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I ground my teeth and bit back the stream of things I wanted to say. It wouldn’t do me any good to say anything to her now, but my eyes stung with her remark, and I wanted nothing more than to make her feel the shit she’d just slammed in my face. This Duke was the reason she divorced me, of that I was sure, though she still wouldn’t admit it even after we’d gone through mediation to decide who got what. Secret affair or not, she got it all and had the wherewithal to shove an unpainted house in my face.
“Why are you here?” she asked, visibly calm now she’d said her piece. “You’re supposed to call.”
“We have joint custody. It’s my weekend.”
“We have undecided custody. It isn’t official yet. Just temporary. But that’s not my fault seeing how long it took us to—”
“I’m not here to fight, Darlene.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and sighed. A month or so ago, I would have taken her words like fuel for my fire and spit them back out in her face, but I’d worked a lot on my mouth and decided to try this a new way. I wanted to be who I needed to be for my family, my son. “I just wanted to see James.”
“Well, he’s not here.”
“I told you on the phone I was coming.”
“Yesterday,” she said. “You told me you were coming yesterday but didn’t say when.”
“My flight got canceled.”
“And I’m supposed to drop everything and reschedule my life around when you decide to drift back into town?” She shifted her bag on her shoulders and swung it behind her, chasing it with her long, black hair as it whipped over her shoulder. “I have a life, too, and I have responsibilities. I don’t have time to cater to you.”
I shifted my feet and tried as hard as I could not to take the bait. She wasn’t acting this way because she was a horrible person. She was doing it to get a rise out of me. For a long time, during our entire marriage, it had worked, but I was finally seeing things for what they were, and I didn’t want to give in to it anymore.
“I know I’ve screwed a lot up. Can we talk about it?” I nodded toward the house. “Go inside your newly painted house and just be civil or something?”
She rolled her eyes and shoved past me, murmuring under her breath, “This patient Ryan doesn’t last long. I know the drill. You’re just trying to corner me into submitting to you.”
I snagged her arm and spun her to face me. “That’s not what this is!”
“Yeah?” she said, jerking her head down to my hand around her arm. “You have a bear’s temper and a rat’s heart. You never did anything for us when we were together, and I’m not about to expect you to do anything about it now that we aren’t.”
“That’s not true,” I said, trying to hide the pain in my voice. “Let me take you to dinner. Let me just talk.”
“I have work, Ryan. Then I have to pick up James from daycare; then I have to pick up groceries. I can’t just havedinner with you. I have responsibilities.”
“I have responsibilities, too, Darlene. Running a business takes a lot of time and work. A business, mind you, thatyouwanted me to expand. I did that for us. This is who you wanted me to be from the beginning, and when I finally did it, you decided it wasn’t enough for you.”
She shook her head, her green eyes sharp and filled with disdain that I’d put there. “You were enough for us, but you never gave us all of you. I wanted you to start a business that you could grow, but I didn’t want you to be responsible for everything. I wanted you to have something you could build on, not something that would take your life away.”
I bit my tongue before I said something I knew I would regret. I knew what I wanted to say, but I’d had a month to get my thoughts together, and I refused to mess it up. Darlene wasn’t wrong. I was a shitty dad for a while, but not for lack of trying, and that’s what she never seemed to understand. I tried, but I’d never been great at organizing my life, and I didn’t realize how much it took away from my family until I finally took a big step and was consumed by all that it brought on. Running a business wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and I wished now more than ever that I could let it all go. “It doesn’t matter anymore what we were, but I still want to be in my son’s life. That doesn’t change because I have to be away for work. I can’t change that.”
“You could. If you wanted to. That’s the problem. You haven’t been with your so-called family for the past three months. What does that tell James?”
“I was here last month.”
She scoffed, her dark-red-painted lips curling into a sneer. “A few hours doesn’t make up for the weeks between.” She walked the rest of the way to her car and opened the passenger side to shove in her bag.
As she made her way around to the other side, I shuffled toward the driveway, a question nagging at my thoughts. “Why now?”
“Huh?”
I pointed to the pristine white siding and the fresh fascia that made the house look almost brand new. “Why did you have this Duke paint it now?”
She sighed, tapping her nails on the white roof of her Mazda as if she were debating whether to tell me the truth. “Duke wants to move up north. We’re getting ready to sell.”
“Up north? For what?” She had won the house in the divorce a few months ago. She wanted to sell it already? Without even telling me?
“To be closer to his family.”
That, I couldn’t take. I stormed to her car, my head pulsing with anger I’d held back until now, and before I reached the passenger side, I heard the small click of the lock and her cold gaze from within her fading tinted windows.
