Regrets Only

by Erin Duffy

  “Oh my God!” she squealed. “It’s so good to see you! You haven’t changed a bit!”

  “It’s great to see you, too,” Owen said.

  “It’s so nice to meet you, Claire,” she sang. I hated that she knew my name, and I’d only found out that she existed two minutes ago.

  “You too,” I replied as I shook her hand, praying that they didn’t stick together from candy bar residue.

  “Congratulations!” she said. She glanced at my enormous belly. “When are you due?”

  “Thanks! I’m due in July.”

  “Only three more months!” she said.

  “Yes. Ten weeks, actually,” I replied. I was counting down the days until the end of my pregnancy and the subsequent return of my ankles, and the difference between three months and ten weeks was enormous.

  “Then we better find you a house fast. I can’t imagine you’ll be able to fly out here much longer.”

  “We’re hoping we can nail something down while we’re here,” Owen said. He placed his hand on my lower back and pulled me a little closer to him. “We need to be here in August so we can get settled before my job starts.”

  “I totally get it. I really think you’re going to like this place. Let’s go inside!”

  We followed Dee Dee up the driveway and entered the house through the basement door, because you had to climb an entire flight of steep stairs up a hill in order to reach the front porch—not something a very pregnant woman needed to be doing.

  “I don’t love the fact that I can’t push a stroller into the backyard,” I’d said. “What will I do with the baby if we go for a walk and he falls asleep in his stroller? I can’t just leave him in the driveway.”

  “This town is very safe. You could actually leave him in the driveway. It wouldn’t be a problem,” she offered. “Or else, you could push the stroller into the basement.” I appreciated her effort, but I was pretty sure that even if this was the safest town in America, I wouldn’t leave a sleeping baby in the driveway. Not the first kid anyway. “This house is really special,” Dee Dee said as we climbed the basement stairs to the hallway outside the kitchen. “It just came on the market and it won’t last long. It has really good bones,” she added, which was what real estate agents said when they wanted to sell a house that probably needed an awful lot of work. The place smelled of cinnamon, and dried lavender, and lemon—like a sachet tucked away in the back of an underwear drawer, and like really clean wood. “Let’s start upstairs,” she suggested.

  The wooden stairs creaked, and groaned, and moaned as we climbed to the second floor, as if they were mad at us for being there. The staircase was missing a spindle, and faint outlines of stains were visible on the creamy wool carpeting in the hallway upstairs, but the moldings were beautiful and the ceilings were coffered and the floors peeking out from the sides of the runner were sanded and glossed. The room at the top of the landing was small and square, with two large windows and one small closet, and not much else. Next to that was the master bedroom. There was a wall of built-in shelves that would be a wonderful place to display family pictures, homemade Mother’s Day cards, and eventually, macaroni necklaces way too special to tuck inside my jewelry box. The windows weren’t particularly big, but they got good sunlight, at least in the early afternoon when we visited the old, charming house that had really good bones. The master bathroom had two vanities, a large steam shower, and a heated floor, which I’d never even heard of before. Who needed a day at a spa when you had this place thirty feet from your bed?

  “Is that a Jacuzzi tub?” I asked, all of a sudden falling in love with this house, which was totally surprising.

  “The owners just renovated both bathrooms on the second floor, and replaced the central air unit. I think you guys would be very, very happy here,” Dee Dee said, which was hard to argue with.

  There was a second bathroom at the end of the hall, a perfect guest bathroom for when my parents came to visit. The bedrooms weren’t big, but neither was our family. They weren’t luxurious, but who needed that? They were clean, and they were functional, and I could see us living here. I glanced at Owen and knew that he, too, felt like this was our home.

  “There are a ton of new restaurants in town, Owen,” she said. “Claire, you’ll love them. There’s a new farm-to-table restaurant called Farmhouse Kitchen that is absolutely amazing. They specialize in using the whole animal. It’s impossible to get into, but I know the manager, so I can get you a table whenever you want. You have to try it, you’ll love it. Trust me.”

  “What do you mean, they use the whole animal?” I asked.

  “It’s nose to tail,” she said.

  “Why would I want to eat pig nose? Or pig tail for that matter? Neither sounds like a draw to me. Then again, I’m pregnant. So unless they serve no fewer than twenty different ice cream flavors, I’m not all that interested in a lot of things,” I joked.

  “Let’s go downstairs. I want you to see the kitchen,” she said, as she escorted us into a perfectly updated, stainless steel, granite topped, Sub-Zero masterpiece. “There’s nothing not to like here, right?” she asked. All I could think about was Antonia and how she would die for this kitchen. “The hardwoods are original,” said Dee Dee. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  I FORCED MYSELF to stop thinking about our introduction, and how I’d been a witness to the beginning of the end of my marriage. “You told me this was our dream house,” I reminded her, just in case that would make her feel bad about her sleeping with my husband on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

  “I think maybe I should go,” she said. She picked up a pump from the floor, then glanced around nervously for the other one.

  I took a step toward her. “You told me we would be happy here, and that you would help us get settled, and that it was nice to meet me.” I was having such a hard time understanding how one person could be so underhanded, so evil, so manipulative, and how I could be so stupid to not even recognize it. I was too busy admiring the hardwood floors to notice who was standing on them next to me.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do this,” Dee Dee said, though she didn’t seem nervous, or guilty, or even uncomfortable. She seemed more aggravated than anything, which really didn’t fit the situation at all. At least pretend.

  “You’re nearly naked in my kitchen eating my waffles. You’re already doing this!”

  “Claire, leave her alone,” Owen pleaded.

  I turned and faced him. No wonder he had gotten up early and showered and dressed before I was even awake. It was all calculated. Every last move he made to get me up and out of the house today. “Don’t say another word, Owen. Don’t you dare speak one more word to me, or to her. The only reason I haven’t gone wild is because Bo is sleeping upstairs, and one of the three adults in this house should give a shit about that!” I hissed.

  “Call me later,” Dee Dee said to Owen. She scooped her dress up off the floor and dropped it over her head.

  “Call me later?” I whispered, as the front door closed quietly behind her. Did Dee Dee not get that they weren’t two teenagers who’d just got busted making out in the basement after school? Did she not realize that she’d taken the best thing that had ever happened to me, and broken it as easily as she’d broken the champagne bottle? I turned to face Owen, and it was as if I’d never seen him before in my life. His head had grown horns, his nostrils breathed fire, and his eyeballs spun in circles in their sockets. “You sent me into the city for a day of pampering, telling me that it was because you loved me, when really it was so you could sleep with our real estate agent.” This isn’t happening, I thought. Not my Owen. Not my marriage.

  “She was my girlfriend. Not just a real estate agent,” Owen said.

  “Is that supposed to make some kind of difference?”

  “No. I don’t know why I said that,” he answered. His face was flushed, and he was fidgeting relentlessly, and I didn’t know if it was because of shame, or regret, or neither, or both, but whateve
r it was looked remarkably like the onset of a seizure.

  “I’m your wife. That’s supposed to make a difference. I thought we were happy.”

  “We were. We are.”

  “No. No. Happy people don’t have affairs. They certainly don’t have calculated getaways in their own house that they facilitate by shipping their wife away for an evening. Did you have big plans? Were you going to cook her dinner?”

  “Don’t do this to yourself.”

  “You had her in this house while our son slept upstairs! Have you lost your mind? Who are you? Who does that? What just happened here? I woke up this morning and believed that I had the most perfect little family in the world and now I’m standing here and I have no idea what’s happening. You sent me away so you could have the house to yourself. Do you have any idea how fucked-up that is? And I would never have known. I wouldn’t have known anything if I was better organized. Oh my God,” I whispered. Owen had manipulated my entire life. None of it was real. I basically just discovered that I was living in The Truman Show.

  Bo cried. He woke up from his nap like he always did, and he cried like he always did, and I ran up the stairs to get him just like I always did, except this was nothing like any of the other times those things had happened. I hurried to his room, pushed open the door, and rushed at the crib by the big bay window. I scooped him up and buried my face in his sailboat-covered romper as I sank down to the floor in the corner of his room next to the rocking chair. I cried silent, hot tears that ran down my face and dripped onto his collar, and rocked him softly for as long as he would let me. I rocked, and quaked, and held him tighter than I needed to, because he’d suddenly become the only thing in my entire world that I knew for certain was real.

  Chapter 2

  HE MADE ME a cup of tea. Because nothing says “I’m sorry I cheated on you with the class of 1998 homecoming queen” like a nice hot cup of Darjeeling. My head was spinning. The kitchen pitched back and forth while I sat at our round kitchen table, the one with white painted legs and a distressed wooden top that I loved, but worried wouldn’t be big enough for the whole family in a few years, assuming that Owen and I had the additional kids we’d once dreamed of having. I stared at the cookbooks shoved on the shelf above the counter next to the stove. I’d promised myself that I was going to organize them before the end of the weekend. They really should be alphabetized, but oddly enough, the fact that books by Rachael Ray were shelved in between books by Giada De Laurentiis and Rick Bayless didn’t seem like much of an issue anymore.

  A filthy kitchen towel hung on the door handle of my stainless steel refrigerator. I kept meaning to wash it, but I never remembered to add it to the laundry pile until after I’d already thrown in a load, filled the machine with Tide, and pressed start on the washing machine that was conveniently hidden in a closet in the upstairs hallway. I hoped Dee Dee didn’t notice how dirty it was. It was bad enough she knew that I couldn’t keep my husband. I didn’t need her thinking I was a slob, too. I held my mug tightly, but I didn’t take a sip. My fingers and toes were numb, and a prickly heat was making its way from the nape of my neck down my arms and my chest until my entire upper body felt like it was on fire. I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. Bo was asleep upstairs for the night and the last time I left him with Owen when he was sleeping upstairs, a nearly naked woman somehow ended up walking around my kitchen. It didn’t seem wise to make that same mistake twice—also, I had no idea where I left my car keys.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he said. This was not a good way to start the conversation. He should have at least started by apologizing for not locking the front door. I’d never be able to unsee his affair. It was now part of my mental Rolodex, one of those defining moments in my life that I’d never forget. It was in there, lumped together with memories of my college graduation, our wedding, and Bo’s birth. It wasn’t fair.

  If I’d ever thought about how I’d react in this situation (and I could honestly say that until now, I’d never thought about how I’d react in this situation), I would’ve thought that I’d never stop screaming—that I’d scream so loud the neighbors down the street would hear me. I’d have expected to yell, bang, threaten, wail, and break anything breakable that I could get my hands on, and that would probably include Owen’s nose or jaw. But that wasn’t what was happening. I’d stopped screaming, and had now gone completely numb. I was waiting for the tears, but none came. I was wondering if maybe I wasn’t smart enough to handle all of this information at once—if my brain tried to process anger, hurt, shock, disappointment, resentment, disgust, sorrow, betrayal, embarrassment, and horror simultaneously and became overloaded. Maybe it decided that it really wasn’t up for the challenge, so it went with numb and said, “Here you go, Claire. This is really all I can do for you right now.” I didn’t know what was happening—just that I was eerily calm despite being devastated, and that had never happened to me before. Then again, neither had this.

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked. Though I knew I didn’t want the answer.

  “About six months,” he answered. Why do men do that? I wondered. Answer questions we don’t really want the answers to?

  I tried to do some basic math, but couldn’t because I was having a hard time understanding why the bulletin board hanging on our wall was swinging like a cheerleader’s ponytail. Six months. That was a long time to be having an affair without your wife noticing. Six months was a long, long time to be an idiot. Then, the worst thought of them all: six months was almost the entire time we’d been living in Connecticut.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?” I felt like I swallowed something sharp, and it was slicing through my esophagus as it made its way to my stomach.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, which obviously made me feel oh so much better.

  “That’s not what I asked you. I know it’s not my fault. I also know that you absolutely think that it’s at least partially my fault. Why don’t you just tell me the truth? Because I don’t think I can handle any more insults today.”

  “I don’t know, Claire. We haven’t talked in so long. We haven’t done anything, or spent any time together, and it never seemed to bother you.”

  “This is how you’re going to try and convince me that you don’t think it’s my fault? I had a baby. We had a baby. I’m sorry that you’re having a hard time taking a backseat to the infant upstairs, but I don’t think having an affair is the way to go about dealing with your own feelings of inadequacy. Why didn’t you come to me? Why did you move me out here if you weren’t even going to care enough to have a conversation with me about how you felt before things got to this point?”

  “You think this was all calculated? I don’t know the answers to those questions, Claire.”

  “How is that possible?” I wailed, those nails I swallowed making their way down into my stomach and stabbing me in a million different places. I felt my insides beginning to churn and imagined my stomach lining shredding, and decided that enduring that would actually be less painful than this conversation.

  “It wasn’t one specific thing. It’s been a lot of things. We’ve grown apart. We don’t have anything to talk about anymore.”

  “That’s ridiculous! We talk all the time. We talk about Bo, and our families, and your job, and your friends, and I talk about Sesame Street, and the music classes at the YMCA. I’m sorry that I’m not up-to-date on global economics at the moment, but this time in our life will pass. I’m going to rejoin the human race soon. I told you I was thinking about going back to work! You try being at home with a baby all day, and let’s see what you have to talk about!” I couldn’t believe that he was using the fact that I was a stay-at-home mom against me. What, Dee Dee had so much more to offer conversations because she could talk about vaulted ceilings and hardwood floors? Is that the stuff on which scintillating conversation was made these days? Is that really why my husband cheated on me?

  “I’m not judging you. I’m just say
ing that it’s made things hard on me.”

  “So you have an affair? It never occurred to you to try talking to me about it? Hey! There’s something we could’ve talked about!”

  “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. We just started talking and one thing led to another.”

  “In person? On the phone?” I asked.

  “What’s the difference?” he answered, which was a stupid question for him to ask. How did he not understand that it mattered—all of it—every sordid, dishonest detail?

  “It makes a difference. You know it makes a difference,” I insisted. One wasn’t better or worse than the other, but I wasn’t going to be the idiot in the room for another second. I needed to know what was going on in my marriage, in my home, in my life, even if it was too late to change any of it.

  “We started texting and emailing. It was nothing at first. Just funny email forwards. Things like that.”

  “You started flirting with your ex-girlfriend on email. That’s just awesome. I didn’t know about it because I’m not the kind of wife who feels the need to search your computer while you’re in the shower. I trusted you. I trusted our marriage. I don’t know how we could be on two completely different pages.”

  “I know. I don’t know what happened, Claire. I don’t know. I wish I could give you some explanation to help make this easier for you, but I don’t have one.”

  “And then what? She asked you to coffee? How did you get from texting to sneaking her into the house while I’m out? That’s not a short progression. It doesn’t just happen. Things happen because you allow them to happen, or because you encourage them to happen. Stop pretending like this was something you had no control over.” The prickly heat continued to move lower, now my knees were burning, and itching, and I half expected my skin to start melting off my legs and fall onto the floor.