Luz is discreet. Good for her.
It’s more than Noreen can say for Kevin.
He didn’t come home last night, and she’s pretty sure he wasn’t at the hospital. Maybe he’d stayed at his new apartment, since he started paying rent on the first of the month—-though she doubts that, as it’s still purportedly unfurnished. He said he doesn’t want to fill it with “just any old furniture” and intends to pillage the house for pieces as soon as the kids are informed of the impending separation.
But Noreen isn’t stupid. She’s certain he’s found a soft landing spot somewhere.
At least his absence spared her another long night on the mattress in the guest room. It’s a perfectly decent mattress. But it cost significantly less than the five--figure premium king--sized one in the master suite.
“You can sleep here too,” Kevin says whenever he’s home overnight. “I don’t mind.”
That makes her want to scream, Well, I do! I mind! I mind! but of course she never does.
She rolls over, huddling deeper into the goose down comforter as the thought of her soon--to--be--ex--husband settles over her like a clammy blanket on a raw day.
Back in September, when he said they had to talk, she assumed he wanted to discuss their upcoming wedding anniversary.
She was wrong.
“This isn’t working,” he said, and for a moment she thought he was referring to the cell phone clasped in his strong, well--groomed surgeon’s hands. He wasn’t wearing his gold wedding band, she noticed belatedly—-but only after he clarified that it was their marriage that wasn’t working.
“We’ve grown apart,” he said, and had the audacity to heap on a few more clichés: “I want us to stay friends,” and “There’s no one else,” topped off by “It’s not you. It’s me.”
“Really?” she said with a bitter laugh. “Really? It’s not you, it’s me? Can’t you do any better than that?”
He could not, other than to assure her, once again, that there’s not another woman.
She didn’t believe it then, and she doesn’t believe it now. You don’t walk away from a life like the one they’ve built here unless you’re walking toward something you think is going to be better.
But it won’t be, after a while. It never is, in these situations. Sooner or later, Kevin is going to come crawling back.
Or maybe he won’t be able to leave her after all, despite having presented it as a fait accompli.
She’s always given him plenty of space. She’s never complained about him being gone so much. She brings in a good income and she takes good care of the house and the kids and the dog and herself. She may be closing in on fifty, but there’s not an ounce of flab on her body. She avoids the sun and has regular injections to keep facial wrinkles at bay, and she’d never permit a strand of gray in her long red mane.
Hell, she’s handled enough divorce cases to know that she’s not the kind of wife men leave; she’s the kind of woman they leave their wives for. In fact . . .
She shakes her head, pushing away the thought of the man who would have done just that, if she’d let him.
But I wasn’t about to walk away from Kevin, and I was so positive he’d never walk away from me.
Yes, well . . . live and learn.
Aware that she has a client meeting in less than an hour, she throws aside the covers and stretches, glad she showered the first time she got up. All it takes now is ten minutes to splash water on her face, put on some makeup, brush her teeth and her hair, and throw on a suit.
Downstairs, she pours lukewarm coffee into a mug and goes over the kids’ afterschool schedules as she waits for it to reheat in the microwave. Shannon has an SAT prep class, Sabrina has a piano lesson, Samantha a Girl Scout meeting. Three different directions, but with enough time between them that Noreen can get each girl to where she has to be and back home again.