by Caro Carson
Oh, it’s very generous of her to offer, but I’m not a Gannon. I’m a Pallas. Russell had been offended, certain that his mother’s feelings would be crushed if nobody wore the gown she’d preserved for decades. But she did see it worn. Each of her daughters wore it, right? It’s a gown for Gannon girls. If you wanted to uphold the family tradition, then I think that means you would wear your father’s tuxedo. The Gannon men’s wedding tuxedo. See? She’d tried to coax a smile out of Russell, but he hadn’t been amused.
Helen had worn her mother-in-law’s gown.
The white dress she’d grabbed from the shower in the Vegas hotel room had been something entirely different. The hem had been wet, as if they’d walked through a puddle, which must have been why it was hanging in the shower, but it had fit her like a glove. She’d looked in the mirror and fallen in love with it instantly. Then she’d picked up the damp hem, exchanged a few choice words with Tom, grabbed a croissant and run out the door.
“It’s not about the dress, darling,” the mother on the TV was saying. “It’s about the man. Be sure, be very sure, that he is the one you want.”
Yeah, well, Helen had screwed that up, too.
The movie went on and on. She wondered how much more Tom could take, because she wanted to run from the room, personally.
Tom just rolled on his side to face the screen more fully and settled in to watch, using his own arm as a pillow. What was wrong with him? He couldn’t possibly want to watch this with her. It was terrible. The bride was indecisive, wondering if the groom was really the right man for her. The movie mother told her that once she said I do, she had to stay committed. Divorce meant she’d be unhappy for the rest of her life. She started pointing out how miserable all the bride’s divorced friends were. Divorce meant failure.
Can’t argue with that. I failed.
Yes, Russell had been the one who’d slept around, but if their marriage had been stronger, it wouldn’t have happened. He’d been right about the number of hours she put into her command position compared to the number of hours she’d put into pleasing him.
The first time was my fault, I will accept that, Russell had said. But this time is different. An affair is just a symptom of how bad our marriage is, and marriage takes two. You broke your vows, too. You were supposed to love and cherish me, remember? Can you honestly say you’ve been cherishing me when you work twelve-hour days for months on end? Do you see the problem? I’d been promised love, but you weren’t giving it to me. You came home tired every night, too tired for me. Too tired to do anything in bed besides the basics. Very basic.
Helen felt tired just remembering it all, just as tired as Tom was now. She wished she could just lay her head back on the couch, and maybe...and maybe Tom would just run his hand over her hair and not be mad at her for being tired after a day that had started before dawn.
Tom tugged gently on her hair, snapping her out of her reverie. Her misery. “Would you like to switch back to the cricket match?”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. He touched her like...like he was her boyfriend. Like he knew how she liked to be touched.
He was watching her, not the television. He smiled at her, just a little bit, maybe a little sadly. “Sorry to interrupt your thoughts, but you were frowning pretty hard. Do you hate the show?” He tugged her hair softly one more time and let go. “Is all that dialogue about divorce making you think about Russell?”
“Oh.” She swallowed. Everything about marriage and divorce made her feel like a loser. She couldn’t say that. Or she could, but she didn’t want to say that, so she stared at the carpet.
“I hope it’s Russell you’re mad at.”
It’s myself. I wasn’t a good wife, and now I’m not going to be a good roommate, either.
“I didn’t say I was mad,” she said, looking stubbornly at the screen. The idyllic church scene had begun, adorable little flower girls toddling down the aisle, wandering toward the pews and back to the middle like little roly-poly pinballs.
“You can’t have any regrets,” Tom said. “You’ve got to be better off without a guy who thinks one-night stands don’t count as cheating.”
She winced at that. There was too much emotional intimacy there, for Tom to know those details, to know what she specifically regretted.
She knew what she was supposed to say. It had been a learning experience. She’d grown as a person. Those were the correct, mature ways to come through a divorce. But what she’d learned was that it sucked to find out how much someone else thought you sucked, and she didn’t want to go through that again.
On the TV, the chubby and cherubic hands of the little girls dropped rose petals on the floor.
“I kind of regret not talking him into having a child. I have nothing to show for two years of my life. Those last months...” Living in exile from her own house, relearning how to cook for one person in a spartan, subleased apartment. She shook her head at the innocent flower girls. “It wouldn’t have been so lonely. I would have still had someone to love.”
Tom was so still and silent, she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. She couldn’t look at him. If he was looking at her with any trace of sympathy on his face, she might cry, and there was no counselor around to set a time limit on that. Although, surely, a man wouldn’t want to live with a woman any longer than he had to if the woman cried all the time over some past relationship. Maybe she should weep loudly.
Yuck. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t even pretend to sit around and mourn Russell.
She hoped Tom had fallen back asleep. Just in case he hadn’t, she finished her thought, but just in case he was asleep, she spoke softly. “But it’s just as well. Russell would have only lectured a child the way he lectured me. I suppose it wouldn’t be very nice of me to have a child if I knew in advance I’d be giving him or her a lousy father.”
“No, it wouldn’t be.” His voice was stone-cold. “If you can’t give the kid a decent father, don’t have the kid.”
There was nothing sympathetic or sleepy in that quick, vehement answer. She turned to look at him without thinking.
He looked away. Now he was the one scowling at the perfectly fake perfection of the ceremony on TV.
“Do you...do you have a child?” As soon as she said it, she knew he didn’t. That would have been something she’d have known before she married him, surely. But she didn’t know how she knew. She’d known he was an officer in the army. She knew he didn’t have any children.
“Of course not. If I did...” He didn’t take his eyes off the movie, but he waved a hand toward the room in general, in irritation.
“What?” She mimicked his irritated wave at the room.
“Don’t you think there’d be a child here if I had one?”
“Well, no. Most men don’t have full custody.”
“I’d at least have a photo. Some toys for the days I do get custody. I’d at least try to be a decent father.”
“I never said you wouldn’t. I said Russell wouldn’t.”
They both scowled at the TV in silence. Now the bride and groom, rather than saying their vows like a normal bride and groom, were having some big teary, soul-baring, secret-sharing session in front of every single person they knew. Idiots.
“You don’t have to worry about Russell anymore.” Tom’s voice had gotten more sympathetic again. He was probably looking at her instead of the television again, but she wasn’t going to peek over her shoulder to find out. “I know it’s only been a couple of weeks since you got your final divorce papers. You worried about him so long, it might take a little while to adjust to the fact that you don’t have to worry about him anymore. But he’s history. You can leave him behind.”
She could, but she couldn’t leave the lessons she’d learned about herself behind. Tom needed to let her go before she made him as miserable as she was.
“This sho
w sucks,” Tom said. “It’s making you unhappy. We should go back to cricket.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him picking up the remote, taking charge, deciding what she should watch. The fact that he was doing what she’d like him to do only made that mildly less irritating. “What if all the dialogue about divorce had me thinking about you, not Russell?”
“There’s no sense in worrying about that, either. Not tonight. You can’t change anything for months.”
“Just a couple of months.” But she was wrung out, and she didn’t want to watch the stupid show, and he was right—there was nothing she could do about anything at the moment, on a Thursday night in December.
“But months.” He sat up, two hundred pounds and six feet two inches of solid male muscle moving gracefully, making room for her. “So you might as well sit somewhere more comfortable than the floor while we go back to cricket and get baffled by the rules. I assume there are rules. It seems like the British would have made rules, right?”
He’d made the offer so casually, so perfectly, that she’d almost sat on the couch before she remembered that she was supposed to be difficult to live with.
She drifted toward the sloppy pile of grocery bags on his table. “You don’t mind if I eat on the couch, right? I’ll just eat these straight out of the bag so there’s no dirty dishes.” She held up the orange-powdered puffs.
Tom raised his eyebrows, both eyebrows, not in a question but in surprise. “Are you kidding me?”
Ha. Got him.
But he smiled like a kid at Christmas. “I love those things. If you let me help you eat this bag, I’ll buy you two more tomorrow, I swear.”
Chapter Nine
Helen was bad at being a bad roommate.
She hated being a failure at this. She hated being a failure at anything.
Almost a week of leaving dirty dishes in the sink, of taking showers that lasted so long that there was no hot water left for her roommate, of parking her car in the driveway so close to Tom’s car that he couldn’t get his driver’s side door open—nearly an entire week of that had seemed to have no effect on Tom at all.
It affected her. Desperate to make him think six months would be too long to live with her, she’d resorted to the worst thing she could think of this evening. She’d baked chocolate chip cookies. From scratch. It would be torture to smell them baking and not be offered a single one.
She stared at the heavenly flat circles of butter, sugar and melty chocolate as they cooled on the kitchen counter. Her household goods hadn’t arrived from Seattle yet, so as a substitute for cooling racks, she’d helped herself to the grill rack off Tom’s outdoor barbecue, unscrewing it with his flat head screwdriver and bringing it in to sit on the kitchen counter.
It hadn’t inconvenienced him. Christmas was just a week away, and although Texas was a southern state, it was still too cold to hang out in the backyard and cook burgers.
The cookies were cooling on it now, smelling like heaven. She couldn’t force herself to put them in a container and take them all into her bedroom. She wasn’t that mean, and Tom hadn’t done anything mean except refuse to divorce her.
She thrust a spatula under a half dozen cookies and threw them on a plate while the chocolate chips were still warm and melty. She put another half dozen on another plate and stalked into the living room, where Tom was watching one of her favorite shows on TV. Did he just happen to have the same taste she did in shows, or was this yet another thing he’d learned about her in Vegas? Was he using it against her?
She was trying to pull off an act as the worst roommate. What if the way he liked what she liked was also an act? What if she fell for it, only to find out the real Tom was as hard to live with as Russell had been? She wondered how long he could keep up this nice guy act before the true Tom Cross came out. She was having a difficult time maintaining her own act.
Maintain? Ha. She hadn’t succeeded in annoying him yet. Now she was going to feed the man homemade cookies.
She handed Tom a plate silently, then stalked over to the dining room table and sat down with her own plate. When he said thanks, she shoved an entire cookie in her mouth. Anger-eating was a thing.
“When do your household goods arrive from Seattle?” he asked, using the standard military phrase for all-your-stuff-from-the-last-house-you-lived-in. “These are delicious, by the way.”
She shoved another cookie in her mouth.
“I’m asking because you obviously hate my couch so much, you’d rather sit in a hard wooden chair. Maybe we can use your couch instead when it arrives. Move mine into the garage.”
Russell’s damned furniture was going to force her to work with Tom to arrange room to store it all. To cooperate. She’d have to put things in Tom’s garage. She’d have to stand the futon vertically in a corner of the spare bedroom to try to fit her own bed in there, the bed Russell had used for sex with another woman. But it would be more comfortable than a futon, right?
Another cookie got crammed in her mouth, fat and carbs and refined flour, good for her tongue, bad for her body. She supposed she could line up a few shots of tequila instead—they could hardly be worse for her than the cookies—but if she woke up with no memory again, then she’d be as worried as Tom was that she had some kind of bizarre alcohol intolerance.
And why was she cramming food into her mouth? Because she was upset about furniture. She’d wanted a fresh start, a clean slate, but Russell had saddled her with the furniture he hadn’t wanted for his own fresh start.
She really needed some milk to wash down these cookies. She hadn’t bought any, but Tom had a gallon in the fridge. A bad roommate would help herself, so she did. Then she poured a second glass and carried it out to the living room and handed it to Tom. His fingers grazed hers, skin warm against hers for less than a breath. With his tongue, he cleaned a cookie crumb off the corner of his mouth.
What was she supposed to do with him?
She stomped back to the table. What she wanted to do was cry. Ugly tears, runny nose, guttural sobs. Because she’d taken a detour to Las Vegas, her whole life had gotten twisted into a knot. She should never have deviated from the straight path she’d planned.
It had started perfectly. With the divorce papers in her hand, she’d gone to a salon and had her long hair cut into a bob. Whose opinion is more important to you than your husband’s? Her own opinion was, thank you very much. She’d had a bob in college and liked it, so she’d had it cut that way again. When she’d headed her car toward Fort Hood, the road ahead had looked so clear: twenty years in the army, a retirement at age forty-one, followed by living on her savings to get a PhD, perhaps teaching college as her second career. Alone.
She was supposed to be alone right now. It was the best, least stressful path through life for someone like her. Someone who didn’t partner well. Look how sour everything had gotten with Russell.
Tom laughed at something on her favorite damn TV show.
Look how awful she was at living with a man who thought he loved her.
But whomever Tom had fallen in love with in Vegas, it wasn’t her. This was the real her, shoving cookies in her mouth, incapable of crossing that line to total bitchiness, yet incapable of meeting Tom’s expectation that they were soul mates.
Please, please divorce me after Valentine’s Day. I can’t live like this until June.
* * *
“Name something you like about your own appearance and explain why.”
Tom hated these questions. They didn’t feel intimate. On the other hand, they were the only reason he got one hour every week to sit and stare at Helen—and have her stare back.
“You go first,” she said.
“I’m a guy. Guys don’t waste a lot of time in front of the mirror.”
“Oh, but girls do?” Helen was spoiling for a fight, pugnacious and pouting in her overstuf
fed chair.
Tom sat back in his. He slid one booted foot forward, in between her boots. Her calf muscles flanked his, one on each side. They’d first sat like this at a table beside a resort pool in Las Vegas, sharing a meal. Talking, then touching. Meshing together.
This was our first touch. This was the beginning. You weren’t angry then, not one bit.
“I don’t know how much time all girls spend in front of mirrors, but you don’t spend much. You loaded up every square inch of the bathroom counter with all kinds of bottles and jars, but you don’t use any of them.”
She frowned. “How would you know? Are you spying on me in the bathroom?”
“They don’t move. The labels weren’t facing one way yesterday, a different way today. They’re gathering dust in place.” I’m not going to give you the fight you want. “What was the question again?”
She scowled at the card. “Name something you like about your own appearance and explain why.”
He glanced at his bare ring finger. If he’d gotten that tattoo, he could have said that was what he liked about himself. They’d been married eighteen days now. Only the kitchen windowsill wore a ring.
“You’re taking too long to answer. You must know you have really, really blue eyes. I bet you were voted ‘Prettiest Eyes’ in your high school yearbook.” Helen said it like an insult.
“Maybe I was. But before you get all pissed off about it, remember that, to me, they’re just my eyes. Same eyes I’ve looked at in the mirror for twenty-seven years. I don’t stand there and admire my eyes while I shave. I don’t even notice them.” He let his knee rock to the side, knocking her leg open. “I’m glad you like them. I think you like them. Either that, or you hate them.” Another nudge. “Why are you so mad today? I love your hair, by the way.”
