Chapter 35
APRIL
I’M AT KROGER BUYING THE green onions Mom had to have. With this many people in the house and a mother this particular about her recipes, we sometimes make multiple grocery runs per day.
Otto is in the cart, and the Goo Goo Dolls are singing over our heads about sympathy. As I compare onions to onions, a woman approaches with a wide smile and gray roots. I recognize her as a longtime patient of Dad’s, but I can’t remember her name.
“April Russo!”
Huh. My maiden name. I inhale. “Hi!”
The woman, overly familiar, grabs both of my hands. “How are you?” Without a breath for me to answer, she focuses on Otto. “Goodness, he’s grown!” She knuckles his cheek, and he leans away. But she is undeterred. “How is Dr. Russo?” she asks.
I blink. This woman and her be verbs. (Though I must admit, her teeth are looking excellent.)
I nod. “He’s well.”
“Really?” She’s surprised. “Not too bad with the…” She tap-taps her forehead with her pointer finger. I notice her cart: yogurts and boxed hair dye.
“Um, it’s a long road, but he’s doing okay.”
Otto burps. The woman looks at him and back at me. I select green onions and add them to my cart, hoping to signal a departure.
“And Leo?” she asks.
I blink again. “Leo?”
“Oh, was that not your husband’s name? Sorry, I’m bad with names. How’s he doing?”
I tickle Otto’s foot for a point of focus as I lie. “He’s well too.”
“Good. You give your dad my best, now. Oh”—she leans in conspiratorially—“it’s buy one, get one free on Suave products.” She thumbs over her shoulder toward the shampoo aisle.
I grin impatiently as I register her hand, her cushion-cut wedding ring, and at once I remember: Mrs. Dukakis, widowed three or four years ago. I fill with an infusion of patience. She is just another woman wearing the jewelry of a lost love.
I thumb my own ring and say, “Good to see you, Mrs. Dukakis.”
“You too, dear. Glad all’s well.”
She dodders away, a coupon fluttering to the ground.
When I pull up at the house, a man is standing at the front door with Josie, who looks uneasy.
I retrieve Otto and the bag of onions from the back seat.
As I approach, Josie reaches for her nephew and the vegetables, and she turns to take them inside.
Over her shoulder, she gives me a meaningful look.
The man faces me with a large manilla envelope I hadn’t noticed before.
“April Russo?”
“Yes?”
Then the envelope is in my hand, and I understand what’s happening.
Leo filed. I’m being served. I’ve only ever seen it in movies.
Inside, I go to my bedroom and open it. Petition for Divorce.
How can something I knew was coming still hurt this badly?
Man and wife, petitioner and respondent.
The words jumble on the page. I’ve never researched whether this is a thing, but I swear my dyslexia gets worse when I’m stressed.
I scan for the “reason for divorce” and find that Leo has been insufferably kind.
There’s a long muddle of words, but “infidelity” is not one of them.
He cited only “irreconcilable differences.”
Those two words anger me. Irreconcilable differences are so ambiguous when I want a detailed screed of how we became strangers to ourselves.
But however it happened, it happened. And we will now move through the signatures and sundering until one day, decades from now, one of our children will sit down with me over lunch and ask, “So, what really happened with you and Dad?”
I’ll have to tell them something more than irreconcilable differences.
When I met with Marta Turner, Esquire, she talked about divorce colonies where women used to travel to Reno for weeks of marital limbo just to qualify for a certificate of divorce—for freedom—many of them in dire need and yet unsuccessful.
“Less than a century ago,” Marta told me, tsking.
“Lucky you live in the time of no-fault.” I twisted my wedding ring and nodded. Lucky.
But now I want to take a blood-red pen and slash through “irreconcilable differences.” I won’t fight over the house or kids or bank accounts, but over fault.
We’re losing so much, we should at least get to keep our faults.
I want to go to court, climb onto a judge’s bench, and yell, “It’s ours!
Give it to us!” Give us our failure and infidelity and abandonment and inaction, and let us take the blame that is ours.
What a disgrace I am to those brave mothers in Reno. But I don’t care. I want to be a disgrace. Because sometimes freedom is a trading of chains.
I stare at the papers in my hand. I have twenty days to answer.
When I have eighteen days left, Josie gets her test results. We’ve all decided we want to know what she learned, so we gather anxiously in the living room.
Today, her hair is orange instead of blue. And her results are negative. No mutation.
Dad, quite lucid after a change in medication, is beside himself with relief. He would have been gutted if he’d given her this defect. It’s a unique grief to love someone whose wounds you’ve created. But he didn’t, he exhales. He didn’t.
Cameron and I look at each other, questions curling from us like smoke.
I want to be relieved for my sister, but I keep thinking about Kroger.
After I put Otto into the cart, I forgot what I had gone to buy—and I had only gone for the one thing.
It was no more than a few seconds before I remembered, but whole lifetimes can happen in a few seconds.
An encounter on the front steps of a high school.
The baby’s heartbeat dropping between contractions.
A man’s soft touch. The inability to remember green onions.
I’m suddenly besieged by my forgettings.
Will life now consist of cataloging every lapse?
Was Dad forgetting things at my age? He wouldn’t be able to tell me now.
Josie has moved on. She is rambling about an audition, and I can’t stand her carefree youth, her comfort in her own skin, her normal chromosomes.
Cameron gives me a knowing glance, and all I want is to sit down with him at the computer twenty years ago and have a JezzBall competition.
To stand at the kitchen counter five years ago and shuck corn together, arguing about what the best Thanksgiving food is.
He should be preparing for his wedding, but instead of making a seating chart or scoping out honeymoon resorts, he is sitting in this living room imagining the same scenes I am.
Scenes where our family vanishes piece by piece, unable to remember and caught in a cyclone of sticky, neon reminders: That’s your mom, she was one of your favorite people.
And: You loved him, but you broke his heart.
And: Suave products for sale on aisle three.