Twenty-eight years ago, when Mike was a baby and Anna was exhausted, Chad had developed a pattern of not being where he said he would be, running late all the time, getting strange phone calls that he tried to pawn off as clients, perfume on his shirt, just the most obvious stuff in the world. She needled him constantly until he admitted he’d met someone, a colleague, he said, that he’d had a brief fling with and regretted it and it was over. It would never happen again, unless Anna kept harassing him. She couldn’t stop, though. Then he said, “Fine, do you want a divorce? Because I won’t fight you on it.”
They were overwhelmed by bills and debt, could barely make the mortgage payments, which was why Anna kept working. She was afraid to leave him or let him go. Her worst nightmare seemed to be coming true, becoming an impoverished single mother like her own mother had been. It was a dark and painful time, betrayed and isolated as she was, when out of the blue Joe called and asked for Chad and on the brink of despair she asked him if he knew. She sobbed and dumped it all on Joe and Joe encouraged her to try to patch things together for the sake of their children.
“And I decided right then and there I was going to have to build something for myself and my kids that was a little more substantial than being a legal secretary, because if he cheated once, he’d cheat again. I was never aware of another affair, however.”
“Ah, so you might suspect, but...” Joe said.
“All the signs were there. After all these years. After I sucked it up and did everything I could to make it work.”
“It was a long time ago, Anna. A lot of water over the dam. It was probably just a midlife crisis.”
“He was sixty-two! How the hell long was he expecting to live?”
Joe lifted his glass. “Much longer than he did. It took a lot of strength for you to get over it and make a good life, a good marriage.”
She just stared at him as if he was insane. “What makes you think I got over it? I never got over it. I’ve been looking over my shoulder for almost thirty years!” She sipped her drink carefully. She didn’t want to scorch her throat again.
Joe threw his back.
“Arlene and I couldn’t hold it together,” Joe said of his ex-wife. “Do you ever hear from her?”
“Never,” Anna said. “Do you?”
“A little,” he said. “It’s about the kids or the grandkids and is mostly confined to texts or the occasional email. Arlene and I were not meant to be. The divorce, though painful, was destiny. We got off to a bad start. I have two great kids and a couple of beautiful granddaughters. But I thought you and Chad invented marriage. In spite of all you’d been through.”
“Because I’m a good sport, that’s why,” she said. “And because everything I ever said about him, about us, made him look like a king. Or at least a benevolent despot.”
And in a way it was true. For years she acted as if it didn’t hurt her that he’d stepped out, found another woman and cheated. She knew exactly what it took to make him feel loved and special and she delivered, whether she felt it was irrelevant. She let it go that he was bad at remembering special occasions, that her feelings were less important than his.
“It seemed you loved him very much,” Joe said.
“Of course I loved him, but that wasn’t the reason I put so much energy into trying to make a decent marriage. It was my commitment. I didn’t expect that he’d never grow old, never get sick, never have issues. I didn’t take for granted that we’d be in love every day. Hell, there were days I hated him and I assumed he had those days, too—isn’t it inevitable? I stayed, anyway. It was Chad who was the part-timer. When it started to get challenging for him, he was always weighing the advantages of leaving. I, on the other hand, never saw any advantage in leaving. Until his latest depression. It was the last straw for me. He had everything and yet he complained. He was ungrateful. He kept saying something was missing, as though it was my job to figure out what that was and deliver it.” She shook her head. “But if he had come home in a better frame of mind... We were usually distracted by discussions of our competing schedules, some major repair or purchase we had to talk about, or if one of the kids had a problem.”
“Amazing how easy it can be to not talk about it, isn’t it?” Joe said.
“Thirty years of practice will do that for you,” she said.
“And yet, you never considered a life on your own terms?”
After a quiet moment, she said, “Because I did love him. I did. But—”