Her hopes fluttered like a hundred thousand starlings.
“Did you call?” He tilted up his cell phone on the workbench. “I’ve been working—”
“I threw my phone under a truck in Cheyenne.”
“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten. Your friend Nicole told me that.”
Nicole?
He gave her a rueful microshrug. “She called and left a message on the home phone. She said I should contact her directly if there was an emergency.”
Jenna absorbed that tidbit. The knowledge that Nicole had butted into her private life didn’t bother her as much as she supposed it should have. She had a funny feeling—a strange, disconnected, floating, but not entirely uncomfortable feeling that friends sometimes do that for one another.
“I was working on a piece for the Stein Hall installation, but it can wait.” He tugged his mask off his head, the straps tugging his shoulder-length hair half out of the rawhide knot that held it away from his face. “Do you need to unload the car?”
“I don’t have the car.” He was acting as if she’d just driven up with a trunk full of groceries on a random Saturday afternoon. “I flew in last night from Des Moines.”
“Tell me the engine didn’t seize. The Lumina was due for an oil change before you left.”
“The car’s fine. Claire and Nicole are driving it to Pine Lake. I’ll pick it up when we fly out to get Zoe.”
He bobbed his head, but Jenna could see by the way he rubbed his hand across his mouth and chin that his mind was working, working.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve got a rental car and a hotel room by the airport. In case she’s here.”
No need to define “she,” or even raise her hand in the direction of the house.
He showed her a three-quarter profile as he reached for a rag. “She’s not here now.”
Now. The little word was like the kick of a horse. Likely, Sissy had planned to come later. Maybe even sleep in Jenna’s house.
Maybe sleep in their bed.
She wondered when during their marriage he thought it was all right to start fucking another woman. She thought she might know the answer. There was a lot of time to pick over the bones of a relationship when you’re driving across the flat prairie in the middle of the country. She’d figured it had been a little more than a year ago when he’d sat at the table tearing a napkin apart over his untouched dinner. Zoe had already left the table. He’d seized Jenna’s hand as she’d jumped up to clean the dishes. We need to talk, he’d said. Then there’d been a pause, a strange, long pause, before he mumbled the good news about an offer for a new commission.
Nicole had warned her about probing about the details of the affair. Nicole said that it would only force his attention to the past instead of the future.
She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
“I’m glad you’re here, Jenna.” With the rag still gripped in one fist, he leaned back against the workbench. “I’ve been hoping for a chance for a do-over.”
Her breath hovered in the back of her throat along with a laugh that she didn’t really want to release. “So you’ve decided to take a blowtorch to the divorce papers?”
He found new interest in the greasy rag. “I know I’ve handled this all wrong.”
“Oh.” A breath of a word. “Was it my disappearance or the dog’s that tipped you off?”
“You two are pretty inseparable.”
You and I used to be, too. In the early days, anyway. Burrowing into their new house with their new baby, content to spend exhausted Saturday evenings on the couch watching black-and-white crime movies or the Japanese samurai films he preferred, while she lay on his lap and he threaded those work-hardened fingers through her hair.
Did he thread his fingers through Sissy’s red hair?
“When I approached you before, I was concerned about the wrong things.” He dropped the rag and crossed his arms. “The way I handled it…I should have figured I’d set you off running.”
The memory rippled between them. It was the day he’d asked her to marry him. He’d dropped on one knee on the rocky shore of Cape Ann with a backdrop of crashing waves and presented an engagement ring, a ruby sitting in the bud of a platinum rose, a setting he’d designed with the help of a friend. She’d been so taken by surprise that she’d run back to the car, leaving him to walk three miles to the hotel through the rain.
Now the raindrops on the roof of the garage hit like hail. The garage had a damp wood smell. She saw a ghost of a smile pass across his face—saw him remembering, too—and she was launched right back to the bed-and-breakfast that she’d returned to, four hours after he’d asked her to marry him, to throw herself upon him and say yes.
The ghost of a smile dissipated. He lowered his head and spoke to his ankles. “You and I have a lot to talk about.”
She said, “We can start with those papers.”
“Yeah, that would be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? There’s nothing reasonable about any of this. I still can’t believe that you handed me a petition of divorce.”
He pressed his lips together with a rueful tilt of the head. “I started off on the wrong foot, but this doesn’t have to be difficult. There are right ways to do this.”
“The right way,” she said, “is not to do it at all.”
He rubbed his jaw with his hand again, feeling up the jawline with his fingers, avoiding her eye altogether. It occurred to her that she’d spent twelve years studying the secret language of the fine muscles of Nate’s face. She understood him as she understood no other person in the world. The sudden but calculated stillness of his frame, for example, suggested a surprise he’d already braced himself for. The slow brush of his fingers along the edge of the workbench spoke of a man distracted by the direction of his own thoughts. The flex of that long muscle in his cheek showed his effort to muster patience, to hold back stronger feelings.
She knew what all this meant, and so she rushed ahead, because sometimes you can outrun your fear. “Listen, I know you have feelings for”—her tongue stumbled on the name—“Sissy. I’m not blind, I got that memo.”
He stopped rubbing his chin and instead dug the heel of his hand into the ridge of his brow.
“I think I know why, too.” Suddenly, she couldn’t quite look at him. “I’ve been working too much this past year. I thought I was fighting for my job—Scott gave me that impression, anyway. It turns out that he was just trying to raise the sell-out price so he could cash out.”
“Yeah, I heard about the layoff.”
Jenna paused. She’d forgotten that she’d never told him. So much had happened in so little time.
“I imagine all those times I worked late, you and she were thrown together a lot with the new travel sports schedule. And Zoe spends so much time over at Sissy’s house—”
“Jenna.” He winked an eye open. “Don’t do this.”
Words died in her throat. He was right, of course. Her mouth was running away on her. She didn’t want the details of the infidelity—they’d just stick in her mind, rise up when she slept, ate, and breathed.
She swallowed, and it was like swallowing a brick. “My point is, I know you have feelings for Sissy. But you once had feelings for me, too.”
Metal dust glittered upon his plaid flannel shirt. Debris flecked the curve of his ear. She could see by the way he’d turned his shoulder that he didn’t like what she was saying. She could see, too, that he was not unaffected by her words.
He was listening.
She should have let her hair down, the way Nate liked it. She should have stopped in the airport hotel’s salon and had it blown out so it would be loose and shiny. She should have parked the rental car at a mall before driving over here. She could have changed out of her travel-weary jeans and puckered T-shirt into something sexy. She could have bought a new lipstick. She’d rarely been the sexual instigator in their relationship, but she also wasn’t too proud to start.
> Her own voice, husky and raw, surprised her. “You loved me once, Nate.”
“Jenna, don’t do this.”
“Despite everything you’ve done, pushing those divorce papers across the kitchen table at me,” she said, her chest tightening, “I still love you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
He pushed away from the workbench. He strode to the back of the room and tossed the dirty rag in a bin. He walked back, his hands low on his hips, dragging the waistband down to show the elastic waist of his black jockey shorts, shuffling in a circle until he finally blew out a breath like he was trying to clear the last bit of air from his lungs.
You shouldn’t.
Her mind tripped, tripped, tripped over the meaning of those words. She shouldn’t love him, so he said, but did that mean he didn’t love her?
He held up his hands. “We should keep this conversation fixed on the issues of the petition—”
“Like we’re in a lawyer’s office? Like there are no emotional consequences to all this?”
“I never wanted to hurt you—”
“Too late. You’re failing.” A rush of anger gripped her throat. “And I’m not the only one who’ll be hurt if you go through with this. Have you thought about Zoe?”
“Of course. The custody issues—”
“Custody issues.” The words sent a drip of cold down her spine. “Do you hear yourself? How do you think Zoe’s going to feel about ‘custody issues’?”
“If we remain calm and reasonable, Zoe won’t get hurt.”
“Then she’ll be the first thirteen-year-old in the world who hasn’t been affected by her parents’ divorce.”
“You know what?” He raised a hand in the air again, a flat palm against her. “Let’s keep Zoe out of this.”
“That’s not possible. I know you love Zoe more than me. I know you love Zoe more than her—”
“The issue here is not Zoe. It’s you and me and the decisions that we have to make to move forward.”
There was one person he left out of that equation, maybe the one person orchestrating this whole scene. He was willing to tear apart their family for the sake of some midmorning lust grown out of shared interests and proximity—but Jenna was willing to throw her pride on a pyre if it meant a chance to keep her family together.
“Here’s a decision we can make to move forward.” Jenna looked around her and nudged a metal pail. “Drop the papers in there and set them on fire.”
“Jenna, for God’s sake—”
“I know it’ll be a sacrifice. For both of us. First of all, I’d have to forgive you. I’m not always good at forgiving. Second, you’d have to give her up.”
“She’s not the only one I’d be giving up.”
A stillness came over her as Nate dragged his hand down his face. She became aware of something else in the room, another presence, so vivid that she found herself glancing more carefully around the garage as if Sissy were crouched behind the bikes or hiding under the overturned wheelbarrow. In the end, she returned to watching the twitch of the fine muscles of his face, until he tucked his fingers in his armpits and leaned forward to hide that expression from her altogether.
“You’re going to hear the news soon enough,” he said. “In a month, it’ll be obvious to everyone. Sissy is pregnant.”
Jenna took the hit like she’d once taken the hit of a paintball in the chest when she’d been forced to attend a corporate outing. The blow of that hard nugget had knocked her off her feet into a patch of mud as blue paint exploded and splattered across her goggles, blinding her.
“Sit down, Jen, please.”
Nate was speaking, or at least, she could see his lips moving. She was staring at him, and then suddenly she wasn’t. In front of her was the door of the garage where steam had misted the window. She couldn’t see outside. Beyond the door, her subcompact rental car was parked in the driveway. If she got into it, she could drive to her hotel and lay upon the bleached sheets of her hotel room.
Nicole and Claire had warned her that this could go very badly. Jenna wondered if they could have predicted how badly.
It all made terrible, terrible sense, of course. This was why he was rushing the divorce. Nate took his responsibilities as a father very seriously. He always had, right from the beginning. He’d probably demanded full legal custody of Zoe solely for the purpose of assuring their daughter that she wasn’t being replaced by the new baby.
Jenna stumbled a few steps, and then, realizing she didn’t have full control of her own body, she pressed her forehead against the wall and felt the sweat on the raw wood. The head of a nail protruded, digging into her skin, and the sharp feeling brought her back to the garage. Jenna tried to figure out what she was feeling. She found herself imagining Theresa striding out this garage door while tossing a flaming Molotov cocktail over her shoulder. She should be angry like that. She had a right to feel as angry as that.
She didn’t. All she felt was shock. The sensation slowly ebbed until she could feel the throbbing hollow in the place where a piece of herself was now lost.
She’d come here in the hopes of changing Nate’s mind by telling him how much she loved him. She’d come here to tell him the truth. What she hadn’t known was that from the beginning, the situation had been beyond her control.
She pushed away from the wall. The small muscles of her neck and shoulders unclenched. She’d tried her best, for Zoe’s sake. And there was something to be said for the value of finality.
She took a deep breath and summoned the plates of mental armor she needed to click over her brain, her ego, her heart. “I’ve barely looked at the papers since the day you handed them to me. I’ll have to read them again.”
She turned around to find him sitting on the floor, his back braced against the edge of the workbench. At the sound of her voice, he looked up from under the shade of his hands, his expression unreadable. His eyes were bloodshot.
She said, “I’ll need to hire a lawyer.”
“Not necessary.” He dropped his hands so they hung between his knees. “We can work out a settlement.”
“No, I need to hire a lawyer. But I’ll have to replace my phone first.” She patted her purse only to realize she was patting her hip because she’d left her purse in the car. “I’ll call you when I have a phone and a lawyer. In the meantime, you can make another appointment with yours.”
Jenna scanned the garage. She took visual inventory of the back shelves, which held soccer equipment, a basketball, a bucket full of children’s rain boots, an old pink bike with rainbow streamers.
How do you split a life?
Nate uncurled himself from his seat on the floor. “Will next week work?”
So fast. “Yes. Before we go to Pine Lake.”
Nate said, “About Pine Lake…”
Then she realized—of course. He wasn’t going to fly out to Pine Lake to spend a week with her family this year. They couldn’t share her childhood bed for seven days. And if he slept on the couch, that would invite questions. Jenna felt a little flutter thinking about her mother’s reaction to this news. Her mother had always adored Nate. No doubt her mother would see the divorce as just another failure by her oddball of a daughter.
He said, “Zoe could spend the extra week after camp vacationing with your family, like she usually does. We’ll figure out an excuse for not being there. Then you and I can take that week to work things out here before Zoe comes home.”
“So thoughtful of you.”
He absorbed that comment on a beat. “Your parents could put Zoe on the plane. We’ll pick her up at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport together.”
“But I’ll be in Pine Lake,” she said. “Claire and Nicole have my car. And I’d always planned to spend that week with Zoe and my parents.”
Nate’s pause was full of the unspoken. Irritation rippled through her. Yes, she and Zoe hadn’t had the best of relationships lately. Yes, Zoe would rather starve herself in her room than share a meal with her
mother. That didn’t mean Jenna was going to avoid spending time with her daughter—quite the opposite. The real problem, she suspected, was that Nate didn’t trust that she could keep her mouth shut about the impending divorce until they had a chance to tell her together.
The situation was getting ugly already. “You keep telling me that there’s a right way to do this.”
“A united front.”
“Then trust me that the last thing I want to do is hurt Zoe. While I’m in Pine Lake, I won’t say a word about our divorce.” The word left a residue in her mouth, a slime she couldn’t scrape off. “In the meantime, we have to figure out a way to break this news to Zoe together.”
Nate didn’t say anything. He sagged against the workbench. His thumbs tatted on the surface. The muscles of his shoulders tightened underneath the stretch of his black T-shirt.
Her suspicions swelled with each passing beat. “Tell me you didn’t already tell Zoe about the divorce.”
“Zoe doesn’t know about the divorce.”
The way he spoke the words, Jenna could tell they were true but that he’d left something out. He turned his face away so she could only see his profile. His throat worked. He kept glancing at that old upholstered chair, the overstuffed armchair that they’d bought for five dollars at a garage sale in the early days when they had a house and no money to furnish it. Later, they’d relegated it to the garage when the fabric had torn, exposing the stained foam of the stuffing.
More than once she’d wandered in on a Saturday to deliver lunch while baby Zoe slept, only to end up pressed naked across it—
No.
In her mind, a new film reel flickered: Zoe bounding across the driveway with a school paper fluttering in her hands, calling out over the sound of music in the garage, Daddy, Daddy, look what I got on my English test, throwing the door open—
“No.” Jenna slammed the back of her hand so hard against her mouth she bit into her skin. “Nate—tell me no.”
Chapter Fifteen
Chicago, Illinois
This is why we came to Chicago?” Claire exited the elevated train at Addison station and saw the banks of lights above Wrigley Field. “To go to a baseball game?”
Random Acts of Kindness Page 16
