My Guys

by Tanya Chris

  I hadn’t seen him—not in person—since that day. I’d made him leave that very night. I didn’t know what he’d been expecting when he told me he’d cheated on me, but apparently not to be thrown out. He’d argued, protested, complained, and cajoled but I’d used the only weapon I had left—tears—and finally he’d packed an overnight bag and left.

  When he did come back from time to time to pick something up or drop something off, I made sure I wasn’t there. When he called, I let it go to voice mail, returning his calls by text. Passive aggressive, yes. He thought I was trying to punish him, but I was only trying to survive.

  Now my mother had invited the enemy in. I backed out of the living room, hoping he hadn’t noticed me, and returned to the kitchen.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, dear?” She had her head in the oven checking on dinner—my birthday dinner. It would be pot roast, of course, with little bits of cauliflower and carrots all around it. Only my mother ever made pot roast anymore. It was delicious.

  “Why is Alex here?”

  “I invited him. It’s your birthday.” She emptied the water from a pot of boiling potatoes and set the pot back on the stove.

  “That might be a good reason not to invite him, under the circumstances.”

  “Melissa. I know you two are having a difficult time, but I’m not going to leave your husband out of your own birthday dinner. It would be rude.”

  “You’d think he’d have the sense to stay away even if you did invite him,” I muttered.

  My mother didn’t respond. The hand mixer clattered against the pot as she whipped up the potatoes. Annoyed with her as I might be, I loved her mashed potatoes.

  “Happy Birthday!” Morgan screeched, bursting through the kitchen door, her arms full of wine and Tyler. She shifted Tyler and gave me a hug with the other arm.

  “Happy Buffday,” Tyler said.

  I gave Tyler his own hug before his mother set him down. He ran immediately to his grandmother who was measuring more milk into the potatoes.

  “Go find Grandpa.” She gave him a kiss, then a push on his rump. He half-ran, half-stumbled through to the living room.

  “Where’s the rest?” Mom asked.

  “John’s picking Lyla up from day care today. They should be here soon.”

  “Good, because dinner’s almost ready.”

  “Mom,” Morgan protested. “It’s not even six o’clock. You’re such a senior citizen.”

  I left them to poke at each other, wandering back towards the doorway to the living room. I peeked inside, testing my toe in the water. To the left of the doorway, Alex sat on the far end of the couch. My father with Tyler snuggled up beside him sat on the end closest to me. It was a double recliner couch, but only my dad reclined.

  In front of them was Dad’s massive television, tuned, as always, to ESPN. Somebody was analyzing something, mesmerizing my father and boring Alex. He kept glancing around the room, his fingers tapping on his thigh impatiently.

  My brother slouched in the easy chair across from them, not facing the television. His eyes were on his phone. Though only seven years separated us, Samuel behaved like a different generation than me.

  He’s older than Nate, I thought, older than Derek. I tried to figure out what made him seem younger and decided that it was probably my guilty conscience wanting to pretend Nate and Derek were especially mature for their age.

  “Hey, Melissa,” Samuel said, lifting his attention momentarily from his phone and noticing me in the doorway. “Happy Birthday.”

  Alex’s head jerked around to find me.

  “Happy Birthday, honey,” my father echoed, his eyes not straying from the old athlete offering up his insight on the television.

  “Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Sam.” I lifted my chin at Alex who had stood but not otherwise moved. He came over to me then.

  “Melissa.” He leaned in to kiss me. I turned my face and let him kiss my cheek. “Happy Birthday.”

  “Thanks for coming.” My parents had raised me to be polite, but I made sure my true feelings were evident in my tone.

  “How could I miss it?” He put his hands in his pockets and leaned back to check me out. “You look good.”

  So did he, but I didn’t say so.

  “I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Really? I thought you’d been avoiding me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, although it was true. The other was true too. I had been busy. Between the theater and climbing I hadn’t had much time to miss Alex lately. Now, with him right in front of me, the force of how much I missed him hit me like it was a fresh loss.

  “How’s my girl?” my father asked with oblivious cheerfulness. Must be a commercial.

  “I’m good, Dad.” Brushing past Alex, I bent down and kissed my father on the cheek. Tyler climbed into his lap, knowing the commercial break meant three minutes of attention.

  “Do the horse one,” he commanded.

  My father did “the horse one,” a move I remembered from my own childhood that involved jostling with sound effects culminating in the rider being dumped on the ground. I watched them, not forgetting that Alex was right behind me.

  “What are you doing with your hair?”

  I pushed my bangs back self-consciously but didn’t turn around. “Growing it out.”

  “It’s nice.”

  I turned around then. He was closer to me than I’d expected.

  “You need a haircut too.” I resisted the urge to touch the hair growing over his ears. He’d always needed me to tell him that. He didn’t see it himself.

  “I know this isn’t the place, but maybe we could talk after?”

  “Donna and I have plans after.”

  “Sometime then. Please?”

  “Sometime.”

  Tyler squealed behind me, giving me an excuse to turn. The aging athlete’s face popped up on the screen. Seeing the shutters come down over my father, I picked Tyler up from his lap and handed him to Alex, telling him that Uncle Alex would play horse with him. Then I escaped back into the kitchen.

  My mother had her head in the oven again. Morgan sat at the kitchen table, a glass of wine in her hand. I went to the cupboard and got myself a wine glass.

  “Too many men in there,” I said as I tipped her bottle into my glass.

  “I can’t believe Mom did that.”

  “You know why.”

  My mother couldn’t quite brag that no one in our family had ever gotten divorced because Uncle Edward and Aunt Diane had divorced when I was ten, but Uncle Edward had died almost immediately thereafter, which my mother saw as both karma and redemption. Her sister wasn’t divorced. She was widowed—which was how Aunt Diane had behaved, to the point of putting her rings back on and wearing a veil to the funeral.

  None of my cousins were divorced. Yet. I considered the possibility that they were all waiting for someone else to go first.

  “I can hear you,” my mother sang out. “And you know I just want you to be happy.”

  “Happily married,” Morgan said, agreeing with my assessment.

  “Happy,” my mother insisted. She brought a cutting board and a colander of freshly washed vegetables to the table and sat down with us. “When Melissa married Alex, she did it because he made her happy, right?”

  “Right,” I agreed, sighing lightly.

  “So you don’t just give up, is all I’m saying.”

  “I didn’t.”

  My mother didn’t know about Alex cheating. I didn’t think she needed to. She liked Alex. My whole family did. He was a likable man. I wondered what she’d say if she did know. Probably that God commanded us to forgive.

  “Maybe he wants to try again,” she said. “Some counseling maybe.” When I didn’t respond, she picked up a knife and started slicing vegetables for the salad.

  “I can help with that,” I offered. I couldn’t go with Alex to counseling, I certainly couldn’t talk to my mo
ther about where our relationship had gone wrong—uninterested and uninteresting—but I could chop onions.

  “You can pour me a glass of wine.”

  “Tell Mom what you’ve been up to,” Morgan suggested as I poured us all some wine.

  “Donna and I auditioned for a play.”

  “No!” Morgan said. “I thought you were just helping out backstage. Oh my God, that’s so exciting.”

  “I’m helping out backstage for this play, but we auditioned for the next play.

  “I don’t know any of this,” my mother said, her hands expertly sectioning a cucumber.

  I told her about helping to build the set and about being a stage hand. “And then on Monday they had auditions for the next show—which is this weird science fiction detective story—and Donna wanted to try out so I went with her. I chickened out, but Donna’s going to do it.”

  “I can’t believe you chickened out,” Morgan said. “I wanted to see you in a play.”

  “You can see Donna.”

  “And the rock climbing,” Morgan said. “Tell her about the rock climbing.”

  I glared at Morgan. I hadn’t been planning to tell my mother about the rock climbing. “It’s nothing, Mom. Pretend rock climbing at a gym. Pretend rocks.”

  “Still doesn’t sound safe.”

  “It’s safe.” I definitely didn’t mention anything about Derek offering to take me climbing outside.

  The kitchen door opened. It was John, Morgan’s husband, with Lyla, their six year old.

  “Aunt Melissa!” she squealed, making a beeline for me as soon as she was in the door. She ran into my arms and I hugged her tight. “It’s your birthday!”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not forever.” She looked at me as though asking me to speed up time for her or perhaps exchange birthdays.

  “Happy Birthday,” her father said, leaning down to kiss me.

  “Thanks, John.”

  “I could use some of that.” He gestured to the wine bottle.

  “Then I hope you brought another one.” Morgan held the bottle up to the light so we could see it was empty.

  “I brought some,” Alex said from the doorway to the living room. He thrust what was clearly a wine bottle wrapped in paper with a ribbon tied around its neck into my hands. I tore off the paper and pretended to act surprised to find wine inside. John brought over two more wine glasses and Morgan poured each of the men a glass.

  “To Melissa,” John said.

  “Melissa,” they all echoed, clinking their glasses together.

  “Dinner in five minutes,” my mother said, breaking up the party. “Someone go tell your father.”

  John carried his glass into the living room and Alex trailed after him. Lyla tried to crawl into my lap so I boosted her up.

  “Can I use your phone, Aunt Melissa?”

  “She’s obsessed,” Morgan said. “I can’t even use mine anymore.”

  I dug my phone out of my pocket and handed it over.

  “Expect fingerprints,” Morgan warned.

  “They wipe off.” I watched Lyla expertly flip through screens like she had a purpose.

  The phone binged.

  “What are you doing to Aunt Melissa’s phone?”

  “Texting. I’m saying LOL. See?” She showed the screen to her mother.

  “Who’s Nate Abbott?” Morgan asked.

  “What?” I grabbed the phone. Nate couldn’t be texting me. I hadn’t given him my phone number. I certainly hadn’t programmed his name into my phone.

  “Facebook,” I muttered, seeing the familiar notification screen. Rebekah had friended me on Monday and the ripples were expanding outward. Nate had just sent me a friend request, making the phone bing. I was relieved that Lyla had not, in fact, texted him LOL. I pressed the accept button. Whatever else might be going on, I could call him a friend.

  “So who is he?”

  “Someone from the theater.” I pushed Lyla off my lap, set the phone to vibrate, and stuck it back in my pocket.

  “A special sort of someone?”

  I shook my head emphatically.

  “Well, you sure grabbed that phone fast enough.”

  “I don’t know him well enough to text him LOL.” I hoped the explanation would satisfy her. I didn’t want to talk to Morgan about Nate. I couldn’t even think about Nate without getting confused.

  Since our conversation in the parking lot, he’d pulled back from me, giving me that clear mind he’d said I needed to make a decision. He still talked to me, still flirted even, but he didn’t touch.

  I missed the physical connection, but I couldn’t bring myself to begin an uncommitted sexual relationship with a twenty-five-year-old in cold blood. Every time we said goodbye, I waited for him to talk me into it, to seduce me into it. And every time, he didn’t.

  “Dinner,” my mother yelled, saving me from further discussion on the subject. As I rose to move to the dining room, I felt the phone vibrate against my hip. I ignored it. I picked up my wine glass and then, on second thought, picked up the bottle to go with it.

  Dinner was a fun, noisy mix of conversation, admonition to the children, and compliments to the chef. Alex fit right in, as he always had.

  “I haven’t eaten this well in a while,” he said when the pot roast and wine were gone.

  “And whose fault is that?” my mother asked pointedly. The table got quiet.

  “My own,” he answered. “I admit that.” He looked straight at me.

  “Can we not talk about this?” I said to my mother.

  “Did I bring it up?”

  “Yes.” I picked up my father’s dish and stacked it on top of mine, then grabbed Alex’s from the other side of me, refusing to look at him.

  I carried the dishes to the kitchen and smacked them down on the counter, wincing at the sound. I didn’t really want to break my mother’s best china, but I did want her to be on my side. Blinking back tears from my eyes, I wished for an ally and remembered my phone’s vibration.

  I pulled out the phone, hoping for a distraction, and there it was—a Facebook message from Nate. My eye was drawn first to his profile picture. It was almost too small to decipher on my phone’s screen but I thought I recognized one of the photos from the show: Nate caught mid-fall during the fight scene. Then I read the message.

  “Finally found you,” he’d written, followed by a smiley face.

  I poked the little box below his message to make the keyboard pop up and typed in “Hi.” Witty. I hesitated over the send button, trying to think of a better response. My mom bustled in with the rest of the dishes stacked in her arms. I pushed send and put the phone away guiltily.

  “You see?” my mother said as she rinsed dishes. “He’s sorry and he wants to work it out.”

  I took the plates she handed me and loaded them into the dishwasher. “What if I don’t want to work it out?”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to? This is your marriage, Melissa. Fifteen years in August. You don’t throw all that away.”

  “He hurt me, Mom. Aren’t you mad at him?” I wanted her to be mad at him.

  “Well, I’m not happy with him.” She pressed her lips together and kept rinsing. “I don’t know what he did, but I can imagine a few things. You think your father never hurt me?”

  “Dad never—”

  “Cheated on me? So it is that. I thought maybe. No, your father never cheated on me, so far as I know.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  She laughed. “He’d have to step away from the television, so, these days, probably not. But before the heart attack he got around fine and the ladies loved him. Who knows?”

  I shook my head, refusing to consider the idea. I felt my phone vibrate against me and yearned to be talking to Nate about almost anything rather than to my mother about my father. My parents’ sex life was not a pleasant topic for contemplation. If I imagined them having sex, which I did
n’t, it was the most tame, sedate, conventionally dull sex I could envision—the very picture of uninteresting. And yet my father loved my mother, had remained loyal to her. Why couldn’t Alex have been that way with me?

  Slotting dishes mechanically into the rack, I felt my stomach clench as my mind replayed the conversation Alex and I had had. First, his confession: he’d had sex with another woman, more than one other woman. He didn’t want to get into details, he’d said, but different women, not a special woman, just women. He’d been doing it for more than a year, since before we’d started trying to make a baby, at first just once and hating himself for it and then with increasing frequency and decreasing guilt. Until today—that day—me wanting him to perform and he couldn’t perform because he’d just been with someone.

  On a Sunday morning while I was at the grocery store buying his special brand of granola that was the only kind he’d eat, he’d been fucking—yes, fucking—another woman and not, in fact, running on a treadmill at the gym.

  “I can’t keep living a double life,” he said. “It’s tearing me up.”

  It was tearing me up too, now that I knew. With my mind still trying to process, to understand, to catch at what I’d somehow missed, I grabbed at the regret in his voice.

  “So you’ll stop?”

  “I can’t stop. I’ve tried. I can stop lying to you about it, but I can’t stop doing it.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you saying you’re a sex addict?”

  “No! God, Melissa, wanting to have sex is not sick.” He put his hands on his temples and sank down on the couch next to me. “See, this is the problem.”

  “But we do have sex.”

  “Rushed, routine sex. And not because you want to.”

  “Just now—”

  “Because you want to have a baby, not because you want to have sex with me. Do you think I can’t tell the difference?”

  “Because I’m not grabbing at your ass all the time? We’re not teenagers, Alex.”

  “You’re not. Maybe I still am. And there are women out there who are still interested in grabbing my ass. Trust me on this.” He sighed and leaned back against the couch. When he spoke again his voice was less angry, more certain. “I can’t go the rest of my life with a partner who’s uninterested in sex, who’s uninterested in me. I can’t do it.”