“Hey, you.” He leans in to pull me into an embrace, but I take a step back, leaving him grasping for air. At close proximity James might have me ready to worship rather than hang him, and tonight I am in no mood to kneel at the altar. “Whoa.” He holds his hands up in a mock sign of surrender, but that flicker in his eyes lets me know he’s gauging the situation. Perhaps he wants to see what I know. “What’s going on?”
“Faulk has proof you slept with his wife.” The words come out ruefully in a catatonic whisper. There were so many ways I could have framed it—a question, a joke accompanied with a laugh, and I honestly thought I’d choose the latter, but the moment I saw his eyes, those otherworldly charms that can make even the most testosterone-laden woman swoon his way, I knew knifing this boil open would be the only way to get the pus out.
“Proof.” He sways back on his heels and doesn’t say another word. He doesn’t give the right inflection for it to be a question and this alarms me far more than Faulk ever did.
A thick silence entombs us as this new reality settles over my chest like a weight. My husband had cheated on me, and I was the last to know. I had been played a fool, and now foolish tears streamed down my cheeks, hot and feverish.
“Daddy, Mommy!” Reagan shouts from the kitchen, her youthful exuberance inextinguishable even in the face of this unnatural disaster.
Neither James nor I eat dinner that night.
* * *
Present Day
* * *
The sun soars once again over the rooftop of the house we’ve called home for the last three years like a fireball of destruction hurtling this way. We had to get out before it could reach us. Rome was burning. We had sacked it for all it was worth, and it was time to go east.
A sold sign swings cold in the breeze as we pull out of the driveway for the very last time. Hailey and Faulk stopped by an hour ago when they saw Reagan in the yard, offering their best wishes while James and his giant dick hovered between us like an invisible noose.
We drive three days, spending the night in cheesy hotels along the way, watching as the California desert gives way to long throated asphalt highways, evergreens rising on either side like stationary guards as we make our way to our new hometown, an old one for James, Concordia, Idaho. The navy blue forest, the inky black lake at the base of town, it all holds a cozy monochromatic charm. In a morbid way, it brings to mind that every teen horror movie begins with a dark forest and a black lake. Concordia has become our own private mountain horror. Secretly, I accept that’s what we’ve become. A horror so terrible it ran us out of town. But I don’t want to run anymore. Concordia is my home now, too. It’s where James and I will work to sew up the hole in our marriage that James saw fit to claw through on his way to sexual freedom. A hole the size of Hailey Oden’s implants.
James spent his childhood in Concordia, the only world he knew until higher education offered him respite. We met in college, back in California where my family lived a mere three miles away from campus. James didn’t seem to mind the distance between his own relatives, though—too many ghosts he used to say of his home state. But when his mother died out of the blue a year ago, leaving his father to fend for himself, James began to have a change of heart when it came to this mountain-esque hideaway. I watch as the evergreens rise like corkscrews into the heavens. I suspect I’ll drink lots of wine here. I’m venturing to guess Idaho doesn’t leave you much choice.
On Thursday, under the supervision of a pencil gray sky, we pull onto Sunnyside Drive, the ironic name of our new street. It’s late September, the month where summer bows down to kiss autumn, and already the sun is more of an idea than a reality. Concordia is robed in a gray tomb of secrets, so hushed you almost suspect it of doing something wrong. Too quiet, like a child who hasn’t made a peep in a good long while.
James drives down the long neck of the cul-de-sac with a neat row of tract homes lining either side. These are not the traditional small bungalows they try to pass off as houses back in L.A. These actually have land around them, and the homes are situated far enough apart that you won’t hear your neighbor sneeze from his bedroom next door. That’s what was wrong with Amarillo Drive, our last street where Hailey Oden made her vaginal debut into my husband’s life. The sneezes and the orgasms were all too easy to number. Los Angeles had become an albatross around our necks. We wouldn’t have survived very long if we stayed.
I threatened James with divorce after the incident, and he drove us straight to a therapist where we rehashed his affair in detail. There was no sex he said. She cornered him in the kitchen at a barbeque and dove her prehensile tongue into his mouth he said. I wanted to produce a stack of Bibles and make him swear on it—see what God had to say, but I was too afraid he wouldn’t do it. Thanks to his staunch Protestant upbringing, James still has the ability to have the living hell scared out of him. I had all of that supernatural power at my fingertips, and I refused to wield it, too afraid to find out the God-awful truth. But his apology seemed sincere enough. Although he was adamant that we move, that we start over, that we not have to look at her repugnant face day in and day out. I almost wanted to laugh at that one. Hailey Oden is a lot of things; repugnant she is not. At least not on the outside.
“The moving trucks are here! They beat us! They beat us!” Reagan chimes gleefully from the back seat as we pull into the driveway of our purchased-sight-unseen home. Mostly sight unseen.
We bought it off the Internet, signed the docs over our phones, and wired the money like some secretive event playing out in a spy movie. His father, Charles, had done a drive-by and walked through our new home recording two hours of painfully sluggish footage for us to ogle. Charles means well, but as a retired judge, newly widowed at that, his need for an audience was met with our unfortunate captive attention.
James said he made the mistake of confessing his misdeed to his father. They spent a few hours on the phone bonding over our disheveled matrimonial state. Charles is a staunch proponent of doing whatever it takes to keep us together. According to James, Charles has been a perfectionist from the day he was born, and he expects nothing less from anybody else—his lone remaining son especially. A marriage was meant to remain as such. There is no good excuse for a dissolution in his polished silver world.
“Look at that.” I marvel at the two-story stunner with its river stone fa?ade, the double chimneys, one on either end of the house, and massively wide driveway large enough to fit two bounce houses if we wanted. The parties we could throw here for Reagan, for ourselves, would be stellar. A border garden of purple and blue cabbage flowers drapes the fence line and adds an ethereal glow to the model home exterior.
“Told you it would be great.” James offers a sly wink as we get out of the car and watch Reagan already spinning in circles on the sprawling jade lawn. “Our money could never stretch this far back home. We finally have what we’ve always wanted.” His warm arm circles around my waist, and a slight feeling of homesickness creeps up on me unexpected—not for our old house, but for who we were before that. “A big house. One we can finally fill with children. Reagan will love it.” He pulls me in and drops a hot kiss over the top of my head. It feels more like a cigarette burn than anything benevolent born of love.
The rest of the afternoon is lost in a bevy of boxes, with me barking out orders to a small crew of scrawny teenage boys, instructing them where to place the furniture—and them snarling, flipping me the finger when they think I’m not looking.
James pulls me in against our new granite-lined kitchen counter and sheds that Cheshire cat grin I fell in love with. “Why don’t you take a break? Maybe call your mom. Let her hear Reagan’s voice. I know she’d like that.”