My neighbor Linda was calling from across the street. I could see her through my front window, standing at her own living room window in her bathrobe with the phone pressed against her ear and the curtain pulled back.
I looked outside.
There he was.
My husband was standing at the bottom of my front porch steps holding two suitcases, with a bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder. He was wearing the gray windbreaker I’d bought him for his fiftieth birthday. His silver Buick was parked crooked in the driveway, half on the grass.
Four months earlier, he’d walked out of this house after twenty-two years of marriage. He’d said he needed “a fresh start.”
Apparently, the fresh start was over.
“Debbie?” Linda said. “You still there?”
“I’m here,” I said. “Let me call you back.”
I opened the front door.
Gary looked up at me and smiled. A big, easy smile, like he was coming home from a long business trip.
“My girlfriend kicked me out,” he announced, “so I’m back!”
I stared at him.
“Was that supposed to be good news?” I said.
My name is Debbie Holloway. I’m fifty-one years old. For twenty-two years, I was married to Gary Holloway, who sold insurance, played golf every Saturday, and never once in two decades remembered to buy toilet paper.
We met when I was twenty-eight. He was thirty. He was charming and funny and loud, the kind of man who walked into a room and started talking to strangers like he’d known them for years. I was quiet. I liked that he did the talking. I liked that he made every party fun.
We got married at twenty-nine and thirty-one. We bought this house, a little yellow two-story on Maple Court with a big front porch and a backyard full of my tomato plants. We had one son, Kevin, who’s twenty-four now and lives in Denver with his girlfriend.
For twenty-two years, I thought we were fine.
Not perfect. Nobody’s perfect. Gary forgot birthdays. He left his socks on the bathroom floor. He took long golf weekends with his buddies and never asked if I wanted to come. He talked over me at dinner parties. He called me “the boss” to his friends in a way that wasn’t really a compliment.
But he also warmed up my car on freezing mornings without being asked. He made ridiculous commentary during crime shows, guessing the killer in the first five minutes and always being wrong. He threw his keys on the kitchen counter every night at six-fifteen, and the sound of them hitting the granite meant home.
I thought that was what marriage looked like after twenty-two years. Comfortable. Ordinary.
I was wrong.
He left on a Tuesday in June.
I came home from the dentist’s office where I work as a receptionist and found him in our bedroom, packing a suitcase. Not a weekend bag. The big one. The one we took to Florida.
“Gary? What’s going on?”
He didn’t stop packing. He folded a polo shirt very carefully and laid it in the suitcase.
“I’m leaving, Deb,” he said.
I stood in the doorway holding my purse.
“Leaving where?”
“Leaving,” he said. “You. This. I need a fresh start.”
I laughed. I actually laughed. I thought it was some kind of strange joke.
He didn’t laugh.
“I’ve met someone,” he said. He still wasn’t looking at me. “Her name doesn’t matter. I’m not happy, Debbie. I haven’t been happy in a long time. I need to figure out who I am.”
“You’re fifty-three,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “I don’t have time to waste.”
I asked him why. Over and over. I followed him around the house while he packed.
“You never said anything,” I said. “Not once. You never said you weren’t happy. I asked you, Gary. At Christmas. I asked you if everything was okay, and you said it was fine. You said everything was fine.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“So you’re hurting me now instead?”
He zipped up the suitcase.
“I’ll send someone for the rest of my stuff,” he said.
Then he walked out to his Buick and drove away.
He left his keys on the kitchen counter. I heard them hit the granite.
I sat down on the kitchen floor and didn’t get up for a long time.
The first few weeks were terrible.
I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat much. I called in sick to work three days in a row, which I’d never done in eleven years. Kevin flew home from Denver for a long weekend and slept on the couch and made me grilled cheese sandwiches and watched old movies with me.
“Dad called me,” Kevin said on the second night. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch. “He said you guys had been unhappy for a long time.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I wasn’t unhappy. I didn’t know he was.”
Kevin was quiet for a while.
“I believe you, Mom,” he said.
Linda was the one who got me through it.
Linda lives across the street. She’s sixty-two, a retired nurse, divorced herself twelve years ago. She has short silver hair and a laugh you can hear from two houses away. She grows the best roses on Maple Court and has an opinion about everything.
She came over the second day after Gary left. She didn’t knock. She just walked in with a casserole dish of baked ziti and a bottle of wine and put them both on my counter.
“Eat this,” she said. “Then cry. Then eat more.”
She came over every day for two weeks. She made me get dressed. She made me take walks around the block. She sat with me on the porch at night and let me talk about Gary until I was sick of my own voice.
One night, about three weeks in, we were sitting on my porch swing, and I said, “What if he comes back?”
Linda looked at me.
“Do you want him to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Part of me does. Part of me thinks I’d take him back in a second if he showed up on that porch and said he was sorry.”
Linda was quiet for a long time.
“Well,” she said finally, “if he ever comes back, and you decide you don’t want him, you call me. I’ll come stand right next to you while he gets his things. I’ll stand by my rosebush with my arms crossed and glare at him. I’m very good at glaring.”
I laughed for the first time in three weeks.
“Deal,” I said.
Then, slowly, things got better.
Not all at once. A little at a time.
In August, I signed up for a night class at the community college. Introduction to Accounting. I’d always been good with numbers. Gary used to tease me about it, about how I balanced the checkbook to the penny. He called it “Debbie’s little hobby.” I’d always wanted to go back to school. Gary always said we didn’t have the money.
Turns out we did. Gary just had other plans for it.
I loved that class. I loved sitting in a classroom with a notebook and a pencil, learning something new. Something that had nothing to do with Gary. Something that was just mine.
In September, I met with a divorce attorney. Her name was Patricia Moore. She was in her fifties, calm and sharp and very kind. We started the paperwork.
Gary wanted out fast. He wanted a “clean break,” he said. He didn’t want to fight. He didn’t want the house. He said he wanted to start over in an apartment downtown with his girlfriend. So Patricia worked out a buyout. I’d pay Gary for his half of the house, from my retirement savings and a small loan. He’d sign it over to me.
He signed the papers in October without reading most of them. He just wanted the check.
The house transfer was finalized at the end of that month. The divorce itself would take longer. In our state, there’s a waiting period. So we were still technically married. But the house was mine. Only mine. My name on the deed.
In November, I painted the kitchen.
Gary had always hated color. For twenty-two years, our kitchen was beige. Beige walls, beige cabinets, beige countertops. He said colors were “tacky.”
I went to the hardware store on a Saturday morning and stood in the paint aisle for an hour. Then I picked a deep, beautiful blue called Harbor Night.
I painted the cabinets myself. It took me all weekend. Linda came over Sunday afternoon to help with the trim, and we drank wine and played old Motown records and sang “My Girl” at the top of our lungs.
When I was done, I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
My kitchen. Blue.
I loved it.
That same week, I had the locks changed.
All of them. The front door, the back door, the side door to the garage. A nice young man named Tony came out and did it in an hour.
When he handed me the new keys, I held them in my hand for a long time.
Nobody else in the world had a copy.
So by the time Gary showed up in my driveway four months later with his suitcases and his golf clubs, I wasn’t the woman he’d left in June.
I just didn’t think he knew that yet.
“Come on, Debbie,” Gary said. He was still smiling. “We’ve been married forever.”
“Funny,” I said. “You remembered that right after she kicked you out.”
He made a face. He set down one of the suitcases on the walk.
“She said I was selfish,” he said. “Can you believe that?”
Then he looked past me, into the house.
“What’s for dinner?”
I stared at him.
Four months. Four months of not one phone call to ask how I was doing. Four months of letting our son tell me “Dad says hi.” Four months of signing papers without reading them and cashing a check for half my house.
And he wanted to know what was for dinner.
“Whatever you cook,” I said, “at your next address.”
He laughed. He actually laughed, like I’d made a joke.
“Very funny, Deb,” he said. “Help me with these bags.”
“Did your girlfriend pack them?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“That was nice of her,” I said. “I would’ve charged you.”
He sighed. He rolled one suitcase a little closer to the porch steps. He did it very casually, like he wasn’t doing anything at all.
“She said I was selfish,” he said again. “Can you believe that?”
“Did she explain why?”
“She wouldn’t stop explaining,” Gary said.
“Sounds difficult,” I said.
He rolled the suitcase up onto the bottom step.
“So where should I put my things?” he said. “The guest room’s fine for a few nights, I guess. Until we sort things out.”
“Gary,” I said. “You left me for another woman.”
“And I’ve learned my lesson.”
“In four months?”
“Three and a half, technically,” he said.
Four months ago, that would’ve made me cry.
Now I had to try very hard to keep from smiling.
Of course he’d brought his golf clubs.
Of course.
“Debbie,” Gary said. He put on his serious face. The one he used to use when he wanted me to agree to something. A new car. A golf weekend. A boat he never ended up buying. “I just want things to get back to normal.”
“You want a proper welcome home?” I said.
He brightened right up.
“Now you’re talking!”
“Then give me five minutes,” I said.
I stepped back inside and closed the door.
I went into the kitchen, under my blue cabinets. I picked up my phone and called Linda.
