Chapter 10
CHAPTER
THE COURT-ORDERED SPOUSAL support resulted in enough money for me to rent an apartment and live until September—six months—to be revisited if mediation for the divorce is unsuccessful.
The only thing Bruce and I agreed on during our first session was to sell our home.
It went quickly—the Realtor was amazed. I wasn’t, after putting in the legwork, research, and elbow grease.
With bleary eyes, I look away from my laptop.
I’ve been working even more on my program since the split—can’t seem to stop—and take in the dismal walk-up I’m renting in an old building on the periphery of the Marina District.
It has threadbare carpets, chipped white Formica counters, nail-hole-scarred walls.
I’ve lived in far worse than this place, but it feels like my marriage never happened.
I’m back to the life of scarcity I once knew so well.
I understood as a kid that life wasn’t fair but thought I’d outrun that fact—that I was finally secure.
Now it’s punched me in the face, and I’m pissed off at Bruce, but even more at my own stupidity.
Never take your eye off the mark, Mama J points out.
“Bruce wasn’t a mark.”
I wander to the window, peer out. There’s a sliver of blue water between pastel-colored apartment buildings if I stand on a chair.
I could’ve swung a nicer rental. But I have no idea how long Bruce’s support will continue as we move through the court system.
I need to save what I can in case my lawyer, Cameron, a gray-haired veteran of divorce, loses the battle for a fair settlement, and I’m left with nothing but his hefty fee.
The disaster of that first lawyers’ meeting returns …
Remember, we just listen, Cameron said before we stepped into the conference room.
Bruce was already seated at a rectangular glass table beside his attorney, Miriam, another gray-haired veteran wearing a no-nonsense pantsuit. She slid a document toward me.
What is this? I asked.
It’s a quit claim, Miriam explained.
Cameron slipped on glasses and read the page. Do you recall signing this?
Quickly, I skimmed it. Yes, about three months ago. Bruce and Hal wanted a loan for expansion and the bank required it. Bruce said it would make the process easier.
It says you have no claim to any ownership or income from the company, Miriam explained.
I felt something inside me break—it was my core belief in Bruce’s character, that he was still a good man deep down, despite his actions. Crosby & Stone was a large portion of our net worth. Did you even get a bank loan? I demanded.
Bruce couldn’t meet my eyes. In the end, it wasn’t necessary.
Miriam pushed another piece of paper across the glass expanse between us. It’s a postnup, she said.
I scanned the document. It stated that should our union dissolve, we are not entitled to any marital gains the other has made during the marriage. My signature was at the bottom of the page, along with a notary’s. I would never sign that.
Miriam tapped the line with my signature. But you did.
When? I asked Bruce, floored.
Two months ago. You came to the office to bring me lunch.
Bruce was on the phone, so I left it on his desk.
On my way to the elevator, he caught up and asked me to initial a few documents for our estate attorney.
I started to read them, and Bruce snapped, For God’s sake, can’t you see how busy I am?
Just sign them. Several of his employees turned to watch.
Embarrassed, I signed and then got out of his hair.
Miriam continued, In California, with the quit claim and post-nup, you are not entitled to any support or assets.
I turned to Cameron. Can he do that?
He can try, my lawyer replied. But we’ll fight it.
I gripped the edge of the table—it was the only thing keeping me from slapping Bruce.
I built the software for your company, worked for years as an unpaid IT officer until the business could afford to hire someone full-time.
I’ve spent the past fifteen years taking care of our home, Circe, supporting you, so that you could focus on growing the business—
I need to protect my future, Bruce interrupted.
Turned out I was even more of a cliché than I imagined.
He was fucking his twenty-six-year-old executive assistant, Mackenzie.
We first met at our annual Christmas party for the office staff and talked about how sad she was to be single, that “the hardest part was that there’s no one to share the sunrise with.
” But Mackenzie was already with Bruce. The only reason they weren’t watching the sunrise together was because he had to come home to me.
On the elevator ride down, Cameron said, It’s going to be a long, uphill battle. Mediation will run in the five digits. Court will cost six. There are no guarantees, but we’ll probably get more than Bruce currently wants to part with.
I blinked back tears. It’s not fair.
That’s life, Mama J now reminds me. You might think you’re on a roll, but in life, just like in Vegas, the deck is stacked against you. In the end, the house always wins.
Overwhelmed, I slump onto a blue denim couch in my new home.
I ordered all the furniture from IKEA and assembled it myself—pages of instructions, baggies filled with screws, washers, little metal tools.
A few times there were leftover pieces, and I had to deconstruct, begin again.
Nothing in the directions said four hands were needed, not two, for best results.
Is that a rule in life, too? I used my knees, chin, the wall for stability, got there in the end.
I did splurge for a small second bedroom for Circe.
The walls are painted sage green, and I blew up some of the photographs she’s taken, framed them myself, then hung a string of twinkle lights to brighten the space.
But my daughter has yet to sleep over, preferring her aerie at Bruce’s house in the Presidio.
Turns out my soon-to-be ex had already leased the stately home, a former colonel’s residence when the military used to be based there, before he asked for a divorce.
Circe has the entire third floor, including her own den to watch television.
Mackenzie, who now lives with them, took my daughter to Restoration Hardware to decorate the new space.
Although I have fifty-fifty custody, at least for now, and have tried almost every day to enforce it, Circe refuses to stay with me. The harder I push, the bigger the chasm grows between us.
If you make me, then I’ll stay. But it won’t help our relationship, Circe said last night.
What will? I asked.
I don’t know. I love you, Mom, but I’m not ready.
At a loss, I now call Dr. Beth. It’s something I’ve put off because I feel like a huge disappointment. But I need to tell her what happened, ask for help and emotional support. I hold the line for thirty minutes before her producer puts me on.
“Hello there, how can I help you?” Dr. Beth asks.
“I called fifteen years ago,” I say, nervously pacing around the apartment.
“Ah. I hope that our conversation made a difference?”
“I was twenty-one, pregnant, considering an abortion. You talked me into telling the father and he proposed. We got married. Our daughter is fourteen.”
“I love a happily ever after. So, what’s going on today?”
“I just found out that my husband is cheating. The affair has been going on for eight months. I had no idea.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Dr. Beth says.
My stomach pitches. “What? It’s true.”
“There were no signs? He didn’t stay late at the office or have business meetings out of town? Strange phone calls at odd hours?”
“No—yes, I mean. All those things happened, but that was normal. He’s CEO of a company. There’s a lot of responsibility.”
“What about sex?”
“He didn’t …”
“My guess is that you rarely initiated. You wanted the husband, marriage, but didn’t want to give anything back. My dear, don’t you know that pigs get slaughtered?”
This conversation is moving way too fast and off track. “I … What do I do now? My husband moved out and my daughter wants to live with him, not me.”
“Girls typically blame their mothers for a divorce. This is why I tell women to do everything to keep their family together, like I did. Commit to one marriage. Period. Truth be told, that was easy for me. I chose a good man who had morals, high standards. But women these days fall for derelicts, drunks, cheaters, crooks, and are then shocked when they’re abusive, commit crimes.
There’s no excuse for any of that behavior.
If it were up to me, the prisons in our country would be fuller.
Callers, if you’re listening right now, learn from this woman’s mistake. Choose better!”
“How do I win my daughter back?”
“You’ll have to tread lightly, wait for her to come to you. It may happen. It may not. Hopefully, she won’t be calling me ten years from now making the same mistakes you did.”
The call abruptly ends. Dr. Beth said a lot of things that cut deep.
But the part about daughters blaming their mothers for divorce was an arrow to my heart.
I stop pacing and stand in front of the oval mirror I bought to make my new apartment seem larger.
“What’s going to happen to my relationship with Circe?
What’s going to happen to me?” I ask my reflection, the words laden with fear.
The woman in the mirror, her hair greasy, chin trembling, has no answer.
The glass shifts and mottled pink-and-brown scabs, like the ones on Mama J’s skin that she used to incessantly pick, slowly spread across my face.
Horrified, I raise trembling hands, but I’m afraid to touch the weeping sores. Am I turning into her?
Mama J’s bloodshot eyes peer out of the mirror at me. You thought you could do better than me, she accuses.
“That’s not true!”
Bullshit, Penny. But now you know. Daughters can be cruel. And there’s a fine line between living in your castle on the hill and hustling to survive. Welcome home.
Something outside scrapes along the window with a drawn-out, high-pitched whine.
My head snaps around. The wind has blown the limb of an ornamental cherry tree into the glass.
Narrow twigs along the bough extend like skeletal fingers, and despite a rational explanation, the overwhelming sense of being stalked invades.
I take a breath, then another, until my pulse slows.
When I turn back to the mirror, I now understand that the sun, striking the tree’s small, red berries, created the illusion of scabs on my face. But what about Mama J’s eyes?
“We’re nothing alike,” I tell her ghost, then call Circe and leave a voicemail. “Hey hon, thinking about you. Let’s catch a movie. Maybe dinner? I miss you.” Despite Dr. Beth’s advice, I’ll keep trying.
The moment I hang up, my phone rings, the tone a fox’s giggle. “Hey, Kiki.”
“What are you doing?”
“Feeling sorry for myself,” I admit.
“Val and I are at Pain Quotidien. Come meet us.”
“I haven’t even showered.” And I’ve been wearing the same sweats and underwear for three days.
“Get down here or we’ll drag you out,” Val says into the phone.
I know she’ll follow through, so I pull on a wrinkled white oxford and jeans, twist dirty hair into a bun, slip on my old Hokas, discovered at the bottom of a box when I moved, and trudge to the café.
On the way, a black cat with a spiked collar crosses the sidewalk right in front of me.
I almost laugh. The worst has already happened.
The cat threads through my legs, winds its body around my ankles, and purrs.
When I reach down to give it a pet, it swipes at me with claws drawn.
Blood beads on the back of my stinging hand as the cat runs off.