I’m in the bathroom putting on makeup for my afternoon shift at Between the Covers when I hear his car pull into the drive. He doesn’t park in the garage—maybe he’s afraid he won’t be able to get out fast enough—and since I’m behind a locked door, I take my time getting dressed and straightening my spine. Deep breathing follows.
When I leave the bedroom, I do not sprint for my car like I want to but follow the sound of voices into the kitchen, where Dorothy is staring across the table at her son, her chin quivering.
Mitchell stands and walks toward me. I resist the urge to fall back. “Why are you here?”
“I came to say I’m sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.” He says this quite sincerely.
“So, you accidentally impregnated a woman twice and are accidentally living with her and your son”—I can barely get the word out—“while pretending that we’re still married and sharing a life?”
“We are still married,” he replies.
“No. Not as far as I’m concerned, we’re not.”
“Legally, we are.”
“Maybe on paper. But I plan to take care of that as soon as possible.” My own chin quivers. “You’re living the life I begged for. With another woman.”
“Her name is Margot.”
I shudder at the sound of her name and the way he says it. “I don’t care what her name is. I don’t want to know anything about her. If you came for your clothes, things that actually belong to you, be my guest.” I wave my arm in the direction of the bedroom. “It’ll save me the trouble of throwing them out in the yard and stomping all over them when I get back from the bookstore.”
“Like some wronged heroine exacting a clichéd revenge?” His mouth quirks in amusement. “This isn’t one of your romance novels.”
“No, it certainly is not.” I settle my purse strap over my shoulder and head for the hall closet to get my coat.
“I made a mistake,” he says, following me. “And I’m here to apologize.”
I yank my coat out of the closet and pull it on. “One child might be a mistake. Two—two is not a mistake. You’re a father, and you clearly have a longtime relationship with that . . . that woman.” I don’t intend to ever speak her name. “How could you come home on weekends and make . . . have sex with me . . . and then go back to her and to your other life?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. I slipped up and had an affair.” His voice turns pleading.
“That boy . . . your son . . . has to be close to four. And she’s pregnant again. You obviously have feelings for her. Do you have any idea how it makes me feel? I begged you to have children, and you had no problem saying no.”
“Yeah, well.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “She never asked.”
This sucks the air right out of my lungs. Dorothy gasps, too, from wherever she is in the kitchen. Listening. Hanging on to every word of this miserable conversation.
“Things just got out of control. I had to support him, didn’t I?” Mitch says. “And she had morning sickness the whole time. And then she couldn’t afford childcare, so she had to stay home with him.”
Each admission is a gunshot to my chest, a hole in my heart.
“I just . . . everything spiraled all to hell. And . . . I love you. I’m still attracted to you.” He offers this as if it’s some great gift, then steps closer. “I can fix this.”
I slap him with every ounce of fury and hurt I possess. “You have clearly lost your mind. I’m done. We were finished the minute you started sleeping with her, only I didn’t know it.” For once, I am too angry to cry. “Clear out your things. I’ll be changing the locks after work.”
He looks shocked to the core. I have never spoken to anyone this harshly or with this much certainty.
His mother gasps in the kitchen.
“Come on out, Dorothy,” I call.
When she limps out to the foyer, I look at the two of them. “I’m pretty sure your mother is expecting you to take her with you. Or at least back to her own house.”
I nod to my mother-in-law. “You always made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for your son. But it’s your son who isn’t good enough for me.”
I’m about to make my exit when Mitch says, “I, um, can’t take her with me.”
“What?” Dorothy and I Greek chorus.
He shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot. “There’s no room for her in the Birmingham apartment. And I’m a little short on funds, so I can’t take a bigger place.”
“Then take her home.”
He winces and gets this odd hangdog look on his face. “I can’t do that, either.”
“Why not?” Dorothy and I chorus once again.
“Because I had to stop making her mortgage payments so that I’d have the cash to support Margot and Mitch Junior without you finding out.” He swallows and drops his eyes. “I . . . the bank has foreclosed and I . . . there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Dorothy’s face reveals every bit of horror that I feel. Mitch cosigned the mortgage when Dorothy refinanced her home, and agreed to make the monthly payments until he’d paid back the money he’d borrowed from her.
“Are you telling me that you’ve lost your mother’s home and now you’re planning to just walk away and leave her here? What in the world is wrong with you?”
a·ghast
/əˈgast/
adjective
filled with horror or shock
Ex: “I am aghast at how ugly and self-centered my husband has proven himself to be.”
Thirteen
Jazmine
On the first of February, the snow everyone was forecasting for Christmas arrives, and everything, including Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, raises its hands and surrenders. Every time it snows here in Atlanta, we embarrass ourselves on the global stage. Frankly, I think everyone, including the equally inexperienced former Southern Californian Rich Hanson, needs to cut us some slack.
I point this out to him when he laughs at the tiny amount of snow required to shut the city down. IMHO, expecting Atlanta to have snow-moving equipment waiting for the rare snowfall that sticks is like expecting Yakutsk, Siberia, to be perfectly air-conditioned on the off chance it hits ninety for a couple of hours one day.
I tell myself that nothing Rich Hanson says can bother me. Because Sony is begging me to get Tyrone Browning to sign a multiyear endorsement deal that will, in fact, put Luther Hemmings’s five million in the piggy bank range. I believe this until I run into him coming out of Larry’s office, where he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time.