Tear You Apart

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“Look, I don’t know all the details, okay? It wasn’t really my business. I guess she’s going to make payments to him or something. And forfeit her share of the retirement. Whatever, Bethie, what do you care? You don’t even like Jeanine.”

That’s not quite true. I don’t know her well enough to not like her. I wince a little at the spurs of burnt umber spiking my name the way he says it. I’ve never liked it when he calls me that, but he still does no matter how many times I ask him not to. “Why are they getting divorced?”

“People grow apart,” Ross says stiffly, in a way that tells me he knows more than he’s letting on, but won’t share it.

I let it go. I don’t really care. My stomach’s in knots, and it has nothing to do with the end of the Presleys’ marriage.

“So she’s saddled with the kids and the house and having to figure out a way to not only get back into the job market to pay for all of it, but she sacrificed her future retirement in order to do it. That’s what it comes down to in the end? Money? After how many years together, two kids...” I pause. “A dog.”

Ross doesn’t notice the layer of sarcasm I put into the word. “Money matters, Beth.”

“Only when you don’t have enough.” The words slip out of me like puffs of black smoke.

He laughs at that. Takes my hand. Strokes his thumb over the palm in the way I told him once, years ago, turned me on. It doesn’t anymore.

“You don’t have to worry about money, honey. I’ll always take care of you.” He laughs again. Making light. “Unless you leave me, of course.”

Nothing about this feels light to me. Not the birthday hitting me harder than I was expecting. Not the way my world has tipped on end and I don’t know how to stand up straight. My fingers curl inside my husband’s to squeeze his hand tight.

“What would happen then?” I ask.

Ross kisses the back of my hand, his breath warm and moist and sending a shiver through me that’s not from arousal. “Oh,” he says with a smile, to show me he’s joking, though I know him well enough to know he’s serious, “I’d make sure you get nothing.”

Chapter Nine

If there’s ever a person who tells you in all their years of marriage they’ve never wondered what it would be like to walk out, you’re talking to a liar. I’d thought it before, when the girls were infants and Ross traveled so much and worked such long hours that I was made a single parent by default. He’d embraced fatherhood with the enthusiasm he had for his golf game. He loved his daughters with everything he had. He simply wasn’t there.

Things got better, as they do when children get older and the constant stream of diapers and feedings eases. Ross was still gone a lot, but the girls and I found our rhythm and routine. I was the taskmaster, he was the guy who came around and treated them to ice cream instead of dinner and brought exotic souvenirs for them to squeal over. It wasn’t so different from the lives of most of our friends. It worked.

My children are grown, getting ready to graduate from college, moving on to jobs and internships and adult lives. The house that had seemed perfect for the four of us now seems too big, too quiet. Too empty. My husband still travels, still works long hours, still spends his leisure time in pursuits that have nothing to do with me. And...what have I done?

I fucked another man. Without a second thought and, so far, without remorse. I’d have done it again, if Will hadn’t so ungracefully extricated himself from the future possibilities.

I’d thought about leaving my husband before. But am I thinking about it now? Sitting at my kitchen table and staring out at my perfectly manicured yard, then around the room at the nearly new appliances, the cabinets we’d just had redone, the pictures of fruit on the walls, I don’t think so.

Ross slides a mug of coffee in front of me. He takes his black, and that’s how he always serves mine even though I don’t. “Morning. What are you up to today?”

“Work.” I’ve worked for over ten years, and he still asks me—when he remembers. As if I have a long social calendar full of mani-pedi appointments and tennis lessons instead of a job.

“Here or the city?”

“Philadelphia’s a city, too, you know,” I tell him.