Greg knows where I tend to sit, so I make my way over to the small table in the corner and pull out my laptop.
And I sit staring at nothing in particular, fidgeting and rubbing my left ring finger with my thumb as if I’m twisting the band that no longer sits there. A tan line from working outside is all that remains of the ring that once symbolized a relationship that had lasted more than half my life.
I’m 32 and going through a divorce, I say to myself. Don’t break down here, Stell, that bastard isn’t worth your tears. Just a few more days.
“Stella?” I hear his voice before I realize he’s set the coffee and scone on the table in front of me. There’s concern in his voice and when I look up I’m wilted by the intense gaze in his thunderous blue eyes.
I’d know those eyes anywhere.
The last time I saw them in person, we were nine. And he left without even saying much of a goodbye.
“Brian, come find me! Count to a thousand and then find me, okay? No peeking this time!” I run away as fast as I can because I know he never actually counts to a thousand. He skips numbers, and that’s not fair, but it makes it more fun for me. I have to hide as fast as I can before he looks up and starts searching the yard.
“One, two, twelve, thirty-seven ...” I hear his voice drift away as I run to the porch and slide between the house and a large potted plant. “Ready or not, here I come!”
I’m crouched down so he can’t see me. He wanders close to the porch, but doesn’t come up on it before turning and walking toward the swing set. I think he’s giving up on the game, which isn’t like him, but he must be. He’s climbing up onto the swing as I scoot out from my hiding spot and make my way off the porch.
“Brian?” He’s scaring me. We always play until we’ve found each other and he’s never not found me before. Something isn’t right; he looks sad. My Brian is never sad — he’s the happiest boy on Earth, but right now he’s crying and I don’t know if I can fix him. “What happened? Did you get hurt?”
I’m just a little girl, but suddenly I feel the weight of the world crashing down on my shoulders as dread settles in my belly. It happens every time something bad happens, like my body knows before my brain does.
“My parents are moving. I’m moving away, Stella. Mom said something about a transfer at Dad’s job, so we have to leave. We’re leaving for Tennessee on Tuesday.”
It’s already Sunday.
My best friend is leaving me in two days and my heart is breaking.
He looks up at me, pain in his eyes, and the tears fall like rain from both of us as we cling to one another on the swing in my back yard.
I’d like to say Keith was my first love and my hardest loss, but I’d be lying.
It was Brian. It has always been Brian.
My breath catches in my throat as I suck in the shock and try to keep myself from falling apart.
“Oh my God.” I stare at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving. This has to be a trick of the mind because there is no fucking way the boy from my past is the man sliding into the chair across from me. But I know it’s him. I’ve seen the family pictures from the Christmas cards his mom sent to my mom for years after they moved, but for him to be here, now, has me a little baffled.
“How are you here?” I whisper, hoping he doesn’t answer.
Am I breathing? I think I forgot how to breathe. I might be having a panic attack, I tell myself.
“What happened, Stell? You look so lost,” Brian says as he reaches out to break off a piece of the pastry he set down just moments ago. Popping the sugary morsel into his mouth, he looks at me sadly. “The girl I knew always had a smile on her face.”
I let out a stilted laugh. We were so young. We knew each other before we knew what heartache was, and now here he was entering my life again right in the midst of the second biggest one of my life without knowing he caused the first.
It feels like a daydream. He’s not actually reentering my life with such minimal effort as if we’ve been sitting across from one another sharing pastries and coffee our entire adult lives. It can’t be real.
I close my eyes against the hallucination and open them slowly.
Brian is sitting across from me and this just feels effortless. Maybe I’m in shock. This is what going into shock is like. It must be. But it makes it so easy to just tell him — offer him my broken, battered, and bruised heart on a platter and see if he can fix it like he used to when we were kids.
“The girl you knew ... she grew up. She grew up, thought she was in love, married him, and just found out he’s a lying, cheating rat bastard who needs to be burned at the stake,” I say quietly, feeling the hot tears slide down my face. Months of waiting for my paper marriage to finally end pool on the table in front of me. “My divorce will be final in three days. Friday. I just have to get through Friday.”
Wiping the evidence of my failure as a wife from my face, I look up. I look into the most precious gift I could have ever been given in this moment and I swear I hear angels sing. God, that sounds so cheesy, but right now all I can think about is how he’s found me and it’s the first time Brian has found me in 23 years — it would be sinful to think there hadn’t been some kind of divine intervention to bring him back to me.
He thoughtfully pops another piece of scone in his mouth, a thoughtful expression on his handsome face.
Reaching across the table, Brian takes my hand in his. It’s the most comfortable I’ve felt since the day we sat huddled together on the swing set in my parent’s backyard.
“Lying and cheating, you say? He never deserved you then.”
Stella
Chapter Six
“Stella, wait! Can we talk for a minute?” Keith yells bounding down the courthouse steps after me.
“For what? What do I have to wait for? Keith, you took my trust, my love, my devotion and threw it in my face. You walked through our front door, packed your shit and left me. I’ve stood by your side since we were twelve. I was there through high school and college graduations, and your first job and the first promotion. We stood by one another through purchasing a home and building a life!” I realize I’m screaming at him and everything I’ve bottled up over the last several months is coming out now that we aren’t in front of a judge. Instead we’re in front of a courthouse and there are people looking at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. Someone will probably get a deputy from inside if I don’t calm the fuck down.
I haven’t lost my mind — I just lost a husband, I tell myself as I take a deep breath. “Tell me ... where did I go wrong?”
I need to know if it was something I did because as much as I want to put all the blame on him, I can’t. This marriage was a work in progress from the time we were kids, and now, per the judge inside that courthouse behind my now ex-husband, that same marriage no longer exists. I finally feel free to ask the questions I haven’t asked anyone.
“Please,” I whisper to him. “Tell me what I didn’t do right.”
“That’s just it, Stell. You were perfect. You just weren’t perfect for me. I think after so much time together — our childhood and being a couple basically from the time we were kids right up through college — I think we followed the natural progression. We did what was expected of us. We graduated college, you went on for your master’s, I started working, and then the next step was to get married. It’s not what you want to hear, I know.”
He’s absolutely right, that’s not what I want to hear. But, I won’t cry. I won’t do it, because he’s right. It was what was expected after all those years being “Stella and Keith” to become “Mr. and Mrs.” Too many people expected it and Keith and I for so long were in the habit of doing things to make other people happy.
In the end, making everyone else happy, that’s what destroyed us.
“I get it, Keith,” I say on a sigh. “I know and now you have an entirely new life. But you are part of almost every memory I have since I was twelve. Learning to move on fro
m here is going to be and has been the hardest part because you were so ingrained in everything I did until six months ago when you walked away without so much as an explanation. I thought I at least deserved an explanation.”
“She found out she was pregnant.”
Stunned, I stand there. Did he really just blurt out that he got his mistress pregnant and that’s why he left me? Maybe I didn’t hear him correctly, so just for the sake of clarification I stutter through a “what?”
Taking a deep breath he begins, “Beth and I were just coworkers. There was nothing between us until we started working closely on a project for the firm. We were working longer hours together at the office and nothing turned into something.”
What do I say to that?
“We started having lunch together most days, and then we were assigned another project and had to go out of town together about a year ago.”
Why does he look devastated? As if baring his soul and making this confession is a consolation to me. It’s not. It’s been going on even longer than I thought and I was completely in the dark. My husband had been stepping out on me for over a year and I never questioned all those signs. There is something fundamentally wrong with me. It’s the only logical explanation.
“About seven months ago,” he continues. I’m supposed to be listening. Right. “Beth walked into work nearly hysterical and pulled me into the storage room and told me she was late. Probably not a detail you need,” he says, wincing.
“This is why you didn’t contest anything in the divorce? You didn’t want the house?” Oh my God. So many questions are running through my mind, but my brain comes to a screeching halt when I realize he said “seven months ago.” It’s like getting a bag full of bricks to the face.
“You’re going to be a dad. In a month?”
I can’t keep the pain out of my voice, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to start crying now after being so strong through all of this — his deserting me, the double life and the whirlwind divorce were enough to make my head spin — but he’s about to be a father, too, and with that revelation he should have just torn my heart from my chest while it was still beating.
“Yeah. She’s due three weeks from today,” he says it quietly, practicing using his kid gloves already.
“I won’t break, Keith. This won’t break me,” I say, hugging him briefly out of habit. “I’m glad you’ve found someone you can be happy with, but I can’t have this conversation anymore.”
I continue descending the courthouse steps, walking away from everything that used to be and confused about how I missed the fork in the road of my life.
Today, I tell myself pulling my phone from my purse to text Steph, today is going to require a lot of wine. Today I’m just going to get myself royally fucked up.
***
“I grabbed two bottles of red and three white, and a six-pack of cupcakes,” Stephanie says as she graces my pajama-clad presence with her excellent timing.
I sigh, audibly, and the smile on her face falls.
“We aren’t celebrating your divorce being final, are we?” She takes in the scenery — crumpled tissues, my hair up in a messy bun, the eyeliner streaks down my face — and cringes when she sees the photo album from our wedding day open to a picture of me staring into Keith’s eyes like nothing else in the world mattered.
And on that day, nothing else did matter because I had been madly in love with him and we were finally starting our adult lives together as a cohesive unit. The dam breaks loose again and I choke back a sob.
“I swear, Steph, I was going to celebrate this. I was going to relish in my freedom, but it’s a Friday night and I’m single for the first time since I was a kid.” I shudder as I try to compose myself and blow my nose, again, in the least ladylike fashion. I’m just so done with the pretense that I am a lady.
I’m fucking miserable.
Unwrapping myself from the tangle of legs and blankets, I stand up on the couch and step down in my sister’s direction holding out a hand — if she knows what’s good for her, the cupcakes will come before the wine.
“No, actually, I want the whites, too,” I say and gather them in my left arm as I head to the kitchen in the back of the house.
Sniffle. Sniffle. Sniffle. This has to stop. I can’t let this control me.
“I took Monday and Tuesday off. There’s no way I can go to the office after this and get the sympathy looks from my staff. They’ve been great to say nothing about it, but we’ve been busy, so there’s been no time to poke and prod into my life,” I say popping the cork out of a bottle of wine from the Finger Lakes.
“Would you like a glass, you fucking wino?” Steph cries out as I take a long pull from the bottle.
“I needed to make sure it was good.” And it is. I blow my nose one more time and let out a breath I feel I’ve been holding for years. “Okay. I’m ready. Ask me what happened.”
“For starters, I am so sorry I wasn’t there with you. Mom and I would have both been there, but ... work. It fucks everything up,” she unnecessarily explains. “So, tell me. What happened? Was he remorseful? Did you punch him in the junk? Ooh, was the whore there?”
Steph has wanted me to run Keith over with the car or punch him in the nuts or hire the mob to bust his kneecaps since I found out about his infidelity. But can I really consider Beth a whore? I mean, she didn’t take money from him that I’m aware of, so in the literal sense it’s doubtful she’s a “whore.”
“I need more wine,” I say pouring a glass, shaking the English major thoughts from my head and taking a deep breath. “He got her pregnant.”
And I wait for it to hit her, watching as the words slap her square in the face. This must be what watching a boxing match in slow motion looks like because I swear I see her face morph before my eyes from my sweet baby sister, who only wants to avenge my honor, to The Hulk. Stephanie just turned into the mother fucking Hulk in front of my eyes.
I cringe as she lets out an ear piercing, “He did what?”
“I’m just going to take these with me while you process that,” I say, walking away with my bottle of wine and the cupcakes so I can plant my ass firmly back on the couch.
I’ve known this since this morning and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea my very recent ex-husband is going to be a father in less than a month.
Following me into the living room, Steph sets my glass down on the coffee table and takes a seat in the overstuffed armchair across from me.
“Ask,” I tell her.
“How far along?”
“Due in three weeks.” I take a long sip from my glass and top it off with more from the bottle.
“Work relationship?”
“Long hours. Put on projects together. Business trip to Pitt.” Another sip.
“Due in three weeks.”
“Yup.”
“Fuck.”
“My sentiments exactly,” I say holding the package of cupcakes out to her.
“Here’s to single ladies,” Steph says raising her pastry. “May we be loud and obnoxious. May we forget our manners in spite of our mother. May we have a lot of filthy sex with men who won’t break our hearts.”
That was that. The toast to end all toasts. The wine began flowing and didn’t stop until Steph decided sleep was more important and passed out on the living room floor, and despite my fairly drunken state I cleaned. It’s been my modus operandi since high school — stress and alcohol turn me into a cleaning freak, so here I am, drunk at 10 p.m. and cleaning my house.
It doesn’t matter that I hadn’t slept well in the weeks leading up to the last day of our marriage or that I had enough wine pumping through my bloodstream to force me into a deep sleep for a month.
Sleep wasn’t going to happen tonight.
Brian
Chapter Seven
Stella hadn’t been back to the Jumping Bean since the day I sat down across from her and essentially ate my way back into her life. I love pastries. It c
ouldn’t be helped.
I spent the next couple of days trying to get her out of my head. The last thing I wanted to do was look like a stalker going after easy prey. I mean, the girl was going through a divorce and I walked back into her life after how many years? To anyone who didn’t know we’d had a history — as innocent as that history was — they’d think I was setting my sights on the town’s newest divorcee.
I wasn’t, though. Maybe I was. I came back to this little college town specifically because I was hoping to find her again. I’ll blame it on fate if I have to; I didn’t know she was married, let alone getting divorced.
There was just so much hurt in her eyes. The pain was palpable. I was watching her eyes the day I told her we were moving all over again. It was that kind of pain. At least twice now she’d been put through this kind of agony. I hated seeing it on her. I hated seeing her hurt so much she couldn’t even react to me sitting there.
She reacted, but it was to what was going on within her instead of me, my presence.
I just kept thinking, “It’s been more than 20 years. Why isn’t she happy to see me after losing touch?” I thought that over and over until she told me about the divorce and then my heart shattered for her. There was a storm brewing deep within her and because I’d kept my distance for months, watching her order up front and interact with her friend and sister, I was under the impression everything was on the up-and-up.
It wasn’t and I just keep wanting to kick myself for not seeing that from where I’d catch my glimpses of her from the kitchen.
I was deep in thought Friday morning — the day she said her divorce was going to be final — when Greg snapped me back to reality with a towel to the back of my head. He’s lucky I’ve known him as long as I have because anyone else would have been laid out on the floor and had their walking papers thrown out the back door after them.
“Dude. Seriously, what has gotten into you? Help me with these muffins or get the hell out of my kitchen,” he said pulling open the oven door. It was half-past six in the morning and Greg was trying to get the baked goods ready for the display case, which meant a lot of cussing, swearing and hand-washing because he forgets we have to follow health department standards and constantly licks batter off his fingers.
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