It's Not About You

by Olivia Reid

  Tonight I planned on teaching him how to cook clam linguini. It was light, simple, and easy. He found the right pots and pans and did the work as I gave directions. I melted the butter and brushed it on the thick cut bread.

  "I thought you were making garlic bread," Michael said as I slipped the cookie sheet of buttery goodness into the oven.

  "I am. You just watch. Now drain that pasta. Chop, chop!"

  Once we had the clam sauce with the linguini I pulled the bread out, sliced up a couple of peeled garlic cloves and started rubbing the cloves on the browned bread. Michael did the same thing and within seconds the garlic released its smelly goodness.

  We ate dinner at the table, with water, wine, some sweet tea and a pot of coffee keeping warm. He talked about looking for this cabin and getting Kyle to help him.

  "I'm surprised he didn't invite himself here."

  Michael wiped his mouth and chin. Clam linguini could be messy. "He almost did. I have to give him a review on this cabin. Apparently he and some friends want to rent a cabin for December."

  My phone buzzed and I grabbed my purse off the other end of the table. I realized I hadn't bothered to look at it since we left.

  The chime was Tanae specific, so I knew it was a text from her. In fact there were five texts from Tanae. None of them said what was wrong.

  Mom, call me.

  Mom, where r u?

  Y aren't u calling me?

  Y r u ignoring me?

  This is important!

  "Is everything okay?"

  I shook my head and gave Michael a warm smile. "No. I have an eighteen year old on the verge of Nineteen. I'll be right back." I pressed Tanae's profile to call and walked out the front door and into…cold!

  "MOM!"

  "Hey…what is wrong with you? What is it?"

  "Why weren't you texting me?"

  Because I'm with my boyfriend. No…that wasn't going to fly. "I have a life, Tanae. What's so important?"

  "I need you to go pick up Phil."

  I just…I pulled the phone back and looked at the face and then put it back to my ear. "What?"

  "Phil's car broke down and he's stuck downtown near Centennial Park."

  Again…I just… "And you want me to get in my car and go pick him up?"

  "Yes."

  "Where are his parents?"

  "In Marietta."

  I rubbed at my face as the outside lights came on. "Tanae, I can't drop what I'm doing and go pick up Phil."

  "Why not?" Her voice reached a slight level of angst-y hysteria. "Mom, don't ruin this for me. I told him you'd go get him."

  "Well, you shouldn't have done that. I'm in the middle of something and I can't leave. He needs to call his parents."

  "Maahhhhhm…"

  How do they do that? Turn a single word into something with eight syllables? "Tanae, why can't he call his parents?" I waited for a few seconds. "He's doing something he's not supposed to be doing, isn't he?"

  "It's not like that."

  "Tanae…"

  "Okay he took his brother's car while he's overseas and it broke down. If his parents find out what he did they'll kick him out!"

  "No they won't. They might not be happy with him, but they won't kick him out."

  "Yes they will!"

  "Tanae…did he tell you they will?"

  "No…yes… "

  I felt Michael's hand on my arm and I nearly jumped out of my skin and down the mountain. I hadn't heard him come out the door. "Do we need to go?"

  Had he heard me? Had he been listening in? Och…no, idiot. This wasn't like the phone at home with multiple extensions. I knew he was just being a great guy but Tanae had just made me mad. "No. We're staying here," I said, not even thinking about Tanae on the phone.

  "Who are you talking to?"

  "No one. Tanae, call him back and tell him your mother is busy and can't come get you. He needs to call his own mother."

  "Who are you with? Is that Kyle?"

  "Tanae, good night." I disconnected and shut the damn thing off.

  Michael stood beside me. He kept a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. "You haven't told her about us, have you?"

  "No."

  "Come talk to me, Grace."

  "I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "Because you don't have kids." I finally turned and looked at him. "Do you?"

  He shook his head. "No."

  Michael looked worried. I didn't like that look on his face. I was the one making him worry. But he was smart. Damn smart. "Did you know I didn't know that for sure?"

  "Yeah. There's a lot we don't know about each other, even after a month." He went to the Ranger and popped open the back. He reached inside and pulled a small sack out. I'd seen it earlier and he'd said to leave it.

  When he came back to me he took my hand and pulled me to the cabin. "You grab the wine, I'll get the cheesecake and we'll meet at the fireplace. And then," he paused as we stopped at the front door. "We talk."

  Michael stared at me as we sat on the floor in front of the fireplace. Empty cheesecake plates, forks and wine glasses littered the stone hearth and I held my coffee mug in my hands. The wind had picked up outside and I was trying to get my courage up to talk to him about Tanae, and Burt, and Thanksgiving and I was failing miserably as to where to start.

  "You haven't told your daughter, or your ex about me. Or about us." He wasn't asking me.

  I searched his face. That was a good place to start. I shook my head.

  "First, I need you to give me an honest reason why."

  Why? Well…

  Hrm.

  I looked at him over my steaming mug. "Because I'm chicken shit."

  His serious expression broke. "You gotta do better than that, babe."

  "Okay. But being chicken shit is a big part of it." I licked my lips. "I don't mean to belittle you or make it sound like you can't understand because you don't have a kid."

  "Point taken, and I agree with you. There are some things you're feeling I don't have a common reference to."

  I smiled at him. "Yeah. You could say that. Wait…let me put this all together and put things in order."

  Michael sipped his coffee and he never took his hand from my knee. He'd slipped off his sweater and wore just a teeshirt and those nice, worn, holy jeans.

  Let the angels sing!

  "My marriage wasn't exactly an easy one. Burt was, no is, a control freak."

  "Did you know that before you got married?"

  "No. Not really. I only have my self to blame for not finding out sooner. It was a sneaky thing, you know? Little stuff at first. I mean, we both had careers. He was an up and coming neurologist at Harvard and I had just been promoted to manager in one of the nice advertising agencies in downtown Atlanta. We'd been acquaintances for a while, introduced by mutual friends until we were at a wedding and we hit it off over drinks."

  Michael's gaze didn't waver. He was paying such close attention I thought for a second he was going to whip out a pen and paper and take notes.

  "We had a small ceremony and kept two households for a while. I mean, he was in Boston, I was here. But that didn't stop me from getting pregnant. He agreed to move back here because my insurance was the best to have the baby with. So we found a house in Chamblee, Georgia. It wasn't where I wanted to live—I had a nice three story picked out in Roswell. One of my good friends up there is a photographer. But he was working at Emory and needed to be close to downtown and so did I.

  "The pregnancy wasn't a great one—I ended up with gestational diabetes. Which was hard because I had to watch what I ate and all I wanted to do was eat. Tanae was born in November, right after Thanksgiving and that's when things changed."

  "Oh? How?"

  "He convinced me that he was making more than enough money and I should stay home and take care of the baby. You know, be a great contact mom. So I agreed and turned in my resignation. But trust me, being home twenty-four seven with a kid is not fun. I needed human inter
action, and since my mom was living here at the time, she would volunteer to come over while I'd go shopping or just out walking, or go meet Kyle for adult talk. Kyle was a real life saver back then.

  "But when Burt found out he got mad. I mean really mad."

  "But not violent."

  "No. That's when I started noticing the way he would word things and what he'd say and when he'd say it. Like for instance with Kyle. He said Kyle was a grown up man with a gay man's values and didn't understand children, so maybe it would be better for the baby if Kyle and I started limiting our interaction…at least until Tanae was older and could understand."

  Michael's brow arched.

  "Yeah. You see it, don't you? I didn't. I was still recovering from a serious body re-fit, because once you have one of those little suckers, you're never quite the same. Nothing fits back where it's supposed to. And he made a point of letting me know that. Not blatant complaints because of the baby fat, just things like I needed to keep in shape for Tanae because I should want to be there when she graduated high school.

  "Now, During those first six years I became mom. I lived it, ate it, drank it. I kept the house clean, the food cooked, the groceries bought, the kid happy, fed and exercised. I didn't see my old friends, except for Kyle who still texted me from time to time and sent me pictures. But then eventually those went away when Burt abruptly decided to get a worse phone contract with a limited data-plan and I was corralled into just a few texts, but only with someone with our carrier. Because then I had to add them to the phone and he could see who I was talking with."

  Now his jaw dropped. "Wait…he was monitoring your calls?"

  "And texts. He would go through my phone and read and look at everything when I was asleep. And trust me, after the long days I used to have, I slept like a stone. I'd fine things removed, deleted, and people's phone numbers blocked."

  "Why in the hell did you stay like that?"

  I pursed my lips a minute. "Ever heard of Kerrie Washington's Purple Purse?"

  "No?"

  "It's a campaign against domestic abuse, and she fights against what is known as financial abuse. Women who put up with their controlling, asinine husbands because they have no financial way out. They don't have jobs, they've been kept isolated and they can't afford the divorce."

  "Jesus. But he never physically hit you."

  "No. Burt's not violent like that. He's verbally abusive, but I also think and this hasn't been proven yet, but I think he's got a mental problem. Socially he's inept. Doesn't understand the nuisances of conversation. Like, when he calls you, he wants to talk about him and only him. You can't get a word in edge-wise because he'll just keep right on talking over you. What you say isn't as important as what he says."

  "Oh," Michael sat up and set his coffee mug on the hearth behind us. "That's not mental illness. That's being a classic narcissist."

  "Yeah. Well. Look up the definition for that word and you'll find Burt's picture printed there. Everything pretty much has to revolve around him, which is why he liked it when I didn't have a life, or friends, because that freed me up to work on him and his needs."

  "What a jackass. So when did you come to your senses?"

  "It happened slowly. As Tanae got older and she was in school, I took that time during the day to look for jobs. To go out and do things and when I got involved in something or I was out with Kyle and having a good time, mom would pick up Tanae. She liked to be at the house when he got home because he didn't know how to act with her around. He would want to yell and commence on his ass-holery but mom intimidated him.

  "And the more I branched out and started finding myself again, I liked it and he didn't. Now, all this time the marriage was…well it sucked. I hated making love to him 'cause let's face it. He's got a little dick and after having a baby I needed something much larger."

  Michael had just brought his coffee up to his lips and now snorted and grabbed a napkin. He was laughing. "Warn me next time on that."

  "Sorry. Warning is not my style. So anyway, I got back into the job market even though it didn't pay much of anything, my slight independence paved the way for the fourteen year accusation that I was having an affair. I heard it at least once a month if not two. He would be sane for about a week, then go into a dark funk and not talk and then there would be a week of growling and glaring, which would build up into a week of bitchy snapping and snide remarks just before he'd have a melt down and begin with things like, 'This isn't going to work anymore' and 'You fucking other people is what ended this relationship.' "

  "Are you serious?"

  "Yeah. But he always kept that part of things between us. He wouldn't go all ugly and snot mouthed except when he and I were alone. Tanae or anybody else never saw the crazy. Just me." I started laughing when I remembered his face. His flared nostrils, his crazy eyes. "There was one time he got some wild hair up his ass and came down stairs stark naked and demanded I talk to him, which of course meant listen to him. I was doing laundry or something and there he was. Naked. In the basement. Hair all out like Einstein's. I mean, how can you take anyone serious when they're flop'n in the wind like that."

  He was rolling on the floor now. "This can't be real."

  "Yeah, it is. That call that night? The one you witnessed? That's nothing. Eventually Tanae started noticing things about her dad that irritated her and she said to me she thought he was a bit touched sometimes. Eventually the recession hit and I went through a variety of jobs until I hit a wall. And he was once again fully supporting us. Then when she was fourteen…it was Christmas and we were at his parents' house in Florida. They live in Orlando and he wanted to stay there for two weeks—which meant we were going to miss my family's holiday. But that didn't matter." I held up my hand with a fist. "Because he's the one paying the bills, he gets things his way!

  "He finally wigged out in front of his mom, and unfortunately, Tanae. Something happened to the car on the way down and the last I heard of it when we arrived was he and his father talking about taking it to a shop after Christmas. The next day I asked him if he was still going to take it to a garage and he bit my head off. Telling me not to worry about the car that he and his dad were taking care of it."

  I could remember that moment like it was yesterday. I'd seen his crazy before, but no one else had. And the last person I wanted to see it was our daughter. I kind of wanted her to be oblivious that her dad wasn't a total nut job. But later that day while sitting in the living room, he started muttering about how he was going to take me home.

  Tanae had asked him what it was he was saying and I looked at him. He looked at me with pure hate and evil in his eyes and said, "You don't belong here. No one wants you here. I'm taking you home. I'm putting you in that car in the morning and I'm taking you home."

  I told Michael this and all the color drained from his face. "He did that in front of your daughter?"

  "And his mother. Yeah. We fought. He wanted me to take a ride with him to take the argument away from the house but I watched too much murder TV and I wasn't about to go anywhere with him. But then he accused me of sleeping with my best friend's husband."

  "You don't mean Kyle."

  "No. My best friend Linda. She and I had become partners in crime. We told each other everything. Talked…every day. For ten years she was a part of my life, just as her son was a part of our daughter's life. They were the same age and liked the same things.

  "She died from a stroke and my world sort of fell apart." I snorted. "He'd moved to Boston by then while Tanae and I stayed in Atlanta. He'd been there for five years and I she knew how much happier I was when he wasn't around. He wasn't there judging and complaining and accusing. A few days after her funeral, before he was supposed to go back, he started in the argument that he was more upset than me. That he had introduced us so I should be sadder for him."

  "Wait…what?"

  "Oh, it's his way. He has to be the center of attention and he wasn't. So he had to direct us all back to him. I
hated him then. Just…hated him. And I wanted him to go." I sipped my coffee. It was cold now and tasted like creamer flavored coffee drink. "But in Florida, not even six months after she was dead and gone, Burt accused me of fucking her widower."

  I looked at Michael. He didn't say anything.

  "I heard something snap. Sort of like… a glass rod breaking. And everything I'd ever felt for him just vanished, and I realized I was standing there in the dark outside in Florida looking at a frightened little boy. A stupid, narcissistic, little prince with no kingdom." I gave a short sigh. "That's when we talked and for the first time I agreed to a divorce. I didn't love him. I didn't even like him. I wanted him out of my life. But with Tanae, that wasn't going to happen. And we weren't financially set for a divorce. They are expensive. So we decided to wait till she turned eighteen. No child support or custody issues. Just a divorce."

  "Was it amicable?"

  "Hell no. This is Doctor Burt J. Murphy here. It's all his way or no way. And I wasn't willing to give him anything. This time I fought and my mom financed it, just to get that son of a bitch out. That divorce was final just after Tanae started her Freshman year."

  "So you've been divorced a year."

  "Yep."

  "And I'm your first since the divorce."

  "Yep. Actually since the marriage and divorce. I never cheated on Burt no matter what he wanted to believe. Oh, and I did date Detective Taylor for a while, but that didn't work out. We were officially separated."

  Michael sucked on his lower lip as he thought. "So first, Burt would hate the fact you're seeing anyone, regardless of age or color or race, and second, the fact there is a rather interesting age difference between us would really upset him."

  I looked at him. "Oh, he'd swear you and I have been seeing each other the whole time he and I were married. But since we were married nearly eighteen years, that would have made you…" I did math. "Like…fourteen?"

  "Uh…yikes?" He moved in close to me and we sat side by side with our backs to the fire but we could see the moon through the trees over the mountains out the window. "So you've been trying to avoid what you know will be the inevitable confrontation with Burt once he knows you're seeing someone."