I was at Hudson’s house studying when I got the call from my mother that they found my father at the bottom of the stairs, not breathing. And I didn’t even feel the slightest bit sad.
“Addie,” she says quietly, the lines under her face deepening, “he was still your father.”
I don’t budge from my spot in the living room. I’m not going to change. Not for him. If she forces me, maybe I’ll go, but once I turn eighteen, that will be the last time ever.
“Fine.” Mom’s shoulders sag. “We don’t have to go.”
I’m shocked. My mother is super stubborn, and I thought for sure we were going to be arguing about this for the next hour. I can’t believe she just let it go like that. “Really?”
“Really. But please get changed. You smell terrible.”
“Okay…”
She offers a smile. “And let’s go out to dinner tonight. We could both use a night out.”
I can’t disagree with that sentiment.
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter Twenty-Four
EVE
FOR MY BIRTHDAY DINNER, I put on my Louis Vuitton pumps and a red dress that clings to my body. I may not be the curviest woman in the world, but I’ve kept in good shape, and this dress accentuates my figure—Jay would appreciate it very much. But when I march into the living room, where Nate is watching television, he barely looks at me.
“Ready to go?” he asks. He hasn’t changed out of the dress shirt and slacks he wore to work, but in his defense, he always looks incredibly handsome.
“I’m ready.” I grab my purse from where I left it on the table next to the front door. “I thought we could go to Maggiano’s tonight.”
Nate looks at me like I just suggested we dash off to Italy to have dinner tonight. “Maggiano’s? That’s kind of far away, isn’t it? And pricey.”
“It’s my birthday,” I start to point out, but I don’t feel like arguing. And the truth is, I’m not excited to be sitting in a car with him for the next forty-five minutes either. “Fine. Do you want to go to Piazza?”
Piazza is a popular Italian restaurant about ten minutes away from here. It’s cheap and fast. Not exactly the kind of place I dream about going to on a special occasion, but I have a feeling nothing about this night is going to be anything special. May as well make the picture complete.
“Sure,” he says.
As always, Nate drives. He turns up the classical music station to a high enough volume that we don’t need to speak to each other. When we first got married, I thought about what future birthdays would be like with this man. He was so affectionate, I used to think that at thirty or forty or even eighty, we wouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other. I never imagined we would be driving to a birthday dinner at a cheap Italian restaurant, struggling to find something to say.
“We have some good talent this year on the poetry magazine,” he says.
“Oh, that’s great,” I say, even though I literally could not possibly care less.
“Those raw emotions are so intense. Only a teenager could write something so utterly compelling.”
I nod. “All those hormones. I can’t even remember what it was like to feel everything so strongly. But I know I did.”
My husband is quiet then, lost in thought. He always seems like he’s a million miles away these days. We have the same job, so it seems like it should be easy to come up with something to say to each other, yet we can’t. We have become strangers to each other.
Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I need to try harder to connect with him. When we were first together, we used to sit in the park together, curled up under a tree, and he would read poetry to me. If he suggested such a thing now, I would roll my eyes at him. I liked the poems he wrote for me, because they came from his heart, but I never enjoyed poetry in general. It all seemed so silly—especially the ones that don’t even rhyme. I mean, I’m a math teacher. I would sooner sit in the park with him and solve quadratic equations.
Maybe I should suggest it now. Maybe this weekend, we can go to the park and share some poetry. And maybe I need to cool things down with Jay. As much as that tryst has meant to me, if I have any interest in saving my marriage, hooking up with another man is not the best way to go about it.
I’ve decided—tomorrow, on the second day of my fourth decade of life, I’m going to make things right. I’m going to spend more time with Nate, and I’m going to tell Jay that it’s over.