“She’s…silly and funny and shy around people she doesn’t know. But once you peel back her layers, she becomes this little comedian.”
“And your husband?” Another detail listed on my demographic sheet. Married. Not single or divorced or separated.
“He’s…” I think about James—my husband—what he means to me and the part he plays in my life. “Sometimes I don’t know if I deserve him. But don’t tell him that. Can’t let that kind of stuff go to his head.” It’s a joke, a shiny veneer to place over the cracks in my marriage hoping to make it look less damaged. But I don’t think I’m fooling her.
“Why don’t you think you deserve him?”
The shell breaks, and I realize it didn’t stand a chance. Nothing can make my relationship look pretty on the outside.
I don’t answer her. Instead, with my bottom lip clamped between my teeth in order to stop my trembling chin, we sit in silence.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
James
NOW
Sylvia and Tommy’sneighborhood is charming and eccentric. A typical street with lush yards and lawn ornaments with multicolored mailboxes—the kind painted by the owners and not ordered or store bought—yet the homes aren’t without the occasional adornments that stand out in an otherwise conventional community. A yellow door with a bright gold doorknob. A four-foot-tall stone garden gnome with a pointed hat painted red. A navy vintage Volkswagen Beetle sitting on a driveway with a burlap pennant banner hung along the back window.
I can picture us living here, raising Sophia right alongside Tommy, Sylvia, and Katy. Just so they can grow up together. That is, if there’s anything left of us to relocate and build a home from the ground up with.
Kendall and I turn the corner around the block, taking a rectangular path while Tommy and Sylvia took the girls to the library. A weekend outing that’s really a guise. I saw it the second they asked both Katy and Sophia if they’d like to do something with just Uncle Tommy and Auntie Sylvia for the day. Tommy looked at me, a silent nod of permission while the girls jumped for joy.
And now, I’m using the opportunity to be alone with Kendall. Talk to her like I said, but now that it’s just us two, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say anything, and the words I want to say are just stuck, waiting for permission to be uttered.
“Those walkway lights are nice,” I say, sticking with facts and logistics.
Kendall nods, her gaze following my index finger as I point out a stone path lined with solar lights that would look really nice at night. Similar to what I’ve wanted for our own home.
“We should get something like that for the house,” I suggest. “The ones I was looking at didn’t have solar panels like that.”
She nods again, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket. I zip my own jacket up. It’s cool with a heavy overcast wafting above us. I think I saw rain in the forecast, and maybe this walk wasn’t necessarily a good idea, but I thought it would be better than us sitting in the living room while we’re forced to look at each other. We can walk and face the road in front of us. Keep that wall up for a little longer.
An older couple walks past us, and it forces me closer to Kendall. I rest my hand on her lower back—instinct—and I notice the man offer a purse-lipped smile in my direction, his own arm wrapped around his wife’s shoulders. I wonder if he notices us, the way we move together, much like him and his wife. Or the way we appear as if we hardly know each other anymore, which is the absolute truth. Or maybe he sees what we’ve always wanted to appear like. A happily married couple. A man, protectively moving closer to his wife while out on a walk to get air and spend some time together.
I want to tell the man it’s all a lie. This ruse, this scam we’re taking part in, playing house when everything about us is broken. I feel like a fraud. To Sophia, to my family, to everyone around us. They don’t know about us, all the broken parts wehate to acknowledge. All they see is this pretty shell, painted and shellacked into something much more attractive than what it is.
“Why did you come here?” she asks suddenly, sounding frustrated. The tightness in her voice shows her patience is wearing thin, stretched tight like a balloon. She asked me the same question last night, and I never offered an answer. I gave her the biggest non-answer anyone could ever give. I left it all on the table, open and scattered, waiting for it to be swept away and tossed.
“I wanted to talk to you.” The restless sleep on the sofa gave me the forethought to come up with that. It’s better thanI don’t fucking know.
“Okay,” she says. She stops walking, facing me with her arms crossed. “You’re here, and you’renottalking. So, talk.”
“Kendall,” I start. “I don’t…”
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t know?—”
She groans, throwing her hands in the air. “You never know,” she accuses. “You just go along with everything. You never take the initiative to figure things out, and you just wait for things to fizzle or just figure themselves out. And when I finally say something to you, you manage to say the wrong fucking thing every time.”
“Because I don’t know what to say,” I argue. “I am so fucking scared that whatever I say might make you upset. And then you’ll stop talking to me for a week, and then we become this shell. Everything feels so goddamn empty, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Then don’t say the wrong thing!”
“How am I supposed to know what the wrong thing is? You never tell me,” I tell her, our voices growing angry and harried. I start to realize this is the most she’s ever said to me. I’m usually met with silence or a cold shoulder. This is the completeopposite. This is fire and anger and all the things I never knew I wanted from her. “You never tell me what I’m supposed to say.”
“I can’ttellyou those things.” I hear the strained tremble in her words, the scowl on her face softening into pain and desperation. “If I have to tell you how to talk to me, how am I supposed to trust you?—”
