by Rebeca Seitz
“Well, I thought I’d start by telling her I’m stupid and I know it.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“And that I love her.”
“She’s not going to believe you, but you need to say it anyway.”
“And that’s where I get lost.”
“Makes sense because that’s the part where you tell her what you did. Can’t see you jumping into that all eager.”
Jamison closed his eyes and tapped his foot on the carpet. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Your call, but I think you’ve got the right idea telling her.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Honesty’s the best policy and all that jazz, right?”
“Right.”
“Besides, let’s say you don’t tell her and she finds out or she already knows and is just waiting on you to say something. Longer you wait, deeper that hole gets.”
“No way she knows. She’d have said something.”
“Were you sitting in the same church I was Sunday? Sounded like somebody said something to Jack.”
Jamison stopped tapping his foot. Had Meg asked Jack to preach some sense his way? For a split second, he felt betrayed, but then knew better. Meg wouldn’t ask her dad to address an issue in their home. She’d come to him.
Which meant someone else knew.
“Somebody knows,” he said out loud.
“Yep.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yep.”
“I’ve got to get to Meg.”
“Yep.”
Urgency overtook him. “Thanks, Darin. I’ve got to go.”
“I’ll be praying, man. Let me know if I can help.”
“Thanks.”
Jamison dropped the phone back on the desk and jerked the Prescott report from his printer. He dumped everything on his desk into his briefcase and grabbed his keys, then rushed from the office.
“Amber, please have this couriered over to Prescott’s office. I’ve got to run home.”
Amber came up out of her chair. “Is everything okay with Meg?”
“She’s fine. I just need to get home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He didn’t wait to see if she had a response. He had to get to Meg. Someone could tell her at any moment and that would make her feel even more betrayed.
God, what was I thinking to carry on that kind of friendship with another woman? Why didn’t You stop me? Make me realize what kind of damage that could do to Meg?
But even as he whined to heaven, he knew the answer. He’d been so caught up in himself that he’d lost sight of his wife.
All the verses in the Bible about loving his wife as Christ loved the church came flooding back. Christ died for the church! And Jamison couldn’t even get through a few weeks of a bad mood before he went trotting off somewhere else to find a woman to share an emotional intimacy.
Filled with self-loathing, he jumped into the car and squealed tires out of the parking lot. With an eye out for police, he held the speedometer nine miles over the speed limit as he made his way through town. In several minutes less than his usual time, he pulled the car into he garage.
The van sat in its customary spot, so Meg was home. As were his kids. His kids! He hadn’t spared a thought for them, either. He deserved to lose his family. His actions the past two months certainly didn’t show he valued them.
Fully awake now from whatever foggy murk he’d fallen into, he hurried into the house, dread filling his mind, fear weighing his heart …
And prayers for God’s mercy on his lips.
Twenty-five
Meg’s head jerked up at his abrupt entry. She was sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. He saw her strong fingers gripping the knife and potato.
How had he ever gazed on another woman’s hands in admiration?
Her eyes widened. “You’re home early. Is everything all right?”
How could he say this? How could he stand here and shatter what they’d shared for two decades?
“Jamison? You’re scaring me.”
“I’m stupid,” he blurted.
A shutter came down over her face. She said nothing and stared at him.
“I love you.”
Still, she said nothing, though she resumed peeling the potatoes with a calm he couldn’t quite understand.
“I—I don’t know how to tell you this, but when you were getting better after your surgery, when things were so hard around here, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what kind of man to be for you and I hated not having any answers for you and I was so stupid that I couldn’t handle not being able to handle the situation, so I went somewhere else.”
No hint of a reaction. Just simple, calm words. “Somewhere else?”
“To someone else. I started a friendship with another woman. It never went beyond just talking together, I swear, but there was a lot of talking. Flirty talking sometimes. And I’ve been thinking about Jack’s sermon, and I know that I had that friendship to meet a need that you were meeting before and that you couldn’t while you were getting better and I’m not saying that excuses me, I’m just explaining that I turned to another woman to satisfy something in me that I should only let you satisfy and I need to tell you and I need to know you can forgive me and we can be okay because I swear it will never happen again.” He came to a stop and gulped in air. He hadn’t meant to dump it all on her like that, but once it started it rushed out like a flood, and all he could do was keep up with the torrent of words as they escaped his mouth.
She said nothing. Just sat there, peeling potatoes as if he’d said gas prices were going up again.
Darin’s words came back to him. Had Meg known? Had she told her father? He couldn’t fathom the old Meg doing such a thing, but the new Meg he wasn’t so sure about. The new Meg did things in new ways, ways he didn’t know as well and therefore couldn’t anticipate.
He counted to sixty, giving her time to respond. When she didn’t, he said, “Meg, did you know?”
Her eyes came to him then, red-rimmed with unshed tears. Her lip quivered and he started toward her, but she held a hand up. “Don’t.”
A whirlpool of destruction swirled around him and he couldn’t find a way out. “You knew?” He couldn’t wrap his mind around that. “How long?”
“Four days.”
He counted back. Long enough to tell her dad and have him preach a sermon. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
She threw the potato at him. The old Meg would never have done that. He wasn’t prepared. Didn’t react in time. It bounced off his shoulder.
“Why didn’t I say anything?! Why didn’t you? You coward!” She followed up the first potato with a second. “Jerk!” He learned to duck by the third one. “What were you thinking? Or should I ask what you were thinking with?! No, I don’t have to ask. I know. I’ve seen her. Get out of my kitchen!”
Jamison’s feet were frozen to the tile. He stared at this woman clothed in Meg’s skin but saying and acting nothing like his Meg.
Not that he’d acted anything like the Jamison she’d known.
“Get out!” Her scream—an ugly, broken sound—terrified him so much that he obeyed.
* * *
FEAR AND ANGER coursed through Meg, shaking her down to her fingertips, so that when she tried to dial Kendra’s number, she messed up the first two tries. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she got it on the third try.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. How are the kids?”
“Happily rotting their brains in front of the television and their teeth with a bowl full of M&Ms. Enjoying your afternoon?”
“Jamison just left.” Meg told her what had gone down.
“Oh, Meg. Oh, honey. Tell me what you need. A dull spoon for castration? I’ve got just the thing.”
Meg sniffed. “I’m calling a scrapping night.”
“I’ll call the others. See you at four?”
“See you then.”
Meg hung up wi
thout any ideas for how to fix the disaster her life had become, but confident that the sisters would help her figure it out. She simply had to hold on until four o’clock.
* * *
AT A FEW minutes until four, Meg climbed Daddy’s porch steps with feet as heavy as a lead boat. Which was fitting, since she felt certain by the end of the night she stood a good chance of sinking.
The door opened before she had a chance to reach for it.
Tandy’s arms came out to her. “Get on in here and let’s get this all sorted out.”
Meg let herself be pulled into a hug. Thank God she had sisters. Tandy kept her arm around Meg as they made their way through the house. She glanced into the living room and saw all three children lined up on the couch, glued to a VeggieTales video. Paid shot through her heart and she tripped. “Steady sis,” Tandy consoled. “We’re here.” Her feet felt like blocks of cement, but she somehow trudged up the steps to the scrapping studio. Joy and Kendra already sat on their stools, though no scrapping items were on the table.
“We decided to put our whole focus on the issue at hand rather than scrapping for the time being,” Joy explained.
Meg had just settled in on her stool when Zelda’s face appeared at the stairs.
“Hi, girls.”
“Zelda, now is not a very good time,” Joy warned.
“Your daddy said Meg called a scrapping night.”
“She did.”
“Then I think it’s a good time.”
Meg blew out a breath. She wanted to be a bridge-builder, but also needed to deal with her life before putting herself out there for everybody else. She didn’t have the energy to put tact into her next words. “Zelda, look, I’m going through something here and I’d rather talk about it with my sisters than my stepmother, okay? No offense or anything.”
Zelda looked at her for a long moment. “I’ve got a story to tell you and I’d like the opportunity to share it. If you want me to leave afterward, I’ll go. But since this is my house, I’d like the respect of being able to at least share this story.”
Meg huffed and nodded, motioning a hurry up signal with her hand. The quicker Zelda got on with it, the quicker she’d leave and the sisters could help her figure out what to do.
“I don’t think I’ve shared this with any of you before, but my first husband, God rest his soul, had one major flaw. He had a problem staying faithful to me when he was deployed.”
Meg raised her head. What was this?
“He wasn’t the only man to wrestle with loneliness and depression out in the field,” Zelda continued, fiddling with her rings, “and he justified it by saying he never strayed when he was home. And he didn’t. I believe that. But it didn’t make the times he deployed any easier to deal with. In my mind, it was in the hard times that a man proved himself to his spouse, and my man made it pretty clear what he did to manage the hard times. He let another woman meet his needs.
“For a lot of years, I wrestled with it. Most times he wasn’t doing anything physical with the woman. He was just having a friendly flirtation for whatever months he was away— getting the looks and small touches from a woman that he couldn’t get from me several oceans away.”
Meg checked out her sisters’ faces; they all looked as flabbergasted as she felt. Was this why Zelda had seemed so calm and in control in the Wimpy’s parking lot? She’d known what Meg was experiencing?
Zelda kept going. “When I brought it up to the other soldiers’ wives, they acted like I was an ungrateful wife and un-American. According to them, I should let my husband do whatever he needed to do to serve his country faithfully and stop making such a big deal about him being friends with another woman in his unit.
“For a while I thought they must be right and I tried to follow their advice. But I learned, after a whole lot of prayer and Bible-searching, that those wives were wrong. Like your daddy said in his sermon, anytime a husband gets his needs or wants met by a woman other than his wife, he’s crossed the line. Doesn’t matter if it’s conversation, affirmation, or sex. It all cheats his wife out of something that’s rightfully hers.
“When I figured that out, I decided to talk to my husband about it. At first, he took the side of the other military wives, as you might guess. It took him over a year to come to me and ask forgiveness. Our marriage changed after that, we were closer, more intimate. He deployed one more time, but I believed him when he told me he stayed faithful—in the full sense of the word—on that mission.
“Now, your situation is a little bit different, Meg. Your hard time wasn’t a military mission but a medical one. Still, I thought you might want to know that I had a blessed, amazing, wonderful marriage for the three years of faithfulness I enjoyed with my husband.” She leaned on the table and waited until Meg met her eyes. “Don’t write him off and don’t shut him out for too long. He’s human and made a mistake. Nobody in this family will think anything of you for forgiving him—well, anything other than that you’re a strong woman committed to her vows and her family.”
Zelda waited a minute longer, then pushed off of the table. “That’s all I wanted to say. You still want me to go?”
Meg slowly shook her head. And here she thought she was a bridge-builder. “No.”
Zelda climbed up onto a stool. “Okay, then. Let’s figure out where you go from here.”
Twenty-six
Meg rested her forearms on the table and glanced at the sisters, all of whom were staring at Zelda. She turned back to her stepmother. “Why didn’t you share this with me before?”
“Oh, Meg.” Zelda’s eyes held empathy and regret. “I couldn’t decide if I would be dishonoring my husband’s memory and if your daddy would be comfortable with me telling you stories about my first marriage. That might be disrespectful to him, and I wouldn’t dishonor him for the world.”
That made sense. “So you talked to Daddy and he preached that sermon instead.”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome.”
Kendra huffed and waved her hands, her bracelets clanking. “Okay, so what does she need to do, Z?”
“Like I said, your situation is a little bit different than mine. Raymond was at war, but I’ll bet Jamison feels like he’s been in a war. He got in over his head and tried to find something that would make him feel like the man he was before the surgery. I doubt he meant for it to become a regular thing and I really, really doubt he’s done anything physical with this woman.”
“Oh, me too,” Meg rushed to agree. “Not that I could see Jamison even sharing conversation with another woman like I saw him doing at Wimpy’s, but I definitely don’t see him getting physical with someone else.” She tried to picture it, but simply couldn’t.
“Yeah, but he still shared things with that woman that he should have been sharing with you,” Tandy reminded them. “Are you okay with that?”
“No.”
“And you don’t have to be.” Zelda adjusted her giant silver hoop earring. “It’s okay to feel hurt and betrayed. I know I did. But you’re going to also have to get to the place where you tell him that. And that you forgive him.”
What would it be like to forgive Jamison? To let this go? To return to their marriage as if he hadn’t done this awful thing? Could she do it?
He’d certainly done plenty for her in these weeks of recovery, overlooking her mood swings, patiently waiting out her tantrums, shielding the kids from her when she wanted to rage at them for no good reason. When she considered all she’d put him through—granted, she hadn’t chosen to put him through it, but still—it occurred to her that she might want to afford some grace to this man she’d pledged to love, honor, and cherish until death they did part.
Because, at the end of the day, marriage was supposed to be about loving the other person. Not defending self. Not finding blame or being right.
Loving.
Meg looked up to find the sisters and Zelda watching her. She met Zelda’s
gaze. “You really forgave him?”
“I did. And I was a better woman and wife for it.”
Meg nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”
Twenty-seven
Meg pulled the van into her garage and turned off the engine, her mind whirling with thoughts like a tornado with wood after hitting a barn. The dashboard clock glowed 11:52 because she hadn’t yet opened a door and cut its power. Nearly midnight. Time for Cinderella’s coach to turn back into a pumpkin?
She glanced around the van. Not exactly a coach, but filled with amenities like leather seats, a DVD player for the kids, and other bells and whistles. Maybe a modern-day coach.
Come on, Meg. You’re stalling and you know it.
Of course she was. As soon as she walked in that door, she’d have to wake Jamison up and talk this out. She considered letting it go until morning, but knew she’d never get to sleep with this hanging over their heads.
At least he’d finally said something to her. The sisters and Zelda kept pointing out that she should be grateful for his confession. And she did feel gratitude. It warred nicely with the betrayal.
But, as Zelda had said, Jamison wasn’t the only one at fault here. Granted, she’d been recovering from brain surgery and thus should be given a whole lot of latitude to deal with her life’s changes. But in the midst of it, Jamison was who she leaned on for ultimate support.
Not God.
Startled at the realization, Meg let the thought calm her mind and spirit. She had put Jamison in a position to fail. Had expected him to be perfect. To be her salvation. To be, in essence, God. Of course he flailed around like a three-year-old who’d been asked to build a bridge. Being God— what an insurmountable task she’d placed before him.
Not that relying on him was wrong. Zelda reassured her she should have been able to trust Jamison and rely on him as her husband. But that didn’t allow her the right to expect perfection from him. To expect him to just take her bad moods and anger with a calm, patient stoicism of one who had the perspective of the ages.