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“You’re both hard-headed as well.”
I shrug.
“Maybe a little.”
“Promise me one thing, Taeli. Someday, you’re gonna want to come home, but your pride is going to get in the way, and you’re gonna think it’s too late. When that happens, you come home anyway because it’ll never be too late.”
“I promise.”
Taeli
Present Day
Iglance into the rearview mirror to see that my twelve-year-old son is still laser-focused on the tablet in his hand. He has had his earbuds in and a game in progress since we crossed the Illinois state line, headed for my home state of Tennessee. That’s approximately eight hours and nearly five hundred seventy miles without one word from him other than to ask for a bathroom break and a Gatorade.
I know that picking up our lives and moving to my hometown of Balsam Ridge wasn’t exactly on his agenda for the summer. He planned to attend a soccer camp with his best friends to hone his skills for next year’s middle school tryouts. He wanted to swim at the community pool with our neighbors. He expected it to be a normal school break, like all the ones that had come before.
Yeah, well, so did I, kid.
I was supposed to head up the neighborhood’s Fourth of July planning committee. I intended to start tennis lessons at the club to improve my serve. I wanted to have mimosa brunches with friends and to take a family vacation to Cabo.
Never in my wildest dreams did I fathom returning to the small mountain town where I had grown up, but when the twenty-four-year-old medical assistant to your husband of sixteen years knocks on your door one rainy Thursday afternoon to inform you that she is pregnant with his child, you tend to do unfathomable things.
Damon is an internal medicine physician in private practice in Chicago. We met at the University of Tennessee during my freshman year. He was a senior and had been accepted into the medical school program at Northwestern. After a brief but passionate courtship, I fell madly in love and decided to drop out of school, leaving my full-ride athletic scholarship behind and following him to Chicago. We married the following spring. He went on to medical school, and I went to work as an office administrator for a machine tool manufacturing firm. I also worked nights to support us, making collection calls for a cellular company, while Damon spent his time, including nights and weekends, studying and doing his clinical rotations.
We were busy humans, ships passing in the night but bumping into one another enough to create another tiny human and drag him into the chaotic fray.
Caleb was born between Damon’s graduation from medical school and his first year of residency. It wasn’t easy—juggling my two jobs, the residency, and parenthood—but we made it work. It was a delicate balance that got a little easier once Damon finished his residency, and with the financial backing of his parents and a substantial business loan, we opened Lowder Family Medicine in Naperville.
I brought my office manager skills to the family business, and Damon was the talent. Caleb was four years old when the practice opened, and he spent many hours entertaining himself under the desk on my office floor while I worked.
By the time Caleb started third grade and had a dozen commitments, including baseball and soccer practices and games, the business was out of the red, and we decided to hire an administrative manager so that I could be a stay-at-home mom. My reward for all the years of sacrifice.
It was glorious. I had worked so hard, for so long so that Damon could open his own practice, and all that work was finally paying off. We built our dream home in our dream neighborhood. I made mom friends through PTA and at the community pool. We joined the local country club, and I became a lady who lunched with other ladies while our husbands were at work and our kids were at school. My job became keeping a magazine spread–worthy home, being a social director for an eight-year-old, playing tennis, practicing yoga, going to Botox parties, and keeping myself in top physical shape for my husband. I was damn good at it too.
At the time, when Caleb started middle school, we had a seamless routine, living in our happy suburban bubble. At least, I thought so. I was living with blinders on. I stopped going to the office for noonday kisses and to say hello to the staff. I stopped paying attention to who was hired and fired. I no longer questioned Damon’s extra-long hours at the office and when he stopped taking half-days off on Fridays. I wasn’t alarmed at the number of after-hours emergencies that had to be handled in the middle of the night. I got comfortable and became numb to it all.
I was living in a beautiful house of cards until that twenty-four-year-old with her cheap hair extensions and enhanced figure kicked it over one hot, humid May afternoon, and it all came tumbling down.
Damon didn’t even try to deny it. I called his cell while she was still standing at my front door and screamed the allegations at him. He politely asked if we could discuss the “issue” when he got home.
The issue? Really?
Ivy, the homewrecker, was as composed and confident as could be when she blew my bubble apart. She was non-apologetic as she professed her love for my husband and explained her intention to keep his love child.
Love.
As if either of them knew what that word meant.
I shut the door in the tramp’s face, went upstairs, and packed a bag for me and a bag for Caleb. I picked him up from school. I checked us into a deluxe suite at The Peninsula Chicago, using Damon’s black card, and I turned off my cell phone.
It took him two days to track us down and another two days to talk me into returning home. His mother was there to watch Caleb while we discussed things, but I was fairly sure he’d called her to be a referee or a witness should I stab him in the neck.
I tried to stay calm. I kept telling myself that Damon loved me and it all had to be a misunderstanding. Ivy was probably some tart who was looking for a windfall. A simple paternity test would clear up this entire matter.
By the time my mother-in-law had rounded Caleb up in her car to take him for pizza, I was as cool as a cucumber. Damon poured us a glass of wine, and we sat down in the living room on the exquisite Ambella sofa that I had special-ordered in Venetian ivory, which had just been delivered the week before. I’d planned and invited all our friends to a dinner party the following weekend to show off the new statement piece of furniture. That was before my husband’s playmate visited me.
“I’m glad you came back.”
