“Why? I don’t want this. I want to stay married.”
She snorted. “Why?”
“Because I was emotionally scarred when my own parents divorced. Because I value family as the foundation of—”
“Are we done? Do you want something to eat?” she said, glancing at her watch. “You’ll have to make it yourself. Oh, you and Dylan should come for dinner. Saturday night, seven o’clock. Hannah’s coming, too, of course.”
Yes. Hannah adored Mom and Beatrice. Actually, she adored Beatrice. No one adored my mom.
“We’re not available,” I said.
“Try to wear something nice for a change,” she said, ignoring me. “Now, I have work to do. Off you go.”
I’d already been dismissed. Mom walked out of the kitchen, heels tapping.
For the next three weeks, Brad played up the role of devoted father, friend and all-around great guy. If Dylan was around, he smiled, joked, cleaned up the kitchen, asked me if my left tire was still losing air. We ate dinner together. On Wednesdays, the day my dad came over to eat, Brad pretended he had a late client and hid in his office, since he’d always been slightly fearful of my father. Or he visited Melissa.
Meanwhile, Dylan and I spent a lot of time together, fishing or kayaking, walking in the woods. I tried to press these moments into my heart—the perfect stillness of Herring Pond as we stood up to our waists in it, the minnows swimming around us in the clear water. Kayaking into the waves at Coast Guard Beach, my son reaching out to steady my boat.
I tried not to tell him how much I’d miss him. Parenting is a 90 percent–10 percent relationship. Dylan was following his life’s trajectory, which was arcing upward and away, and all I could do was watch and wish him the best.
They don’t tell you how agonizing it is to have raised your child well. To have made yourself superfluous, while your child never stops being your beating heart.
He was ready. Ready to leave home, and ready to leave his parents. Football would guarantee him friends, and the coach texted him daily for reports of Dylan’s workout and food intake.
Melissa was closer to Dylan’s age than to Brad’s. What if our son loved having a rich stepmother? What if she bought him a sports car? What if he spent Christmas with them, or they flew out to Yellowstone to see him without me?
This is what insanity was. Trying to answer the unanswerable.
Thank God I had work. Wanda was the only obstetrician with offices on the Outer Cape, and we handled just about every pregnant woman from Orleans to Provincetown. But this summer, when I saw a pregnant mama, I was awash in memories of my one healthy pregnancy . . . and the one I lost. Postpartum clients reminded me of my own days as a young mother. When my client Zoe miscarried at fourteen weeks, I held her close, crying with her, rocking her, thinking of my own little girl, so still and white in my arms. I always cried when a patient miscarried. But this time, I had to go to my car to cry, a wracking howling grief that had to be hidden from Carol and Wanda. Maybe I needed antidepressants. Maybe I should see a therapist (pause for bitter laughter).
The need to talk to Vanessa burned in my chest, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My mother and Wanda were the only ones who knew. Mom had probably forgotten already. Dad . . . he wouldn’t be able to hide his fury, and Dylan would find out within seconds if Dad knew, because Brad would be cowering in a corner, whimpering. Rightly so. Who could make a body disappear better than a fisherman?
I spent my nights in our—my—bedroom, which had a little office alcove, poring over our finances, trying to make a budget with half the income our life was based on. There were blogs and websites and information about women like me—Chump Lady, Divorce Mag, Betrayed Women’s Club. I read articles about how to tell your college student his parents were divorcing. In person, they all said, but I just couldn’t do that to my son before he left.
I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a breakdown. “Push, that’s right, you’re doing so well, Grace!” I need to spend less on groceries. Should I become a Costco member? I should list Brad’s stupid book as an asset so I can get half of his piddling royalties just to piss him off. “His head is crowning! This is the most intense part, Grace. Deep breaths, no pushing, okay? You’re almost there. You’re doing amazing work.”
I felt like two people. No, three. The supportive midwife, the loving mother and the raging harpy who wanted to set fire to everything. My dreams were terrifying and bleak. Dylan’s plane crashed last year, and I was only now getting the news. Brad said he wanted to make up, but Melissa had just bought our house, and she’d be living with us. The Goody Chapman caught fire, and Dad and I moved to Alabama.
I’d never been so tired in my life.
One morning, when Brad was allegedly working and Dylan was out, Vanessa burst into my house. “Oh, Lillie! I’m stunned! I can’t believe he’d do this to you!”
She wrapped me in her arms, and the tears started flowing for both of us. “Come, let’s sit down,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.” Because yes, she knew where everything was, unlike my own mother.
She got a box of tissues and plopped it on the table in front of me, then stood by the sink, wiping her own tears until the coffee was ready. Then she poured us each a cup, black for her, cream for me, and sat down across from me. “Dylan’s car isn’t there. He’s out?” she asked.
“Yes.” Dylan was with his girlfriend and then would be going to his job at PJ’s, a drive-up seafood place with the best fried clams anywhere.
“Brad called us last night and told us everything,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep a wink, so this morning, I got in my car and came right here. Oh, Lillie. We had no idea things were so bad! Tell me the truth. What’s been going on, honey? How are you? You must be devastated.”
Oh, how wonderful to talk to someone who cared. “I . . . I think I’m in shock,” I said. “One day he was happy, the next day he’s talking about adventures and journeys and growing apart, and I had no clue. He cheated on me, Vanessa! He cheated on me!” I started sobbing.
“Oh, honey.” She squeezed my hand. “The wife is always the last to know, they say,” she said, dabbing her eyes. “We’re so ashamed of him. This is not how he was brought up. I almost wonder if he’s having a nervous breakdown. Do you know what he said to us? That he deserves ‘joy.’?” She made finger quotes. “What exactly does that mean? And doesn’t having a healthy son and a loving wife bring you joy?”
“Exactly,” I said, my mouth wobbling.
“I mean, really. There’s divorce, and then there’s this,” she said.
“To the best of my knowledge, we were fine, Vanessa. We were better than fine. We were happy and content and . . . happy.”
“He said you’ve been drifting apart for at least four years, since Dylan started high school.”
“I— That’s not true. I mean, yes, life was busier with Dylan and football and all that, but if you’d have asked me a month ago if I had a good marriage, I would have said I had a great marriage. I really thought that.”
“Maybe he has a brain tumor,” she said, echoing my own thoughts. She leaned forward to lay her hand on mine, and the smell of her perfume, the caring in her voice . . . it meant the world to me. “We will not support this in the least. He says she’s an aspiring yoga teacher! For heaven’s sake!”
Ah, the Boston Brahmin. I thanked God Melissa wasn’t a heart surgeon out of Harvard. “I appreciate you more than I can say,” I murmured.
For an hour, we talked about Brad, me, Dylan and that woman. We decided this was a midlife crisis in every cliché way imaginable, from Brad’s new glasses and clothes to working out.