Secrets over Sweet Tea

by Denise Hildreth Jones

  “Okay.” She left him there for a minute. He rocked in his loafers and pulled at the fabric of his blue Izod shirt, which hung loosely over his khaki pants. He walked slowly toward Jackson’s office and paused in the doorway. Jackson had his back to the door, looking for something on the bookshelves.

  Every inch of the office was inviting. Sunshine streamed in through big windows to the French doors where Zach stood. The walls and thick moldings were all painted a clean white that set off the dark hardwood floor and heavy furniture.

  Zach stared a moment longer and breathed a quick prayer. Please don’t let this be a train wreck. It was the first prayer he had managed all week. He was grateful he still knew how.

  Zach spoke. “I’m here.”

  Jackson turned, his face lit up with a genuine smile. “Hey, man, great to see you.” He walked over and gave him a hug, then motioned to the sofa. “Sit. Please sit.”

  Zach took a seat and rubbed his hands on his knees.

  Jackson pulled an armchair over from the other side of the room and brought it closer to the sofa. “Long week, huh?”

  Zach let out a small laugh. “Interminable.”

  “Any backlash?”

  “No, not really. A few friends of mine and Caroline’s have called, so she is obviously talking to her friends. But around town, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of gossip or anything. I can’t believe it, honestly.”

  “Well, that makes me very grateful. It says a lot about our church, I think.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by Scarlett Jo. Her large frame loomed in the open doorway, but as she stepped aside, Zach caught sight of Caroline. Their eyes locked on each other as Scarlett Jo announced the obvious: “Fellas, Caroline is here.”

  Both Zach and Jackson stood immediately. Zach was grateful Jackson had words in that moment because he had just lost control of his ability to speak.

  Caroline entered the room. Jackson welcomed her with a quick but kind embrace, and she gave him a tense smile. Then she was beside Zach. He didn’t know what to do with her. Did he hug her? Simply nod?

  “Hey,” he offered.

  “Hi” was all she gave in return.

  Scarlett Jo clapped her hands together, causing him to jump a little. “I’ll be right back with something to drink.”

  Her absence created a chasm in the room. He wished she’d stayed.

  “How are you?” he asked Caroline, reaching out awkwardly to touch her arm.

  It was rigid. Nothing new there. “Fine.”

  He turned his eyes toward Jackson, who read his desperation. “Why don’t you both have a seat?”

  Zach watched as Caroline straightened her peach-colored sundress. She was perfectly put together, as always. Hair perfect. Dress perfect. Shoes and makeup and smile—all perfect. There had been moments in their life together when he wanted to reach into all that perfection and mess it up. Could that be partly what his behavior was about—a way to make everything less perfect? Or maybe to reveal how fake and imperfect it already was.

  He didn’t know. Maybe that was an excuse. And he knew it didn’t really excuse anything.

  Caroline turned her head toward him as if she knew he was studying her in some way. The edges of her mouth set firmly.

  Jackson spoke. “Caroline, I want to thank you for coming. I know you didn’t have to, but both Zach and I are grateful you did.”

  Zach didn’t feel grateful at all. Caroline just cupped her hands in her lap and gave Jackson another little smile.

  “Well, do either one of you want to say anything?” the pastor went on. “I know you haven’t seen each other or really talked in a week. And last time you did talk, it was—well, hostile, I guess you could say. So I want to give both of you the chance to say something if you want to, now that you’ve had some time to cool down and think.”

  Neither of them moved. Zach felt as if the front of his shirt were stretching. The tightness in his chest all but removed his ability to breathe.

  Scarlett Jo came to the rescue. “Okeydoke, here’s some sweet tea.” She carried a large tray in and set it on Jackson’s desk. She handed Caroline and Zach each a glass of tea with a small napkin wrapped around the base. Both gave a soft thank-you. She handed Jackson his glass and kissed him on the cheek. He touched her hand softly, and Zach noted their expressions. The knowing. The kindness. The freedom in the way they loved each other. He wasn’t sure he had ever known anything like that.

  Scarlett Jo left the room, quietly closing the French doors behind her.

  As soon as she was gone, it was as if something loosened his tongue. “Caroline, I’m so sorry. I know I’ve hurt you in the most horrific of ways. I’ve betrayed your trust. I’ve put a wedge in our marriage. But I will do whatever is necessary to make this right.”

  He stopped abruptly. That was all he had. He waited. She sat there and looked at him but didn’t speak.

  “Do you have anything to say?” he finally blurted.

  Then he saw something odd. What seemed like genuine emotion flooded to the surface. Her eyes glistened with the emergence of tears. But she shook her head, saying nothing.

  Jackson nodded. “Well, I understand. Sometimes it’s tough to know what to say in situations like these. But I want to share something with you both. You see, as a pastor for some twenty years now, I’ve discovered there are three parts to most affairs. There is the crisis part, which is where you are now. But there is also what led up to the affair and what happens after it. During the crisis part, the couple’s hearts usually want to stay focused on who is to blame. But I care about you both so much I want you to focus on what will get you to a place of healing. So I feel like it is necessary for us to go back and focus on the earlier part. Our goal is to figure out what got both of you to this point.”

  Zach turned toward Caroline and watched as she gnawed at the inside of her mouth. Her eyes narrowed in the way they did when she entered a place of quiet seething.

  “Jackson,” he said, “what got us here is me. My dysfunction is obviously off the charts. Caroline had nothing to do with getting us here. Everything I did was my decision.”

  Jackson nodded. “You’re absolutely right. Everything you did with Elise was your decision. But why do you think you made that decision? Pain is often what forces us to places of hiding out, which is usually what affairs are. They are a way to hide from something we don’t want to deal with, something that is too painful. And usually both partners contribute to that in some way. So what is it for you?”

  Zach hadn’t expected a question. And he didn’t want Caroline to explode right here in the pastor’s office. He knew what her explosions looked like.

  “Well, I don’t . . . I’m not sure I know exactly why. It’s just . . . It’s been hard.”

  Caroline’s head snapped around. “Hard? It’s been hard for you? What are you talking about?” Her anger was still under wraps, but it seeped through her words, as deadly as carbon monoxide.

  “I’m not saying you made it hard, babe. I’m just saying . . . well . . .” He dropped his head, and his next words came out more as a mumble. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  He raised his head and looked to Jackson for rescue, but Jackson just pressed harder. “What were you running away from, Zach? Because I’ve learned that with most decisions in life, we’re either running to something that is healthy and alive or running from something that we’re trying to avoid. With adultery, you’re almost always running from something.”

  Zach was getting frustrated. He didn’t want to say anything bad about Caroline. She was already teetering between explosion and nuclear meltdown. Besides, it was his fault. It was all his fault. “I guess I was running from me. From my poor decisions. I was running from my stuff.” Okay, that all sounded good. But he could tell by Jackson’s face he wasn’t buying a lick of it.

  “Well, sure,” Jackson said. “We all run away from ourselves a lot. But let’s take this a little further. What in your heart w
as so broken that you felt like you needed to run away from your wife and to another woman?”

  Caroline’s knee was moving quickly up and down. One wrong word, one wrong move, and he was certain she would pounce. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

  “How about you, Caroline? What do you feel might have gotten you and Zach here? Have you been running from anything?”

  He could tell her eyebrows wanted to lift. Botox had rendered them useless. But a smooth brow couldn’t mask the anger that perpetually simmered inside. “I don’t run from anything, Pastor. I’m more of an up-front, honest person.”

  Jackson nodded. “Okay, everything is up-front and honest. So how did we get here?”

  Caroline’s words came out exacting, prickly. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean my desire for both of you is your healing. That’s way more important than having the right answers. And to get you past this place of crisis and into any kind of future together, we need to unwrap any pretense and get to what is underneath all this hurt.”

  Then Caroline lost it. “We got here because my husband doesn’t know how to keep a commitment. Which I should have known because he never keeps his word to me regarding anything else either. He’s always telling me he’ll get the car serviced and he never does. He tells me that he’ll take care of something around the house and he doesn’t do it.” She turned to Zach. “I should have known you wouldn’t have any respect for a marriage covenant either.”

  Now she was back to Jackson. Zach was getting motion sickness. “I mean, if a man can’t keep his word in the small things, why would you expect him to keep his word in the big things.” It was a question, but she spoke it as a statement.

  “Do you have trouble keeping your word, Zach?” Jackson asked.

  Her last statement had ignited some indignation. “Caroline, how can you compare getting your car serviced to a marriage covenant? I try to get it all done, and I want to. So my first response when you ask me to do something is to tell you yes. But then I’m slammed at work, and by the time I get home, I just want to relax and talk to the girls and such. If you want to call that not keeping my word, fine, but that doesn’t have anything to do with why we’re here.”

  “So why are we here, Zach? Are we here so your pastor friend can look at me and tell me I’m just as messed up as you are?” The gloves were off. The control was gone. Her voice escalated. “Are we here so that you can get some validation for cheating on me?”

  Zach looked at Jackson, hoping for help. But Jackson simply leaned back in his chair, apparently willing to let this go on.

  She wasn’t finished. “Or, I know—maybe we’re here so you can try to make me as much to blame as you are?” She slammed her drink down on the table next to her and stood. “Well, I can tell you both, I won’t sit here and listen to it. If this is the kind of counseling you dole out, Pastor—” the words came out laced with sarcasm, the Southern sweetness gone—“then you can save it for your other church members. And you, Zach Craig, can forget me ever doing this again.”

  She marched to the French doors and jerked one open. The only thing they could hear as she left was the weight of her steps as she stalked to the door. They listened as it opened and closed.

  Zach set his glass down and stood. “We can’t just let her leave like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s serious, Jackson. She’s not coming back. She thought you were saying this wasn’t my fault.”

  “Is it all your fault, Zach?”

  “Of course it is. I did it. How could it not be my fault?”

  “The affair was your fault, Zach. I never argued that. But you and Caroline both had a role to play in how your marriage got to this point.”

  Zach stared at him. “Even if that’s true, you could have worked that in gradually.”

  Jackson nodded. “Maybe you’re right. Though I’m thinking that with Caroline we might never have gotten there. With Caroline, you need to cut right to the chase.”

  “Well, you certainly did that. Now I’m thinking I need to find an apartment.”

  Jackson nodded again. “I’ll help you.”

  Zach raised his hand. “No, that will be enough. You have helped entirely enough.” He took the same exit Caroline had used. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t be back.

  Zach hit Caroline’s number on his iPhone as he got into his car and drove the three short blocks to the parking lot behind his office building. She sent him straight to voice mail—ten times. This wasn’t how he’d wanted their talk to go, not at all. Jackson had no business taking the conversation there. Caroline had every right to blame him for everything—including that “counseling” session. He’d been stupid, thoughtless. He let her know this on nine of the ten voice mails.

  Then came a call from his friend Tommy Wilson, another divorce attorney in Franklin. He knew. Which meant other people around the city knew. Which meant judges knew. Which meant potential clients knew. Which meant . . . God alone knew what all that meant.

  Zach dodged cicadas as he climbed the steps to his office. For the first time, the impact of his decisions and the reality of his life bore down on him with all of their weight. He leaned against the wall because his legs felt too unsteady to hold him up. And there in the stairwell Zach Craig came face-to-face with what his options were. Just like this stairwell, his life offered two directions. The choice was his.

  He could walk back down these stairs, go straight to Caroline, and give her whatever she wanted, just to make peace and return to normal. He considered that choice with the intense desire of a thirsty man in a desert.

  Then his eyes moved upward. His other choice was to fight—for his home, his marriage, his children, his own life. But fighting would take energy, energy he wasn’t sure he had. Energy that, even if expended, might not get him what he was fighting for. He could do everything he needed to do and still come up empty-handed. Years of being a divorce attorney had taught him that lesson many times over.

  He leaned his head against the wall and breathed a prayer. Emotion that had been bottled up for years followed quickly. “I don’t know what to do. Nothing feels worth it.”

  The words bounced through the empty, narrow stairwell. He didn’t move. He wasn’t sure he could. He closed his eyes. And then, as if heaven itself were about to open, he sensed a warmth, a light. He waited, hoping heaven would speak. Something. Anything.

  “Zach, are you okay?”

  That didn’t sound like heaven. And he figured heaven would already know if he was okay or not. He cracked one eye open and saw Darlene’s figure illuminated in the open doorway of the offices above him, the sun from the front windows bright behind her.

  Well, that wasn’t what he’d been hoping for. He didn’t try to hide the disappointment. It was pretty much what he had come to expect from his prayers.

  Darlene scurried down the stairs, her elegant heels clacking on the concrete. Why was she wearing those shoes on a Saturday, anyway?

  “Are you okay?” she asked again. “Come on up here. You look horrible.”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked as she tugged him upward. He was thinking the downward idea looked better and better.

  “I’m going to a wedding this afternoon, and I left the present on my desk. Looks like this is where I was supposed to be anyway. Sit.”

  She sat him down on the sofa across from her desk and left for the kitchen. In a minute she returned with a bottle of water—ice-cold, just the way he liked it.

  He smiled. “You know what I like more than my own wife does.” He unscrewed the white plastic top, feeling the click as the top separated.

  She sat beside him. “That’s not true.”

  “It is true. Some days I don’t know if Caroline knows my name.”

  “Have you talked to her? Since . . . I mean . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  He stretched an arm across the back of the sofa and crossed one leg over the other. “I’ve talked to her vo
ice mail. And I’ve been talked at by her. But no, Caroline and I have not really talked.”

  “She’s hurting, Zach. And she’s angry. She’s all those things.”

  “I know. I know. I understand all of that.”

  Darlene pressed her left shoulder back into the couch and crossed her hands in her lap. Zach was grateful for her. She offered him what his mother would have if she were still living—a soft and comforting presence. “But you’re hurting too. And you need to give yourself permission to feel it.”

  “I don’t deserve to feel anything but shame. I don’t deserve anything but for her to leave me. That is what I deserve.”

  She smiled at him—a knowing, understanding smile. “Yes, you deserve all of that. We all do. But shame isn’t where we’re called to live.”

  “Well, I might have to live there. Caroline’s not going to let me come home.” He heard the peevish, childish tone in his own voice, and he didn’t care. He felt peevish and childish.

  “Zach, I’m going to tell you something.” Her voice took on an authoritative tone—another side to her mothering ways. “Look at me.”

  He raised his head and looked into her sympathetic hazel eyes.

  “This isn’t just about your marriage,” she said. “It’s about who you are. Because you’re not going to be any good to anybody until you figure out what happened to Zach. I mean it. You are not the man you once were. When I first started working for you, you were alive. You walked through these offices with such energy and zeal. Such ambition. And I have watched over these last seven years as you have turned into a shell of a man.”

  She laid a gentle hand on his arm. “I love Caroline and the girls. I want your marriage to work. I do. But that isn’t what matters most right now. What is most important right now is deciding what you’re going to do about you. You’ve got to fight for what you’ve allowed to be stolen.

  “Now . . .” She raised her petite frame from the sofa, then went to her desk and picked up her package. He watched as those high heels on her sixty-nine-year-old feet made a graceful exit toward the door. She waved a hand over her shoulder at him. “That is all I will say about it.”