by Phoebe Fox
“So that was when your”—I made myself say the word—“divorce was final.”
He nodded pathetically.
“Were you going to tell me? Ever?”
“Brook... Of course—of course I would have. I was just waiting until the time was right.”
The right time might have been when we met, I reflected. The right time might have been on one of our early dates, when it was clear things were heating up between us, or when we started to get serious. I wanted to ask Kendall what he deemed “the right time” would have been—pictured him down on a knee, avowing his love and asking me to spend the rest of my life with him: And oh, before I forget, I’ve done this once before.
But I kept my tone modulated—I knew from experience that as soon as you got emotional, most men tuned out. And, I reminded myself, I had kept something from him too.
“Kendall.” I breathed deeply. “I can understand why you wouldn’t have told me this early in.” I couldn’t. “But how could you have asked me to move in with you without telling me?”
He looked down into his fascinating drink again, then flicked a glance toward the door to the Bar Belle. He shifted in his chair. Fingered the stem of his martini glass. Cleared his throat and smoothed the sharp crease of his pants.
“I didn’t... I didn’t...know.”
“You didn’t know what? That you were married?”
“I didn’t know...” He muttered something else that sounded vaguely English.
“What? I didn’t hear you.”
His face contracted like a fist. “I didn’t know that I was going to ask you to move in. I hadn’t exactly planned it.”
My fingers and face felt suddenly cold, and I sat staring at him. “What do you mean?”
“I...I just... I was feeling happy Brook, and we had such a good time that night, and...so I…”
“So you asked me to live with you?”
“It just popped out.”
“It popped out?” I yelled in disbelief.
“Brook... shhh-shhh.” I didn’t know if he was trying to soothe me or silence me, but it set me even further off.
“Were you just asking out of relief, Kendall? Was it even about me?”
“Brook!” He glanced quickly around the patio.
“What, Kendall? What was it?”
He pushed back his chair and stood. “Look, we’re not doing this here. Wait while I pay my tab and we can go—”
“No!” I grabbed his arm and shot to my feet. “You’re not running away from this. Turn around. Goddammit, Kendall, turn around and be a man!”
He yanked his arm away and stepped back. “Jesus! What the hell has gotten into you?”
“What’s gotten into me? What’s gotten into me, Kendall”—my voice dripped with a nasty sarcasm that made me shrill—“is that in the last five minutes I’ve found out you were having a completely different relationship than I was. What’s gotten ‘into me’ is the realization that most of our relationship was a lie.”
“Brook, calm down,” he hissed.
“No, I don’t think so.” The pitch of my voice rose along with my volume. “We’re not going to ‘calm down’ and ‘talk about this rationally’ this time. Here’s a radical idea, Kendall—instead let’s be honest for once. Let’s actually say things we mean. Oh, and hey—another nutty thought—what if we actually have a real fucking emotion for a change?”
He raised his hands as though I were holding him at gunpoint and started backing away, toward the door to the bar. “You’re not rational. You need to calm down and call me when we can talk like adults.”
“I am talking like an adult. Why don’t you act like an adult, Kendall, instead of like a recalcitrant child who’s afraid of getting in trouble.”
“I’m out of here.”
But I was too far gone for a retreat. I lunged forward and grabbed an edge of his suit, yanking him back. Some part of me registered that we’d drawn the attention, even through the glass, of everyone at the Bar Belle. But I couldn’t stop myself; I was out of control.
“What are you doing? Quit it, Brook.” The harder he pulled away, the more I jerked the expensive tropical wool toward me.
“You don’t mess with someone’s emotions like that. You don’t tell them things just to make them feel better. You don’t just up and leave! You don’t say you love someone and then leave them!” I didn’t think I was talking just about Kendall anymore.
“Back off! Let go of me!”
Looking back, I think he probably did the only thing he could do in that position to get himself out of my death grasp on his lapels: he set his hands on my chest and pushed me away.
But Kendall was a big man, and strong, and charged up with emotion (for maybe the very first time—or at least, the first time with me).
His hands hit my breasts hard and the push hurt. I stumbled back a step and my heel caught in the brickwork. I felt myself losing my balance, flailed wildly trying to catch it, but plowed backward, my tailbone cracking against the edge of the wrought-iron table as I went down, bringing it tilting over on top of me. Our glasses slid off and over, Kendalltini and gimlet splashing over my chest and lap and the martini glass shattering on the patio beside me. My highball glass landed in my lap.
“Brook! Oh, my God.” Kendall started forward.
“Stay away from me!”
The doors behind him crashed open and people swelled out as if propelled through them. Wet and sticky, I started to scramble furiously to my feet.
“Brook, the glass!” Kendall was still coming, a hand out to help me up.
“Do not touch me!” I was screaming. I reached down to lever myself off the brick and instantly realized what he’d meant as broken glass cut into my palm. I cried out and lifted my hand, glittering with glass and red with blood.
Peter and David were heading over, their faces alarmed, Ricky’s face bobbing amid the onlookers, looking at me with a fierce pity. I thought I saw Melissa Overton’s smug, gloating face in the crowd that was still swelling outside on the patio, everyone staring at me, but rage and shame were blinding me, blending all the faces together.
“You need a doctor.” To Kendall’s credit he was still there, still trying to help, but his expression was distant, his tone flat and removed, as if he were a passerby who’d witnessed an accident.
“You need a soul.” I couldn’t stop my mouth. It was like I’d sprung a toxic leak.
By this time Peter had come to one side of me, David on the other—“You okay, honey?” “Careful now...”—and they were hoisting me up under my armpits.
Kendall threw his hands in the air, washing his hands of me, of us, and turned to go inside. Leaving me there on the patio, sopping, bleeding, humiliated in front of a crowd of mostly strangers.
“That’s right. Walk away. That’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s all your infantile little emotions are capable of.” I was shouting it after him, a fishwife, a harpy, a Jerry Springer special.
Kendall didn’t even slow down.
And because I hadn’t hit actual rock bottom yet, I had one last encore, my aria, the big denouement of our scene. The gimlet glass was still clutched in my hand from where I’d picked it off my lap as Peter and David had taken my arms. I jerked out of David’s grip on my right and cocked my arm back, let the glass fly with all my strength toward the back of Kendall’s head. He started to turn at the collective gasp and a couple of shouts from the erstwhile audience, and I had a satisfying image of it smacking his pretty face.
But my aim was off, and it sailed harmlessly past him, exploding like a bomb against the concrete wall of the bar beside the door.
Kendall flinched, but didn’t turn around, just looked back over his shoulder, and even in profile I could see his disgusted expression.
“Jesus, Brook. You’re fucking insane. Get some help.�
�
thirty
I sat in my car. My hands trembled—it took three tries to get the key into the ignition. Some part of me registered that I was in no shape to drive, but it was drowned out by the urge to get away, to put as much distance between myself and what had just happened, as soon as possible. I wished I could do the same thing with my life—just drive off, pull away, stare back in the rearview mirror at the pathetic creature I was leaving behind.
But she was still with me when I pulled into my driveway at the house. Still there when I let myself in past the ruined living room, the hateful kitchen, into the barren master bedroom, disinterestedly cleaned and bandaged my hand, and fell into my bed still wearing my clothes. She curled up with me under the covers, and even shutting my eyes I couldn’t escape her.
I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I lay there, eyes wide and dry and scratchy, straining fruitlessly to hear the ringing of my phone. But it didn’t ring. I couldn’t think who might call.
In the screaming silence I heard, over and over, the replay in my head of Kendall’s words, accompanied by the slide show of my own behavior in the bar. But gradually it all blurred into a white noise of self-hatred, and I drifted off. When I woke up sometime later it was still dark, but I didn’t bother looking at the clock beside the bed. I blinked at the ceiling, feeling the crust in my eyes, my lashes caked together with clumped mascara. I hadn’t eaten since sometime in the afternoon, but filling my belly didn’t seem a compelling enough reason to drag myself from the bed. I was hot, and that did motivate me—but only enough to unbutton my cardigan and pull it out from beneath the covers, then slip out of my skirt and discard it the same way.
I rolled back onto my side and shut my eyes, and waited for oblivion to claim me again.
When I woke the next time, it was light, and it was Gloria Gaynor who called me out of sleep—the “I Will Survive” melody Sasha had programmed in after Kendall’s disappearance. I turned over and fumbled my phone out of my purse, not knowing who I was hoping for, just realizing that my heart leaped when I heard it ringing.
“Doll!” My dad always greeted me as if I were the world’s best surprise. “You wanna finish up that bathroom today?”
I sank back, deflated. “What time is it?”
“Ah, a little late—almost nine—but a perfect time to get started. Whattaya think?”
“I don’t think so, Daddy...”
“Come on, now, sweetheart. Soonest begun, soonest done.”
I rubbed my crusty eyes, my fingers coming away with black smears of makeup. “Maybe not today.”
“No time like the present. I’m on my way—you eat yet?”
I sat up reluctantly, pushing tangled hair away from my face. It wasn’t at all like him to be this insistent. Had something happened? Had he heard something from my mom...something bad? Maybe he needed to talk. I didn’t know if I had any rally left in me, but I couldn’t let my father down.
“Yeah, Daddy. Okay. Give me a few minutes?” I needed to at least take a shower. It wouldn’t do him any good to see me looking like scrambled death.
“I’m gonna treat us to something from Merritt’s Bakery. By the time I get through that line on a Saturday morning it’ll be at least a half hour, doll. Up and at ’em.” Besides having suddenly sprung a cliché leak, my dad had become uncharacteristically dogged and persistent.
We hung up and I sat shaking my head, wondering what on earth could have happened that turned my dad into my mother.
Dad showed up with a bulging bag full of the best baked goods in Fort Myers—chocolate croissants and puffy cream-filled pastries and mini cinnamon rolls so tender and fragrant you could eat half a dozen before you realized it. I tried hard to scarf them with my usual gusto, but just the thought of all that rich butter and sugar made my stomach turn. I pulled apart a cinnamon roll on my plate—it was still steaming inside—and hoped my father wouldn’t notice how little made it into my mouth.
I don’t know what I was expecting—for him to show up a wreck, dark circles under his eyes, a distant expression, face slack and pale. But he was just the same old Daddy, with that big, happy-to-see-you smile he’d always greeted me with.
Of course, we weren’t a confessional kind of family. If he had something on his mind, maybe it would work its way to the surface.
As always, my father was efficient and focused. We screwed the Backerboard to the fresh new wall to ready it for the tile, and then created an efficient assembly line where I buttered the back of each tile with Mastik and he spaced-and-placed them against the wall.
ICAN had had boxes and boxes of leftover tiles, and I had chosen a six-inch earthy slate-look porcelain, along with bronze and gold glass accent tiles I could never have afforded anywhere else. As we laid tile after tile in place, for the first time my house actually started to resemble the elegant vision Sasha and I had invoked the day I’d bought it. I wished she could see it.
I thought he might start talking as we worked, within the safe remove of concentrating on a project, instead of having to face me. But Daddy stayed mum, our conversation limited to instructions and requests strictly about the job at hand. So after a while, with the only sounds the soft scrape of my trowel against porcelain, I filled in the silences, hoping that if I opened the conversational floodgates, whatever was on his mind would come pouring out. Hoping it would drown out the ocean of shame and regret I was floundering in.
I asked about his cabinets. I asked about fishing. I asked about other projects he was working on. I didn’t realize until I was trying to draw my dad out, instead of spouting my usual stream of free association about my own life that I so easily slipped into with him, how little I actually knew of him.
The cabinets, he said, were coming along. Of course, they had been “coming along” for nearly a year now, so that could mean anything from total disarray to close to finished. He hadn’t been fishing lately—he didn’t hear much from Stu in the past couple of weeks.
Yeah. No wonder. Stu had had his hands full of Sasha, I thought with a sharp flash of hurt.
His next project would be countertops. He got the idea when we were at ICAN, looking at their slabs of beautiful granite. “Can’t have such pretty new cabinets and put that awful old stuff back in for your mom,” Dad said.
I wanted to snap out my knee-jerk retort that my mom didn’t deserve his effort, his consideration. I wanted to ask him why he was being such a patsy for her. I wanted to shake some spine into him, some self-worth, enough ego so that he stopped lying down and waiting patiently for her to grace him once again with her presence, and instead realize he deserved better, confront her, demand she get her act together or she would lose him.
Instead, I bit back all my venom and focused on what Dad needed. He loved my mom, and for whatever reason he was letting her steer the course of his life. If I attacked her again he’d only get defensive of her, as he did every time.
It was time to come clean with my father. If he thought he was helping me with a problem, in the process, my smart, wonderful, loving dad would have to see the parallels to his own life and come to his own realizations about how he was being treated.
“Dad...” I handed him a tile and reached for another as he laid it carefully into place. “I could use some advice.”
He glanced over, his fingertips pressed gently to the tile, holding it steady. “Of course, doll. What about?”
And, haltingly, through my own shame, I told him about what I had done last night—how I had confronted Kendall, how I’d thought for just a few minutes that everything was going to be all right, and how I’d humiliated myself when I realized that it wasn’t. My dad didn’t watch me while I spoke—and I was grateful. Just as I’d done when I was younger, I talked to his back and shoulders and the back of his head, his reassuringly capable, constant motions calming my soul and loosening my tongue.
When I finished my story I
stopped talking, and we worked for a few minutes in a quiet that felt soothing rather than awkward. I’d told my dad about my behavior as a way to help him find some relief from his pain, but in the process I’d lightened something in my own chest.
“Ah, doll,” he said finally, carefully taping down a completed row of tiles to keep them from sliding out of place as the Mastik dried. “It’s amazing the awful things you can do that you don’t think you’re capable of doing to someone you love.”
I didn’t know if he meant me or Kendall. “Can you forgive them?” I asked my dad. And I wasn’t sure if I was asking whether I could forgive Kendall, or whether Kendall could ever forgive me. Or whether it was even Kendall I was talking about at all.
I’d gotten sidetracked with my own problems, and I’d forgotten I was trying to guide my dad onto a path. I pushed my thoughts back to my mother. “When someone does something...awful like that...even though they love you...when they’ve crossed a certain line, can that be forgiven?” Dad didn’t speak for a moment, and I hoped he was considering the question for himself. I buttered the back of another tile. “And should it be? It seems to me that if you love someone, it means not doing something on purpose to hurt them. It means thinking things through before you do or say things you can’t take back. That’s what love is.” I handed my dad the tile. “Isn’t it?”
Dad fixed the tile to the top of the next row, square and perfect. He tapped it to remove air bubbles underneath, and he didn’t look back at me. I waited.
Finally he spoke. “I’m gonna tell you something, Brook Lyn.” Dad never used my whole name. “And then we aren’t ever going to discuss it again. This isn’t something anyone else knows, except your mother, and if I share it with you, I’m asking you not to share it with anyone else—ever. Not your brother. Not Sasha. And not your mother. If she ever finds out I’m telling you this, I would have a hard time forgiving you for that. Can you agree to this?”
His tone had gone flat and dead serious, and all I could do was nod, the sudden dread burgeoning in my gut swallowing any words. But my father was looking directly at me now, not working, and one look at his expression told me he needed something more formal and binding than a nod. I swallowed hard and mustered, “Okay, Dad. I promise.”