A Changing Marriage

by Susan Kietzman

  Bob nodded his head and then finished his beer, not wanting to get caught up in Billy’s melancholy. “I’m going to take off,” he said, putting his empty glass on the bar. “Come with me for some dinner. I know Denise would love to see you.”

  “Nah. I’m going to hang a little bit longer. Thanks though.”

  “You okay?”

  “Absolutely. Listen, stop by the florist on your way home and get Denise some flowers.”

  “I will. You take care.” Bob shook his friend’s hand.

  “I always do.”

  Bob walked out into the warm evening air, but Billy’s words followed him, making him think about his marriage to Karen, making him admit that even though she had been the one to have an affair first that he had been more guilty than she had.

  The next day, Bob called Karen from his office and asked her if she was free for lunch. Karen’s stomach lurched. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes. Everything’s great. I just thought it would be nice to get together for more than ten minutes. When I pick up and drop off the kids, it’s always so hectic. So, can you meet me at the downtown deli at one?”

  Karen thought for a moment. “Yes. I can do that.”

  When Karen walked into the deli, Bob was already sitting at a table by the window. He smiled and stood when he saw her. As soon as she reached the table, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Hi.”

  She cocked her head back, startled. “What was that for?”

  Bob shrugged. “I don’t know. Thirteen years, I guess.” Karen gave him a questioning look. “Okay, enough of that. Why don’t you stay here while I get us something to eat. Roast beef, Swiss, lettuce, tomato, and lots of mayonnaise on whole wheat?”

  Karen laughed. “Yes. Grilled ham, cheddar, and tomato on rye for you?”

  Bob smiled. “I’ll be right back.”

  As Bob stood in line, he looked back at his former wife. She was sitting with her back to the large window behind her. The sun shone through the glass, surrounding her in soft, cream-colored light. She held a dessert menu in her lap and was looking down at it, her face in light shadow. Her coppery hair, shorter now than it had been in college, but every bit as vibrant, framed her face. And in an instant, Bob was back in the bustling student center at State, working his way through the crowded hallway and seeing Karen Spears for the first time. She was an angelic vision, aglow in heavenly serenity. Bob had been able to think of nothing else that day. And when he met her, he worked as hard as he had at anything in his life to win her love.

  “Can I help you, sir?” Bob looked at the woman behind the deli counter.

  “What?”

  “What can I get you for lunch?” Bob frowned. What happened to that love? He ordered their sandwiches and walked back to the table. Karen looked up at him as he approached.

  “Save room for dessert,” she said brightly. “This caramel cheesecake looks amazing.”

  Bob sat down. “What happened to us?” Karen’s smile faded as he reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “What was so bad that we couldn’t work it out?”

  Karen looked out the window. “It’s different looking back on it than it was going through it.”

  “It was horrible going through it?”

  Karen tilted her head. “Sometimes.”

  “The fighting was horrible. But it’s hard, now, to remember what brought on the fighting.”

  Karen sighed. “We were living different lives, Bob. You were caught up in work and traveling, and I was bogged down with stay-at-home motherhood. Our worlds were so far apart. . . .”

  “That there was no way to get them back together?”

  Julie, a perky blonde in her twenties wearing an apron and a pin-on name tag, arrived at their table with a tray holding their sandwiches and tall glasses of ice water. She set the glasses down, then held a green plastic basket in the air. “Roast beef?”

  “Right here,” said Karen.

  Julie set the basket down in front of Karen. “You’re going to love this,” she said. “The roast beef arrived this morning. And the grilled ham and cheese for you, sir.” Bob nodded, and Julie placed his basket down. “Enjoy your lunch,” she sang as she walked away.

  “Sure,” said Karen, returning to their conversation, “there are ways to get back together, but both people have to want to. Other things—women like Denise—get in the way.”

  “Men like Nick get in the way, too.”

  Karen shook her head. “If this is where this conversation is going, then I don’t want to have it. Let’s try not to lay blame at each other’s feet, because both of us were at fault. Instead of turning to each other for love and support, we started to look elsewhere.”

  Bob took a bite of his sandwich. “I don’t know why we did that.” After he swallowed, he said, “I’m sorry, Karen.”

  Karen looked down at her roast beef sandwich. “I’m sorry, too.” She took a bite of her sandwich, hoping that swallowing food would ease the ache in her throat.

  “We did have some good times,” he said. “Remember the time the power went out and we drank warm white wine by candlelight in the bathtub?”

  Karen smiled. “And remember when we decided to go on a family picnic and Robert ate all of the devilled eggs in the car and then threw up when we got there?”

  Bob laughed. “Rebecca was asleep, or she definitely would have squealed on him.”

  “She still sleeps in the car. I can’t drive to Rite Aid without her taking a nap. I don’t know how she’s ever going to drive on her own.”

  “Trust me. She’ll figure it out. She’s one smart girl.”

  “Yes, she is. She takes after you.”

  Bob held up his hand. “No, no. She’s absolutely your daughter, from her brainy head to her well-shaped feet.”

  Karen smiled. “She does have gorgeous feet.”

  “As do you.”

  And so the conversation went for the next hour: an exchange of compliments, bursts of laughter, smiles of recognition, and tinges of regret. Bob and Karen finally stood, long after their lunches were gone, and walked out of the deli together. Bob walked Karen to her car, where they kissed each other on the lips before saying good-bye.

  That afternoon Bob was distracted at work, his normal focus on strategies and percentages subverted by attention to the conversations he’d had with both Billy and Karen. He was stuck, a skipping record album, on the thought that if he and Karen had worked harder at their marriage, they would still be together. It was a futile line of thinking because nothing could be done about it. He was married to Denise, the woman he had left his marriage for and the mother of his baby. Karen, too, was no longer available, no longer his, now that she was with her soul mate, as she had once described Nick. Bob glanced at the spreadsheets covering his desk. Whatever the hell that meant; he thought he and Karen had been soul mates.

  Karen looked at the kitchen clock; she had just over an hour before Robert came home. She looked in the cupboards and the fridge and, finding all the ingredients, decided to make turkey sausage lasagna for dinner, one of Nick’s favorites and a meal tolerated by everyone else at the table. She took a whole-wheat baguette out of the freezer as the meat browned. She sliced the goat cheese, his suggestion for turning a plebian dish into a gourmet meal. Bob’s favorite meal was steak, Caesar salad, and white garlic bread, a man’s meal for a man’s man. She didn’t blame him anymore for who he was because, when she was honest with herself, she admitted that he had always been that way. He had always worked hard, even in college, which then was something Karen had admired about him. Unlike some of the other boys, who appeared to do little outside of drinking past capacity on the weekends and skipping afternoon classes in favor of playing touch football on the green, Bob had always been driven. He worked hard enough to eliminate his competition, both in the classroom and on the social scene. Hadn’t he wooed Karen away from other suitors, including Ray McNamara, who had been ready to marry her and make her the very wealthy wife
of a baseball legend? Karen looked out the windows into the backyard. Where would she be now if she had taken Ray up on his offer? St. Louis?

  Karen sometimes wondered if Bob had proposed to her more out of the fear of losing her rather than out of an overwhelming desire to be her husband. It didn’t really matter, she thought, as she layered the lasagna noodles in the pan. What mattered was that she had accepted his proposal, that she had agreed to marry him because she wanted to be with him for the rest of her life. She placed the goat cheese on top of the noodles and then ladled on a layer of sausage sauce, and then repeated the pattern, topping the final layer with mozzarella cheese and then covering the pan with aluminum foil. Rebecca and Robert ensured that she and Bob would continue to be together as parents, even though they were no longer life partners. Karen split the loaf of bread with a serrated knife. She couldn’t look at her son without seeing her husband. And her daughter was just as smart and motivated as her dad. Once Rebecca shook her teenage angst, she would be every bit as successful as her father. Rebecca and Robert were Karen and Bob’s children. Nick wasn’t a part of that equation, just like she was outside the Venn diagram of Nick’s relationship with Trisha and their girls, Abby and Emily. They were adorable girls, but they looked and acted nothing like Karen. Nick was visibly in love with his daughters, which Karen found both endearing and annoying. She wondered how and why he loved them so much, questioning her love for Rebecca and Robert. Her resentment of the trappings of motherhood had formed a wedge between her and her children, between her and her husband. Why hadn’t she done something to temper that? Why wasn’t she the type of mother, like Sarah, who could give up everything for her children? She put the lasagna in the oven. She had been as selfish as Bob. If both of them had been able to, had wanted to put their own interests and their innate stubbornness to the side, they should have been able to work it out.

  When the phone rang, Karen was not surprised that it was Bob, even though he rarely called. “Hi. It’s me.” She sat down in a kitchen chair. “I’ve been thinking about you all afternoon.”

  Karen inhaled. “And I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “Why are we thinking about each other like this?”

  “I don’t know. We’re questioning our decisions, I guess.”

  They were quiet for a moment. “Did we have a good marriage, Karen?”

  “Yes,” she said immediately. “For a while, we had a good marriage.”

  “Did we have something other marriages didn’t, or was our marriage like everyone else’s?”

  Karen filled the teakettle with water. “We had a good marriage, Bob.”

  “So we blew it.”

  Karen smiled. Bob sounded like a little boy whose gym-class team had just lost a playground baseball game. “Yes. We blew it.”

  “I wish we had another chance.” Karen put her hand to her chest. “Look,” he said, in response to her silence. “I’ve got to run. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Bob walked through the door of the house he and Denise had bought several months ago. While everything was put away—Denise was incredibly organized and tidy—it still didn’t feel like home. He set his heavy briefcase down and then draped his coat on one of the gold-tone hangers that hung in the front hall closet. “Hello!” Denise called. “We’re in the kitchen.”

  Bob walked down the long hallway from the front of the house to the back and found Denise, his wife, sitting on the pristine white floor with Melody, his daughter. Denise stood when he entered the room, deftly scooping up Melody and kissing her cheek before she kissed Bob. “It’s Daddy,” Denise said, beaming at her daughter. “Daddy’s home! How was your day, honey?”

  “Good,” said Bob, loosening his tie. “And yours?”

  “Melody and I went grocery shopping so we could make you a nice dinner. How does lasagna sound?”

  “Wonderful,” said Bob, who hoped she’d put meat instead of spinach into it.

  “Great.” She kissed him on the lips. “I’m going to change her, and then we can sit down and talk. There’s some red wine on the counter.”

  Bob uncorked the wine bottle. He poured two generous glasses and carried them back down the hall to the living room. He sat in one of the matching armchairs Denise called their thrones and took a sip from his glass. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, Denise was hovering over him with their daughter. She put Melody down in Bob’s lap, and he put his arm around the daughter who didn’t feel like Rebecca had, who didn’t feel like his.

  Across town, Karen took her first bite of lasagna as Robert talked about playing Little League baseball, and Emily made a face at the tangy Italian dressing Karen had put on the salad. “This is so good,” said Nick, chewing.

  Karen smiled at her new husband. Putting a piece of garlic bread into her mouth, she willed herself to focus on her family and the chatter at the table. When she looked at Robert’s animated face, she saw Bob, and let the afternoon’s conversation run again through her mind.

  Three women, each facing an empty nest, come together to cheer and challenge one another in this insightful, poignant new novel from acclaimed author Susan Kietzman.

  For years, Ellie, Alice, and Joan enjoyed a casual friendship while volunteering at their children’s Connecticut high school. Now, with those children grown and gone to college, a local tragedy brings the three into contact again. But what begins as a catch-up lunch soon moves beyond small talk to the struggles of this next stage of life.

  Joan Howard has spent thirty years of marriage doing what’s expected of Howard women: shopping, dressing well, and keeping a beautiful home. Unfulfilled, her boredom and emptiness eventually find a secret outlet at the local casino. Meanwhile, Ellie’s efforts to expand her accounting business lead to a new friendship that clashes with her family’s traditional worldview. And Alice, feeling increasingly distant from her husband, and alienated from her once fit body, takes up running again. But a terrifying ordeal shatters her confidence and spurs a decision that will affect all three women in different ways.

  Over the course of an eventful year, Ellie, Alice, and Joan will meet every other Wednesday to talk, plan—and find the freedom, and the courage, to redefine themselves.

  Keep reading for an exciting sneak peek

  of the next novel from Susan Kietzman,

  EVERY OTHER WEDNESDAY!

  Click here to get your copy.

  The calendar on the mustard colored wall of her kitchen confirmed what Alice Stone already knew; it had been two months since her youngest daughter left for college, and Alice was still baking cookies as if Linda were still at home. Every week, she baked two or three dozen, even though her husband, Dave, was running more and eating less, and even though Linda had long ago told her mother that teenage girls didn’t eat cookies. It was a habit, this baking, that Alice had initiated when her three girls were young and looking for a snack when they got home from school. And it kept Alice busy for a couple hours, from the mixing of the ingredients she kept stocked in her cupboards to the baking of the dough. Baking cookies was a productive way to pass time, Alice had convinced herself, better than sitting on the couch and flipping through a magazine. And being productive at home was a good enough reason to be at home, to not get a job.

  In some ways, Alice did want to work. Having a job would give her something to do, a new purpose in life, now that her girls were out of the house. And on some days, she longed for something to fill and challenge her brain, not to mention the extra money that Dave mentioned regularly. He certainly wanted her to work, so she could help with the “incredible expense of putting three kids through college”—although Hilary had just graduated and Cathy had been out of school for three years—something Alice was well aware of since she paid the bills. But, in terms of getting a job, she knew a lot more about what she didn’t want to do than what she wanted to do. She didn’t want to work at Fast Pace, the running store she and Dave had opened twenty-eight years ago when they had moved back to Connecticut, and when she
was running as many miles in a week as Dave. And she didn’t want to perform menial labor, though she had to admit that what she had been doing as a stay-at-home mom, the grocery shopping, meal preparation, driving kids to lessons and school events, and running errands, all fit squarely into that category. Working women liked to show their empathy by praising the honorable profession of mothers dressed in sweats instead of suits, by comparing the skill sets of the cookie baking, tantrum thwarting, coupon clipping moms to those of the team building, forward thinking, solution oriented corporate ladder climbers, but women at home knew better. If they were paid for what they did, it would be minimum wage. This had been okay with Alice, because, in addition to performing banal tasks, she had been caring for her girls. But if she tried to join the workforce now, she would be qualified for and have nothing but boring, inconsequential labor to define her days.

  Dave told her this was crazy talk; she could do any number of things. She was a college graduate, with a degree in psychology that could be useful in many professions, including, he had said over the years, helping runners find the right gear for their style and activity level. But lately, since they had been talking about Alice working again, Dave hadn’t encouraged her to join the team at Fast Pace. Perhaps he, like the rest of the working world, knew that someone who had been out of touch for as long as Alice had been making cookies would have trouble transitioning into the frenzied, twenty-four-hour, global, competitive employment arena.