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She looks up, and it takes her a moment to register who I am. When she does, her eyes go wide. There’s a fear in them as though she’s worried that I’ve come here to kick her ass.
She looks back at her son. “Sweetie, we will read it again in a little while. Why don’t we go in the living room and watch a movie?”
She does her best to avoid me as she leads her son into the other room.
“She’s worried you’re going to beat her up,” Cheryl says with a small laugh.
“I’m too hungover to beat anyone up,” I mumble.
“Yeah, I figured. I was going to tell you that you looked like shit, but I figured you knew.”
“Oh yeah…I know.”
“Let me put on a pot of coffee, and you can tell me what you’re doing all the way out here.”
A few minutes later, each of us has a steaming mug in front of us as we sit across the table from each other.
She doesn’t say anything, instead waits for me to start talking.
“I’m sorry for going a little crazy yesterday,” I begin.
“A little?”
I chuckle. “Okay, I went full-on psycho, and I’m sorry. I just heard him in the background, and it all just sort of hit me all at once. I think everything that I have been avoiding finally caught up with me.”
“I knew it eventually would. Andi, why’d you come here?”
“Cheryl, I’m falling in love…with a wonderful man. But it seems that all of my hang-ups are stopping us from moving on with our lives. We had a big fight about it last night. I tried to drown my sorrows but instead got a big dose of reality. Figured coming here was as good as a place to start.”
“Andi, she didn’t know.”
“Huh?” I ask.
“Stacy didn’t know. Michael was lying to her, too. I guess they met at a club one night when he was out of town, and they hit it off. He would see her every time he was in town. He told her his home office was in Sacramento and kept promising to move her and Mikey there, but he always made some sort of excuse. She didn’t know about you until she read his obituary.”
You’d think I’d be more surprised by this information, but I think I’m still too hungover to process it all.
“How’d she even find out he died? The crash happened when he was on his way back.”
She shrugs. “He had friends there just like he had friends in Sacramento. I guess they saw it on the news. She looked up the funeral information, which she assumed that I planned. She assumed no one contacted her because they weren’t legally married.”
“I think all this time I have been so mad at her, but really, Michael is the one I was mad at. And to be honest, I don’t even know if the cheating is what makes me so mad. Yeah, it was a shitty thing to do, but our marriage was a shit show anyway. I think that what bothers me is that he didn’t just leave me. He kept stringing me along. For years. I could have gotten on with my life so much sooner if he had just had the guts to leave.”
She sighs. “I wish that too. I wish that he would have just been honest because he made me lose years with my grandbaby. I don’t know what happened. He was raised better than that.”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I think part of it is that he and I both got together so young that we both changed over time. He was a different person when he was with Stacy, but he didn’t want to give up who he was with me either.”
“Maybe,” she mumbles. “Figured you’d be the last person to make excuses for him.”
I snort. “You and me both! But honestly, Cheryl, I am tired of being angry. I’ve held onto so much anger over the years, and I can’t keep doing it anymore. Jonas and I had a big fight about it last night.”
“What happened?”
I tell her about how I just choose to push things under the rug instead of dealing with them. I tell her about my anger toward Michael and my parents, all of whom I feel abandoned me.
“Maybe if I knew what happened to them, but Michael told me that he looked into them, and they didn’t want anything to do with me,” I say while wrapping my cold hands around the warm mug.
“Honey, why didn’t you just get ahold of them after they stopped by all those years ago?”
