That was the thing I noticed most. Standing there on my porch, with Rachel at the bottom of the walk and Linda beside me and half the neighborhood watching from behind their curtains. He looked like a man who’d been caught.
He didn’t look like a man who was sorry.
Then he reached for my hand.
“Debbie,” he said. “Please. I apologize. I just want to come home.”
I stepped back.
He still hadn’t asked whether I wanted him there. Not once. Not since he pulled into my driveway.
“What are you apologizing for, Gary?” I said.
“For all of this.”
“Be specific.”
He glanced down at his suitcases. At his golf clubs leaning against my railing.
“For putting us in this situation,” he said. “I have nowhere to stay. The apartment’s in Rachel’s name. Hotels are really expensive. I’ve had a really awful week.”
I waited.
He didn’t say anything else.
“That’s what you’re sorry about?” I said.
“I’m trying here, Debbie!”
“No,” I said. “You’re not trying. You’re looking for a bed.”
He stared at me like I’d broken a promise.
I hadn’t. I’d never promised him anything. Not since June.
“You wanted a clean break,” I said. “Remember? You said that. To Patricia. In her office. You said you wanted a clean break and you didn’t want to fight. You accepted the buyout for your half of the house. You took the check. You signed the papers without reading them. The transfer was finalized at the end of October.” I took a breath. “This house is mine now, Gary. Only mine.”
Gary’s eyes moved to the front door.
Then to the shiny new brass lock.
“You can’t just leave me outside,” he said.
“I can,” I said. “You taught me how.”
Rachel adjusted the strap of her purse on her wrist.
She looked up at me from the bottom of the walk.
“Debbie,” she said. Her voice was very quiet. “I never would have dated him if I’d known. I swear to God. I would never. I should have asked more questions.”
“You believed someone you cared about,” I said. “I did too. For twenty-two years.”
Rachel nodded. Her eyes filled with tears.
She turned around and walked back across the street toward Linda’s car.
Gary called after her.
“Rachel! Rachel, wait!”
She didn’t turn around.
Then Gary looked at Linda.
“Are you happy now?” he said.
Linda shrugged.
“Not particularly,” she said. “But Debbie might be.”
I went inside and shut the door.
I shut it while he was still standing there deciding whom to blame.
I locked it with my new key.
Then I walked into the kitchen, picked up the garage-door remote from the hook by the back door, and pressed the button.
Through the kitchen window, I watched.
The garage door rolled up. There were the two cardboard boxes, sitting in the middle of the empty concrete floor where his Buick used to park. I’d labeled them both in black marker. GARY.
Linda had walked back to her own front yard. She was standing next to her big pink rosebush with her arms crossed, exactly like she’d promised me four months ago on my porch swing. She was glaring.
She’s very good at glaring.
Gary stood on my porch for a long moment. He looked at my front door. He looked at the garage. He looked at Linda.
Then he picked up his golf clubs.
He carried the two boxes from the garage to his Buick. One at a time. The first one was heavy. That was the one with the ceramic frogs. He had to set it down on the driveway halfway to the car and catch his breath.
Then he dragged both suitcases back down the porch steps, one at a time. One of the wheels caught on the bottom step, and he almost fell.
Then he tried to fit his golf bag into the trunk of the Buick. It didn’t fit. He tried it at an angle. It still didn’t fit. He took out one of the boxes and tried again. Then he put the golf bag in the back seat instead, sticking out the window.
He’d arrived expecting me to carry his bags into the house.
Now he was carrying everything back out by himself.
He slammed the trunk.
He looked up at my kitchen window. I don’t know if he could see me. I didn’t move away.
Then he got in the Buick and backed out of my driveway, over the corner of the lawn, and drove away down Maple Court.
The golf clubs stuck out the back window like a flag.
I pressed the remote again. The garage door rolled down.
I stood in my kitchen for a long time, under my blue cabinets, looking at the empty driveway.
Linda drove Carol and Rachel home.
When she came back, about twenty minutes later, she walked straight into my house without knocking, the way she had for four months.
She was carrying a grocery bag.
“Emergency supplies,” she announced.
She set the bag on my counter and started unpacking it.
A bottle of sparkling cider. A wedge of cheddar cheese. A box of crackers. And a tiny round cake from the bakery on Elm Street, with pink frosting and white sugar flowers around the edge.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked.
Linda set the cake down in the middle of my counter.
“You got your porch back,” she said.
We ate cake for dinner under my blue cabinets.
We didn’t use plates. We just sat at the kitchen table with two forks and ate it right out of the little cardboard box. We drank the sparkling cider out of my good wine glasses.
Halfway through the cake, I started crying.
I didn’t plan to. I didn’t even know it was coming. One minute I was laughing about Gary trying to fit his golf bag into the trunk, and the next minute I had my face in my hands and I was sobbing.
I wasn’t crying because I wanted him back. I knew that. I’d known it the second he asked what was for dinner.
I was crying for the pot roast on March eighth. For the candles I blew out by myself. For six months of Thursdays at the chemo center that he’d turned into a story about how cruel I was. For twenty-two years of being the one who smoothed everything over, while he was telling somebody else I was the reason he was unhappy.
Linda didn’t say anything. She didn’t tell me to stop. She just pulled her chair over next to mine and put her arm around my shoulders.
She stayed until I stopped.
Gary called me eleven times the next week.
I didn’t answer. He left voicemails.
The first one was angry. I can’t believe you humiliated me like that in front of the whole street, Debbie. In front of Linda. Do you know what people are saying?
The third one was sad. I’ve been staying at my brother’s. Sleeping on his pullout couch. It’s terrible for my back.
The seventh one was the old Gary. Charming. Warm. Deb, come on. Twenty-two years. We had good times, didn’t we? Remember Myrtle Beach? Remember that waiter who spilled soup on me? Let’s just talk. Dinner. My treat.
The eleventh one was just one sentence.
I’m sorry, Debbie.
I listened to that one three times.
Then I deleted all of them.
Kevin called from Denver that Sunday.
“Mom,” he said. “Dad called me.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“He said you threw him out. He said you embarrassed him in front of the whole neighborhood. He said you had some woman show up to ambush him.”
I sighed.
“Kevin, honey…”
“And then,” Kevin said, “I called Aunt Linda.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She told me everything,” Kevin said. His voice was tight. “About Rachel. About James. About Grandma Marian and the chemo. About March eighth.” He was quiet for a long time. “He told her I was seventeen?”
“He did.”
“Mom,” Kevin said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry he did that to you.”
“It’s not your fault, honey.”
“I know it’s not my fault,” Kevin said. “I’m still sorry.”
Two weeks later, Kevin called his father.
I wasn’t there. He told me about it afterward.
“I asked him why he said all that stuff about you,” Kevin said. “About you not visiting Grandma. About keeping him trapped.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it was complicated. He said I wouldn’t understand.” Kevin took a breath. “So I said, ‘Dad, I’m twenty-four. I’m not seventeen. I understand fine.’ And then I said, ‘Mom drove Grandma to chemo every Thursday. I was home from college that spring. I saw her do it. I saw her come home exhausted. I saw her clean throw-up out of her car.’ And he just went quiet.”
“Kevin.”
“I told him I love him,” Kevin said. “He’s still my dad. But I told him I’m not going to listen to him say things about you that aren’t true. Not ever again. And if he does, I’ll hang up.”
My eyes filled.
“You didn’t have to do that, honey.”
“Yeah, Mom,” Kevin said. “I did.”
In January, I passed my accounting class.
I got an A minus. The minus was for Chapter Seven, depreciation. I never did understand depreciation. But I didn’t care. I took my report card and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a tomato.
In February, I signed up for the next class. Intermediate Accounting.
My professor, a gruff older man named Mr. Kaminski, pulled me aside after the first week.
“You’re good at this, Mrs. Holloway,” he said. “Very good. Have you ever thought about getting certified? The community college has a bookkeeping certification program. Two years, part-time. You’d be great at it.”
I stood there in the hallway holding my textbook.
Gary had called it my little hobby. For twenty-two years.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
I signed up the next day.
In March, I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize.
Hi Debbie. This is Rachel. Carol gave me your number. I hope that’s okay. I was wondering if you’d want to get coffee sometime. Totally fine if you don’t. I just keep thinking about you.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I wrote back. I’d like that.
We met at a little coffee shop near the library on a Saturday morning.
Rachel was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table by the window with two cups of coffee in front of her.
“I didn’t know how you take it,” she said, when I sat down. “So I got you black. And there’s cream and sugar if you want.”
“Black’s fine,” I said.
We were quiet for a while. It was awkward. Of course it was. We’d both loved the same man. We’d both been lied to by him. We’d both believed him.
“I feel so stupid,” Rachel said finally. She was turning her cup around and around on the table. “I keep going back over it. All the little things. The times he couldn’t see me on weekends. The way he never let me come to his place. The way he always paid in cash.” She shook her head. “Everybody kept telling me there were red flags. I just didn’t want to see them.”
“I was married to him for twenty-two years,” I said. “I didn’t see them either.”
Rachel looked up at me.
“He talked about you,” she said. “All the time. Not good things. I’m sorry. But I want you to know something.” She took a breath. “Every bad thing he said about you, he’d say it like he was trying to convince himself. Like he needed you to be the bad guy. Because otherwise…” She stopped.
“Otherwise,” I said, “he’d have to be the bad guy.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said quietly.
We talked for two hours.
About Gary, at first. Then not about Gary. About her job as a dental hygienist, which made me laugh, because I work at a dentist’s office. About her two daughters in college. About my accounting class. About Linda and Carol and the book club. About the terrible orange golf shirt with the alligator.
“I threw it out,” Rachel said. “He left it at my apartment. I put it in the dumpster behind the building. And then I went back and took it out of the dumpster and cut it into tiny pieces with my kitchen scissors. And then I threw it out again.”
I laughed so hard I spilled my coffee.
When we left, Rachel hugged me in the parking lot.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not hating me.”
“I never hated you,” I said. “We were both just people who believed him.”
The divorce was final in April.
It was a short hearing. Ten minutes. Gary didn’t come. His lawyer came instead. Patricia sat next to me and held my hand under the table.
The judge signed the papers. She looked at me over her glasses.
“Mrs. Holloway,” she said. “Is there anything else?”
“No, Your Honor,” I said. “That’s everything.”
Patricia walked me out to my car.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
I thought about it.
“Light,” I said. “I feel really light.”
That evening, I got a letter in the mail.
It was from Gary. Handwritten, on yellow legal paper. Two pages.
It wasn’t charming. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t the old Gary at all.
Debbie,
Kevin won’t talk to me much anymore. My brother wants me off his couch. Rachel blocked my number. I’ve had a lot of time to think on that pullout couch.
I told a lot of lies. About you. About Mom. About Kevin. About everything. I told them because it was easier to make you the reason I was unhappy than to admit I was the reason. You were always good to me. You were good to my mother. I knew it the whole time. I just didn’t want to know it.
I’m not asking you for anything. I know I don’t get to ask. I just wanted you to know I know.
I’m sorry about March 8th. I’m sorry about the pot roast.
— Gary
I read it twice, sitting on the porch swing.
Then I folded it up and put it in the drawer of my nightstand. Not because I wanted to read it again. I just didn’t want to throw it away yet.
Maybe someday I’ll forgive him. I don’t know. Maybe I already have, a little. Forgiving him isn’t the same as wanting him back. It just means I’m not going to carry him around anymore.
He was right about one thing in that letter. He did know.
He’d known the whole time.
In May, I planted my tomatoes.
I put them in the backyard in the same spot as always, along the fence. But this year, I planted twice as many. Cherry tomatoes and big beefsteaks and a kind called Brandywine that Linda swears by. I planted basil and peppers and a whole row of sunflowers along the back, because Gary always said sunflowers were “messy.”
Linda came over and helped. We knelt in the dirt side by side with our gloves on, digging holes and patting down soil.
“You know,” Linda said, “you should come to book club.”
“Carol’s book club? Where Rachel goes?”
“That’s the one.”
“Isn’t that a little strange?”
Linda sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with the back of her glove.
“Debbie,” she said, “the strangest thing that’s ever going to happen on Maple Court already happened on your porch. I think we can handle book club.”
I laughed.
I went to book club in June. Rachel saved me a seat next to her.
It’s been a year now since Gary showed up in my driveway with his suitcases.
I still live in the little yellow house on Maple Court. It’s still mine. Only mine. The kitchen is still blue. I’ve painted the bathroom too, a soft green called Sea Glass. Next spring, I’m doing the bedroom. I haven’t picked a color yet.
I’m halfway through my bookkeeping certification. Mr. Kaminski says I’ll have no trouble finding a job when I finish. I already have two clients. Linda, who has never once balanced her checkbook in her life, and the dentist I work for, who’s been doing his own books for fifteen years and is terrible at it.
Kevin and Priya came home for Thanksgiving. We ate turkey under the blue cabinets. Kevin carved. Priya brought a pie. Linda came over for dessert and brought another pie. We had too many pies.
Kevin talks to his father sometimes. Once a month, maybe. It’s not easy. But they’re working on it. That’s between the two of them. I stay out of it.
Some evenings, I sit on my porch swing with a cup of tea and watch the sun go down over Maple Court.
Linda waves at me from across the street. Mr. Abernathy comes out to get his mail and takes his time about it. The Petersons’ curtain moves.
Nobody pulls into my driveway with suitcases.
Nobody asks me what’s for dinner.
And when I come home from work at six-fifteen and walk into my blue kitchen, the only keys that hit the granite counter are mine.
