In this case, it means he asked me something and I was too busy missing my old custom kitchen with the walk-in pantry to hear him.
“I’m sorry,” I say, as he sighs again. “Can you repeat that?”
“My mom called.” He says it like it’s no big deal, but now I’m not sure I want to hear him after all.
“And?” I ask stiffly.
“And Miranda’s bringing the kids up to the cottage for the weekend.”
I close my eyes. I know what I missed. “And you want to take the boys up too.”
“You could come,” he says, like he’s only just thought of the idea, but if I know anything about Dominic, he’s been working on this speech for hours. “It worked okay the last time.”
It . . . was not okay. In fact, it was awkward as hell. Miranda, Dominic’s sister, didn’t speak to me once, and Dominic’s mom would hardly look at me. Apparently once the ink is dry on the divorce papers, you stop existing to your former in-laws. At the end of the night, when I went to sleep in the stuffy bedroom the kids called “the Harry Potter room” because it was essentially built under the stairs, I heard Jacob ask Dominic, “Why isn’t Daddy sleeping with you?” and nearly broke down.
So, no. It wasn’t okay. That attempt at normalcy failed spectacularly.
And besides, “If I come, where is Miranda supposed to sleep?” Last time, she’d shared a room with her mother and bitched endlessly over breakfast about how badly Rosa snored all night.
“There’s always a hotel. Or an Airbnb.”
“For Miranda?” I ask.
“No.” Dominic sighs, disappointed I’m not playing his game. “For you.”
Of course. Sometimes I can barely believe we were married for almost ten years, and together for six before that. The guy has the emotional intelligence of a beaver.
“It’s my weekend to have the boys,” I say firmly.
“I know, but Miranda—”
“And instead of honouring our agreement . . . ” I lean on the last word. I’d been perfectly happy to keep things informal and amicable. Dominic was the one who’d insisted on getting the custody agreement formalized. “So the boys don’t get confused. They need structure.”
“Nash.” But apparently that structure doesn’t apply when Dominic’s family snaps their collective fingers.
“Instead of honouring—” I say again.
“You can have them next weekend,” he says with the same tired sigh.
“I’m at a conference next weekend.”
“Then the weekend after.”
“That’s my weekend to have them anyway!” I’m yelling now. I catch nervous glances from two members of our event team as they scurry by my office door. Harpreet, head of marketing, follows and gives me a dirty look. I grit my teeth. I’m supposed to be a role model. Nash O’Hara, Executive Director. The nameplate is fixed to my door, and certain expectations come with it. Yet too many people on my staff have already been witness to the dissolution of my marriage. I do my best not to bring this shit with me to the office, but it’s impossible to keep it completely insulated.
I didn’t think it would be like this. We worked so hard to be a couple. And then the boys. Every part of bringing them home was a struggle, but we were happy, the four of us together, in our three-bedroom home on a subdivision cul-de-sac where every house looked like ours.
Except sometime between the first visit with the social worker and that evening last year when I came home to find my stuff in boxes by the door, Dominic decided it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. For him or the boys. I did my best to be a father and husband and run the festival, and in the end I had to admit I could only manage two out of three.
“Fine.” Even if I hop in the car right now, Friday afternoon traffic means they’ll be long gone before I ever get to Markham. And what would I do then? Call the police? Help, help. My ex-husband has taken our children to his mother’s lavish lakeside cottage so they can play hide-and-seek with their cousins all weekend. I do not want to be the asshole. We have said too many things to each other that we’ll never be able to take back. For the boys’ sakes, if nothing else, I don’t want to add more to the list. “Have fun up north. Make sure Jacob wears sunscreen and Karter doesn’t eat too many—”
“Okay, perfect, thanks for understanding!” The phone goes dead. One thing I will say for Dominic: he doesn’t gloat. He gets what he wants and then moves on.
As an ex-husband, he’s a jerk. As a dad, he’s great, at least. It’s the only peace I’ve been able to make as I find myself forty-two and single again. Dominic and I both want what’s best for our kids. We just can’t give it to them together anymore.
Doug’s lurking at my door as I hang up. I scowl at him. “Eavesdropping’s rude, you know.”
He hunches a bit, making me think of a mole or a badger, even though I’ve never seen one in real life, just in the storybooks I used to read to Jacob and Karter at bedtime.
“You shouldn’t let him push you around like that,” Doug says. “They’re your kids too.”
They are. But somehow, exiled downtown as I am, they feel like they’re another life away. “Well, now I have a weekend to myself. Freedom to do whatever I want.”
“Yeah.” Doug’s smile is wry. It’s nice to see him smile. He’s had as tough a go of it lately as I have. “But you’ll spend it all working.”
“I won’t!” I say. “I’ll—” My brain goes blank because, yeah, that’s what I’ll do. My inability to stop bringing work home is why Dominic said he was done. Bringing the laptop on our Algonquin Park canoe trip was the last straw, apparently. Not that we had Wi-Fi out in the woods, but I figured I could at least work on drafting a new set of fundraising requests once the kids were asleep. Dominic and I were well past the blow jobs under the stars phase of our relationship by then.
Meanwhile, Doug’s smile is growing, like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “You’ll what?”
I wish we hadn’t gone paperless at the office, because I really need to wad something up and throw it at him. “I don’t know. What are you doing?”
His smile fades. “Calvin and I have a cake tasting.”
For a guy who’s supposed to be getting married in a few months, Doug is not nearly as excited as I think he should be. But maybe that’s for the best. When Dominic and I got married, I completely bought into the “biggest day of my life” crap, and look where that got me.
“Stick with vanilla,” I say. “Go with coffee buttercream if Calvin insists on being fancy.”
“Feels like everything Calvin is doing for this wedding is to make it fancier than his last decision made it. I told him we should just skip it all and go to city hall, and he—” Doug shrugs. “Coffee buttercream. I’ll remember that.”
I try to look encouraging. No point in dumping my baggage on Doug. It’ll be two years this fall since his dad died, and for a while I thought we were going to lose Doug too. He was ghostly on the odd days he did come to the office. But since he and Calvin got engaged, he’s been doing better. Hopefully married life will help him turn the rest of the corner.