’t shared anything, because she hadn’t wanted to open herself up, she hadn’t wanted to expose her pain.
But shouldn’t he hear it? Shouldn’t he know that what he had done to her had consequences?
She picked up her phone. “Aren’t you going to stop me from calling him while I’m drunk?”
“No,” Cara said. “I’m not. Because he isn’t a random man, he was your partner for fifteen years, and he deserves to get yelled at drunkenly.”
Marlowe hit his contact without thinking any deeper about it. Without even going over what she was going to say.
“Marlowe? It’s late.”
His voice sounded husky, and she wondered if he was sleeping in bed next to this other woman. It made her feel like she was being stabbed, slowly. Like she could feel the whole blade of the knife going into her stomach.
Suddenly, she was angry. Suddenly, she didn’t want to just call him to share her feelings. To give herself a chance to speak her side of things. No. She just wanted to yell at him.
“How dare you take the money for the car?”
“Marlowe… I had to move to a new apartment in the city. I needed a deposit, and I needed –”
“Bullshit. You didn’t need the cost of a car. And I still need a car. I came all the way out to Oregon, and you were supposed to come with me. You… You sent me out here, knowing full well that you weren’t going to come with me, and now you’ve left me with a thousand dollars?”
“Aren’t you getting paid for your new job?” he asked, sounding weirdly detached and not like any version of him that she’d ever known.
“Aren’t you? Aren’t you back to being dual-income?”
“I needed the money. And maybe I should’ve talked to you about it, but you have your new job, and I’m still working on finding something. Plus, I was the one pulling all the late nights at the bar.”
Like he’d been doing the most work?
There were certain indignities that Marlowe would never be able to allow. He was sleeping with another woman, and that was a terrible thing. She could hold her head high, be hurt, but being confident that she had been a good wife, and she hadn’t felt the need to completely excoriate him.
She could take insults to her looks, to her personality. But her work ethic? Especially when she had been the one doing the majority of the organizational efforts at every single job she had ever had with him.
He was gregarious, charismatic, it was true. But she was the one who kept everything organized. She was the one who kept everything running.
Him trying to pull that bullshit, oh, that was a bridge too far.
“Are you kidding me?” Her voice had gone soft, quiet, and if he were a smart man, then he would know that he better walk it back, because he was in very big trouble.
But he was not a smart man. She already knew that. All of his recent behavior indicated this.
And he continued to be an idiot.
“No. The jobs that we’ve gotten, they were because –”
“If you’re going to say it’s because of your personality, I am going to fly back to New York with my thousand dollars and punch you in the face.
I understand that people like you. Hell, I used to like you, Aiden, and never have I gone off another person quite so quickly, the graph of my feelings for you shows one of the steepest declines from love to what the fuck in the history of mankind.
But if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have kept any of those jobs.
I’m here doing this one by myself. The work of two people, and I’m going to do it.
You know why? Because I’m not going to fail.
But you, you’re going to fail without me.
The things that you don’t realize that I do…
Maybe you’re going to be able to get this woman to do them for you for a while.
But I cared about you for most of my life.
I’ve loved you for all these years, and so helping you, picking up the slack for you, that was something that I did…
Joyfully. This woman is going to expect you to be an adult because she is not a seventeen-year-old girl falling in love with the cutest boy at school.
And when that comes home to roost, you’re going to find yourself alone, again, and the one thing you are never going to do is come crawling back to me.
Because I’ll slam the door in your face.
You get one chance with me, and you used yours.
Pay me back half the car money, or I am sending a lawyer after you.
You better believe I will. Because I’m now getting the income that was supposed to be for both of us.
Because my boss actually isn’t an asshole. Unlike you.”
She hung the phone up and found that she was breathing incredibly hard.
Cara was standing in the corner holding the wine bottle. “More?”
“So much more. I’m obviously crashing on your couch tonight.”
“That’s just fine. You can follow me over to the bakery in the morning.”
The bakery. In the morning.
Where she would see Cody again.
If she still felt this reckless tomorrow morning, God help them both.