What if he had really meant it? What if it really were over? I lifted my hand to my throat as if I could physically unstop the breath that had caught there.
And what would I do? If there were no more Phillip, who would I be? No one else would marry me. I’d have to leave the Stabler. I’d have to leave Chicago, leave the rows of art galleries in River North where I could stroll for hours and see a dozen pieces that changed everything. I’d have to go back to my hometown. Back to Magnolia, to my mother, to the Ladies Association and humid summers, to walk among my ruins and stew in my failures.
Magnolia. The fight had eclipsed my dread over my impending peacekeeping trip to see my mother, but in three hours, I was supposed to be on a plane. But I couldn’t go now, could I? I had to stay and make things right with Phillip. Except he clearly didn’t want to see me. Didn’t want to talk to me.
But maybe if I went, maybe if I went and left Phillip alone for a while, he’d calm down. I’d just been upset the night before, drunk on the foolish idea of painting again, trapped in a too-tight dress (Phillip had been right about the cookies, he was always right), irritated by Dimpy Stockton’s cheerful entitlement. And he’d calm down, just as I had. Phillip was endlessly mercurial, and horribly spoiled, and sometimes the best thing to do, I’d found, was to leave him to it. Eventually he got bored of his own drama and would emerge from it as though it had never happened. And I wouldn’t say a word of it to my mother. She and Phillip adored each other, and if she knew I had screwed this up . . .
Well. I wasn’t going to think about that. Because it was going to be fine. Pulling my suitcase out of my closet, I packed in silence. I’d be gone for a week and by the time I came back, everything would be fine. He’d have forgotten all about a divorce. I’d have forgotten the anger that had swollen inside me, the resentment at the way he treated me, the sick certainty I felt when he pushed at the issue of a baby. The weather would be warm in Magnolia. I could take shorts, sleeveless shirts, not that anyone wanted to see my bare, chubby arms. There would be so much pollen in the air I wouldn’t be able to breathe, and my mother and I would be at each other’s throats within twenty-four hours, but it wouldn’t be here. I took the nearly empty bottle of antacids and ground them into a fine powder against my tongue on the way to the airport, feeling the twist in my stomach as it pulled angrily against itself.
Ostensibly, my parents had settled in Magnolia because it was in between Memphis and Little Rock, and my father had begun investing in real estate in both cities, but I think they chose it because it was equally inconvenient for both of their families to visit. My mother said she liked it because it was small, barely a city. “Memphis without all the fuss,” she called it, as though Memphis were a latter-day Gotham, all crime-fighting superheroes and threatening skylines. But Magnolia was a Goldilocks city—just large enough to have the cultural amenities my mother enjoyed, just small enough that she could run its social scene with her tiny, well-moisturized fist, just Southern enough for the charm without too much culture shock for my Northern parents, just Northern enough to cool off during the winter months without doing too much damage to my mother’s garden. As much as I complained about it, I’d been in no hurry to escape; it had held me in its slow, sticky thrall until Phillip and I had moved to Chicago.