I wasn’t sure what the appropriate response to that was. “Congratulations?” I said finally.
He didn’t laugh. “I was calling to check when your flight arrives on Saturday.” All business. Of course. He wasn’t calling because he missed me. It was as impersonal as scheduling a doctor’s appointment. And there was no forgiveness—and no apology.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to check.” There was a touch of defensiveness in my tone. Hadn’t I come here to wear a hairshirt, to wait for him to forgive me? But I hadn’t been doing that. I’d been imagining what it might be like to live here, what it might feel like to have Cassandra and Sharon and Henry as my friends, how I could forge a life that didn’t include the Chicago Women’s Club or the Magnolia Ladies Association, and I realized none of those thoughts had included him.
“There’s a dinner with one of the investors on Saturday night. You’ll be expected to be there.”
Another dinner. I thought of the last one, of Dimpy Stockton’s braying laugh, the conversations about the cost of vacations and jewelry that could have funded a charity for a month, the endless one-upmanship, and was flooded with the painful desire not to have to go to that dinner, not to have to go to a dinner like that ever again. “Look, I don’t know if I’ll be back on Saturday.” I tensed, waiting for his response.
“You have to. The dinner is on Saturday night,” Phillip repeated, but he didn’t sound angry, only irritated, as though I were keeping him from something he’d rather be doing.
“That’s the thing. Mother has decided to sell the house, and she needs help getting it ready.” I made myself sound busy, sound confident. He couldn’t be mad at me for helping my mother, right?
“Can’t someone else do it?” Phillip asked peevishly. I felt my own ire rising in response.
“Well, I’m an only child,” I said, explaining it as though he and I had never met, as though I hadn’t ever told him how I’d longed for a sibling, how disappointed I was that his sisters and I hadn’t grown close. “And yes, she can pay someone, but there are things to go through. Family things.”
“But the dinner is this Saturday. What do you expect me to tell them?” His voice was reedy and querulous. I could picture him standing in the living room, looking out over the lake. There would be takeout containers on the island in the kitchen (he had never learned to cook, and whenever I was away I came back to find a trash can full of plastic forks and Phillip complaining about the weight he’d put on in his stomach, as though it were my fault), and there would be a growing pile of dress shirts on my side of the bed because he thought he was too busy to go to the dry cleaner himself.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. It felt so far from being my problem.
“You’re not even close. When did you start caring about your mother?” he asked.
His words stung. How many times had I complained to him about my mother, wished aloud that we were more alike, that I wasn’t such a disappointment to her? How many times had I groaned and procrastinated about packing before going to visit her?
I knew what I should do. I should tell him that of course I was coming home. Getting him to forget about divorce, to realize he missed me had been the whole point—give him a little space, come back and smooth everything over. Except shouldn’t it have been different? Shouldn’t he have apologized? Shouldn’t he want me to come back?
And shouldn’t I want to go back?
Because I knew now I didn’t want that. I didn’t want that at all.
“I’m not leaving her to do this on her own,” I said. I was still hiding behind my mother, who needed me there about as much as she needed a chocolate teapot, but it was all I had.
“You’re so selfish. I need you at this dinner. We’re supposed to be married, Madeleine. Remember that?”
“And you said we should get a divorce. Remember that?” I spat the last word.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, with an enormous, exhausted sigh, as though divorce hadn’t been his idea in the first place, as though I were making it up. And I felt foolish for ever believing he would actually follow through. Saying we should get a divorce had been nothing but a way for him to win the fight, a reminder of how lucky I was and how easily he could take it all away. “You don’t know how good you have it. Do you know how many women would be happy to be married to me?”