Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Eleanor lay huddled on her side until she heard the click of the front door that said that Brian had left.
This was how she’d spent the weekend, with only a few exceptions.
She’d exiled Brian to the guest room after his gutting announcement on Friday night and had done everything she could to avoid the sight of him ever since.
She’d only just managed to get away without breaking down crying in front of him at the restaurant, and she did not plan on giving herself the opportunity to do so now.
Perhaps it was silly, but clinging to her pride felt like the one thing she could control in this crazy situation.
She dragged herself out of bed and headed down the stairs to make a pot of coffee, ignoring all the photographs of her, Brian, and Jeremy, looking happy together as a family.
She had spent nearly twenty years in this house, and she hadn’t worked outside of her home since their son had been born. And now…
Well, what the blazes was she supposed to do now?
She caught her reflection in a hanging pot.
She’d loved that rack. Brian had grumbled for ages about putting it up for her, but she had always loved the aesthetic of pots and pans hanging over a kitchen island.
Now, as she caught her reflection, her face wan with lack of sleep, it felt like mockery.
“You’re a forty-two-year-old housewife,” she told that reflection, cringing at the irony when she thought of happily teasing her own reflection only a few days prior, before that fateful dinner. “You have no career. Your kid is grown. You’re about to be divorced. Your life is basically over.”
If she thought saying the words out loud would give them less power, she was wrong. If anything, she felt worse.
And that was nothing compared to how she felt when she saw a manilla envelope waiting for her on the kitchen table. She slid the papers out a few inches, then shoved them hastily back in when she saw the words PETITION FOR DIVORCE.
It took everything in her not to break down and cry. Brian had told her he wanted a divorce on Friday night. It was now Monday morning. If Brian already had gotten divorce papers drawn up, it meant he’d been thinking about this for a long time.
How had her marriage quietly died without her even noticing?
The only thing that saved Eleanor from indulging in a good, long weeping session was the ringing of her phone. She almost didn’t answer, since she wasn’t in the mood to speak to most people, until she saw the caller was Lila Johnson, her long-time friend… and the receptionist at Brian’s work.
She took a steadying breath before she answered.
“Lila, hi,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.
Lila’s tone was cautious. “Eleanor, hey,” she said gently. “Um, I just overheard Brian saying something on the phone and… well, I don’t want to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong, but is everything okay with you?”
Maybe it was the knowing tone in Lila’s voice, or maybe it was the pain of keeping everything bottled up inside over the past several days, but Eleanor found herself telling the truth.
“No, it’s not okay. Nothing is okay, actually. We went out for dinner on Friday for what I thought was our twentieth anniversary celebration but was actually a chance for Brian to tell me he wanted a divorce.”
Lila’s next words were too hushed for Eleanor to hear, but she thought they might be the kind of words one didn’t normally hear from a lady.
Although Eleanor didn’t normally approve of such language, but part of her was gratified by the idea that the other woman was shocked enough by this news to let the words slip out.
“Goodness gracious, Eleanor!” Lila said when she’d regained a bit of her composure. “I can’t believe… did you have any idea?”
“None,” Eleanor confirmed grimly. “And, boy, do I feel stupid. I researched the restaurant, read reviews of his favorite meal, and got myself all excited thinking we were going to plan the next chapter in our lives now that Jeremy is gone to college.”
“And then he hit you with that horrible news out of nowhere,” Lila muttered, still sounding stunned.
“Out of nowhere,” Eleanor repeated. “What I can’t understand is why he chose such a romantic restaurant. I mean, if you’re going to dump your wife of twenty years, you can do it any old place.”
“Um, I might have a clue about that,” Lila said sheepishly.
“I actually made that booking. In my defense, I also thought it was a romantic dinner, although I didn’t know it was your twentieth anniversary, of all things!
I thought he was just taking you out for a date night, since he’s been working so much recently…
and even so, I gave him an earful about fobbing that task off on me. ”
Eleanor felt a twisting mix of relief at having this one piece of the puzzle solved; happiness, at having a friend who would defend her, even if it meant telling off her boss; and shame, at knowing that Lila had had more clues, however small, than Eleanor did about the decline of her marriage.
“I’m so sorry,” Lila went on. “I should have said something.”
“It’s not your fault,” Eleanor reassured her friend. “Trust me. I came downstairs to find divorce papers on my kitchen table this morning, so there’s nothing you could have done, not if it had gotten this far.”
Lila sucked in a gasp. “Oh my gosh, that’s horrible.”
“That’s not even the worst of it,” Eleanor said. Despite the terrible situation, it felt good to get it off her chest. “Apparently, there’s somebody else.”
There was a long, awkward silence.
“Okay,” Lila said slowly, like she was coming to a realization even as she spoke.
“I… I might be wrong, so don’t take this as absolute fact, but Brian has been spending a lot of time with Sarah Wallis, the new associate attorney recently.
I heard some gossip, but I thought it was nothing.
I couldn’t think Brian would ever do something like this. ”
A distant part of Eleanor’s brain recognized that Lila sounded distressed, like she felt guilty. Eleanor should reassure her, she knew, but she couldn’t manage to get the words out, since she felt like she’d been punched in the gut. It was all she could do to breathe.
Eleanor had met Sarah Wallis at Brian’s company’s Christmas party the previous winter.
The woman was young, barely thirty years old, and she’d just graduated from law school when she’d started at the tax law agency.
Eleanor had seen that the younger woman was attentive to Brian, although she’d just attributed this to a young lawyer looking up to a more established lawyer for professional guidance.
Now that felt silly. Should she have seen this coming?
Eleanor had never wanted to be the kind of woman who was jealous of her husband’s time.
She’d always seen that as socially regressive and a touch petty.
But when she thought of young, pretty Sarah, with her long, shiny hair and her exciting career in front of her…
Well, it made Eleanor feel like a fool.
“I have to go,” she gasped to Lila, hanging up the phone before the other woman could say anything else.
Sarah sat at her kitchen table for a long time, her eyes tracing the familiar wood grain.
Her coffee grew cold as her mind drifted.
How many times had she cleaned this table over the years?
How many times had she chuckled over the spot where Jeremy had slipped with his protractor and taken out a little gouge…
Oh, no, she thought, sitting up straight in her chair. Jeremy. She had to call Jeremy, and she had to do it before Brian did. Given how Brian had handled the dinner on Friday, she couldn’t trust her soon-to-be ex-husband to deliver the news delicately.
She glanced at the clock and, after some quick mental calculations that made her reasonably certain he wouldn’t be in class, she dialed her son’s number.
“Hey, Mom,” Jeremy greeted when he answered after only a few rings. “What’s up?”
In the background of the call, she could hear the hustle and bustle of college life. She hadn’t enjoyed hearing about a major life change in public, so she thought maybe her son wouldn’t like it either.
“Hey, sweetie,” she said. “Is now a good time? I have something important to talk to you about. No, everyone is safe,” she added hastily when her son made a noise of alarm. “I just think it’s something worth discussing in private.”
Jeremy let out a worried sounding breath. “Okay,” he said. “Hang on one second.”
The background noises faded, and then Eleanor heard him quickly ask his roommate to have their room to himself for a minute. There was some shuffling, and then a clicking door, and then Jeremy was back.
“I’m here,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on before I start to freak out.”
“Don’t freak out,” she replied automatically, her maternal instincts kicking in. “I just wanted to let you know, to hear it from me. But your dad and I are splitting up.”
A small, selfish part of her wanted to tell her son the story the same way she’d told it to Lila, wanted to express how Brian had totally blindsided her, how he was having an emotional affair, at the very least, with another woman.
But the more rational, kinder side of her remembered that Brian, for all his faults, would always be Jeremy’s father, and she didn’t want to cause any friction between them.
Jeremy was quiet for so long that Eleanor almost spoke up again. Just as she was about to, however, he said, “Wow. Okay. This is… well, I wouldn’t call it a surprise but—”
“You wouldn’t?” Eleanor asked, startled, before she could stop herself. Then she cringed, realizing she’d given herself away a bit. “Sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Oh, Mom,” he said, sounding sympathetic. “It sounds like it surprised you, and that stinks, I’m so sorry.”
“You’re not supposed to be comforting me,” she insisted with a watery chuckle.