Unfortunately, as he grew, Elizabeth seemed to diminish. She couldn’t quite make herself be happy for him, and that shamed her.
She was his wife. Every woman knew the secret handshake that went along with the church ceremony. You had signed on to be a cheerleader whether you’d known it or not, whether you felt like it or not. Supposedly what was good for one of you was good for both.
How could she admit to being jealous of her husband’s happiness and success? And if she dared to voice those poisonous thoughts to Jack, he’d be hurt and confused. He’d give her that frowning look—the one he always wore when she tried to talk about their relationship—and say, very matter-of-factly, Well, Birdie, what is it you want to do?
She had come to despise that question.
So, instead of telling Jack that she felt lost and more than a little abandoned by his sudden happiness, she ripped the hell out of the dining room.
It had been a perfectly functional, if boring, room before, tucked as it was between the kitchen and living room. Like many of the original cottages built along this part of the coast, the house had begun life as a summer getaway for a rich Portland family. Built for limited, high summer use, it had a big main floor with a large kitchen and even larger living room, and two small bedrooms upstairs. Over the years, under a variety of owners, the house had been expanded and remodeled and reshaped. By the time Jack and Elizabeth had stumbled across it in 1999, the poor place had become a jumbled mess.
All Jack had been able to see was the cost: a run-down house with peeling paint and outdated plumbing fixtures … bedrooms that were too small, windows that were too thin, a yard gone bad. Not to mention the commute. Echo Beach was quite a drive from Portland.
But Elizabeth had seen past all that, to a beautiful little cottage with a wraparound porch and view to die for. She fell in love with the pouting lip of land that overlooked a secluded curl of beach.
For the only time in their marriage, she put her foot down, and Jack yielded.
She’d started work immediately. In the last two years, she’d made a remarkable number of changes. By herself, she’d stripped things down to the good, old-fashioned bones. She’d ripped up yards of avocado-green shag carpeting and found a beautiful honey-gold oak floor beneath, which she’d refinished. Then she’d painstakingly removed the white paint from the river-rock fireplace and pulled up the plastic molding that ran along the baseboards. She’d scraped fifty years’ worth of paint off the kitchen cabinets and replaced the countertops with exquisite granite tiles.
Because she worked alone, her progress was slow. Although she’d finished (mostly) the kitchen and living room, she was still a long way from done. Only last week, the dining room had seemed to be a low priority, much less important than fixing up the master suite. After all, the kids were rarely here anymore, and when they did come home, they were off with friends for dinner. She and Jack didn’t entertain much; it was just too far away for most of his colleagues to drive.
But last night had changed her outlook. She wasn’t even sure why.
She and Jack had been sitting in the living room, watching television. The phone had rung every fifteen minutes, and he answered every time, talking endlessly about himself and the story.
Elizabeth had heard the resurrection in his voice and it sparked a lot of memories. Few of them were good.
In the early years of their relationship, she’d loved football. Watching him play in college had been thrilling. For an overly protected southern girl who’d been raised to speak softly and only when spoken to, the high-octane world of football had amazed her. Every time Jack won, he brought a dusting of victory and fame home with him. They’d loved each other then, wildly, madly, deeply.
But time had changed that, had changed them. Somewhere along the way—she thought it was when they moved to New York—he’d become a Star, and stars acted differently than ordinary men. They stayed out all night, drinking with their teammates and slept all day, ignoring their wives and children. They slept with other women.
She and Jack had barely made it through those dark and terrible days. What had saved them, ironically, was the end of his fame. When he’d blown his knee out and gotten hooked on drugs, he’d needed Elizabeth again.
Last night, as she’d listened to him talk ad nauseam about himself, she’d glimpsed their future; it was a mirror image of the past.
And suddenly, she’d looked into the dining room and thought, That wall needs a set of French doors.
The next morning, after he left for work, she went to the hardware store, bought herself a paper dust mask and a sledgehammer, and got to work. Every time the phone rang, she smashed the sledgehammer into the crumbling wall.
Now, almost eight hours later, she stood back from her work. She was breathing hard, and her arms ached.