“I’m so sorry. What about his dad’s old business?” I asked.
“I don’t know. If the house sells quickly, and for a good price, he can maybe salvage it. Pieces of it. It’s not my problem.”
I boggled at her. “Not your . . . ? Rachel, if you and Jake got into—”
“We did not get into anything,” Rachel interrupted, and there was so much frost in her tone that I felt it, a crystalline bite in my lungs as I sucked in breath. “Jake got us into trouble all by himself. He never gave me so much as an inkling. He let it get bad and bad and worse, and he hid it, and he borrowed to cover it. For God only knows how long, Lavender and I have been living in a house of cards, while Smiley Daddy took us to Greece. He bought me an eight-hundred-dollar pashmina, and he couldn’t pay the mortgage.”
“Okay, that’s bad,” I said.
It was a sin that Rachel especially would have a hard time forgiving. Jake had . . . well, he had Rachel-ed her. He had taken his stuffed bunny to the laundry closet and cried there, with Rachel locked out, not even knowing. It was stupid, too, because if he’d told her when the trouble started, Rachel could have fixed it. She could have fixed the living hell out of it, then started a budgeting blog and landed on Good Morning America.
It was a very Jake Jacoby thing to do, however. Not that I was taking his side. I would never take Jake’s side, even if he tripped and staggered by accident into the right. But this time I could see it. I could even understand it. Jake had reinvented himself for Rachel. He’d defined himself as this self-made successbot who followed trends in man fashion and cared a great, hollering deal about March Madness. Back when he was JJ, he and I hadn’t even known what March Madness was; I still wasn’t entirely clear on it. Jake Jacoby was such a fundamentally dishonest construct, it was a miracle that lying about debt was all he’d done.
Still, it was all he had done, sounded like, and screwing up with money seemed forgivable. I recognized betrayal when it crossed my path, and fronting to stay successful in your wife’s eyes did not rise to that level.
“That’s very bad, but he’s the only dad Lavender’s ever going to be issued.” Even as I said it, I realized what a hypocrite I was. Batman was the only father Digby would ever have, and a complete unknown. I wouldn’t even look at him on Facebook, but here I was advocating father’s rights for an absolute known jackass. This was not about me, however, so I soldiered on. “You could fix this.”
She snorted. “My marriage, you mean? ‘Can I fix it?’ is not even the question. You’re missing the point.”
“Okay. What is the point?” I asked.
She flicked at the air with all ten fingers, as if the answer were hanging in the atmosphere around us, obvious.
“He never told me. He never planned to tell me. He was going to—” Her voice broke, and she clenched her eyes shut, as if Jake were standing right in front of us and she could no longer bear to look at him. “He was going to stick us with it, me and Lavender. Disappear and leave us in his mess.”
“Oh,” I said, a long-drawn-out syllable, full of a dawning understanding. It was what Rachel’s mother had done when Rachel was three months old. It would hit her so hard and so directly that I wondered if her own history hadn’t made her jump to that conclusion. I asked her, “Are you sure that’s what he meant to do?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, ice cold. “I was looking for an old recipe in MS Word, and I found a draft of a blubbering letter he was writing. It read like a suicide note. Leia, I thought it was a suicide note, but then I started digging in his browser history and e-mail, and he’d used our last dimes to buy a plane ticket to Oregon. Ticket. Singular. Just him. If I hadn’t had a craving for Nana’s lemon bars, he would have been gone.”
Now, that was the JJ I knew. That was the JJ he’d always been. Of course he’d planned to poof, even knowing that it was something his wife could not forgive. When JJ did something so bad he couldn’t stand himself, he disappeared, ditching anyone who’d been dumb enough to love him. It was time for JJ, version 3.0. I could imagine him in Portland, growing a giant beard and a craft-beer belly, maybe moving into one of those tiny houses. He could call himself Jac. Do whatever people did out there. No more Superman-loving dork and now no more sportsy yuppie. Maybe he’d even take up boccie ball. That unmitigated asshole.
Rachel said, “I confronted him that day, when you came over with the cake. I told him that he had to decide. He could stand and face his mess with us or run west like the lowest-crawling worm on the planet.”
“Jesus, Rachel,” I said. Birchie would have fussed at me for taking the Lord’s name in vain, but this was, I think, an actual prayer. Lav had witnessed that fight. She knew that her dad had planned to ditch her. “What did he say?”
“He hasn’t gotten back to me on that yet,” Rachel said, both so glib and so bitter that it set my eyes to stinging. “I don’t even know if he got on the plane. I told him not to speak to me or look at me or even think my name unless he was ready to man up.”
So when shit got real, JJ had filled a Whole Foods bag with underpants and left. Nice. At least Rachel had called him on it. When Jake screwed me over, I’d given him the luxury of never having to explain himself. Of course, I’d had the luxury of not having his child.
“I know this hits you where you live, but Lav at least needs to hear from him. She—”
Rachel’s eyes blazed. “I told him not to dare think her name either. Not if he’s going to leave her.”
If Jake weren’t such a coward, he would have contacted his child anyway. I pushed through Rachel’s touch-me-not force field, practically visible around her, and I laid one hand on her clammy arm.
“What can I do to help? Please let me help. I can get you caught up on the house payments so you have time to sell—”
She blinked, several times, rapidly, as if she had just noticed me in the room. Her lips curled up oh-so-slightly at the corners.