The Other Mothers (Chop, Chop Series Book 5)

by L. N. Cronk

  She didn’t answer.

  “It was a lie of omission,” I told her and she looked down at her feet. A loud crash came from downstairs and we could hear Lily, our youngest child, begin to cry. Laci looked back up at me. I ignored Lily and said, “You should have told me.”

  She looked at me for a long moment and then nodded. We could still hear Lily wailing, but Laci didn’t move. I knew she wanted to go to her, but that she was choosing me over Lily.

  And I also knew that she was telling me the truth . . . she hadn’t slept with Tanner.

  “Go see what happened,” I finally said, tipping my head toward the door.

  “Are you sure?” Laci asked.

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “I’ll be right down.”

  She looked at me hesitantly for a moment, but then turned and went out the door. I watched after her as she disappeared.

  I still had a lot of questions. We were going to be up late that evening, talking deep into the night, arguing, justifying, explaining, pleading. Making up. Working things out. And there was no doubt in my mind that we were indeed going to work things out, but . . .

  What if I’d found out that they’d slept together?

  I was still staring at the doorway, into the empty hall when this thought came into my mind. The sounds of my birthday party and of Lily’s quieting cries were drifting to me from downstairs.

  Downstairs.

  My whole life was downstairs: Laci, Dorito, Amber and Lily.

  I asked myself again: What if I’d found out that they had slept together?

  And then I answered myself with what I knew to be the truth: We still would make up. We still would work things out.

  After all, what choice did I have?

  It wasn’t as if I could ever live without a single one of them.

  ~ ~ ~

  THE FIRST THING I did when I got downstairs was to find Lily. Lily was four years old and had been adopted from the same orphanage that Dorito had been. She’d been born completely deaf, two years ago she’d received cochlear implants and could now hear and talk. She didn’t talk anywhere near as much as Dorito did, but then again, who did? I scooped her up.

  “What were you crying for?” I asked.

  She furrowed her brow and pointed at Laci’s mom who was on her hands and knees, mopping something up off the kitchen floor.

  “Uh-oh,” Lily said, solemnly.

  “Did you break something?” I asked her.

  She nodded and stuck her lip out.

  “Did you get hurt?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, then,” I said, kissing her cheek, “don’t worry about it.”

  She glanced at her grandma one more time, but then gave me a smile. I kissed her again and put her down. I looked around for Tanner, but couldn’t find him anywhere, so I found Laci instead.

  “Where’s Tanner?” I asked.

  “He was gone by the time I got back down here,” she said quietly.

  I decided that was fine by me.

  It was after ten o’clock by the time everyone had left and all the kids were in bed. I brushed my teeth and came out of the bathroom to find Laci sitting up in bed, waiting to start our inevitable discussion.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I began. “How could you keep something like that from me?”

  “Well for one thing,” she said quietly, “I knew you’d overreact.”

  “Overreact?!” I cried.

  “Yes,” she said calmly, as if I had just made her point for her exactly.

  “That doesn’t give you the right to lie to me about it for seven years.”

  “I didn’t lie,” she tried again.

  “Semantics, Laci.”

  She sighed reluctantly.

  “So you’ve kept this from me all this time just because you thought I was going to be mad?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” she hesitated. “That’s not the only reason.”

  “What else?”

  “It’s not something I like to think about,” she said finally, looking down at her hands which were in her lap, “much less talk about.”

  “Why not?” I asked, sitting by the foot of the bed. If this conversation was suddenly going to turn into a discussion about what a lousy boyfriend Tanner had been then I very much wanted to hear all about it.

  “It was one of the worst times of my life,” she went on.

  “What did he do?” I asked with growing alarm.

  “No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “Not because of anything Tanner did . . . because of what I did.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I don’t even know where to start,” she said, glancing up at me.

  I sat quietly until she figured it out.

  “It was really hard that first year after Greg died,” she finally said, shaking her head, “but I always had hope. As awful as it was, I never really doubted that God was in control . . . that He had a plan. I wasn’t real happy about His plan, mind you, but I still had complete faith that somehow He was going to work everything out for good.”

  “That’s a whole lot better than I was doing,” I muttered and she gave me a small smile.

  “Even though Greg wasn’t there to encourage me anymore,” she said, “I could almost still hear his voice in my head, reminding me to be faithful to God and to trust Him and have patience and not to doubt Him.

  “So even though you and I weren’t dating anymore,” she went on, “I believed that if I was patient enough, God was going to heal you and that we’d be together . . . just like He’d told me.”

  “And?”

  “You completely stopped coming home,” she answered.

  “Oh.”

  “And once you were gone I started doubting Him. I doubted everything I’d ever believed and I felt so cut off from God. I’ve never felt so alone before in my entire life. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced.”

  “And then what happened?” I asked when she didn’t go on.

  “Tanner helped me get through it.”

  “I’ll just bet he did.” I glowered at her.

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “He was there for you.”

  “Yeah,” she nodded. “He was there for me.”

  “That’s the oldest trick in the book, Laci! Don’t you know that? Being there for someone when they’re on the rebound?! How long did he wait until he started going after you? Spring break?”

  “He didn’t . . . he didn’t ‘go after me’.”

  “Right.”

  “He didn’t, David. I went after him.”

  “You went after him?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I needed a friend.”

  A friend?

  “You were just friends?” I asked hopefully.

  “No,” she said even quieter.

  “You were more than just friends?”

  She nodded.

  “How much more?”

  “David–”

  “How much more?” I asked again. “I wanna know. How much more?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, throwing her hands into the air. “More! Okay? We were more than just friends.”

  “How far did you go with him?”

  She rolled her eyes at me, crossed her arms, and leaned back against the headboard.

  “I want to know what you did with him,” I insisted.

  “Nothing more than you ever did with Samantha,” she said, angrily.

  I thought about that for a minute. Laci knew everything about my relationship with my first girlfriend, Samantha. If she and Tanner hadn’t done anything more than me and Sam . . . well, I guessed that wasn’t too bad.

  “That doesn’t make any sense though,” I told her, shaking my head. “Why would Tanner have gone out with you for a year and a half when his main reason for dating someone is-”

  “It was different with me,” she interrupted.

  “Different?”

  “He loved me,�
�� she said quietly.

  “No, he didn’t,” I scoffed. “Tanner tells every girl he ever meets that so they’ll jump into bed with him.”

  “No,” she insisted. “He only said it to me.”

  “And you really believe that?” I asked doubtfully.

  “I know that,” she said softly, but with certainty. “He loved me.”

  And then she dropped her head. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she was crying. I didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “Did you love him?” I finally asked. She wouldn’t look back up at me, but she nodded.

  I had asked her if she’d slept with him, but it had never occurred to me to ask her if she’d loved him. Now that I had, I honestly didn’t know which thought bothered me more.

  “Why’d you break up?” I finally asked.

  She looked back up at me with tears in her eyes. “God finally showed me that I wasn’t following His will.”

  “And?”

  “And we broke up.”

  I should have found a lot of comfort in the fact that God so clearly had a plan for my life, but instead I found myself angry.

  “So, basically, if you’d done what you wanted to do instead of what God wanted you to do, you’d probably be married to Tanner right now instead of me.”

  “Don’t do this, David.”

  “Do what?”

  “Don’t turn this into a pity party for yourself.”

  “A pity party?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “No matter what happens, you somehow manage to only think about how it affects you!”

  “I do not!”

  “Yes, you do!” she argued. “Ever since you’ve found out about this, all you’ve done is feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Well excuse me for not liking the idea that maybe my wife would rather be with my best friend instead of with me!”

  “Do you honestly believe that?” she cried. “These past seven years – everything we’ve been through – every way I’ve ever loved you? Do you honestly think that I’ve been secretly yearning for Tanner all that time?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Have you?”

  She stared at me in disbelief for a moment and then got up and stalked out of the room. I sighed and fell back onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  I laid there and thought about what Laci had said about me. After about ten minutes – in a rare moment of maturity – I actually wondered if she was right. Was I overreacting? Was I just feeling sorry for myself ?

  Possibly . . .

  I got up off the bed and went to find Laci.

  I went downstairs. She wasn’t in the living room. The basement was dark. Where could she be? I worried for a brief moment, but then I had a sudden inspiration and headed back up the stairs.

  Laci and I had been married for almost seven years and (I’m ashamed to say that) during that time, there had been plenty of nights where we’d gone to bed so angry at each other that we’d slept with our backs to one another, each of us hugging our own side of the bed so as to not touch the other. Sometimes one of us would wake up in the middle of the night to find that an arm or a leg had strayed over into the other’s territory. We’d pull the wayward limb back to our own side and then struggle to fall back asleep, all the while reliving the row in our mind and justifying whatever it was that we might have said to the other.

  The next morning we would only speak to each other in short, curt sentences (“Do you know where Dorito’s gloves are?”, “Is there any orange juice left?”), until finally one of us would attempt to make a joke. That would be the beginning of the end of our fight, and then – eventually – we would officially make up.

  So I can’t exactly say that Laci and I had never gone to bed mad at each other, but I can say that we’d never been so angry that one of us had decided to sleep on the couch in my office.

  Now, however, that was exactly where I found Laci. She had pulled the sleeper sofa out of the couch and made it up with sheets, blankets and a pillow from the closet in my office. She was under the covers, her back to the door, pretending to be asleep.

  “Laci.”

  She ignored me.

  “Laci.”

  “What?” she finally answered, not turning toward me.

  I sat down on the floor and rested my head on the bed. I felt like a dog.

  “You know what I think?” I asked her.

  “I can only imagine,” she said dryly.

  “I think that you love me very much.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “And I think that I’m the luckiest man in the world and that I couldn’t ask for anything more than what I’ve got.”

  She turned around and faced me.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “And what have you done with my husband?”

  “Really,” I smiled. “You’re the best wife anyone could ever ask for and I know that. And I know that you love me.”

  Her face softened.

  “I’ve never wished I was with Tanner instead of you,” she told me earnestly, propping herself up on her elbows.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t even let myself think about him like that,” she went on.

  “I know.”

  She smiled back at me, looking relieved.

  “Do you let yourself think about me like that?” I asked her with what I hoped was a rakish grin.

  “Occasionally,” she smiled coyly.

  “Oh, really?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Wanna tell me about it?” I asked.

  She nodded again and I got up off the floor.

  ~ ~ ~

  LATER, STILL ON the bed in my office, I lay with Laci’s head on my shoulder. She was sound asleep, but I was wide awake, thinking about everything she had told me. Either Tanner had lied to her or Laci was quite possibly the only girl he had ever loved. I thought about that for a while. If he had loved her, how long had he loved her after they’d broken up?

  Or did he still love her?

  Oddly, the thought that he might still love her didn’t bother me. I pressed my cheek to the top of her head. Laci was mine. She was always going to be mine. Every night she was going to curl up next to me and every morning she was going to wake up beside me. I thought how if Tanner ever did find someone to share his life with they would never compare to Laci. I turned my head and pressed my lips to her hair. She stirred slightly on my shoulder and I tightened my grip around her body.

  I wondered how Tanner felt when he was around us. How did it feel for him to watch me put my hand on Laci’s knee while we were eating dinner? How did it feel for him to watch me kiss her goodbye when he picked me up to go hunting? How had it felt for him to stand beside me in church as I had married her?

  Maybe Tanner didn’t care – maybe he’d never loved her. Or maybe he had loved her once, but had gotten over her a long, long time ago, never giving a second thought to the feelings he’d once had for her.

  Maybe.

  But somehow I doubted it . . . Laci wasn’t someone you could get over easily.

  And as I lay there with Laci in my arms, trying to fall asleep, I found myself feeling something for Tanner that I’d never experienced before.

  I felt sorry for him.

  I couldn’t remember a time that I hadn’t known Tanner. Like Laci, he’d always been a part of my life.

  In every way Tanner was bigger than life. He was funny – always joking around – and had the sharpest wit of anybody I knew. He was smart, too. I may have always teased him about being a big, dumb jock, but both of us knew that it wasn’t true. He’d been offered football scholarships at several universities including Notre Dame and Auburn, but had surprised everybody by accepting one from a less prestigious football school much closer to home.

  Tanner was at least six and a half feet tall (more likely closer to six-seven). He was probably pushing two hundred and seventy pounds and every bit of it was muscle. During high school Tanner had been an all-star athlete,
excelling in every sport he’d ever played. I’d lost count of how many times he’d been voted the MVP in one sport or another.

  In football, Tanner would sometimes go for an entire game with only a break at halftime because he would play both defense and offense – defensive end, linebacker, tight end – whatever they’d needed. In basketball he’d averaged over twenty-five points per game and had erased over half of the existing school records. (He finished his high school basketball career with over two thousand points, seven hundred rebounds, and more than four hundred assists). In baseball, each of the three records he’d set (for most home runs in a season, highest number of no-hitters in a career, and most consecutive no-hitters) had stood for nine years – until his little brother, Jordan, had come along and shattered them all.

  When we’d needed to pull up the carpet in our living room, Tanner had been there – hauling it off to the dump on a rented trailer that he’d hitched to his truck. He’d brought stones over and helped me put in a patio in the backyard. Last year on my birthday he’d spent the entire day helping my dad install my new hot tub with a deck around it.

  I’d spent thousands of hours with Tanner – hunting, fishing, playing racquetball and cards, skiing, shooting, swimming, lifting weights, canoeing, kayaking. We’d even tried sailing once. I could hardly remember a fun time in my life that Tanner hadn’t been a part of – but now I didn’t know if I would ever be able to face him again.

  God, I prayed, how am I ever going to get past this? You know I’m not good at this kind of thing. The thought of him kissing her, holding her, loving her . . . How am I ever going to look at Tanner again without thinking about that – without hating him? I’ll try – I really will, but if I’m gonna be mature about this, too, then You’re going to have to step in and help.

  I sighed and looked up at the dark ceiling and then turned onto my side, away from Laci, and gazed out the window. Light from the streetlamp outside reflected off of a bottle that was sitting on a table at the end of the couch. It was nail polish, and (although I couldn’t really make it out in the dark), I knew that it was a little, clear bottle with pink hearts on it. Purple polish with silver glitter.