“I know,” Tami said, “and you two don’t talk about that, either. In fact, you don’t talk.”
“We talk.”
Tami gave her an assessing look. “Marriages go through hard times. Sometimes you have to get in there and fight for your love. That’s the only way for it to get better.”
Jolene couldn’t help thinking of her parents, and the way her mother had fought for a man’s love … and never gotten it. “Look, Tami. Michael and I are fine. We love each other. Now, can we please, please talk about something else?”
Tami lifted her half-full glass. “To you, my friend. You look fabulous for being so freakishly old.”
“I look fabulous, period.”
Tami laughed at that and launched into a funny story about her family.
It was ten forty before they knew it, and Tami put her empty glass down on the table. “I have to get home. I told Carl I’d be home for Letterman.”
Jolene got to her feet. “Thanks for coming, Tam. I needed it.”
Tami hugged her fiercely. Together, they walked to the back door.
Jolene watched her friend cut across the driveway and head toward the adjoining property. At last, she closed the door.
In the quiet, she was alone with her thoughts, and she didn’t like their company.
*
It was midnight when Michael pulled into the garage and parked next to Jolene’s SUV. On the seat beside him lay a dozen pink roses bound in cellophane. He’d been on the ferry, already on his way home, when he remembered that Jolene preferred red roses. Of course. Soft and girly wasn’t her style, never had been, not even on that first, sad day when she walked into his life.
She’d been seventeen. A kid, dressed in thrift-store clothes, with her long blond hair a mess and her beautiful green eyes puffy from crying, and yet, with all of that, she’d walked into the legal-aid office with her back straight, clutching a ratty vinyl purse. He’d been an intern then, in his first year of law school.
She had seemed impossibly brave to him, a girl refusing help even in the worst days of her life. He’d fallen a little in love with her right then, enough to ask her to come back and see him when she was older. It had been her boldness that spoke to him from the beginning, the courage she’d worn as easily as that cheap acrylic sweater.
Six years later she’d walked back into his life, an army helicopter pilot, of all things. He’d been young enough to still believe in love at first sight and old enough to know it didn’t happen every day. He’d told himself it didn’t matter that he was blue state and she was military, that they had nothing in common. He’d felt so loved by her, so adored, that he couldn’t breathe. And their lovemaking had been amazing. In sex, as in everything, Jo had been all in.
He picked up the roses and the small Tiffany’s box beside it, wondering if the expensive gift would redeem him. She would see that he’d bought it before—that he’d remembered her birthday in time to have her gift engraved—but would that be enough? He’d missed her birthday dinner—forgotten.
It exhausted him, just thinking of the scene that was coming. He would use his charm to make her smile, beg for her forgiveness, and she would grant it with a grace and ease that would make short work of the whole thing, but he would see the hurt in her green eyes, in the way her smile wouldn’t quite bloom, and he would know that he’d disappointed her again. He was the bad guy here; there was no doubt about that, and she would remind him of it in a million tiny ways until he could hardly look at her, until he rolled away from her in bed and stared at the wall and imagined a different life.
He got out of the car and went into the house. In the shadowy kitchen, he found a vase and put the roses in it, then carried them up the stairs.
The master bedroom lights were off except for a small, decorative lamp on the desk by the window. He set the flowers on the antique dresser and went into the bathroom, where he undressed and got ready for bed. Climbing in, he pulled the heavy down comforter up to his chest and lay there in the dark.
It used to soothe him, listening to his wife’s breathing, but now every sound she made kept him awake.
He closed his eyes and hoped for the best, knowing before he even tried that it would be hours before he fell asleep and that, once found, his slumber would be haphazard at best, plagued by dreams of a life unlived, a path unchosen.
When he woke, hours later, he felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. Watery light came through the windowpanes, making the sage-colored walls look gray as driftwood. The dark wood floors swallowed whatever sunlight came their way.