by Erin Duffy
“Okay,” I said, as I slathered cream cheese across a halved sesame bagel and took a bite. The dough was soft, and warm, and comforting and I was so happy to have my appetite back it was hard to remember the time where food made me nauseous and eating was a chore, even though that time was only five months ago. “Let me just get Bo’s shoes.” Antonia had gone spinning, continuing the Sunday morning routine she’d had back in Chicago, and I thought it would be nice for Bo and I to go for a walk before the sun became too hot to bear and we spent the rest of the afternoon hunkered down inside in the air-conditioning. Antonia had been eyeing a purse in a store window in town, and I wanted to cruise by the store on our walk and buy it for her, because she was right when she said that little things could make a big difference, and I wanted this little thing to convey a big thank-you for being an amazing friend. I shuffled into the hallway and removed the small blue sneakers from the basket on the floor and strapped them on Bo’s pudgy feet, then headed down to the basement to clip him in his stroller. Bo was getting ready to walk. He pulled himself up on the side of his stroller and tried to appreciate his new vantage point on the world. My little baby was now a little boy. A new phase of our life was about to begin.
“Have you talked to Owen at all?” Fred asked as we walked.
“Just the usual, why?” I wondered.
“Just curious if you guys talked about anything since your last argument.”
“No. There’s not much to talk about. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t have handled things differently, but honestly, Marcy should’ve kept her mouth shut, and Owen should’ve kept his pants zipped, so there was plenty of blame to go around.”
“It doesn’t sound like you feel all that bad about it,” Fred pointed out.
“I’m just so tired of finding out important information about Owen’s life by accident. He’s my son’s father. If he’s going to Alaska, I should know. What if there was an emergency? Am I wrong to think that?”
“No. You’re not wrong. You should work on your delivery, though. Throwing Bo’s grandmother out of the house might have been a little extreme,” Fred said. One of the reasons I liked Fred was because he always stayed calm and steady. Calm and steady were two things that eluded me recently, and I liked having that kind of influence in my life. I wasn’t entirely sure why Fred was interested in me, unless calm and steady people were drawn to those who seem to summon chaos as easily as people hail cabs.
“You don’t know her,” I reminded him. “I’ve wanted to throw Marcy out of the house every time she stepped foot in it.”
“True.” He paused, but I knew he had more to say and was searching for the words. Fred was good like that, and I should try to do that more often, instead of just spewing whatever came to mind out into the universe without stopping to think about anything. “It does show, though, that you’re still volatile. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me a little nervous, Claire. It doesn’t matter what happened to you. At some point you need to get your emotions under control. What am I supposed to think when you tell me that you threw your son’s grandmother out of the house? It’s not exactly . . . what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“I honestly have no idea,” I said. I shouldn’t have told him anything. I thought we were past the part of the program where I had to prove my sanity to him. I thought he’d understand my feelings where all of this was concerned, but now I worried that we were right back into the “you’re bad crazy” mindset and I was done defending myself against that. You could be emotional without being nuts, and if he didn’t get that then he didn’t understand women in the slightest. He either liked me and wanted to be with me, or he didn’t, but if he did then he was going to have to like all of me and that included the part that wanted to punt Marcy to the curb.
“Attractive. It’s not attractive,” he said, casually, as if that wasn’t one of the worst things you could ever say to a woman in any situation, period.
“Wow. Well, that’s an interesting piece of information. Thanks for that,” I said.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Fred said, which might be the second worst thing you could ever say to a woman, period.
“Okay,” I said, waiting to be knocked down again, waiting for him to reach inside my chest cavity, grab my newly restored heart with both hands, and squeeze the bejeezus out of it.
“I wasn’t completely honest with you when I told you about my divorce,” Fred said. He blotted the grooves in his forehead with a handkerchief, sweat dripping down the back of his neck and causing his shirt to stick to his back. He kicked a small rock, and it skipped off the curb and disappeared under bushes lining the sidewalk. I wished I could’ve disappeared with it.
“Oh my God. You’re still married. Are you kidding? You know what I’ve been going through, and you’re still married?” I stopped walking and stepped on the brake pedal by the back wheel of Bo’s stroller. My legs shook beneath me, and my body went numb, my fingers and toes tingling from hypoxia. “This isn’t happening. I don’t want to be Dee Dee. I don’t date married men!” I felt the blood rush to my head again. I don’t care what Fred thought of me. I wasn’t going to let another man make a fool out of me. Not again. “I should’ve known. I should’ve known there was something seriously wrong with you the second you agreed to go out with me again. Why would you do that? Why would anyone want to see me again after what I did to Owen? My friends asked me that, and I asked myself that, and I chalked it up to you just being a good guy who understood a little bit how hard this situation is for me. But that wasn’t it at all. You were just using me like Owen did. You have a wife at home and you just figured it didn’t really matter if I was crazy, because I was never going to be anything except the other woman. So why did you make me defend myself? Why did you make me prove to you over and over again that I wasn’t a raging lunatic? Why would you do this to me? Is every man on earth seriously demented? Do I need to join a convent? Is that where my life is heading? Are you—”
“Stop,” he said, calmly. “Put a sock in it and stop with the incessant questions and let me finish before you say something you’ll really regret.”
“See, lucky for me regret is not really something I care about. I’ll just add it to my Regrets Only blog. I think it could go viral. At this point I have so much source material I could probably get a book deal or a miniseries on Netflix!” I screeched, which caused birds to fly out of the trees on the other side of the street.
“Claire!” he yelled. “I’m not married. I didn’t lie to you when I told you that I was divorced. I am. I was.” He corrected himself, which was confusing. He is divorced? He was divorced? How was this possibly a confusing concept?
“Fred, I swear to God, I can’t take any more disappointment. I need to believe that there are still good people in this world. I need to believe that not everyone is out to get me. Otherwise, I’m going back to bed for the next year. Spit it out.”
“I don’t really like to talk about it, which is why I didn’t tell you in the beginning, but now I feel like it’s time for you to know. I’ve been waiting for the right time.”
“Time for me to know what? What, exactly, didn’t you tell me?” I glanced down the street at the normal, happy people enjoying the beautiful summer morning: an elderly couple shuffling in the crosswalk, holding hands and cups of coffee from the bakery three blocks away; a gaggle of preteens, maybe eleven or twelve years old, in tiny shorts and tank tops carrying field hockey sticks and bottles of orange Gatorade; a young father with his son on his shoulders, promising him that the next time they reach a tree he’ll stop so the little boy could grab the branches. A few minutes ago I felt as normal as they were, just a nice couple pushing a baby stroller down a tree-lined street in suburbia. Now, I felt like an outsider, who was once again forced to examine life in this town from the cheap seats.
“She died. Two years ago,” he said, answering my question. “I didn’t tell you that she died.”
“Yo
ur wife died? You’re a widower?” I asked. This changed everything. I thought we shared the divorce card. I thought we understood each other, because we had both been in the trenches, and had worked our way out of them. I thought that was part of our bond. If he was a widower, then I didn’t understand him at all.
“No,” Fred said. “I’m sorry. I’m not explaining this well. I’ve never had to talk about it before, and I guess I’m not very good at it.”
“No. You’re not,” I said. “I guess you’re not perfect either.”
“I’m divorced. We got divorced first, but she died two years ago. I’m sorry I haven’t told you until now, but I wasn’t sure what to say.”
I was about to tell him that I didn’t need him or his stupid drum sander, but I paused before I actually uttered a word. “I don’t know what to say either,” I finally admitted. This was a first for me. Was I supposed to offer my condolences? Was I supposed to say that it was a good thing he divorced her before she passed away? Was I supposed to ask what happened? What was the right thing to say when your new boyfriend told you that his ex-wife was dead? “What happened?” I asked.
“She had an aneurysm. It was instantaneous. She was over at a friend’s house. I wasn’t there, obviously. I didn’t find out until the following day,” he admitted. I tried to think about how I would feel if Owen was suddenly gone, and my body immediately reacted as if I’d eaten something spicy. My eyes watered, and my throat and stomach burned and itched and threatened to close up.
“I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “How long had you been divorced?”
“Over a year. Still, it was an awful thing to go through.”
“I can’t imagine. Just because people leave your life doesn’t mean you want them to really leave your life.”
“It’s strange. More than anything I kept thinking about how my life would be if we’d stayed married. What if things had been great between us and we were living out our happily ever after, and that happened? Then I’m a widower, and not just a guy who’s divorced and who had already gotten used to living life without her. The universe had already decided that we were never going to have a life together. There was always a clock counting down above us until our time ran out, but we didn’t know it.”
“It’s crazy to think about it like that,” I said, which was true, but I still was getting really tired of people treating the universe as an active participant in their life. The universe didn’t kill Fred’s ex-wife, and it didn’t bring Owen and Dee Dee together. An aneurysm and a U-Haul did those things. That was it.
“I know. My whole life could’ve been different. Instead, I was just the ex-husband at the funeral, the guy people looked at sideways wondering why I’d bothered to show.”
“I’m sure nobody thought that,” I said, even though I’d bet there were more than a few people who did.
“It’s not something I like to talk about, and it’s certainly not an easy thing to work into conversation, but I wanted you to know. I didn’t want you to think that there was an ex-wife out there waiting to pop out of the bushes and sabotage what we have.”
“How do you know I was thinking that?” I asked.
“Just a guess.”
“I’m so sorry, Fred. I feel horrible for you for having to go through that. I feel horrible for her, that she was so young and had her whole life to look forward to. I feel horrible for your family.”
“What I hate the most is knowing that our divorce caused so much stress for her the last few years of her life. She wasted so much time fighting with me over stupid little things: who was going to get the flat-screen TV in the basement, and who got to keep the house. At the time it all seemed important. Then she was gone, and I realized that none of it mattered. It was too late then to tell her I was sorry, or to try and make things easier on her—on both of us. It shouldn’t take something like death to give you some perspective on your life but it did.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I don’t want to watch you make my mistakes. I know Owen hurt you and you hate him and you have every right to. I guess my advice to you is to not get mired in anger. Find a way to see the bigger picture. I wish someone had told me that, so I wanted to tell you.”
“So when I asked if you still spoke to your wife you lied to me,” I said. I didn’t know why I chose to focus on that. Probably because it seemed easier than trying to admit that he was right and that I needed to forgive Owen. And probably Marcy, but definitely Owen.
“No. I told you that I hadn’t spoken to her in a few years. That’s true.”
“Technicality.”
“I didn’t even know you. I didn’t want to divulge something so personal. I can’t apologize for that. I won’t. If you don’t get that, I don’t know what to tell you.”
I had to admit he was right. “I don’t blame you. Thank you for telling me. Do you want to talk about her?”
“No,” he said, firmly. “Don’t forget we were divorced when she died. We didn’t have the best relationship, but I like to remember the good stuff. I think I’ll just keep that for myself if that’s okay.”
“It is.”
“You should focus on the good times. Nothing is going to change what happened between you, but you can either remember the parts of your relationship that made you happy, or you can remember the parts that made you miserable. It’s entirely up to you. Things can change in an instant.”
“They already have,” I said as we approached the park. We sat down on a bench near the pond, Bo’s stroller tucked next to me under the shade of a giant tree, and I reluctantly allowed my mind to scroll through my ever-growing list of regrets.
Chapter 19
LABOR DAY WAS fast approaching, and once upon a time that would have bothered me a lot, but now I was actually excited about fall and everything that lay in front of me because life was finally back in my house. The bad memories of Owen were starting to fade and were being replaced with new ones I created for myself with the people I loved. Now I just needed Fred to rip down the insect wallpaper in the powder room and this house would totally feel like home.
Bo was starting to say words: “Mama,” which I loved, and “Da Da,” which I didn’t love, and if he woke up one day and said “Dee Dee” I’d have no choice but to hurl myself out of a second-floor window, so I tried not to think about that possibility too much. Living with a baby made it impossible to ignore the passage of time. Every day there was a new word, or a new skill, or a new tooth, and it was all happening so fast I could barely believe it. He walked holding on to things, but he was getting ready to let go and go it alone. Every morning I woke up and wondered if today would be the day that he decided he was brave enough to move without the help of a table or chair or leg to support him. I knew one of these days he’d do it, and it would be the first steps he took away from me, and out into the world on his own. It was a wonderful time for him, but a scary time for me, because I wasn’t ready to let him go—not even a little bit. I decided that Antonia could never, ever leave the house. She was going to have to be in this with me for the long haul.
Lissy officially closed the store a week ago, and Fred had been sanding the floors all weekend. We only had a few weeks left until our opening, and he said it would take him about two days to finish, and that was two days ago, and I was starting to get nervous. I wanted to go down there and check on his progress, but he made me promise that I’d stay away from the store until he was finished, because sanding floors was apparently noisy, and dusty, and you had to wear a mask over your mouth, and protective goggles over your eyes to keep the wood dust from burning your retinas, and I didn’t have either of those things. When he was finished sanding the floors we were going to paint them, and that meant we needed to buy paint.
Lissy, Antonia, and I met in the parking lot outside of Home Depot, and that was a place that I never would’ve imagined Lissy, Antonia, and I would meet on a Sunday morning. I had no idea that Home Depot was so enormous. We stood in the mi
ddle of the warehouse, right in front of the automatic doors, waiting for someone with a nametag and a clue to come give us directions, or a map, or some breadcrumbs we could drop on the floor in case we got lost and couldn’t find our way out. I wasn’t planning on being here long, but now I realized that it was going to take us twenty minutes just to find the paint section, and that we probably should’ve just gone to the local hardware store, and grabbed some of those cards with different shades of paint on them that Benjamin Moore lets you take home for free. We were in way over our heads.
“Do you think we could paint them red?” Lissy asked after a very nice man escorted us what felt like three miles from the entrance to the paint section of the store.
“I think red might make the space look small,” I suggested. “Maybe a pink would be better? Besides, your logo is red, and some of the accent trim in the store is red, and you will obviously have red lips, and we don’t need to hit people over the head with it. Pink is a nod to your color, but a little more subtle.”
“I agree,” said Antonia. “Let’s look at the pinks.”
You’d be surprised how many shades of pink there are, but after thirty minutes of searching, we found some promising contenders: Easter Bunny, Bermuda Breeze, and Rhododendron being the early front-runners.
“I don’t like Rhododendron,” Lissy said, dismissing it immediately. “We had one at the bottom of our driveway when I was little and bees swarmed all over it. Half the time I was afraid to leave my house.”