She looked surprised, then dismayed. “Is he still there?” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “Yeah, that’s my ex. We made plans, but then we had a fight and I changed my mind. Now he’s here and he says he’s waiting for me to come to my senses.” She looked back up at me. “Don’t tell me you’re divorced, too.”
“I am.”
She gave an awkward laugh. “You’re too pretty to be divorced.”
It was an odd comment, but again, I understood. She was feeling self-conscious about her yoga pants, her messy hair. I wasn’t looking very glamorous myself—I had on jeans, a tee, a fitted cargo jacket, my long hair in its ponytail, almost no makeup—but I was further along this rough road than she was.
“My ex thinks his new girlfriend is prettier,” I said, even though I had no resentment that Van had moved on. I watched Alison’s shoulders relax a little, the crinkles around her eyes ease as she nodded.
“Fuck him, then,” she said.
I nodded. What was the difference, I wondered, between a sociopath and someone who does everyday lying to make other people feel better? “Definitely,” I said. “And don’t come to your senses.”
She looked surprised. “You think?”
“I think.”
“He says he misses me, but when we were together I annoyed him like crazy. He never wanted me around. He practically packed my things. So why does he miss me now?”
Van had tried a let’s-try-again line two weeks after he left. I was surprised at first, but then I remembered how much he hated shopping and cooking, which he’d left to me. He had probably starved for those first two weeks. “Splitting up is hard,” I said to Alison, “but if it’s the right thing to do, then it’s worth it.”
She stared at the extinguished cigarette in her hand, as if wishing she could relight it. “He says he wants the cat. He barely noticed we had a cat, so I took it with me when I left, because he wouldn’t get fed otherwise. The cat, I mean.” She frowned. “Now he says he wants to discuss the cat. What does that mean? Who wants to talk to someone so badly that they discuss a cat they don’t care about? Still, I could just give him the cat and he might go away. What do you think I should do?”
I thought it over. I thought about what it would be like to be married to someone who sat in a parking lot, reading a book, waiting for you to come to your senses, and give him what he wanted, whether he’d ever said he wanted it or not. I’d rather be single until I died.
I shrugged. “Don’t go back,” I said, “and don’t give him the cat, either. That’s my advice. But then again, I haven’t seen my therapist in a long time.”
She looked shocked at that, and then she nodded. By the time I got in the elevator, I heard her door close without another word.
CHAPTER TEN
September 2017
SHEA
On Sunday, the sky was dark and lowering, the air damp. The salt smell blowing in from the ocean was getting stronger as I took the bus to Beth Greer’s neighborhood. Arlen Heights was built on a slope that rose above the marina downtown, ending on a bluff overlooking the water. The wind was sharper here, but the view was beautiful, a vista of the town below and the vast and empty Pacific.
My parents had never been rich; my father worked for an auto parts company, and my mother was a substitute teacher. During my childhood, we lived in one of the small houses in Claire Lake, away from the piers and the tourists. As a child, I walked every day through my quiet neighborhood to my school, past well-tended shrubbery and a park with a baseball diamond. Lots of people think that nothing bad ever happens in a place like that, but it isn’t true.
Arlen Heights was different. The houses were spread out, set far back from the winding streets, which were kept narrow and rough on purpose, as if that made the place more real. I saw one elderly man with a dog, a woman doing a brisk walk, and no one else as the bus pulled up to the stop. As it drove away, the silence descended.