by Mary Gorman
“Gee, thanks.” She laughed.
Dave, realizing what he had just said, felt abashed. “I didn’t mean … ” he began, flustered. “I mean, you’re the kind of woman who would appreciate — ”
“Oooh!” exclaimed the little girl, pointing at something on the table. “Pretty!”
Denise and Dave looked to see where she was pointing. It was a small white figure of a bride and groom, arm in arm under a heart shaped arch. “Can I see?”
Denise hesitated, then picked up the static figures and knelt to show them to the child, whose eyes were wide and round. “Oooh,” she said again. “That’s beautiful.”
Denise smiled wistfully. “Yes,” she agreed. “It is.”
“That’s a strange thing to be selling at a tag sale,” Dave remarked. His mother and father’s wedding cake topper was still in the family, proudly on display in his mother’s curio cabinet.
The lady in the apron, perhaps sensing another sale, approached them. “Are you bothering the nice people, Gracie?” she asked.
“She’s fine,” Dave assured her. “She was just curious about the cake topper.”
“Gracie’s my neighbor’s little girl,” the apron lady informed them. “She’s sure that everything for sale here is a treasure.”
“It is an unusual thing to have at a tag sale,” Dave noted. He didn’t want to offend the lady by directly asking about her decision to sell the memento of her wedding, but at the same time he wondered.
“I’m getting divorced,” she told him without being asked. “My about-to-be ex-husband decided that he would rather up and move to Hawaii than be with me. A lot of the things here,” she said, looking at the variety of items on the table, “are either his or are things that are associated with him.” For the first time Dave registered the fact that many of the items on the table — the tools, the sports memorabilia, the beer mugs — were all decidedly male oriented. He didn’t know what to say.
“It’s good to be able to let go,” Denise told her. “Instead of dwelling on him, just think about you from now on. Without him, you’ll be able to call all your own shots. It will be great.”
The apron lady smiled grimly. “That’s what I aim to do. Come on, Gracie, let’s find your mommy.” She took the little girl by the hand and led her towards a heavyset woman in a green tank top. Denise stood up and looked at the small figures in her hand.
“That’s really sad,” Dave commented after a long moment of silence. “That the marriage didn’t work out, I mean.”
Denise started at the bride and groom in her hand. “Yes,” she said at last. “I guess it is.”
“Does it remind you of your wedding?” he asked gently.
Denise shook her head. “No. We didn’t make a big song and dance out of it. Jason and I eloped while we were both still in college. It was the most romantic thing you could ever imagine. He asked me at a little sidewalk café in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. We hopped a plane that night for Jamaica — they only have a twenty-four hour waiting period there, and so were married on a beach at dawn less than forty-eight hours after the proposal.”
It crossed Dave’s mind that when he was in college he couldn’t have afforded a Greyhound bus to Cape Cod, let alone a jet plane for two to Jamaica on an impulse, but he didn’t say so out loud. “Does that mean that you didn’t have anyone there? No family, I mean?”
She tilted her head slightly sideways to look at him. “No,” she said evenly. “My mother was a little hurt by that, I think, but she never came out and said as much. I’ve always wondered what his family thought. They were kind of stiff around me, but then again, they were always kind of stiff, anyway.”
“Did you miss having a wedding with all the trimmings?” he asked gently.
She smiled a sad little smile. “I think every little girl dreams of having a big wedding with all the trimmings, but I didn’t miss it at the time. No. I think I was just happy to be young and in love and marrying the man that I thought was my prince.”
She looked across the driveway to where the lady in the apron stood next to little Gracie, talking to the woman in the green tank top. She stared down at the cake topper in her hands, sucked in her lip a little, then crossed the driveway with Dave trailing behind. When she reached the three females, Denise knelt down in front of the little girl and held out the cake topper. “Would you like this?” she asked, a little shyly.
Gracie didn’t hesitate at all. “Oh, yes!” she exclaimed, reaching for it.
“If it’s okay with your Mommy,” Denise added, looking up at the lady in the tank top.
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Thank you!” Gracie blurted out. “Oh, thank you, thank you! It’s the most beautifulest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Denise smiled and straightened up. “The cake topper plus the bike came to twenty-two dollars, right?”
“Right.” The apron woman nodded, reaching for the cash.
• • •
Denise rode her new bike back from the tag sale. Dave drove back, and was waiting for her when she got back, rocking gently on the porch swing. Denise wheeled into the driveway and parked her bike, then walked up to him, shining and slightly breathless. “That was a good deal. Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” he replied. “It rides well?”
“Yeah. Mind you, I’m still not sure when I’ll get time to actually ride it, but at least I have it and that’s a start.” She came up on the porch and sat down next to him on the swing, setting it to rocking again. They sat together in companionable silence for several long minutes while she caught her breath. They stared straight ahead, looking at Dave’s car parked in the street, each alone with their thoughts.
Finally Dave said, “That was nice of you, giving that little girl the bride and groom.”
She drew in a breath, but didn’t look at him. She tried not to think about her marriage. It was in the past, and she liked to keep it there, but suddenly there it was in the forefront of her mind again. “Yeah, well. I like kids.”
“But you never had any of your own?” he asked, curious.
“I thought there’d be time, you know? And Jason said he wasn’t ready yet. He was busy taking over as a CEO in his family’s business. So I waited. I waited to have my children, and I waited so long that I ended up without a husband.”
“What happened?” Dave asked. He knew the answer but didn’t want her to know that he’d listened to the office gossip about her.
She shook her head. “I stayed home and cooked his meals and went to his functions and hosted his dinner parties, and he worked late and screwed his secretary.” She couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of her voice, even now.
“I’m sorry,” he said truthfully. “No one should have to go through something like that.”
“Yeah, me too,” she said. “They say the wife’s the last to know, and after it all came out, people would say that I must have suspected something, but I honestly didn’t know that it was going on. Not ’til the end.”
“How did you find out?” he asked, gently pushing the porch swing back and forth with his foot. There was something comforting in the movement.
She looked up at the gingerbread woodworking in the cornices of the porch posts. “She told me. His secretary. Confronted me, really. Said that the only thing keeping her from having him was me — that he was too soft-hearted to tell me himself that he didn’t love me. He loved her instead — physically, spiritually, emotionally. So why didn’t I just give up that sham of a marriage and let her have him?”
“Dear God,” Dave muttered.
“I think what I said was a little stronger than that,” she admitted with a half-hearted smile.
“So you left him?”
“No. I stayed to confront him. I didn’t trust her. Hell, I don’t
think I believed her at first. And then I thought that if it was true, then it had to have been her fault. She must have made him. Tricked him, somehow. Seduced him. I was so sure that it had to be her fault.”
“You must have really loved him,” he said quietly.
Had she loved Jason? Oh, God, she had! She thought that he would be the man she’d spend the rest of her life with. “I thought I did. God, I thought I did. But none of it was what I thought — not him, not my marriage, not my life. None of it.” She stared at the porch railing, stripped bare. “He made a half-hearted attempt to get me to stay. Told me he loved me, that he didn’t want the marriage to end, that he’d make it up to me.”
“But you sent him packing.”
Her smile held no joy. “I took him back. I figured after six years together, he deserved another chance. Maybe it was like a seven year itch sort of thing. He said he didn’t love her. Said he didn’t know why he’d done it, but that he’d have her transferred to another office if that was what I wanted. So I stayed.” Her voice was full of bitterness. “And I tried to be a better wife. I thought maybe if I kept the house cleaner, made better meals, was a better lover … ” She blinked. “No one can say I didn’t try.”
“I’m sure you did,” he told her. “But it didn’t make a difference?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t trust him. At first, I thought that was a bad thing. A good wife trusts her husband, you know? But every time he said he had to work late, I wondered. Finally, I packed up a picnic dinner one night. Champagne, stuffed mushrooms, French bread, rare sliced roast beef, and coconut macaroons — those were his favorite cookies, and I made them myself, grating the coconut by hand and then topping each one with a little maraschino cherry.” She drew in a deep breath. “God, I was pathetic.”
“No,” he told her. “You weren’t.”
She glanced at him, but didn’t reply.
“So … you caught him?” he asked gently after a long moment.
She shook her head. “He wasn’t there. So I looked up her address on my cell phone and I drove to her building. God, it’s a wonder I didn’t kill anybody on the drive over there, I was so upset. I didn’t know what her apartment number was and so I just stood outside the building waiting for him to come out. It started to rain, but I still stood there. I knew. I just knew. And while I waited there, I had time to think. If he walked out that door, it was over. No more chances. No more apologies. Over. AIDS and other STDs aside, there’s such a thing as self-respect.”
She glanced at him. “He was there, of course. And eventually he came out. I stayed long enough to tell him I was leaving him. I still can’t believe how calm I was when I told him. I just said goodbye and got in the car and drove off. I went to the airport, and threw the picnic basket out the window on the way. I peeled off my birth control patch and left it in the trash in the ladies’ room. I charged my plane ticket on his company credit card and flew to our house on the Oregon coast. I always loved that house, and it was the one place I thought of that I could just go and think.
“I cried and I thought and I cried some more. Eventually I called my mother and told her. Then I called a lawyer.” She smiled. “I think he probably thought he’d hit the mother lode when he’d heard who I was divorcing. But I didn’t want it. Not his name, not his money, not his property. I didn’t want any part of him anymore. I realized that I’d left behind my life when I married him. I’d never finished college, had never held more than a part time job, and I’d always lived in his family’s houses. I decided that if I took his money or anything that had been ‘ours,’ that people would always think of me as his ex. I wouldn’t be known for my own self, but I’d be the woman who’d gotten her money by marrying well then divorcing. Then again, I didn’t want to make his infidelities a matter of public record. If I divorced him on the grounds of his infidelity, then everyone would know. I could have gotten a bigger settlement by making the divorce his fault, but it wasn’t worth the humiliation, you know?”
Dave made a noncommittal noise in his throat and reached his arm along the back of the porch swing and just waited, letting her talk.
“So I got my divorce, and my freedom and my life. I put the best spin I could on it.” She laughed. “I even threw myself a divorce party. Invited all of my girlfriends to our house in the Hamptons for an afternoon of champagne and men bashing. We burned my marriage license, threw darts at a picture of Jason, and topped it all off by passing out my wedding china and taking turns smashing it in the driveway. The next day I moved back to Boston.”
Dave waited.
After a long moment, Denise sighed. “I try not to look back. Not ever. But every now and then, it ambushes me. Like with that cake topper. I try to celebrate my singleness. And I really do believe that my divorce was a good thing. But you’re right. It really is sad that it didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry, Denise.”
She smiled sadly. “So am I.”
“You’re better of without him,” he told her.
She looked at him then. “Thanks.”
She leaned back against the swing and rocked for several beats. Dave had the sense that she was debating with herself whether or not to tell him something, and so he waited.
At last she sighed. “I feel like a fool in so many ways. For falling in love with him. For marrying him. For giving up all of the things that were for me so that I could help him get ahead.” She drew in a deep breath, then said, “For not being interesting enough to keep him from straying.”
Dave defended her immediately. “That wasn’t your choice, that was his.”
“I know. But I wondered for a long time, what was it about her that made her more desirable than me? Why didn’t it work? What could I have done differently?”
“Nothing,” Dave affirmed. “You did nothing wrong. Look, did you have an affair? Did you neglect him?”
“No.”
“Some guys are just thrill seekers,” he told her. “They like the challenge and excitement of finding a woman, but they don’t realize what a good thing they had all along.”
The corner of her mouth quirked. “That’s what my mother says. Like she would know. She and my dad were together for a quarter of a century and never so much as looked at other people.”
“Well, they might have looked,” Dave mused, “but they had too much respect for each other to have acted on it.”
“In a way I suppose it was a blessing,” she told him. “That I found out when I did. That we didn’t have any kids yet. That I still had my family to come home to.”
“You’re better off,” he said again.
She drew in a deep breath. “Yeah,” she replied. “I guess I am. I’ve got my freedom, my mom, a kick-ass new job. Hell, I’ve even got my face plastered on billboards and buses all over Boston. But you know what? The bottom line is, I’m happy. Happier now than I had been in a long time.”
Looking at her face, he could see both pride and the satisfaction there, so he simply said, “I believe you.”
She smiled at him. “You’re a nice guy, you know that?”
He snorted. “I do my best.”
She surveyed the mess that they had made of her mother’s porch; the drop clothes and sand papers and scrapers that sat waiting for them. “I guess we should get to work,” she told him finally. “I don’t think a therapy session was on today’s agenda.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you just needed to talk,” he said. “I don’t mind. Really.” He reached over and gave her knee a friendly squeeze. “Maybe I’ll need someone to listen someday myself.”
She smiled at him. “You? What secrets could you possibly have?”
“Oh,” he said with a knowing tone. “You’d be surprised.”
Chapter Nine: The Museum
“I don’t get women,” Kirk announced during half time of the B
oston College Florida State football game on a late October afternoon.
Dave arched an eyebrow in his friend’s direction. Kirk generally considered himself a ladies’ man. “Is there any particular reason why you say this now?”
“It’s this book I’ve been reading. Here’s this woman, right? And she enters into a marriage of convenience with this multimillionaire. He’s got a bit of a stick up his butt and she’s a bit of a wild child, but she starts to get under his skin and they’re great in the stack together. So finally, the reason they were living together gets resolved and he realizes that he doesn’t want to be without her, so he asks her to marry him. Get this, she says ‘No’ because he’s never used the words ‘I love you.’ I mean, how stupid is that?”
“So what happens then?” Ghoulie asked, tilting his head curiously.
“The poor sap has to grovel and tell her that he loves her. It’s like they’re magic words or something. Would a woman really do that? They’re just words.”
“I don’t know,” Ghoulie mused. “Words mean a lot to women. They remember things that we don’t, like the anniversary of when your meet, and exactly what you said when you asked them out for the first time.”
“Do you remember that stuff?” Kirk asked him.
“No, but Shelby does.”
“Maybe it’s just that words mean more to women than they do the men,” Dave said. “I mean, you tell women you love them all the time, don’t you, Kirkie?”
“Yeah. But that’s part of the dance. They expect to hear it.”
“Maybe you just answered your own question,” Dave pointed out.
Kirk looked over at him in surprise. “Yeah, but to turn down marriage just because a guy has never said the words?”