Walking on Broken Glass

by Christa Allan

  “Devin and I needed to sort things out. We wanted to know what we’d be up against before we started telling everyone. We figured it’d be easier that way.”

  She told me the oncologist reported it was stage 1, which meant it hadn’t gone to the lymph nodes. “If there aren’t any cancerous cells around it, and Dr. Warriner said she doesn’t suspect there will be, the survival rate's usually one hundred percent.”

  “When are you getting it removed? Isn’t there something you can do now?”

  “The lumpectomy is scheduled for next week, and the game plan is five to seven weeks of radiation therapy, five days a week. Pray. You can pray now.”

  Instead of driving home right away, Molly and I went to the bakery shop we saw when we’d pulled into the parking lot.

  We ordered croissants with chicken salad and a large slab of carrot cake. I could’ve skipped the chicken salad, but Molly said eating for three required some protein.

  I squeezed a lemon in my water. “Molly, I’m so sorry. For weeks now, you’ve focused on me. Heck, for weeks, I’ve focused on me. And now, here you’re facing this awful news, and I feel like a slug.”

  “How could you know? Don’t be upset with yourself. Before we got the report, Devin and I thought about important stuff we had to do. Like turning the sprinklers on, changing the air conditioner filters, and dropping clothes off at the cleaners.”

  “You’re kidding.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Well, sort of. We decided to not think about it until we knew for sure. We just went on with the day to day stuff. And we prayed. I mostly prayed not to look like Carl if I had to lose my hair.”

  I almost choked on my sandwich. “Now that would be a fright. He could loan you one of those toupees he never wears. They’re in boxes in our attic. I made sure to label them because opening one of those boxes can be scary. His mother bought those things, she said, for his self-esteem. I think she didn’t like his baldness because she thought it made her seem older.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on the hair rugs. Devin said I’d make a lovely bald woman,” she laughed. Molly's voice slid into serious when she said, “I couldn’t do this without him. He's my first best friend.”

  Whatever twinge of silly jealousy vibrated in my heart, I hushed it just looking at Molly when she talked about her husband. Something inside her illuminated her face, her eyes, her body.

  She scraped the cream cheese icing off her carrot cake and spread it on my slice. This dessert thing always seemed to work out in my favor.

  “I’m not glad this happened. But it's made me realize what Devin means to me in ways I never expected. He sees in me what I can’t see in myself. Like he can reach into my soul, put it in my hand, and tell me, ‘Here's your gift. It's you.’ I don’t know how he manages to make me feel so special.” She wiped away tears and, when I saw the unabashed love in her eyes, I had to turn away for a moment. The brightness burned.

  I stopped eating. I wanted to say something, something meaningful and important, but I couldn’t. I was in unfamiliar territory.

  She ate the last bite of cake from the plate, and said, “You know what I love most about Devin? We can be alone in a closet and make one another laugh.”

  That night, as I chopped mushrooms, onions, and green peppers for my omelet, I pictured Molly's intensity this afternoon when she talked about Devin. I’d carried it with me since she’d said “alone in a closet.”

  I pushed the knife through the onion. The knife thwacked against the maple cutting board. Thwack. Another cut. Thwack. Thwack. Carl and I struggled alone in this oversized house. I moved the knife slowly through the layers as the pungent odor burned the inside of my nose. I sniffled and wiped my stinging eyes with the back of my hand.

  I finished chopping, but tears plopped on the cutting board. I’m a well of emptiness. The truth rumbled in the hollowness like an earthquake. It cracked open the walls of my heart, and sand poured through like trying to fill a sieve.

  Carl and I weren’t going to make it through this together. We had too many spaces in ourselves and in our marriage.

  We shared painful closet experiences.

  Molly and Devin shared intimacy.

  It wasn’t about the sex.

  It was about the intimacy.

  47

  So, how was your day?

  Fine, thank you.

  I’m having twins, and my friend's having cancer.

  I told Rebecca after the AA meeting that if I hadn’t been in recovery, I don’t know how I would’ve made it through that day. As usual, no-frills Rebecca reminded me pronto, “You wouldn’t have made it. You would have been drunk.”

  We talked about Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Rebecca told me to think of it as cataloging the closet of our souls. Another closet. I told her the inventory might be searching, but I couldn’t promise fearless, at least not without a drink or two or ten. The 12 Steps are clever though. The first three suck you right in, and then they slam you with this one. Right about the time you’ve got a grip on this sobriety business, they send you to a step that makes you want to dip your Big Book in a barrel of beer. Here's the deal breaker as I saw it. No Step 4. Then no Steps 5-12. Step 4 was the gatekeeper step. Without it you couldn’t climb the rest.

  A sufficient explanation for me. I wouldn’t sacrifice eight steps because I balked at spilling out my guts on paper. I’d spilled them out for years in toilets and yards all over the country.

  I called Molly and asked if she wanted to go shopping while she still had hair. “My maternity clothes won’t make it through twindom. Besides, it's not healthy for you to stay inside and think about your boob all day,” I said. Before I left, I dumped everything out of my “go to AA purse,” a large hobo, which held my Big Book, a steno pad for notes, pens, a few pieces of chocolate, and the usual wallet, lipstick, keys. Retail therapy required a smaller option, which I’d bought not long before my addiction therapy. I tossed a few essentials into my snazzy Coach metallic crossover purse, then went to my closet to find my credit card wallet. It looked more pregnant than I did. I opened it and flipped through dozens of my little plastic tickets to happiness. A euphoria I now realized I paid for some nights with my body.

  I looked at my Big Book, dumped on my bed with my other purse paraphernalia, looked at the wad of credit cards, and headed to Carl's office. I fed the credit cards to the paper shredder one by one as the steel cutters grinded their satisfaction. And with each one, I whispered a prayer for the strength to avoid temptation.

  I walked out of the house, my purse and my soul leaner.

  Carl called my cell as I turned into Molly's driveway. He said he’d left the site and would be home by dinner. He told me he needed to talk to me—one of those generic, ambiguous statements that created macramé with my internal body parts. His responses to my questions sounded clipped and abrupt, like the gardener had sheared them with hedge trimmers. I wondered if he had arrived at the same realization about our marriage. Or our lack of one.

  I didn’t tell Molly about the plastic card slaughter or Carl's news. I didn’t tell her I struggled with when and how and where to tell Carl that I wanted to leave. She needed relief from drama more than I did right now.

  We spent two hours flinging clothes around in the maternity boutique. Finally, I decided I’d burned so many calories pulling clothes on and off that I could eat an ice cream sundae at Cold Stone. Twice.

  “The mountain of outfits by the register is taller than I am. That means I’m done,” I announced when Molly walked into the dressing room. She didn’t answer me, and her face looked like it had been cast in concrete.

  I regretted thinking this would be a pleasant distraction for Molly. But before I said anything, her expression cracked a bit, and I spotted a twinge of a smile. I looked her over. Something seemed curiously skewed. “Isn’t that one of the tops I tried on?”

  “Yes, so what do you think?” She straightened the shoulders on
the white sleeveless smocked shirt she wore, then she slowly turned around.

  “Oh, you didn’t,” I said, Theresa-like, with attitude, and cracked up.

  “Oh, yes I did,” she said, and her laugh filled the dressing room.

  She’d turned the fake baby bump around so that it rested right above her fanny. We laughed all the way to the register where I paid for everything in cash.

  Molly wanted to stop in the shoe store, and I welcomed the chance to sit.

  “I wonder if it's possible to have a shoe addiction,” I mused as I ogled Christian Louboutin pumps and Stuart Weitzman flats. “Why do I love shoes? Is it something Freudian?”

  “People think making love starts in the bedroom, but it really doesn’t. It starts in the kitchen,” said Molly, ever-so-casually, as she walked around in a pair of knee-high natural suede boots while she held a pair of black vintage leather ones.

  “When did we start talking about this? And are you supposed to be that loud when you’re being so freaky?”

  “I heard ‘love’ and ‘Freud.’ Made an assumption. Oops.” She sat next to me and held out her feet so I could pull off the boots.

  “The kitchen? Really?” I didn’t know if I might have treaded on sacred ground. But Molly and I had traveled so far, maybe we found new boundaries to cross.

  She alternately grunted and yanked the other pair of boots on her feet. “I don’t mean location. Well, maybe. But Devin and I realized if we couldn’t be friends and enjoy one another's company in the kitchen, then why would we think the bedroom's going to work? I think too many couples try to start a relationship in the bedroom, then get to the kitchen and realize they don’t have anything to say to one another. That's all I meant.”

  No, Molly, that's everything.

  While I waited for Carl that evening, I bombarded God with prayer. Stalker prayer. I even called Rebecca with one of those “unspoken” prayer requests. Loops of “what if” and “maybe” careened around my brain. I asked God to give me serenity. I didn’t know what or how to pray, but I trusted God knew.

  I ordered Chinese for dinner so we wouldn’t have to go out in public. I even set the dining room table, with plates you couldn’t throw away and silverware, not plastic ware. The take-out boxes decorated the table like little gifts. Fragrant presents of ginger, peppercorns, and garlic.

  When I saw the headlights of Carl's convertible through the silk taffeta drapes in the dining room, I pushed aside the uneasiness that threatened to come between us and sat in the living room to wait for him. He opened the door, and fearsome pain and sadness walked in with him and left their footprints on every feature of his face.

  I raised my face to him. He leaned in my direction, but looked over my shoulder as I kissed his cheek. “Welcome home,” I said, and tried to decipher the worry etched in his forehead.

  “Thanks. It was a long ride,” he said and draped his suit jacket on the winged-back chair, unknotted and pulled off his tie, then folded it in half, and set it on top of his jacket. “What's for dinner?”

  “I ordered Chinese. Everything's in the dining room.”

  “Great. I’m going to wash my hands, throw some water on my face,” he informed me as he headed to our bedroom.

  Whatever distracted him rendered me invisible. He didn’t look at me; he looked through me. I filled two glasses with water, set them down by our plates, and opened the containers of ginger salmon, lemon pepper shrimp, lettuce wraps, and fried rice. My stomach growled its impatience, so I spooned some of everything in my plate. I’d just started to serve his food when he returned.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said and reached across the table so I could hand him his plate. His voice wasn’t at all boorish; in fact, it sounded like he buried a “thank you” in his words.

  We both sat, I nodded “grace” at God, and Carl adjusted his napkin.

  I plunged into the ocean of confusion. “So, you said there was something we needed to talk about.”

  He set his fork on his plate. I realized at that moment that he hadn’t cleaned his fork before he ate.

  “I wanted to wait until after dinner—”

  Maybe I should’ve worn a life jacket before I jumped. “I’m sorry. I—”

  He raised his hand. “No, don’t apologize. I didn’t expect to get home so late. We can talk now.”

  “Can we eat and talk?”

  He almost smiled. “Sure. But I need you to just listen. As in try not to ask questions right away.”

  Fried rice occupied most of the space in my mouth. I nodded. Whatever this was, it wasn’t about us. I sensed a weariness in him unconnected to me.

  “My parents, specifically my father, informed me that they’ve been in discussion with a major industrial supply chain for several months. About selling their business. Last week, the corporation made my parents an offer they said they couldn’t refuse, and they didn’t. They sold the business.”

  I swallowed my dumbfoundedness. But I could almost feel my eyelids leap to my eyebrows. My eyes felt like flashbulbs.

  “Apparently, they were about to sign an agreement to purchase, and that's when my parents invited me into the business.” He paused and looked at me. “Here's the killer part. My parents knew that even if I stayed at Morgan Management, because it's privately owned, Morgan would never offer me a percentage of their business. So Mom and Dad figured forty-nine percent of the family business was better than zero percent working somewhere else. If my parents had me on board before they made the sale, then I went as part of the agreement.”

  “Wait, I know I’m not supposed to talk, but I’m really confused.”

  He pushed his plate away. A plate he didn’t have to cover because most of his food was still on it. “Go ahead. I know it's confusing. It gets worse, so ask now.”

  Dread just tapped on my shoulder. “They pulled you away from Morgan to do this? Why didn’t they talk to you first? They’ve told you since before college that the business was yours to inherit.”

  “My father said he figured I’d never leave Morgan unless another company gave me an over-the-top offer or unless they offered me part of their business. Well, they couldn’t control an over-the-top offer, but they could lure me away with their percentage. I couldn’t buy-in, my father said, if I stayed at Morgan. So, they gave me forty-nine percent.”

  He slumped in the chair and stared at the table. “All those years my father joked that he buys and sells and doesn’t even need merchandise. And now I’m the merchandise.”

  Not once had rage crept into his voice. But quiet resignation and defeat crawled all over him.

  “They said they didn’t include me in the buy-out discussion because they didn’t want my hesitation ruining the deal for them.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. They could’ve sold a hundred percent without you.”

  “Yes, but in their minds, that meant I might never own a business. He pushed his palms into the table. “Do you mind if we sit outside? I’m not hungry, and …”

  I carried my plate and glass outside to the patio table. Carl lit citronella candles to discourage the mosquitoes. He pulled out a chair for me, then sat in the one next to mine. The thick night air closed in around us.

  He unbuttoned his shirt sleeves and folded the cuffs up— equal widths of course. “I devoted my life to them, to being the son they wanted.” Carl sounded broken. “I went to the college they wanted me to attend. I wasn’t given a chance in their business when I graduated. I didn’t question their decision. Then they sell me out. Manipulated the entire chain of events. Orchestrated it all.”

  A coil of anger wound itself around the solid brick of resentment in my gut, and I wanted to fling the entire contraption at Carl's parents. But a familiar breeze stirred in my consciousness. I leaned back as Carl continued.

  “In fact, that night at the club when they found out you’d been at Brookforest for drinking, they wanted to talk to me because they knew this deal was in the works. Hate to say it, but
they didn’t care about you. They were afraid of any scandal. That's what they told me that night. They wanted to know if very many people knew.” At this point in the telling, Carl's demeanor shifted. His indignation resurrected his betrayal.

  “That depends if you count the AA people,” I said, “but we don’t share last names. Lucky for your parents.”

  I pushed a chair over and propped my feet up. We never did install that fountain we talked about. It would have made for a much more soothing backdrop than the neighbor's kids jumping like human popcorn on their trampoline in the yard behind us. In a few years, there might be payback from this backyard. I consoled myself with that.

  “What really infuriates me is they told me they did this for me,” he said. “To help me. To give me a chance at a life like theirs. They were saving me from myself. And what they were really saying is that I was too dumb to make my own decisions. They don’t understand what I’m so upset about. My mother suggested I was ungrateful.”