Double the Love

by Taggart, Molly

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did I do somethin’ wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her back still turned sternly against him. “You tell me.”

  “Tell you what?” He sat up, leaned against the headboard, and reached over to the lamp. The light was sudden and bright and Shannon closed her eyes tightly. She didn’t sit up next to him.

  “What you did in the past,” she said, opening her eyes again slowly. That comment Sarah had made this afternoon - I can bring up some things from your past. You know what I’m talking about. – it had been bothering her all afternoon and evening.

  “What are you talkin’ ‘bout?”

  As if he didn’t know. He’d seen that she’d heard. "What your ex could bring up in court.” She turned half way toward him. “Did you cheat on her? All this time you’ve been saying it was her, but were you the first one to cheat? Years ago, did you—”

  “—No.” He vigorously shook his head. “No. I never cheated on her. And I would never cheat on you.”

  Shannon put her arms behind herself and used them to slide up into a sitting position. Leaning back against the headboard, she drew her grey-flannel-clad legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Then what? What was it you did?”

  He chewed on his bottom lip and closed his eyes.

  “What haven’t you told me?” she asked.

  Jeb’s lower lip slid away from his teeth. He licked his upper lip and then bit down on his tongue. Finally, he opened his eyes and spoke. “I might have made some poor…I might of…I mean I did…I did use some drugs.”

  Shannon let go of her legs and stretched them back out. “What? You smoked some pot?”

  “It wasn’t pot she was refferin’ to.”

  “What then?”

  He rested his hands in his lap. “It was cocaine.”

  Shannon brought a hand to her forehead. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I haven’t touched it, or any drugs whatsoever, I mean, other than alcohol, for over eight years. Soon as I found out Sarah was pregnant, I stopped. It was recreational. It’s not like I was ever really addicted—”

  “Really addicted?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like I was stealin’ to feed some habit or like I had to check in to rehab to be able to stop or—”

  “Isn’t cocaine highly addictive?”

  “Not physically, but psychologically, yeah, it is, for a lot of people.”

  “But not for you?”

  “I missed it a lot when I quit. Sure I did. I had to change my environment, and I was irritable, but I did quit. And I haven’t touched it for over eight years. I swear, Shannon, I haven’t touched it. And I never will again.”

  “But you didn’t tell me!”

  He flinched when she yelled. “It was in the past. I didn’t think it would ever come up. You haven’t told me everything, have you?”

  “I pretty much have, Jeb.”

  “What I quit doin’ over eight years ago…the drugs…it ain’t gonna affect us now.”

  “You should have told me. I feel like…” She shook her head.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you rushed me into marriage,” she admitted. Despite being three years from forty, Shannon had never been married before. Part of it was that she hadn’t found the right guy, but part of it was that marriage scared her. She didn’t see it, as a lot of her friends seemed to, as something you could just hop in and out of. She was in this now. She couldn’t just leap out of Jeb’s life, the way she’d done with so many ex-boyfriends, if he turned out to be much more flawed than she’d imagined, or if things got tough. “You kept pestering me to say yes after you proposed,” she continued, “and then you insisted we get married right away so I could go on your health insurance.” From the time they’d had their first date to the time they’d gotten legally married had been less than eight months. “I’m worried maybe I don’t know you as well as I thought I did. I feel like you should have given me more time and more information before we got married.”

  Jeb stared straight ahead at a guitar hanging in the alcove on the opposite wall of their bedroom. Shannon had selected it to hang there because she thought it was his “sexiest” guitar. “Okay,” he said finally. “Well now you know. You know I did drugs before I even knew you! You know all my horrible, egregious sins, oh pure one. So now what?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic!” She threw back the blankets. “You never mentioned the drugs. I have a right to be pissed off that you didn’t even mention them!”

  Shannon walked out of the bedroom. She turned on the light over the stairs with an infuriated flick of her wrist and thundered down to the living room.

  Chapter Five

  Jeb followed Shannon downstairs and slumped down into the coffee-brown leather chair next to the matching couch where she was sitting, her legs bouncing up and down rapidly against the floor.

  “You agreed you weren’t going to do this dramatic shit anymore,” he said, masking his fear with anger. “So can we talk about this?” When she didn’t respond, he said, “I mean, I don’t expect you not to have emotions, Shannon. And I’m glad you and I don’t just sweep everythin’ under the rug the way my ex and I did, ‘til it’s burstin’ at the seams, but we need to be able to talk without the screamin’ and the stompin’ downstairs and doors bein’ locked, right?”

  “I’m not locking any doors this time. And you were yelling too.”

  “Only in response to you. If you don’t yell, I won’t yell.”

  She threw herself back against the cushions of the couch and crossed one leg over the other, but she kept bouncing the lower leg. “What made you…” she began. “Why…How did you start?”

  “I was in a band at the time. It’s what the other guys in the band did, so…” He shrugged. Maybe if he treated it casually, she would too. “It was what I did. Only ‘bout once a week.”

  “And how did you treat your wife when you were high?”

  “I didn’t do it ‘round her. When we were usin’, we always stayed the night at a hotel.”

  Shannon stopped bouncing her leg and pulled both of them up to her chest. Her bright red polished toenails hung over the edge of the cushion. He’d nibbled those toes just last night, playfully, before they’d made love a second time, before this moment had toppled that past peace. “So Sarah was okay with this?” she asked.

  “The gigs went late, and they were sometimes a couple hours from home. I always spent the night at a hotel after. She’d stay ‘til maybe eleven if she came to the gigs at all, and then she’d go home and not expect me ‘til the next mornin’. She didn’t know I was usin’ until my drummer mentioned it in front of her.”

  “So you lied to her too?” She glanced at him abruptly. “Jesus, Jeb!”

  “I didn’t lie! She didn’t ask. When my drummer mentioned it, she asked me if it was true, and I told her the truth. I didn’t lie. She told me she was pregnant and she wanted me to quit, so I did. I even quit the band to make sure I wouldn’t keep bein’ tempted.” He stretched his arm back behind himself, put a hand on the top of his hatless head, and rubbed his blonde curls.

  “How long did you use?”

  “The first time…For ‘bout a year while I was on the road. Then that band broke up and I formed a new one. Nobody else in the new band used, so it was easier for me not to. That was the first time I quit.” Shannon looked down at the glass-top coffee table. He hated the way she avoided his eyes. What emotion was she hiding? “But I had to leave that band when Sarah and I got serious,” he continued. “She didn’t like me bein’ gone nights. So I joined a different band that only played Saturday nights. ‘Cause she wanted me to. But they all did cocaine.”

  “You’re blaming your wife?” Shannon looked up from the table and shook her head. Those eyes were almost all hard silver now, with only some of the blue filtering through. “Seriously?”

  “No. I’m just explainin’ how it happened.”

  “You’re
shifting responsibility is what you’re doing. So how long that time?”

  “Six or seven months. When Sarah asked me to quit, I did.”

  “You made it sound like the divorce was all her fault! But it turns out you had a history of not being an ideal husband, didn’t you?”

  “I never claimed to be an ideal husband, Shannon. Never. And divorce is rarely all one person’s fault.” He slid his hand out of his hair and let it fall on the arm of the chair. “I was a fool to do the drugs, but I quit. A long time ago. Long before she cheated on me. I tried to be a good husband. I did. It was a long time ago.”

  Shannon slid her legs away from her arms and touched her bare feet down on the soft, plush carpet. She leaned forward. “It’s not that you did drugs, Jeb. That’s not it. It’s that you did something dangerous for months without telling your wife about it. You might never have told her if someone else hadn’t. And you married me without ever telling me about it. Do you think that’s fair? Do you think that’s trustworthy?”

  “You can—” He choked on his words. He couldn’t even quite remember what he was trying to say. He pressed his lips hard against each other. “Please,” he managed finally, “I’ve made mistakes. But I love you and you can trust me. I won’t ever hurt you.” He looked at her, his eyes imploring her.

  She looked away from him, down at the carpet. “I need a little time.”

  “Time for what?” he asked, trying to control the quiver in his voice.

  “I just need some time! To think!”

  “Do you want me to sleep on the couch tonight?”

  “I want you to go.”

  “Go where?”

  She looked up from the carpet. “Maybe you could stay at Roger and Becky’s for a little while.”

  Roger was Jeb’s brother. The two men had been estranged for seventeen years, and Jeb’s reconciliation with his brother at their father’s funeral had enabled him to meet Becky’s sister—Shannon. Death had given birth to a new life of love, a funeral had been eclipsed, less than a year later, by a wedding.

  Shannon had a somewhat impulsive personality, and that was probably one of the reasons she had avoided too much commitment in the past. What if, ironically, it was only her impulsiveness that had caused her to commit to him? His voice caught when he asked, “How long?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you. You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t lie to you.”

  “Jeb—”

  He stood up abruptly. “I didn’t lie. Don’t call me a liar! I just didn’t tell you somethin’ I didn’t think you needed to know because it was somethin’ I did when I was someone else, and I thought you loved me for who I am now. I thought you…I thought you were gonna accept me. I thought someone in my life was finally gonna accept me!” His father had never accepted him. Jeb’s dad had exposed every weakness in him as a child, and, when he was a man, his wife had done the same. Shannon was different. He’d thought so, anyway.

  “I had a right to know,” she yelled as he stomped up the stairs, “and you lied to me!”

  The floor creaked as he walked around their master bedroom opening and slamming his dresser drawers. He came back through the living room with a duffel bag stuffed so full it look like the zipper was going to split open. “What about the piano students who come here?” he asked.

  “You don’t have any who come here until Tuesday. So just come here when they’re here.”

  “Well how am I gonna practice? My piano’s here. All my guitars are here.”

  She glared at him. “That’s what you’re thinking of right now? Your music? You want me to go stay with them instead?”

  “No,” he said, jerking the duffle bag up and down in his hands. “No. I’ll go.”

  A few seconds later, the door was slamming shut behind him.

  Chapter Six

  “Well how long is he staying?” Shannon’s sister Becky asked in a low whisper. She was glancing out the kitchen to the dining room, where Jeb sat looking at his recent calls list on his cell phone. Jeb heard her, but he pretended not to.

  “I don’t know,” Jeb’s brother Roger muttered. “Tonight at least. Maybe tomorrow. They had some kind of fight.”

  “About what?” Becky hissed.

  “I don’t know, hon. I know as much as you do.”

  When Roger came into the dining room, Jeb clicked the phone off and shoved it in his pocket.

  “So…uh…you can stay in the guest bedroom tonight,” Roger said. “Becky got the bed ready. Clean sheets and everything.”

  “Thanks.” Jeb looked over his brother’s shoulder as Becky emerged from the kitchen.

  “We’re always happy to have you,” she said, “or you and Shannon, anytime.”

  Jeb looked down at the mention of Shannon’s name. “Thanks, Becky. You’re kind.”

  Becky sat across the table from him. Roger didn’t join them. Jeb’s brother said something about needing to make a phone call in his office and disappeared.

  As soon as Roger was gone, Becky asked, “Do you want talk about what happened?”

  Jeb shook his head.

  “It’s just, sometimes it helps to get an impartial—”

  “—Impartial?” Jeb laughed. “You’re not going to be impartial, Becky. She’s your sister.”

  “And you’re my brother.”

  “In law.”

  “I love you like a brother, Jeb. I hope you know that by now.”

  He leaned back against his chair and let his legs fall open loosely. He put a hand just above his knee. “So what would you do if you found out Roger used to use cocaine and he didn’t tell you about it? Say he quit almost nine years before you even met him and he hadn’t touched it since.”

  “I would be pretty shocked, Jeb, because that would mean he was using cocaine at the age of seven.” Roger and Becky had begun dating in high school.

  Jeb could feel her looking directly at him, but he avoided eye contact.

  “So you used to use cocaine,” she said matter-of-factly. Surprised by the lack of astonishment in her voice, he met her eyes. “And you never mentioned it to Shannon. And now’s she’s found out, and she’s angry that you didn’t tell her.”

  Jeb nodded.

  “And why didn’t you tell Shannon?”

  “I didn’t think it was relevant.” He traced a line in the woodwork with his index finger. “It was somethin’ that happened years before I met her, somethin’ I haven’t done in years. It doesn’t affect us.”

  “What’s the real reason you didn’t tell her?”

  Jeb looked back up at his sister-in-law. He reached up and took off his cowboy hat and set it on the table. “I guess I was afraid if she knew, she might think I wasn’t reliable and she might not want to marry me. I was afraid of losing her.” He’d lost his wife, after all. He’d lost his mother and his father and, for almost two decades, his brother. Jeb wanted to hold on, to dig in deep, but in his life, things had a way of getting uprooted.

  “Did you tell her that’s why you didn’t tell her?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  Jeb half nodded. He looked at Becky. “If…If Shannon decides…Listen. Whatever happens to me and Shannon, can I still come ‘round here? I want to be an uncle to Lizzie.” Becky and Roger’s daughter Lizzie was six, the same age as his own daughter Mary Ellen. “I want be in Roger’s life. I want…family. If I lose Shannon, I don’t want to lose that too.”

  “Of course you can, Jeb. But you and Shannon are going to be fine.”

  He rubbed his leg. “She was really upset. I mean, she’s been upset before, but she was really…she basically said she wished she hadn’t married me.” He coughed and then stood up from the chair. He wasn’t going to tear up in front of his sister-in-law. “Need anythin’ from the grocery store?” he asked. “Thought I’d run out and get some beer so I don’t drink all of Roger’s.”

  “Get a gallon of milk,” said Roger, entering the dining room as though he’d be
en hovering and just waiting for a non-embarrassing time to rejoin them. “And some Chubby Hubby ice cream.”

  *

  “What the hell are you doing?” Roger stood in the kitchen, looking at Jeb, who lay beneath the sink.

  “Sorry. Was I makin’ too much noise?” Jeb slid out from under the sink and sat up, wrench in hand.

  “What are you doing? It’s 2 AM!”

  “I was fixin’ the sink. It wasn’t drainin’ properly.” He put the wrench in the tool box next to him, shoved the box in the cabinet under the sink, closed the door, and stood. “It’s workin’ now.”

  “I take it Shannon still hasn’t returned your calls?”

  Jeb shook his head.

  “Did you drink all the beer?” Roger asked. “Or do you want to share one?”

  “There’s four left. I’ll open a couple.”

  Later, nearly an hour after they’d settled into the living room and begun talking, Roger said, “Just tell her you’re sorry you lied.”

  “But I didn’t lie,” Jeb insisted.

  “In her mind, you did. So just tell her you’re sorry you lied.”

  “But then I’d be admitin’ to somethin’ I didn’t do. I’m not a liar! I don’t want her to think I’m a liar.”

  “She doesn’t think you’re a liar, Jeb,” Roger said, placing his empty beer bottle on the coffee table. “She feels like you lied.”

  Jeb shook his head and let out a sigh. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Women don’t make any sense. I’m no expert, but I’ve been married over twenty years to one, and I know this much: if they get angry and say you lied to them, then just say you’re sorry you lied to them. This is not an intellectual debate. This is not an argument you’re going to win with semantics and definitions of what it means to lie. Just say you’re sorry you lied and that you won’t do it again.”

  “But if just not tellin’ somebody everythin’ you ever done is a lie, I will do it again.”