I open up my messenger to confirm that Cassie has not replied to my third text about whether or not she needs me to bring her something, or did she want to tell Grandma good night, or did she remember to take her homework because she’ll need to go back to school on Monday and does she think she will be at her dad’s house until then?
What all of it really means, of course, is Don’t leave me, I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready.
“Did Chris make it to his plane on time?” I ask, changing the subject. “I’m sorry he had to leave sooner than planned.”
“I got a message a few hours ago that he was boarding,” Lola says. “He should land soon. They’re doing a new spot. I guess that’s showbiz—even goofy commercials.” She makes the same sighing snort that Ray did. “What exactly did I think caused him to have to go back and forth to LA?” She shakes her head and pulls at a loose thread on the old bedspread.
“I think this is the first time he’s gone since you started seeing him. He’s been on an extended visit for months now.”
“I think you’re right,” she says, wrinkling her brow. “Where did I think he lived? Was he staying in a hotel all this time?”
She wiggles off my bed and scoots over to her own.
“I don’t know,” I say. “If I was known as the goofy insurance commercial guy and I met a beautiful woman who didn’t recognize me, I wouldn’t spill the beans either.”
She nods and fiddles with the clock on her bedside table.
“Did Jack come inside?” she says, changing the subject yet again. “I didn’t see him.”
“No,” I say. “He just stole Cassie from the front yard and left.”
I make a face at her so she knows I’m exaggerating, but I’m sure she knows that already. Jack’s not a bad guy. He was just a bad husband. I think. It’s hard to see where you’re going when you’re lost. You feel shook up, and nothing looks like it would if you knew the way to get to where you were meant to be. Streets don’t seem to connect like they should. Tree branches hang too far over the road, and mailboxes seem to leap off their posts and roll underneath your car.
“Probably for the best,” Lola says. “How did it go? Him showing up?”
“I threw a coffee mug full of vodka at him,” I say.
She snickers. “Welcome to your life, post-divorce.”
“You make it sound like a disease,” I say. A sickness I didn’t see coming and one for which there is no easy remedy.
“Sorry,” she says, seeing that I’m not playing into the joke. “I know there was a time when you wanted this to work out.”
“Maybe,” I say. “More like a time when I was naïve enough to think it would.”
Correction—naïve enough to think that it would be easy.
“Did you think it would last?” she asks. “Going in.”
“Of course,” I say. “Everyone thinks that.”
“Was Jack cheating back then? At the start of it?”
I don’t mind when she asks me questions like that. Sometimes it’s nice to have an opening to talk about things that most people hope you don’t bring up because it’s awkward for them to listen to.
“I don’t know,” I say, doubting that he was in the beginning. “He says he wasn’t.”
“Of course he says that,” Lola says. “But he admits to cheating now, right. Like it was a one-time thing or something. Did he tell you how it didn’t mean anything?” She rolls her eyes and makes a scoffing sound at the back of her throat.
“He says he never cheated at all,” I say. “I saw him though, talking to that girl who worked in his office—that secretary. Body language says it all.”
“I thought you said he owned up to it?” Lola said in confusion.
“He says he was ‘seeing’ someone.” I make sarcastic air quotes. “But that he didn’t sleep with her.”
“Whatever,” Lola says. “He’s playing semantics.”
“It might have been just as much my fault.”
Every month that I didn’t get pregnant, I built the wall between us higher. After a while, sex stopped being fun and became a basic scientific function. A man and a woman have sex for the purpose of reproduction. Male and female sexual organs perform mandated tasks to achieve completion of the sexual act in which the male ejaculates sperm into the female. The sperm then makes its way to the egg and begins the process of new life.
I can almost hear the monotone voice-over from those science films in high school. Except this voice-over goes on to say, Except in some sad cases in which the poor male toils and labors and sends his fruitless sperm inside the inhospitable female for naught. It will be a useless journey and a battle lost, as the weak sperm peck at the steel egg until their energy is spent and they die.
Not very sexy.
Then I did get pregnant and everything was great, I think. Then I lost the baby nineteen weeks in and everything broke apart like a plate dropped to the floor. It shattered into pieces that can never go back together, because shards so fine yet so important are lost—too small to see, yet big enough to make it unfixable.
“Maybe if I hadn’t taken all the fun out, we’d still be together,” I say.
“Doesn’t give him the right to go elsewhere,” Lola says, ever on my side.
“No, but it makes it understandable.”
“It does?”
“This has been hard on Jack, too,” I say to Lola. “I wish everyone didn’t hate him. I don’t hate him.”
I want to, but I don’t.
“I’m your sister. I can’t help but get my hackles up. It just seemed like it didn’t faze him and you were going through it alone. I don’t understand that.”
She’s wrong about that, it did faze him, but I don’t want to talk about it.
“Hackles?” I question, and she laughs.
“Darn tootin’,” she says and throws her pillow at
