The Secret Ingredient for a Happy Marriage

by Shirley Jump

  Was. Already, Colleen could feel his pain. She hadn’t lost any of her children, but like any mother, that fear lingered at the edge of every good night, every missed call, every stormy day. “What happened to her?”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. The soft jazz on the sound system and the murmur of conversations filled the silence. Colleen waited. She knew too well that some subjects required patience and space, and so she gave his thoughts room to breathe and bloom.

  “Sophie was a beautiful girl, inside and out. She was so light and happy when she was little, always singing and spinning. She loved to spin, and she’d wear these dresses that flared out when she did, like a ballerina.” His face softened at the memory, and Colleen could almost see the little dark-haired girl in the picture in his office dancing. “Nori, my wife, and I did our best with her, but with the divorce and shared custody and both of us working too much and home too little, she was left on her own far too much. When she got to high school, she got…lost. That’s the best word for it.”

  Another fear Colleen knew well. Abby had done the same for a while, but then she’d joined the softball team and that had redirected a lot of her teenage anger. Thank God. “Did Sophie fall in with a bad crowd?”

  Roger nodded. “By the time Nori and I realized Sophie was in trouble, she had gone from pot to heroin. We sent her to rehab. Three of them. But that damned drug had its tenterhooks in her and wouldn’t let go.”

  Colleen had seen those addicts on the streets of Dorchester. Most days, she almost saw through them, because they were such a common sight. The church had an outreach program, of course, and Colleen had donated to that, but never had she put a face to the drugs. She thought again of that young girl in the picture, that missing front tooth in a smile as wide as Boston Harbor. She couldn’t imagine how painful it would be to see one of her girls descend into that world. They’d been faced with temptations, as all children were, but thank God her girls had made smart choices. It was times like this that reminded her how very blessed her life had been. “Oh, Roger, I’m so sorry.”

  “She ran away from home a dozen times, and twice we found her in the hospital. Beaten, raped, strung out. Lord, it broke my heart every time, and I tried, God knows I tried, to save her. But she was stubborn and the drugs were stronger than her faith in herself. The third time, she didn’t come home.” His eyes filled and his voice thickened. His hands trembled against the glass, and Colleen’s breath caught, knowing in her heart what was coming next, wishing Roger wasn’t going to say the words. “My sweet Sophie died the day before her seventeenth birthday.”

  “Oh, dear Lord, Roger. That is terrible. I’m so very sorry, and I know that doesn’t even begin to touch the grief you have felt, but I am.” She covered his hand with her own and gave his fingers a squeeze.

  He gave her a weak smile. “She was sober, you know, for six months before that third time. God, I had such hope then. I really thought she could do it that time, you know? She moved in with me, and she was going to school and saying all the right things, and I started to believe. To trust that God had her in His hands and she would be okay.

  “One night, we were sitting on my back deck, and I swear, it was just like having my happy little girl back again. She was wearing one of those flare-out skirts she loved so much, and she was humming along with the radio.” His smile wavered. He drew in a deep breath and held it a moment before he spoke again. “The sun was going down, and I remember she sat beside me, reached across the chairs, and took my hand. We’d been talking about the garden, about how she wanted to plant some flowers come spring. She loved flowers, all kinds. Roses, orchids, daisies—like you, Colleen.”

  He paused, and she sat there quietly, waiting. Giving Roger the room he needed to let the long-hidden painful words trickle forward.

  “Then she turned to me and said—and I’ll never forget this moment, the way her eyes were so bright and intent, the conviction in her voice—she said, ‘Dad, I want you to know that the one thing that kept me going was knowing home would always be here. That you would be here. It gave me hope, too, that someday I could have a different life. The life I wanted before I took that one wrong turn.’

  “I damned near started to cry right then. Instead, I just gave her a hug and told her how proud I was of her. How I believed in her. She cried a little, too, and then whispered words to me that I have heard in my heart every single day since she died. ‘Promise me, Dad,’ she said, ‘if anything ever happens or I screw up again, that home will always be here. And so will you.’”

  Colleen’s heart squeezed, and she blinked away her tears. The mother in her ached for Roger, for the lost life that could have been something amazing. His grief filled the space between them and drew her closer, in that shared language of parents who knew heartache. “She must have loved you very much.”

  “Not nearly as much as I loved her.” He shook his head and swiped away a tear. “It was ten years after we buried her before I stopped being angry at God and decided to do something. I realized, if there had been a place like Sophie’s Home around when my daughter was lost and on the streets, maybe she could have found shelter, safety, support. These girls need a place they can depend on, a place that will give them the security they need. So I quit my job and bought that house and poured everything I had into it.”

  “I’m sure Sophie is looking down on you, proud of her father for all the lives he has helped.”

  “Ah, but it’s never enough lives, is it? I’m always worried about the teenager who hasn’t come to us or the mother who is living on the streets and doesn’t know we exist.”

  Colleen vowed to make it her mission to spread the word about Roger’s shelter. To help even more than she already did and bring in more donations. Maybe starting with her bridge group or those ladies down at Saturday night bingo. She could start a trickle that would hopefully someday turn into a river, giving him the resources he needed to help even more girls and women. He was an amazing man, doing an amazing thing, and that drove her to want to make a difference. For the first time in a long time, stirrings of excitement danced in Colleen’s belly. Something new to put her passion into, her energy. “That is an incredible story. I can see why you are so passionate about it. And it makes me want to help even more. What else can I do?”

  “Just get Iris on the right path. She’s a lost girl, too, and I don’t want to lose another one.”

  Colleen gave his hand another squeeze and realized touching him had become natural at some point. “I can do that.”

  SIXTEEN

  Five miles later, Nora was sweating, exhausted, and no less stressed than when she started her run late that Saturday morning. She had less than twenty-four hours left in the Truro house, which meant getting back to reality and, more, dealing with that reality. She hadn’t hit the Megabucks or found a pot of gold in the last five days, so that meant the problems she’d left behind were still waiting for her, like mice in a shadowed corner.

  Nora walked back toward the house, uncapping the water bottle she’d brought with her and taking a long drink. As she rounded the corner, she saw Will in his front yard, adding a sea life scene to his plain black metal mailbox. The vivid colors of saltwater fish and a soft blue-green ocean almost seemed real in those depths of color and shadow.

  “Looking good,” she said. Though she wasn’t sure if she meant the artwork or the man. Will was the kind of man who made jeans look like a sin, even today, with spatters of paint and an old Grateful Dead T-shirt. Damn, he looked good. If she was any kind of a Catholic, she’d be whispering a Hail Mary for committing mental adultery.

  She didn’t.

  Will dropped his paintbrush into a Folgers coffee can and gave her a grin. “I could say the same about you. Have a good run?”

  “Yes, thank you.” She held up the water bottle. “And this time I didn’t need rescuing.”

  He rose and brushed the grass off his knees. He placed the coffee can on the post holding the mailbox.
“Pity. I was hoping for an excuse to see you again.”

  Damn it. Why did that comment make her take two steps closer to him? Coaxing a smile out of her on a day when she was overwhelmed and stressed and a little panicked. And made her wonder what it would be like to kiss him, to feel his chest against hers. His smile was a little lopsided, and a part of her found that endearing. Sexy. Tempting. “That’s really nice of you to say, Will, but I—”

  “Is this why you left me? For him?”

  Ben’s voice froze Nora’s sentence. She turned, the move seeming to take a century, until she was face-to-face with the man she had once pledged her life to. He was a statue, steel ice, and a hot wave of guilt washed over her, even though she was doing nothing wrong. Except she had been sinning in her mind, in the way she looked at Will. She’d been thinking about kissing and touching another man, a man whose eyes reflected interest, not condemnation. A man who hadn’t left her more than a quarter million dollars in debt and homeless. She’d been imagining what her life could be like without Ben, and with this man instead. “No, Ben, this isn’t why I left you. And this isn’t what you think.”

  Will stepped forward and thrust out his hand. Nora wanted to tell him to stop, to not make it worse, but Will moved faster than she could find her voice. “Ben, is it? Nice to meet you. I’m Will—”

  “I don’t care who you are.” Ben leaned into Will’s face. Ben was a good three inches taller than Will, and his shadow loomed over the artist. “Stay the fuck away from my wife.”

  Will put up both hands and took a step back. “I swear, man, nothing is going on between us. We’re just temporary neighbors.”

  Ben’s gaze darted between Will and Nora. His eyes connected with his wife’s, and in the moment they connected, it seemed as if Ben could read every thought she’d just had about Will. Ben’s anger flickered, then yielded to hurt, and Nora wanted to erase the entire moment. But there were no words that would mend this rift. No bandage she could put on the marriage that had died two years ago.

  She thought of all those Friday and Saturday nights he’d been gone until the wee hours. The secrets he’d kept. The money he’d wasted. The snowy day he had left her alone and scared. She knew that sense of betrayal, knew it well. How dare he accuse her of anything. Ben was the one who had abandoned her, who had checked out long ago. His mistress had been a pair of dice, the affair housed in a dark, smoky casino. “Ben—”

  “The kids are inside with your sister. I left their stuff in the hall.” He turned on his heel. “I’m done here.”

  Nora broke into a run and caught up with him just as he reached his car. She touched his arm, but it was like connecting with a steel post. Her emotions roller coasted, rising and falling between anger and hurt, bottoming out into fear. “Ben, stop. There’s nothing going on between Will and me.”

  Ben spun around, and for the first time, she noticed the lines in his face, the shadows dusting his eyes. “So you’re on a first name basis with the ‘temporary neighbor’? Funny, we lived next door to the Monahans for five years, and I don’t think you could have told me either of their first names.”

  “The Monahans weren’t our friends.” And she’d never been home. She’d been working or volunteering at the school or shuttling the kids to different places. There’d been no time for neighborhood block parties or inviting them over to play cards. She’d been doing the job of two parents, because Ben had been too busy sending their money down the drain.

  “And this man you’ve known for what, a week, is?” Ben said. “I find that convenient, considering you asked me for a divorce just the day before you went on your impromptu vacation.”

  She threw up her hands. “God, why do you have to make every single fight we have into something like this? Something huge, over the top? Is it the gambling? Are you still jonesing for that high? Because that’s what you do, Ben. You go big, in everything you do, regardless of what it costs us.”

  He pointed down the street, to Will’s half-finished mailbox, standing alone since Will had gone inside. “I’m not making it into anything. I saw you with him. I saw the way he looked at you—”

  “Which is nothing I can control.”

  “And the way you looked back at him.” Ben took two steps closer, his face unreadable. He had two days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks, and his dark hair was long enough to need a trim. “You used to look at me like that.” His voice broke a little and her heart cracked.

  But she couldn’t let him in again. Couldn’t let that whisper of vulnerability in his words tempt her to return to something that had already taken its last breath. “Since when have you cared how I look at you? I’ve been looking at you like that for a dozen years, and what did you do with that look?”

  “Here we go again.” He cursed. “Jesus, Nora, when are you going to stop making me pay for my sins?”

  “When they stop ruining our lives.”

  “You think I did that single-handedly, Nora? It takes two to make a marriage and two to break it.”

  She shook her head. When was he going to see that he was the one who had plunged them into a crater of debt so deep they had no hope of climbing out? That it was him at that roulette table, not her? She’d been at home, trying to hold on to the very thing Ben had left, as if his family was just another game of chance. And when she had tried to make it work, that one last-ditch effort to turn their lives around, he’d left her again for Foxwoods.

  She shivered in the warm Cape Cod sun, as if she were back on that bench while the snow fell around her and her dreams ebbed away. It had been over a year, and still the pain was a dagger. “I’m not having this conversation again, Ben. We have argued about what happened a thousand times. You don’t see it. All that therapy and meetings and you still don’t see what you did to us.”

  “I do see it, Nora. It’s why I kept trying.”

  She let out a sharp, short laugh. “Trying? You call leaving me to do everything trying? Unplugging from your family when I needed you most? You left me, Ben. You walked out the door and…” Nora shook her head and drew in a breath that headed off the threat of tears.

  “What are you talking about? I never left you, Nora. I’ve been here, the whole time.”

  A part of her wanted to tell him, to just unleash all the words she had kept inside. The hurt was like a giant wall of water, held back by a flimsy piece of plastic. If she nudged it, she was afraid it would drown her.

  Either way, it was too late. They were done. “Why can’t you just accept this and move on? Let it go?”

  “Let it go? You’re my wife, Nora. Those are my kids in there. This is our family. I can’t let that go.”

  She wanted to reach out, to touch his unruly hair and tell him she didn’t want to let go either. But then she thought of the bills, the auction notice, the stress that had been thrust on her shoulders days ago, and most of all, of that cold winter day when he’d driven away and she stayed where she was. “That’s not what you said the other night.”

  “Yeah, well, news flash—I’m also not superhuman. I get hurt and depressed and angry, and I lash out and say things I don’t mean sometimes too.”

  She sighed. Why did he have to waver so much? To keep resurrecting this hope in her, that maybe he had changed? He’d whispered all the right words that night a year ago, and she had believed for a moment that there was still a chance, that the man she’d fallen in love with over a plastic cup of ginger ale was still there. “Do you think I didn’t mean it when I asked for a divorce?”

  He closed the gap between them. If she inhaled, she’d catch the scent of his cologne, a fragrance as familiar as her own name. “Yes, that’s exactly what I think.”

  “Then you don’t know me very well, Ben.” Nora stood stock-still, a tin soldier fortifying herself against weakening to a whiff of cologne and the memories the scent awakened.

  He studied her for a long time. The softness in his gaze hardened. “No, I guess I don’t.” Then he climbed into his car and left.
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  Sarah sat in the kitchen chair, arms crossed, face defiant. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Nora sighed and sat in the opposite chair. The second she’d entered the house after Ben left, she’d heard yelling in the kitchen, with Magpie trying her best to referee. Now Sarah was in a time-out, and Jake was on the back porch with Magpie, his little shoulders hunched. “You got into a fight with your brother. And you broke his truck.”

  Sarah shrugged. “He started it.”

  “Maybe so, but that doesn’t give you permission to fight with him or break his toys. You’re the older one, Sarah, and you should know better.”

  Sarah cut her gaze to the floor. The chair was low enough for her feet to touch the tile, and she swung her bare toes back and forth against the cool melon-colored surface. “Why are we here?”

  The question surprised Nora. “I thought it would be fun to go on vacation. Aren’t you having fun?”

  Sarah shook her head. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “I want to go home. I want to see Daddy.”

  Nora sighed. At some point, she had to tell the kids the truth. Was it wrong to want to keep them in the dark a little longer? To not disrupt their world right away? “We will, soon. And you just got back from seeing Daddy.”

  Sarah shrugged. She gripped the side of the chair and lifted her teary eyes to her mother’s. “Why were you fighting with Daddy? Why can’t you just be nice to him?”

  God, had Sarah seen their argument in the street? Nora should have thought before she’d said anything to Ben, especially in full view of the house. All she’d seen was white-hot anger. She hadn’t thought about front-facing windows and two kids on the other side. And for the second week in a row, Worst Mother of the Year goes to…Nora Daniels.

  Nora’s first response was to lie again, to pretend she and Ben weren’t fighting. But kids picked up on the subtleties, the tension that sparked the air. On the rare occasions when her parents had an argument, she’d known. Ma would be working on one side of the house, Dad on the other, a wall of silence thickening the air.