A long silent pause on the other end made her stop and think she should have at least said hello first.
“I can’t talk right now. I’ll call you back in an hour.” The clipped tone set her off.
“I’m here with four kids and no backup. I need your help.”
“Hold on.”
Her patience nearly snapped when she heard his muffled “Please excuse me for a moment. I need to take this,” and a woman said, “Sure. No problem.”
She got even angrier when it took him another minute to come back on the line.
“What is going on?” he demanded in a hushed whisper.
“Who was that woman?”
“A client.”
“You didn’t say anything about a business dinner tonight.”
“I called you three times today and left you two messages, but apparently you were too busy to listen to them.”
She couldn’t refute that. After she picked up all four kids at school, took them to the park to play, out for frozen yogurt, got them back to the house to wash up and do homework, then started dinner, she hadn’t even looked at her phone . . . until now.
“Can you get out of the dinner and come home and help me?”
“No.” He didn’t say anything more.
“But I have Sierra’s boys here. They’re sleeping over. It’s crazy. I burned dinner, the smoke alarm went off, and Oliver freaked out.”
“I’m sure you’ve got it covered. I need to get back to my client.”
“That’s all you have to say.”
“We’ve been over this too many times to count at this point. According to your master plan, the kids were supposed to be at the park carnival thing tonight. I figured you weren’t expecting me, since you didn’t tell me about it, or even ask if I wanted to go with you.”
“Of course we wanted you to go, but there was no way I was taking four kids on my own.”
“And you prove my point for me. You thought you’d be doing that alone and changed your plans without telling me a thing.”
The anger and frustration in his voice only made her angrier. “So I’m expected to plan your schedule, too.”
“I thought we were a family. One that does things together. But lately, you’re so busy keeping busy you forget I exist. It took you over an hour to realize I wasn’t home at the usual time. Instead of listening to my messages, you interrupt my business meeting and insinuate I’m out with a woman behind your back.”
True. Still . . . “It’s not like you’re hot for me when you get home.”
“Most of the time you don’t notice I’m even there unless you need me to do something with the kids. It’s all I can do to get you to stop whatever you’re doing to kiss me hello. It used to be that I couldn’t leave or come home without kissing you. Now, it feels like it’s just one more chore for you to do. Most of the time, it doesn’t make even one of your lists.”
True. Damnit. This wasn’t all her fault. “That’s not fair.”
“I’m the first one who’ll say no, it’s not. I used to have a wife. Now I’ve got the mother of my kids. You’re so wrapped up in that, you don’t have time for anything else, including me, and while I get it, I’m tired of it.”
That scared her all the way to her soul. “What are you saying?”
“Something needs to change. We’ve talked about it to death, but you refuse to cut back and spend more time at home. Your priorities don’t include me. My needs and wants rank dead last to the kids and their activities and you wanting to make it seem like we’ve got the perfect life. The photos are great, Amy, but have you ever noticed I’m not in most of them? Where are the ones of us doing things as a family?”
She didn’t know what to say.
“We planned tonight as our first date night in God knows how long. Do you remember that?” He didn’t give her a chance to respond. “But instead of putting that on your precious calendar, you scheduled yet another thing for the kids to do.”
“The park carnival only happens once a year. I thought the kids would love it, but then Sierra asked if I could watch her boys, too.”
“That just sounds like excuses to me about how unimportant our date was to you. I was looking forward to it. I had a reservation and a plan to seduce my wife. But she wasn’t interested. She made other plans. So I made other plans, and I need to get back to them. At least my boss will appreciate my extra effort.”
Desperation seized her heart. “Rex, please. Come home, we’ll talk about this.”
“I’ve said everything I have to say. You know how I feel. I know you’re not going to change. Maybe it’s time I did something about it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re always complaining you have no time to yourself. You obviously don’t want to spend it with me, so maybe we fix that and I take my fair share of time with the kids.”
She turned her back on the kids who were tearing pages out of the magazines and making them into paper airplanes and tossing them all over the living room. “Are you saying you want a divorce?” She kept her voice low, so the kids didn’t hear her say that last word she’d never thought would come out of her mouth when talking about her and Rex. They loved each other. They swore they’d be together forever. They promised that nothing would ever come between them.
“I’m telling you that if something doesn’t change now, it’s not looking good for us.”
She stood stunned, listening to the dead line.
He’d hung up on her.
What the . . .
How did this all become her fault?
She glanced at the color-coded calendar.
Green for sports.
Blue for art class.
Orange for music class.
Red for birthday parties. The bold color to help her remember to pick up a gift.
Purple items for the things she volunteered to do: working in the kids’ classrooms, school and community events.
She had a rainbow collage of events listed that should have made her life feel full and satisfying. So why did she feel like a bedraggled athlete coming in last at the end of a triathlon every day? She made it through, but she didn’t feel like a winner. She didn’t feel like she’d enjoyed it.
“Aunt Amy, I’m hungry.” Danny stared up at her, his finger in his mouth.
“Don’t put your fingers in your mouth. They’re dirty.”
Danny pulled his finger free and showed her the long paper cut that welled with blood and dripped down to his palm. “It hurts.”
Yeah, every accusation Rex lashed her with tonight felt like a stinging paper cut, throbbing in her mind. But when he insinuated they were headed for a divorce and it was all her fault, she felt the dagger to the heart.
Amy fought back tears, her anger and frustration, along with the fear and uncertainty about the future.
She wanted to fix this, but also felt paralyzed, because it all overwhelmed her.
She’d been dealing with those feelings for months. Because she liked everything perfect and organized, trying to untangle her life only made it seem that much harder to do, so she didn’t do anything but get through the next marathon day.