Chapter Three #2
She looks at me with a wrinkled forehead and smooths her hair down before readjusting the cute little maple leaf apron she’s wearing.
“You’re right. We’ll just be normal. Normal.
Normal. Normal.” She’s repeating the word like a mantra as she swings open the front door with a breath and a smile. “Hey! What are you two doing here?”
The door has only been open a second when I step in behind her, my hand on her back as I stare toward the idiot who traded everything in for novelty.
“Oh,” he groans and glances back and forth between me and Jen quickly, “you have company.”
I reach out my hand, and I’m met with soft palms. Soft, sweaty palms. “Atlas.”
“Atlas,” the man repeats as he nods and stares at his ex-wife before returning his gaze to me, “that’s an interesting name. Are you here doing some kind of work on the house, Atlas?”
“No,” Jen says, tucking her arm around my waist. “This is my,” she pauses and glances down at her son, “friend. He’s coming to the wedding with me Saturday, so I figured he’d stay here tonight.”
“To the wedding?” the ex says slowly while he stares toward me with a downturned expression. “Really?”
“Yes, really,” Jen continues. “Why are you saying it like that?”
“No reason,” he says, straightening himself. “Can you watch Jackson tonight?”
She reaches for her son and offers him a hug and a kiss on the head. “I’m always available for Jackson, but what happened to the plans you guys made? I thought you were taking him to a football game in the city today?”
The scrawny man in flannel nods his head slowly. “I can’t. Em got us tickets to a Post Malone concert in the city last minute.”
“On a work night? Thought you hated going out after dinner on a work night.”
“Well,” he shakes his head, “she likes the music, and we’re—”
“We’d love to take Jackson tonight,” I interrupt, “but we have plans.”
“Plans?” he repeats as though he wants me to tell him what said plans are, though I don’t have a clue. I’m going to need to come up with a better script for the wedding to make this whole thing as legit as possible.
“Plans,” I say again. “Sorry about that.”
The man glares at me and nods, Jackson now climbing the maple tree in front of the porch like I did when I was a kid.
“Okay,” the man shrugs, “maybe Em’s mom is free. I’ll check with her.” He hollers back to Jackson, “Come on. Your mom is busy tonight.”
“Hey,” I step forward and grip the man by the arm, “don’t do that. Don’t make this her fault.”
The man narrows his brows toward me then toward Jen. “Who the fuck is this guy?”
She shifts slightly. “He’s not wrong. You’ve done this to me almost every weekend you’ve had him since the divorce was final. I swear you take advantage of the fact that you know I’ll do anything for that kid.”
“You’re jealous,” the asshole snaps. “Jealous and bitter of my life with Em. You know she’s trying, right? She shows up to games, bakes for the team, sits with Jackson all night when he can’t sleep. Why won’t you give her the time of day?”
Jen draws in a deep breath and lets it out slowly as her shoulders roll back.
Man, this guy is asking for me to loosen up his teeth for him.
“I think it’s time for you to go.” I step forward, my hand on the small of Jen’s back in comfort.
Reed doesn’t look in my direction. As expected, he continues to intimidate the woman in the room instead. “I don’t want this fuck around our kid.”
Jen laughs and hugs her son as he barrels into her at hyper speed. “I’ll come pick you up on Sunday, okay? We’ll spend the whole day fishing at the little creek on the back end of the property. That sound good?”
Jackson grins and runs to the car that his father is already pacing toward. I figure this is a win, but by the way Jen has crossed her arms and turned away from me, I gather that’s not the case.
“You okay?” I land my hand on her back as she stays still, a chill autumn breeze surrounding us.
“I think you should go.”
Sunlight catches in the corner of my vision as she talks. “What?”
“Yeah,” she glances toward me as the electric car backs up in the gravel driveway, “I hate drama, and this is drama.”
“How was this drama? You stood up to an asshole who pushes you around.”
“No,” her arms cross over her chest, and she steps back into the house as the car turns left out onto the paved road, “you stood up to him. I don’t need you to do that. I can take care of myself.”
We’re talking through the screen door now, and I’m not fully sure how I went from leaning into her lips for a kiss to this. “This is what you wanted. You wanted to make him jealous.”
“I know,” she huffs, “and that was childish of me. I’m someone’s mother. I can’t be acting like this.”
“Why did you divorce him?”
“No.” She shakes her head quickly and grabs hold of the heavy wooden door. “I’m not doing this anymore. This whole fake date thing was dumb. I need you to go.”
I stand in the doorway for a moment, watching her catch tears before I say, “I’ll go if you tell me what happened between the two of you.”
Lungs filling with air, she stares down at the beam of light casting onto the hard pine floor. “Why does anyone get divorced? It just didn’t work anymore.”
“Okay. Why?”
“He’s an asshole!” She pushes another tear away.
“I don’t know. He was inconsistent. One second, he’d be this nice guy who got me treats and seemed to care.
The next he was making me feel like my entire existence was a burden.
If I had a need, it was an insult to everything else he’d ever done for me.
If I fell apart, he fell apart too, never addressing my problem.
Nothing was simple. I had to fight and argue for the standard relationship package.
” A tear rolls over her cheek, but she catches it quickly.
“It makes me sick how easily he does the things he does for that girl. Like, I love live music. I asked him so many times to go see a concert with me over the years.”
“He wouldn’t take you?”
“Oh, he’d have taken me, but he’d have dropped hints about how little money we have, how tired we’d be all week afterwards, put conditions on every aspect of it.
My therapist said it was a form of covert control.
He’d never say no outright, but he’d lay just enough rocks in the path that I’d feel guilty and change my mind.
” She drags in a deep breath, and the sky goes dark as thunder rolls in the distance.
“I didn’t want Jackson to come from a broken family, so I tried to keep it together as long as I could. ”
“I’m so sorry.” I want to say more, do more, find the guy and punch him for fun, but right now I settle for opening the screen door and stepping inside to hold his ex-wife.
The woman fighting back tears. The woman who needs a fresh start, and a man who’ll remind her that she’s worth far more than the bare minimum.
“I really think you should go.” The second the words leave her lips, her body melts into mine. “This was a mistake.”
“Not at all.” I shake my head and cup her soft face in my hand. “This is exactly what you need. Now come sit on my lap. We’re gonna play a game and get you feeling better.”