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When I get home, Jack is at the condo, clearing out the rest of his stuff.
“Is Cassie home?” I ask, looking at the clock over the microwave and realizing I’m later than I wanted to be.
“She’s in her room,” Jack says without making eye contact.
I want to peek in and make sure she isn’t packing too, but I don’t want to seem overbearing. There’s no good place for me to be, so I wander around like someone looking the place over, trying to decide if they want to buy it.
I stop by Cassie’s door, listening in case I can hear her. Kids used to be noisy—music up too loud, yelling into the phone, video game music on high. Now no one actually speaks to each other; music is piped in through earbuds, childhood has gone silent. I decide she must be in there even if there isn’t much evidence of her presence and slink off to the kitchen.
It wouldn’t show by looking at it, but it’s been over a year since Jack actually lived here. But now all the papers are processed and the jig is up. The marriage is officially over. I give Jack his space as he boxes and bags the things he cares about enough to haul away with him. I watch him decide for and against, holding things up, weighing their significance. I realize that I had come to think of Jack as rather unassuming, but today he’s coming off pretty sexy in his dress shirt, unbuttoned enough to release his tie, and his sleeves rolled up at the cuff. His chestnut-colored and usually clean-cut hair is disheveled, and I know he’s been running his hands through it in that anxious way that he does.
This particular part of a relationship’s demise is like a terribly unfunny joke. You’ve done the yelling, the crying, the bargaining, the giving up. You’ve hired the lawyers and paid the fees, but now you have to hole up in the kitchen and chop vegetables for a dinner you’re not really going to eat so that your disappearing other half can pack the last of his things in a cardboard box. Funny the way we try to put life in a box.
This stage of it all happens in some other twisted celestial plane where things take much longer than they should and you feel like a royal jerk for slicing carrots through the whole mess, but it would be rude to offer to help.
Let’s speed this up now. Toss this in, too; my potatoes are on boil. If you hurry it up, you can be out of here before the biscuits are done.
“I think that’s it,” Jack says, coming into the kitchen and sitting at the barstool like he used to do on those rare occasions when he was home in time to catch me cooking as opposed to our usual routine of Cassie and me eating alone and then nuking the remains for him when he got home.
“Ok, then,” I say.
There is nothing to be said about this process. Nothing that makes it any better, that is. It’s surreal to divvy everything up like children portioning out candy and counting the pieces to make sure each gets their fair share.
You take the couch, and I’ll take the love seat and recliner. You take the bigger of the saucepans, and I’ll take those two little ones that you don’t like anyway. We each get two plates, two coffee mugs, two glasses, and two sets of silverware.
“Are you going with me to the thing?” I ask, feeling silly at my inability to say the word funeral out loud.
“I don’t think so.” Jack swivels around, putting his back to me. “I don’t feel like being the royal horse’s behind all day.”
“Don’t you think not showing up will have the same effect?”
“Two totally different scenarios.” Jack swivels back around on the barstool to face me. “One—I don’t go, and your Aunt Rose asks you in that tone of hers why I’m not there, even though she knows good and well that we’re divorced. You make some excuse for me, or you don’t, and she tsk-tsks at you and goes on her merry way. People talk amongst themselves for a minute, but out of sight, out of mind, and I’m soon forgotten.”
“And scenario two?”
“Two,” he says, holding up two fingers for effect. “I go, and everyone leers at me all day because they know we’ve split and that I don’t belong there anymore and if I look at my phone or yawn or get up to get a drink, it will be an indication of my lack of sincerity and they’ll talk about me behind their hands and roll their eyes like I can’t see them.”
I want to come back at him with some pithy something, but he’s right. Of course, scenario two makes things difficult for him whereas scenario one makes it hard on me. I could fire at him for that, but were the tables turned, I can’t honestly say I would do any different. There’s no sense to torture him. Despite the end of our time together and the events that led to it, I do love him. It’s almost never a lack of love that ends things. There’s always another side to the story.
Jack stands up, and I know he wants to get the heck out of here, so I don’t press the issue. I walk around the counter to meet him, and we stand in front of each other in that awkward good-bye moment that you can only have with someone with whom you’ve shared the highest highs and the lowest lows. Someone you care about despite it all.
“Nina,” Jack says and brushes my hair back from my shoulder. “I’m really sorry about Nate. If you want me to go, I will. If Cassie wants me to go, I’m there. All that other talk was just me blowing
