Regrets Only

by Erin Duffy

  “What do you want me to tell people?” my mother asked.

  “Why do you have to tell them anything? Why does anyone need to know?” I asked.

  “People ask how you’re doing, Claire. You don’t live in a vacuum.”

  “Don’t I?” I said. I was being unfair, I knew it, but I also didn’t care. It didn’t seem right that I had to be dragged through the gossip mill at home and not even be present to defend myself. It made me sick to think of people running into each other in the deli in town and talking about poor Claire Stevens while they were waiting for a turkey sandwich. I was humiliated in Connecticut, and I would be humiliated in absentia in Chicago, and that was more humiliation than I felt like I should have to endure. Shame and embarrassment would follow me for the rest of my life, but now it would follow my parents, too. They were just as much a part of this divorce as I was. Any hope for more grandchildren, now gone. Any hope for nice holidays with their only daughter and son-in-law, gone. Not to mention the fact that they’d certainly now feel like I was their responsibility, and they’d worry about me, and stress about me, and stay up late at night feeling sorry for me and wondering how I was going to figure out this new life all by myself, and that would break their hearts, and knowing that would break mine all over again. “I’m sorry you’re dealing with this,” I whispered. I also wasn’t sure why I was apologizing, but I felt like I should.

  “Stop. We aren’t dealing with anything. We’re just worried about you,” she said, as expected.

  “I’m fine. I don’t want you to worry about me. I’ve got this,” I said. I covered my eyes with the back of my hand and splayed out on my bed, because it somehow felt better to have this conversation while horizontal.

  “You don’t sound like it. Why don’t I come stay with you and Bo for a few days?” she asked.

  “Please don’t, Mom. I appreciate it, but I’m a big girl. I can handle it,” I said, which wasn’t technically a lie. I was handling it. I didn’t say I was handling it well. “I know you want to help, but I need to figure this out on my own.”

  “I can’t believe this happened to you,” my mom said, her voice quivering. “I could kill him, Claire. I swear I could kill him.”

  “Yeah. Get in line,” I replied. The sobs I’d been holding back finally forced themselves free. “I don’t want you to worry. I’ll let you know if I need anything. Right now I need to just get my bearings. I’m going to be okay. Please, I don’t want you guys to stress over this.”

  “I know you are. It’s just so unfair. You’re so young, and now you’re going to be divorced with a baby,” she reiterated, just in case I had forgotten.

  “Yeah. I know,” I said. If any part of me had been wondering if maybe I should let my mom come and stay for a while, it was gone. I couldn’t possibly handle seeing the sadness on her face, or hearing the pity in her voice, or listening to sentences like the one she just uttered, which made me want to slam my head into the wall. We needed to keep space between us for a little while, so that I could lie and tell her that I was rebounding like the strong, independent woman that she raised. It wouldn’t benefit either of us to have her see the truth for herself. “I have friends here. I have a life. I don’t need Owen. I just need to regroup. That’s all,” I said, because that was what my mother wanted to hear, and I immediately realized I needed to protect my parents from this divorce almost as much as I needed to protect Bo from it, too.

  “Your father plays golf with a lawyer out here who used to work in New York City. We’ll get you the name of the best divorce lawyer there is. Don’t worry about the cost. We’ll pay for it.” Tears welled again. So far, nothing she’d said had done anything to help get me out of this mess, but a lawyer could. A lawyer was the best gift someone could’ve given me right now, and it made me miss my parents so much I thought I might die.

  “I don’t know how to thank you. If you can do that for me, it would be an enormous help. I don’t even know where to start to try and find a lawyer.”

  “You take care of you and Bo, and let us take care of the lawyer. I’m so proud of you. If you need anything from us, anything at all, any time of day, you call. I’m here for you and so is your father. You’ll get through this. You’re tough. If you change your mind and want us there we will be on the next flight out.”

  “You know it,” I said. I looked down and realized that over the course of this conversation I’d managed to chew off every nail on my right hand. Awesome. “I love you. I’ll talk to you soon. I’m really sorry, Mom.” I said it again because I couldn’t not say it no matter how hard I tried. I was sorry. I just didn’t know exactly for what.

  “I’m sorry, too. And neither one of us should be. The only one who should be apologizing is Owen.”

  When I hung up I realized that telling my parents had just made everything worse, and that that conversation was one of the worst things I’d ever endured in my entire life, and I was going to delay having to put myself through that again for as long as was humanly possible, so Antonia was just going to have to wait. I was still battling numbness, fatigue, and a tingling sensation in my extremities that may or may not indicate an impending stroke, but at least I’d soon have a lawyer who would help get me off the East Coast. Other than Bo, that was the only thing that mattered. I put my ringer on silent, and swore that I was done with the phone forever. Me and my fancy New York City lawyer would get this all straightened out, and there’d be no need for anyone else to know about it until it was all over.

  SIX DAYS AFTER I told my parents, and almost a full two weeks after waffle-gate, I made my way into the city to meet with my lawyer, Tara Redmond, and it did not go as planned. Much to my horror, she basically told me that I should just slap a UCONN bumper sticker on my car and learn to love the fall foliage on the East Coast, because I wasn’t going anywhere. My plan for not having to tell anyone else about the pending divorce until I could also say that I was moving back home wasn’t going to happen, and so once again I was forced to readjust. I couldn’t avoid Antonia any longer. I sat on the edge of my bed and ran my big toe along the fibers in the carpet while I picked up the phone and dialed Antonia’s number. I knew she would answer because it was 7:00 P.M. in Chicago and on Friday nights Antonia went spinning from 6:00 until 6:45 and by 7:00 she was in the market next door to the gym buying a salad for dinner. If I was at home, I’d be with her. I should be with her.

  “Ciao, bella! What’s up?” she said. “The music in class tonight was terrible. You’d have been so annoyed. What’s the latest and greatest from the East Coast?” she asked. Hearing her voice made my heart ache. I missed her so much. I missed the life we used to have together. I missed the way she managed to make me smile even when I thought it was impossible. I wondered if she’d still be able to do that, or if this was something that not even she could make better. “Where have you been? I’ve sent you a few texts and you haven’t written me back. What, you have cool friends in Connecticut with riding boots and ponies and you’re too busy to talk to me now?” she teased.

  “I caught Owen having an affair with our Realtor. I met with a divorce lawyer and she told me I can’t ever move home to Chicago,” I said. I heard the words come out of my mouth, but I still couldn’t believe them to be true.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she replied.

  “Thank you,” I whispered before I hung up. I was a big girl, and I didn’t need my mother flying in to help take care of me—but allowing my best friend to do it was a different thing entirely.

  I rolled onto my back, pulled the covers up over my head, and decided that for the time being, when Bo slept, so would I.

  BO WOKE UP early the next day and we headed downstairs to have breakfast. “How are you doing today, buddy?” I asked. I was determined to hold it together for him, to make sure that he didn’t notice that anything had changed. I would’ve worried that Bo noticed that Owen wasn’t around, but since he typically traveled at least two or three nights a week, it wasn’t all
that unusual for him to be gone. Bo probably didn’t notice that anything had changed, which was crazy since everything had changed right in front of him in a very big way. He reached up and grabbed the small diamond pendant hanging on my neck and babbled while he twisted and turned and bit it as I defrosted applesauce I’d made a month ago and stored in ice cube trays in the freezer. “Okay, little man, I have to put you down for a second, but then we’ll sit and have breakfast together, all right?” I sat him on his play mat with an activity board and a toy flashlight that lit up blue, red, and green and made the most annoying noises in the entire world. I handed him a frozen bagel I kept handy for when his teething became particularly painful, and watched as he clapped and smiled and shoved as much of it in his mouth as he could with his fat little hands. Something inside me warmed at the reminder that Bo still loved me more than anything on earth, even if Owen didn’t. It was just the two of us now, I thought, and my brain coiled itself tightly around a horrifying thought: I’m going to die. Not today, but eventually. This realization was the second worst thing that had happened to me in the last twenty-four hours.

  No one knew how to make Bo’s oatmeal the way he liked it—how I ground it in my mini Cuisinart and mixed it with applesauce and cinnamon. No one knew that I could sneak avocado into his Greek yogurt without him noticing, or that he liked when I read Elmo’s 12 Days of Christmas, no matter the time of year, before he went to bed. Owen didn’t even know this stuff. He never paid attention when I cooked for Bo, and thought that I was being crazy for making most of his food instead of buying it at the grocery store like his mother used to do. I could drop dead in the dry cleaner, or the driveway, or the grocery store at any moment. If it happened in the grocery store, I hoped it would at least be in the aisle that sold Bounty and Ajax. Maybe then the store manager would be able to use me to demonstrate just how absorbent the two-ply paper towel really was.

  These weren’t thoughts that happily married people had early on in their union, but once you became a single mother, your perspective changed. The entire world seemed unfathomably dangerous. I used to walk down the stairs in heels! Thin, spiky heels! What was I thinking? I felt irresponsible just owning them! I immediately scooped Bo up off the floor, ran upstairs, and reached under my bed to find the tattered brown tote bag that I last used on our honeymoon in Aruba. It was probably a pretty safe bet that I wouldn’t be going on any beach vacations or a second honeymoon anytime soon, so I took the bag over to my closet and started to fill it with my once beloved shoes.

  The sidewalk outside my house was craggy. Whenever I walked on it, fragmented pieces of stone and brick caused my knees to buckle and turned my ankles. It was just a matter of time before I pitched forward, smashed my head into the corner of a broken brick, and bled out on the pavement. For all intents and purposes, it was a death trap, and I couldn’t believe that it didn’t turn up on the inspection. Then there was the blinking light at the intersection of Avenue What’s It Called and Boulevard of Broken Marriages. That thing was just begging for some millennial with a selfie stick to come plowing through it at a high rate of speed and ram into the driver’s side door of my sensible four-door sedan. Don’t even get me started on the hurricanes in the Northeast. People must have a death wish just living here. It was going to happen. The only responsible thing to do was prepare.

  I wished I had my laptop, but it was downstairs on the kitchen counter and that might as well have been seven miles away. My mind continued to race with the staggering amount of information I needed to get down on a piece of paper somewhere, so that Antonia would know what to do once I was gone. I couldn’t rely on Owen to handle this information. I apparently couldn’t rely on Owen to do much of anything, and this was not the time to be taking any big chances. First off, I needed to start a spreadsheet with all the important information: the name of Bo’s pediatrician, the phone number of the pharmacy, the location of Bo’s birth certificate, and the temperature I set the thermostat when he went to bed at night. Antonia didn’t know what foods Bo liked, or where to find the recipe for his favorite sweet potato purée. Neither did Owen. I was the lone keeper of all of this information, and that was a major responsibility that I couldn’t believe I was just noticing now. I decided that I needed to make a death chart with links to all of the recipes I used, so that while Bo was adjusting to life without his mother, he’d at least have his favorite homemade teething biscuits that I cut into giant stars with a Christmas cookie cutter.

  I had a notebook where I jotted down recipes I wanted to make for him as he grew older, finally got teeth, and could eat more grown-up food. I wanted to make him homemade granola bars, and Oreos, and graham crackers, and cinnamon biscuits that had just the right amount of sweetness. I wanted to make miniature calzones, and potpies, and meatballs that were stuffed with cheese and coated in garlicky pesto. I was already thinking about these things and he had only cut a single tooth. I decided to create a separate spreadsheet that I would save in my death folder. From now on, everything was going to be documented and painstakingly cataloged so that there would be no confusion. I moved some of Bo’s favorite toys—the flashlight, a stuffed elephant, an ark filled with little pairs of plastic animals and one creepy-looking man holding a stick that I could only assume was supposed to be Noah, and a board puzzle—up to my room so that he could play on the floor next to my bed. I crawled back under my duvet and let it wrap me, and warm me, and remind me how miserable life outside this bed was, and suggest that I should never step foot out of it again.

  Chapter 4

  ON A RAINY early April afternoon about two weeks after Tara informed me I was going to die in Connecticut, Antonia showed up on my doorstep. She arrived with two bags, a laptop, and an Apple Watch that served as an alarm clock, a calculator, a datebook, and maybe an actual watch, though I wasn’t entirely sure, because she was always late for everything. She flung herself on me and wrapped her arms tightly around my shoulders. “I’m so sorry. I’d have been here sooner but I had to meet with two couples who were about to leave on a three-week trip to Tuscany and the vineyard they were supposed to visit totally botched their wine tour. It was a mess and I almost had to rebook the whole trip. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m here now. I have no words, bella. I don’t know what else to say.” I leaned into her, and emptied my lungs of all the angst and pain that had been building over the last two weeks. The wail was almost inhuman, a long, moaning, wheezing shriek that just seemed to keep coming as Antonia hugged me. “Let it out. It’s going to be okay,” she promised. I had no idea how she planned on making that true.

  She moved her things into the guest room upstairs, which I hadn’t put much thought into decorating because I wasn’t expecting any overnight guests, and now I regretted it. If Antonia was going to put her life on hold for me, I should at least be able to offer her a room with an area rug, but the floors were still bare, and cold in the morning despite the fact that it was spring. Then, she hurried back downstairs and into the kitchen, scooped Bo out of his jumper, and kissed him a million times before she held him over her head and let his fat, swollen gums drool all over her forehead. Really good friends will drop what they’re doing and fly to Connecticut to take care of you and your son when you discover your marriage is over. At least, the really good friends who work from home will. A lot of people would’ve just sent a card and promised to call every Wednesday night after the six o’clock news to see how I was doing. A lot of people would’ve promised to visit but would never have actually shown up. A lot of people aren’t Antonia.

  I hated to admit that I needed help. Until now, I’d never have thought I’d be the type to need someone to stay with me to help me pull myself together, but I did. I felt like I was living underwater, and that I could come up for air for a brief period of time, but would inevitably end up submerged again, all of my senses foggy, and my equilibrium off, and my body cold no matter how many blankets I wrapped around myself. I wished I could be one of those girls who spent the day after
a breakup driving around town with the windows down singing Kelly Clarkson while the wind blew through my hair, but instead I was lying in bed watching Rachael Ray teach me how to make my own takeout, and wondering when that became a thing.

  Antonia didn’t wait long to get into the details. She poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the kitchen table. “How did this happen? Who is this woman?” she asked. “Do you know her?”

  Of course I knew her. Every married woman knew her—the ghost from her husband’s past that lingered around longer than she should, the quiet threat she’d never admit was a concern, the well-rested, non-wrinkled, annoyingly perfect tramp with a thigh gap who reminded women who became mothers of the people they used to be and never would be again. She was my worst nightmare. “She was Owen’s high school girlfriend. I didn’t know that at first.”

  “Oh, come on,” Antonia said.

  “Yep. It’s that ridiculous. The day we moved in she came over with a bottle of wine and gave us a toast.” Recalling that day now felt like reliving a traumatic event. “She said, ‘Good neighbors make great friends.’ I didn’t realize how good, I guess.” Dee Dee had clinked her glass against Owen’s and I remembered noticing that she had no fewer than four bangle bracelets dangling off her wrist. Maybe five. “I should’ve known she was trying too hard.”

  “She was maneuvering her way in before you had even unpacked?”