Things We Didn't Say

Chapter 31

Casey



I gasp myself awake, as if an alarm bell is clanging in my chest.

I squint at the clock. Midnight.

I leap out of bed, and tiny dots of light swarm into my vision. I sink slowly back to the edge of the bed. I’ve been asleep since dinner, leaving the kids and Mallory unattended. Michael didn’t say I had to keep watch like a jailer, but I know he expects me to make sure everything is okay, and I can’t let him down.

I listen at each child’s door, approaching Dylan’s door out of habit, even, but it stands open, his room light still on, casting shadows over the emptiness. I flick off the light to save electricity, plunging the upper story into darkness, except where the moon slips in through Dylan’s open curtains.

The moon. That means the clouds have parted. The storm has stopped.

I pick my way carefully down the stairs, feeling my nap clinging to me, slowing me down.

I find Mallory downstairs in the living room, watching TV.

“The girls are asleep,” she says.

I resist the urge to ask her if she made sure Jewel brushed and flossed. It doesn’t matter now, anyway.

I sit on the opposite edge of the couch, wishing I’d stayed asleep. If the kids are asleep, there’s no reason for me to be up. The few hours’ rest has made me feel off-balance and foggy-headed. Worse than when I’d been awake on the adrenaline of the sleepless.

“I don’t bite,” Mallory says, smirking at a cop show rerun. Some CSI team is standing around a corpse, frowning at it.

I notice that I’m plastered into the far corner, feet tucked up like I’m afraid of her. I shift a little to the middle.

“You hungry? I made you a plate.”

I jerk my head away from the TV in surprise. She walks out to the kitchen, and I hear the microwave beep a few times. In a couple of minutes she emerges with a steaming plate of spaghetti and sets it down on the coffee table in front of me.

“Go for it,” she says.

My sleep-deprived brain briefly entertains the notion that she’s poisoned me. This makes me chuckle before I dive in. I realize I’m starving.

“What’s funny?” she asks.

I shake my head, not daring to tell her.

I polish off the plate of spaghetti, and before I even get up, she takes it from my hand. “Here, I’ll put it away.”

She’s being too nice. Maybe cyanide really is coursing through my veins. Doesn’t that smell like almonds? Did I smell almonds?

She flops down on the couch again.

“Don’t look at me like that. Seriously, what do you think I’m gonna do?”

I’m glad she can’t see me blush at this.

“I’m going to have to tolerate you, I guess,” she says with a heavy sigh, stretching her arms over her head.

“What happened to ‘You will never raise my children’?”

She waves her hand at me. “I thought Michael would have explained by now not to take anything I say seriously. I get sort of worked up, if you hadn’t noticed. I would like to play a more active role. Maybe I can work my way up to shared custody.”

I hold my breath, not knowing how Michael would want me to answer.

“Would that be so bad?” she says, turning her smile on me. “More time for just you and Mike? Newlyweds?”

Michael has talked about her smile during one of the conversations we had early on when he was trying to explain her to me, before I told him to stop trying. He said her smile was magnetic and powerful. I thought he was full of it, just trying to rationalize his lust for a foxy coed, but I never said so.

It is a charming smile, but that’s all. She doesn’t have magic powers.

She has turned back to the TV. “I know. You don’t want to say anything. I get it.” She seizes the remote and jabs it at the TV. “God, this is boring. I’m bored. Aren’t you bored?”

I nod. Seems safe enough to agree.

“I’ll make some popcorn and put on some music. If it’s quiet, it shouldn’t wake the girls. Maybe we can talk, you know?”

I’m wary, but also pleased. I can see Michael now, smiling and relieved that he doesn’t have to worry about us in the same room anymore, in awe, in fact, that I made friends with his crazy ex.

He will be so proud of me.


For several minutes we just snack on popcorn, and then I start to feel stupid for thinking I could talk to her.

“So, how did you meet Mike?” she finally says.

“You never heard?”

She snorts. She has turned on her end of the couch to face me, sitting cross-legged. “Yeah, we’ve never much discussed his current love life.”

So I tell her the story about meeting at the med center when Jewel was sick.

She sniffles a little, wipes her eyes. I’m not sure I get it, it’s not that romantic.

Then she answers my unspoken confusion. “I should have been home to take her to the doctor.”

Normally I would snap at this, something to the effect that it’s her own damn fault. But this would seem cruel to say now.

She pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her face on her knees, looking out to the middle of the room.

I want to break the mood, so I turn the question around on her.

“How did you meet Michael?”

She snaps her attention back to me. “Really? You want to know?”

I nod. Frankly, I’m curious to hear her version of the story.

This has livened her up. She goes back to cross-legged sitting and nabs a fistful of popcorn.

“Well. I was at a party at MSU. I was a social work major, he ever tell you that? Ha. I was going to solve all the world’s problems. I was going to make sure what happened to me never happened to any other girl.” She says this as if mocking herself, with exaggerated earnestness. She laughs, shakes her head, and eats some more before resuming. “Anyway, so my guy of the moment was giving me a hard time. He’d been so hot, all tattooed and sexy, but a mean drunk, so I ditched him. Then I was all bored and wandering by myself when I saw this nerd . . . Remember that show Murphy Brown? Remember the boss, what was his name?”

I’ve seen it on reruns. I try to think . . . “Miles?”

“Yeah! He looked like Miles! Only taller. And not Jewish. But anyhow, he was the polar opposite of Tattoo Guy—you know, I f*cked that guy for two weeks and I don’t even remember his name?—and I thought maybe I should try something different. He was so cute, and at first he was all standoffish and sad. Some girl had just dumped him for another guy. But his resistance lasted like, what, a minute? I kissed him right behind his earlobe, and just licked a little bit there, he really loves that . . . Wait, you probably know that!”

She carries on some more about the seduction, but all I can think of is how Michael told me not to kiss his neck at all. He said he found it distracting.

I look up in surprise as Mallory continues her story, reaching over and slapping my knee to emphasize something funny. I tune back in to hear her describing their first night of sex in great, gory detail.

Why did I start this conversation?

She sits back, almost glowing like she just really had sex. “Yeah, he was done for. And I thought, hey, who knew that nerds could be so great in bed? And he was so nice. God, so nice. No one had ever been that nice to me. Especially no man. So it started as a lark, but I kept seeing him. I worshipped him back then. I think that’s why he stuck around so long, I mean, who can resist being worshipped? I was like a starving person who’d been eating gruel finally given a fresh apple. All I ever wanted then was fresh apples, one after another. And then, Angel.”

At this I maintain a diplomatic silence.

“Oh, I know. You think I got pregnant on purpose. Everyone on Michael’s side thinks that. My own family thought it, too. No one thought I could actually keep a decent man on my own.” She begins to pick at her cuticles, crack her knuckles. “Guess they were right, in the end. But I’d like to think he stayed with me for some other reason than the baby. I mean, these days, having a baby out of wedlock is nothing, right? People do it all the time. Who even uses that word, wedlock? Lock, yeah, right. It was meant to be, I guess, however awful it was. Because it wasn’t always awful. You know that, right, that it wasn’t always?”

“Sure,” I say, because it must not have been. Not every minute.

“It won’t always be perfect, either,” she says, pointing to me. “Don’t get your hopes up for that.”

“Oh, I know that. Believe me.”

“Oh?” Mallory smirks. “Really.”

I shouldn’t say anything. But maybe this is just the kind of girlfriend bonding to heal the rift. After all, it’s something we have in common. I opt for a small complaint, something most wives have, as I’ve gathered.

“Well, I sometimes feel like he takes me for granted.”

She sits up straight. “Oh, honey. We have a lot to talk about.”