Every Wrong Reason

by Rachel Higginson

  I held her close to my chest for as long as she would let me and cried, no, sobbed until the sun came up.

  God, I hated divorce.

  Chapter Fifteen

  22. It’s too late for us.

  “Am I late?” Kara tossed her coat on the empty chair between us and threw her purse down. Her pale cheeks were rosy from the blustery wind outside and her hair was wild from the short walk to the coffee shop.

  Starbucks. Not Eli’s alternate reality coffee purgatory.

  “No, I’m early.” I smiled at her, but my face felt oddly stretched and uncomfortable.

  The barista at the end of the counter called her name and she left me for a moment to pick up her giant macchiato. She sat back down a minute later and held up her hand for me to stay quiet while she took the first sip of her drink.

  This time when I smiled it was small but natural.

  “You look like hell,” she murmured after she’d gotten her fix.

  “I feel like hell.”

  “How was Thanksgiving?”

  I thought back to the day spent at my parents’ house. Josh and Emily hadn’t been there. They’d traveled to Emily’s parents’ in Minnesota for the week. It had been an awkward six hours. My dad had spent the entire day watching football and my mom had spent it trying to overfeed me and grill me about Nick.

  The turkey took two hours longer than it was supposed to and my pie didn’t turn out- a fact my mother couldn’t help but point out. More than once.

  “Awful,” I finally told Kara. “How was yours?”

  “Equally awful. Next year let’s have our own celebration. We’ll start new traditions, drink wine all day long and wear sweatpants.”

  I perked up a little bit. “That sounds amazing. We’re adults after all. We should be able to spend the day how we want.”

  She sat up straighter too. “Just because we don’t have families of our own, doesn’t mean we should be relegated to suffering with our parents for every holiday. Why not come up with our own thing?”

  My rising spirits took a sharp plunge and I thought I would be sick. I didn’t want to make this about me. I didn’t want to spend our entire Black Friday psychoanalyzing my depression. But I couldn’t form words.

  I couldn’t make anything come out of my mouth.

  Kara noticed my change of mood immediately. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

  “You didn’t,” I rushed to assure her. “It’s just… I used to have a family, you know? It wasn’t much of one, but it was mine. And now… now I don’t. It’s just weird. It’s, uh, surreal. I’m not sure that I’ve entirely grasped the concept of being alone again.”

  “Oh, babe,” Kara sighed. “You don’t have to grasp it yet. And I swear I wasn’t trying to rub it in your face. I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “I know. God, I’m sorry. I hate that I’m so self-absorbed. I feel like you’re so sick of me, but I just can’t seem to stop. I thought it would get easier… instead, it just seems to get harder and harder.”

  “I’m not sick of you,” Kara assured me. She pushed her wild red hair out of her face and leaned toward me. “I actually understand more than you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never told you this before because, well, honestly, I haven’t really told anyone in a very long time… It’s hard for me to talk about. Really hard. I shouldn’t have kept it from you. It’s just… I couldn’t make myself say the words.” I watched her intently; afraid that any change in my expression would spook her. I had no idea what she was going to say, but I felt the heavy importance of it. Finally, after a long pause in which she seemed to need to pull herself together, she said quietly, “I, uh, I was married before.”

  “Wait, what?” I slid forward in my seat until I perched on the very edge. Kara had never even alluded to a previous marriage before. I knew she had some serious hang-ups with men, but I never could have imagined that they possibly stemmed from marriage! I took in a shuddering breath and had the worst feeling that I didn’t really know my best friend, that she was just as much of a mystery as the rest of the world.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she growled. “It’s not that I didn’t trust you or wanted to keep it a secret, it’s just that… well, it’s embarrassing! I try not to ever think about it, let alone actually talk about it. Besides, it was a long time ago and has nothing to do with who I am today.”

  “It has something to do with who you are today,” I argued.

  Her expression crumpled and I realized all of her bravado had been exactly that… just a show of bravery to hide her past wounds… her past agony.

  “You’re right,” she sighed. “It does. But I’m serious when I say it was a long time ago. I’m a different person today. I moved on with my life. Really, I built a new life for myself. I just, I just wanted to let you know that I really do understand what you’re going through. And I also know that it gets better… that it won’t always hurt like this.”

  “What happened? Tell me, please?”

  She rolled her eyes at my soft tone but wiggled in a way that let me know she was gearing herself up for a conversation she didn’t want to have, but would have for me. “You know I have a… precarious relationship with my parents?” She lifted her eyebrows waiting for my acknowledgment. I nodded once and she continued, “They’ve always been overbearing, completely impossible. Ever since I can remember, they’ve always wanted to… control me. It’s always been difficult to live with their expectations, but especially during high school, and even more so when it came to my future and how I would live it out. They had a certain set of demands they wanted me to meet and I just wanted to, I don’t know, be a kid… be free. I just wanted to live out from under their thumb.”

  She paused for a moment, seeming lost in the past. I reached out and squeezed her hand. It was a gentle move of sympathy on my part, but she jerked at the contact, jerked awake from whatever memories had momentarily imprisoned her.

  “Naturally,” she continued, “I jumped at the first opportunity to get away from them. That opportunity came in the form of Marcus Henry, my high school sweetheart. We were so in love. Seriously, Kate, you wouldn’t have even recognized me. I was out of control. The world revolved around Marcus. The sun rose and set with him. And when he wanted to get married straight out of high school I didn’t even think twice. I saw an opportunity to get away from my parents and bonus, I would be married to the man of my dreams.”

  “You got married at eighteen? I thought I married young! Holy shit, Kara!”

  She dropped her face into her hand, “I know,” she groaned. “It’s embarrassing. I have no idea what I was thinking. And looking back now I realize how stupid I was. I wasn’t in love, I was infatuated. And there just wasn’t enough substance between us for anything to last.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, we got married without my parent’s knowledge. We just snuck off to the courthouse and called it good. I didn’t even change my name. I didn’t know I had to! I thought it would be like an automatic thing.”

  I smiled at the eighteen-year-old version of my friend.

  “Anyway, my parents were furious, as you can imagine. No, they were beyond furious. I have never in my life seen them so outraged. They cut me off completely, and for the first time in my life, I was introduced to the real world. Marcus was equally furious. Apparently his young and in love plan included living off my parents’ wealth. His parents were a little more forgiving, and let us move into their basement, but they couldn’t help us beyond that. All of our plans for college were abandoned as we went to work full-time at crap paying jobs and tried to navigate our lives as newlyweds. My parents are crazy, don’t get me wrong. But I had a promising future, even if it wasn’t the one I would have chosen. I was suddenly faced with a life I didn’t want and a boy I didn’t love… I wasn’t even sure I liked him anymore.

  “It took exactly eighteen months for us to decid
e that neither of us was willing to fight for happiness in a miserable marriage that was headed nowhere. And then… then he started cheating on me. He didn’t even try to hide it. I think he wanted me to know or find out. I think he wanted out but didn’t want to be the one responsible for ending it. Not that he didn’t play his part. But he was like that. He never took responsibility for his mistakes. He couldn’t keep a job for the same reason. I put up with the cheating longer than I should have. I don’t know why. I knew my life had sunk about as low as it could go, but I was afraid of what else could happen if I left him. At least with Marcus I had a roof over my head.”

  My heart broke for my friend. I wanted to give her a hug, but I could sense that she did not want to be touched right now. Her back was stiff and her shoulders painfully held back. She was just barely holding herself together. If I did anything to spook her, she would lose it. “What did you do?” I asked carefully.

  “The one thing I swore I would never do.” She gave me a sad, defeated smile. “I went back to my parents. I begged them for their forgiveness and for their help.”

  “They gave it to you,” I concluded. She spoke to them now and it seemed very much against her will.

  “They did,” she confirmed. “They helped me with the divorce, or I should say, annulment. They let me move back in with them. In fact, after I went to them I never saw Marcus again, except for the last time in court. They took care of removing my things from his house and all of the documents that needed to be signed or whatever. They saved me. And then they paid my way through school. They helped me move on with my life as if I never left them.”

  Sensing that their help cost her deeply, I whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

  She waved off my apology as if it wasn’t necessary. “I got my way in the end, though. They thought they were giving me a practice with my degree, something they could brag to their country club friends about and recommend to all of the miserable trophy wives they know. They never saw the whole guidance counselor at an inner-city school thing coming. It still pisses them off.”

  We shared a victorious smile. “I wondered why you were so much older than me.”

  She stuck her tongue out. “Only three years. It’s not like I have tenure.”

  “Thank you for telling me that.”

  She shrugged self-consciously, “I just wanted you to know that I mean it when I say it gets better. It hurts. God, it hurts. But it doesn’t always.”

  “I need to hear that. Keep telling me. Don’t stop.”

  She gave me a sad smile. “It’s kind of nice, though.”

  All of my breath whooshed out of me and I thought for a second I would start choking. “What?”

  “Nick. At least he’s putting up a fight for you. Marcus didn’t. Or at least I never heard about it if he did, but I’m almost one-hundred percent positive he just signed whatever papers my parents shoved in front of him and never thought about me again. We weren’t right for each other, don’t get me wrong. And what we did was so completely stupid. But looking back… I don’t know… it would have been nice if he fought for me. It would have somehow soothed my ego after all of this time. I wouldn’t feel so… discarded.”

  A million of my own thoughts tumbled around in my head, but I put them aside for now and said, “You’re not discarded, Kara. He was an idiot. You guys were so young. He was too young and immature to realize how amazing he had it.”

  She tilted her head to stare out the window. “I haven’t been able to look him up since. Not once. I know he’s on Facebook because I see our mutual high school friends comment on his posts sometimes, but I’m too afraid of what I’ll find. I know what I want to find. I want him to be alone and miserable and working a dead end job or still living in his parents’ basement.” Her pretty lips turned down in a frown. “But I’m too afraid that he’ll be happily married with a yoga instructor for a wife and six perfect kids that model for Gap.”

  I let out a surprised laugh, “He’s not married to a yoga instructor and if he has six kids then they’re all from different moms.”

  She wrinkled her nose, “I like that.”

  “You’re a catch, babe. Any guy would be lucky to have you.”

  Her gaze found mine again and her gray eyes sparkled like silver from unshed tears. “You too, Kate. Whatever happened with Nick does not define you. There’s a better relationship out there. You’ll find it.”

  “Maybe,” I whispered. But what I really thought was no. There wasn’t a better relationship out there. I’d been given a good one… a great one and I’d mismanaged it. I’d poisoned it.

  I’d destroyed it.

  I didn’t deserve a better relationship after how I’d treated this one.

  “Well, if it isn’t the shrieking harpy effectively destroying my brother’s life.”

  The harsh, guttural tone came from above me. Feeling the coffee I’d just finished swirl and churn in my belly, I slowly lifted my eyes to stare up at the very last person on earth I wanted to see.

  Jared Carter. Nick’s little brother.

  “Hi, Jared,” I smiled patiently, despite the rotten feeling inside me, despite the urge to run screaming from the coffee shop, waving my arms over my head like a lunatic.

  Jared looked so much like Nick; it actually hurt to see him here. Although, where Nick’s muscles had always been lean and lithe, Jared’s were bulky and compacted. Nick had run college track, Jared had played football at a division two school, where he hit people so his teammates could score points. They had the same light brown hair, though, highlighted by streaks of the sun. Jared’s eyes were a darker blue than Nick’s too. Nick’s eyes looked like blue flames and Jared’s were so dark that you had to lean close just to be sure they really were blue. Jared was also younger by five years. Nick’s body had filled out with manhood. Jared’s, just like his attitude, was still working on it.

  “Kate, wish I could say that it’s nice to see you,” he sneered.

  “No, you don’t.”

  His mouth spread in a cruel grin, “You’re right. No, I don’t.”

  “You know my friend, Kara.” I tilted my head in her direction.

  Jared nodded once, “Kara.”

  She clicked her manicured nails on the wooden tabletop. “Jared.”

  “Do you know what I’m doing here, Kate? Why I would choose this particular Starbucks in the middle of my busy Friday?”

  “Because you don’t have a job?” I leaned forward, uncharacteristically mean-spirited. “Or a life?”

  His grin disappeared. “I’m picking up a coffee for my brother. He had to work today. They’re letting him work on production. They like him there. They think he’s a natural.”

  I struggled to swallow against my closing throat. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  He loomed over us, not moving even after the barista called his name.

  I let out a frustrated sigh. He was ruining my afternoon. “What do you want, Jared?”

  His jaw flexed, just like Nick’s would have. I licked my dry lips and tried not to slam my hands down on the table and demand that he leave.

  “He’s miserable,” Jared finally ground out. “He… He’s not over you.”

  My heart pounded against my chest cavity once, painfully, then stopped beating altogether. “I’m not over him either,” I finally admitted. “That’s not what this is about.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Jared persisted.

  Kara let out a sound of pure irritation and I snapped, “I know exactly what I’m doing. And Jared, so does he. I don’t know what he told you, but he wanted this too. We came to this decision together.”

  “Then why is he doing everything in his power to stop it?”

  My eyebrows shot to my hairline. “Is that what he’s doing? He’s trying to win me back by taking everything from me?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he muttered.

  “But isn’t that the point? If he’s trying to get me back, shouldn’t I unde
rstand what he’s doing? So far he’s done nothing but make this more miserable than it needs to be and hurt me beyond repair. If Nick didn’t want the divorce, he wouldn’t have gotten the lawyer he did or write the list of demands that he did! If Nick didn’t want the divorce, he would never have moved out of our house!”

  Jared’s upper lip curled back with distaste. “That shows you exactly how little you know him.” I opened my mouth to launch into another argument, but before I could say anything he added, “And it shows how very little you realize the damage you’ve done.”

  He turned around and stalked out of the building, forgetting his coffee on the counter. I watched him go, wondering if I should chase after him with the abandoned cups or if I should leave before he came back in for them. In the end, I just sat there and he never came back.

  The confused barista eventually threw the coffee away.

  “God, he’s an asshole,” Kara declared.

  “Such an asshole.”

  “How dare he!” she continued, then launched into a rant about his stupidity and how he had never done anything with his life and never would.

  I only half-listened though. I couldn’t get his words out of my head or write him off so completely.

  It shows how little you know him.

  It shows how very little you realize the damage you’ve done.

  I told my students all the time that if they wanted to do anything with their lives, they had to take responsibility for their actions. That was why I chose the classics I did. The Scarlet Letter… Romeo and Juliet… Ethan Frome.

  I practically preached responsibility.

  And yet I had done nothing but blame and blame and blame Nick for destroying our marriage… for making our divorce as awful as possible.

  I let him take all of the blame without ever owning up to my end.

  Kara and I finished our coffee and then headed off to do some minor Black Friday shopping. But I never got over Jared’s accusation.

  And I couldn’t shake off the bitter feeling that he was right.