Part 6 (2/2)

”Oh, f.u.c.k off!” I yelled, not bothering to look back at him.

The good news was that my being angry at Monroe gave me a break from being angry at Mike. It was like my ears had been ringing for weeks and suddenly it had stopped. I showered, using well water to wash lake water out of my hair, which had never made sense to me. I shampooed in anger, which is never smart as you tend to go through about half a bottle of Paul Mitch.e.l.l before you realize what you're doing. I dragged on some pajamas and pulled out my laptop bag.

I sighed, staring at the blank Word doc.u.ment. Samantha had asked me to come up with some thoughts on the breakdown of my marriage to Mike. She said it would help her come up with the best plan of attack for divorce court. But I sat there, mocked by the blinking cursor, and couldn't come up with anything to say. After what happened with the newsletter, I was almost afraid to write anything. Where to start? When did my marriage start to decline?

If I was honest with myself, I typed, I would say my marriage probably started to decline before it started. About three days before we got married, I woke up in a cold sweat. I marched into my parents' room and was about to tell them I couldn't marry Mike. We weren't right for each other. I wasn't ready to get married yet. There were too many things I still wanted to do. I opened my mouth and got as far as ”I can't” when I saw my father's face. Whatever I was about to say, he didn't want to hear. As usual, he only wanted to hear ”happy thoughts” from his youngest child. So I bit my lip. I said, ”I can't find my address book for thank-you notes. Have you seen it?” And I backed out of the room with a lead weight in my stomach.

The morning of our wedding, I woke up and vomited. And then vomited again. And part of me hoped that I was pregnant so I would have a good reason for going through with the wedding.

It turned out to be nerves.

I wrote about the pressure I felt from our families to stay with Mike, about my own feelings of obligation to Mike after being with him for so long. I wrote about losing the job opportunity at the newspaper, the shame I felt in letting myself get talked out of working, how useless I felt staying home, and how lost I was with no expectation of how I would spend every day. I wrote about how I'd networked and entertained and worked parttime in Mike's office during tax season. And yes, how I wrote his monthly newsletter.

It felt like automatic writing, like some filter-impaired spirit had taken over my typing fingers. I wrote about the first time I realized that Mike's dad was a jacka.s.s and it was likely that Mike was going to turn out just like him. About getting conception advice from eighty-year-old Margaret Mason, a fellow church member who'd decided that ”enough was enough” and it was time for us to have a baby. I wrote until my fingers hurt and the s.p.a.ce between my shoulder blades began to ache. My eyes were grainy and tired. I felt hollowed out. Nothing. No anger, no anxiety. Just empty and tired. I'd lost track of time... and had written almost fifteen pages. And I hadn't even gotten to the ”Mike's a cheating b.a.s.t.a.r.d” period of our marriage.

I ran a hand over my face and saved my doc.u.ment. I wasn't sure how useful it would be to Samantha, but writing it made me feel... lighter. It was easier to move, like my joints had been unlocked. I stood, stretched high, and yawned. I looked at the little double bed in the ”master bedroom” with the old purple patchwork quilt. It actually looked inviting. I stretched across the top of the blankets, keeping carefully to my usual side of the bed, the left, before I realized that I didn't have to share. If I wanted to sleep lengthwise, I could. Experimentally, I slid my feet onto the right side, stretching in a long line, enjoying the luxury of unlimited legroom. I sighed, switched off the little bedside lamp, and wondered what I would write the next day.

I woke up to a pitch-black room. I panicked for a moment, unsure of where I was or whose bed I was in. It was still an adjustment to sleep alone, even though Mike wasn't exactly an exciting presence in the bedroom, when he was there. And it was a comfort to have his warm weight balancing the mattress. Once you get used to that, trying to sleep alone feels like you've forgotten something. You lie there and wonder whether you left the front door unlocked or the stove on and then you realize, oh, there's supposed to be another person in my bed.

I was starving. I hadn't eaten anything during the literary unburdening of my soul. I foraged in the fridge and was overwhelmed with my choices. I never ate midnight snacks. Since, as my mother-in-law put it, ”Mike likes his girls thin,” I was pretty careful about what I ate. And despite the fact that I loved to cook a variety of dishes, so much of my meal planning and shopping revolved around Mike's finicky palate - no spices, no fish, no nightshade vegetables. The rare exceptions were when we entertained people who, say, might like seasonings other than salt and pepper. Mike suffered through those meals, and after our guests left, groaned for the rest of the night as if I'd poisoned him.

Even now, the contents of my pantry reflected Mike's tastes. White bread, American cheese, deli-sliced roast turkey. (Because smoked turkey was too exotic.) I must have shopped on automatic pilot.

So what did I want? It was so strange not to have to take anyone else's feelings into consideration. If I felt like eating pot stickers and waffles for dinner, I could. If I felt like eating pot stickers and waffles for dinner every night for the next two weeks, I could.

So what did people eat at this hour of the morning?

I finally settled for the makings of a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and a can of c.o.ke. I didn't bother turning on the porch light as it would only attract mosquitoes... and the attention of my neighbor, who was awake and sitting at his computer near his living room window. He seemed to be smiling at the screen. The tilt of his lips, the arch of white teeth, lit up his whole face. He was relaxed, happy, an entirely different person from the a.s.s who pulled me out of the lake. It would have been nice to spend time with -...

Wait, I disliked this man, intensely. ”Enjoy barelylegalfarmgirls.com, you jerk,” I muttered.

He stretched his long, lean arms over his head, craning his neck toward the window. He did a double take when he saw me watching him. His relaxed expression all but evaporated and with an abrupt flick of his wrist, he shut his blinds.

a.s.shole.

I took an overly aggressive bite of sandwich, feeling a surge of guilt at being so tense in the face of such serenity. This place was my sanctuary. I had just as much right to be there as Monroe did. I would not let him take this from me. I forced the snark to drain from my body so I could enjoy it. The sky was perfectly clear and so close to dawn that it was starless. I could hear the water gently b.u.mping Gammy's rowboat against the dock. Somewhere in the weeds, a bullfrog tried to drown out the crickets. Across the cove, a devoted fisherman was rowing along the sh.o.r.e, setting gig lines, long, floating strings of hooks that you set before dawn, hoping to return for an economy-size catch. It was so peaceful. Opening my drink seemed to make an obscene amount of noise.

I yawned. The hermit lifestyle was messing with my internal clock. I doubted that post-midnight snacks involving grilled fats and soda would do much for my waistline. If I wanted to do my trainer, the Carb n.a.z.i, proud, I would put on my running shoes and go for a jog at daybreak. But the first thing I wanted to do was get back on my laptop and start writing about Mike's mother's ability to sense every single time we were naked and call to ”see what we were up to.” It was like she had a chip implanted in him somewhere.

Revived by bubbly caffeine, I worked until the sun came up, describing how I felt when Mike first hired Beebee and how all the women in town seemed to have a collective fit. I looked out the window and saw that Monroe's lights were off. Apparently he'd turned in for the morning. Maybe he was some sort of nocturnal creature, only capable of annoying me after dark.

I tapped at the keys to bring up what I'd written about the morning I'd received Beebee's flowers. I had my own neuroses to deal with. I didn't have time for his.

12 * Shakespeare Territory.

Come on, loser, out of bed.”

Lifting my drool-stained face from the pillow, I squinted up at my brother, who was smirking down at me and waving a pint of rocky road under my nose. I winced when Emmett pulled up the shades, flooding the room with late afternoon light.

”Go away, I was up at the b.u.t.t crack of dawn,” I moaned, pulling the quilt over my head. ”Besides, I'm in hiding.”

”Well, you're doing a lousy job, love lump,” Emmett chided from the other side of the bed. I felt him nudging my ribs through the quilts. ”It took me all of two guesses to get your location out of Mama.”

”What was your other guess?” I asked, my voice m.u.f.fled by the blankets.

”That creepy old sanitarium where we used to visit Great-Auntie Myrtle.”

Emmett shook my covered shoulders. ”Get up or I'll eat all this ice cream myself and you will be responsible for the resulting cellulite on my thighs.”

I whipped the covers off my head as he continued to poke at me. ”Oh, you don't have any cellulite, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You're the only one in the family without it.”

Emmett shrank back at the sight of my horrific bedhead and pillow creases. ”Gah! Quick, take the ice cream before your eyes turn me to stone.”

I glared up at him. Emmett was basically a male version of me. The same dimples, our father's blue eyes, the same topheavy, bowed lips. Our hair was a matching shade of b.u.t.tery blond, which Emmett insisted he dyed to look like mine. I thought he was trying to be nice until I caught him attempting to cut a sample swatch of my hair to take to his colorist.

Emmett has boundary issues.

My brother ran The Auctionarium, a brick-and-mortar business for people who didn't know how to use eBay, Amazon, or basically any online site that sold used items. He took in weird family heirlooms, antiques, and garage sale fodder and sold them online for a handsome profit. From looking at him, you couldn't tell he was a computer geek-slash-the-world's-foremost-authority-on-carnival-gla.s.s. Unless he was crawling around in someone's bas.e.m.e.nt or barn searching for valuables, he favored a sort of Cape Cod aesthetic. Lots of madras and plaid. It looked like Calvin Klein threw up in his closet.

Imagine growing up with a brother who knew how to dress better than you did. It's humiliating.

”Come on, Lace, out of bed,” he said, smacking me repeatedly with a pillow. ”This is starting to look like something out of Valley of the Dolls. And not in the fun way.”

”I'm coming, but only for the ice cream.” I grumbled, s.n.a.t.c.hing the container from his hand and wrapping the quilt around my shoulders. Emmett, who'd always had a flair for the dramatic, took the tail end of the quilt and carried it like a royal train.

”What time is it?” I asked, using the spoon he ceremoniously presented to dig into the melty chocolate.

”Around four,” Emmett said. ”Why were you up at the b.u.t.t crack of dawn?”

”Writing,” I said. ”The sad story of my life. My lawyer wants my thoughts on how exactly my marriage went to c.r.a.p.”

”Well, it started when you married a pompous, pretentious, prematurely old man,” he snorted.

Emmett loved alliteration, but he had never liked Mike. When Mike and I started dating, I thought it was normal for Emmett to treat Mike like an annoying younger brother. And after a few years, I blamed the distance between them on Mike's latent h.o.m.ophobia. But now I had to admit that Emmett's ”a.s.shat radar” was just more acutely tuned than my own.

”Hey, where have you been, Em?” I demanded, finally awake enough to be indignant. ”My life has come cras.h.i.+ng down around my ears and you can't drag yourself home?”

”Sweetie, I'm sorry, the resort was all about relaxation and binge drinking. The staff didn't allow TVs, internet access, or newspapers ... or Crocs. It was fantastic. I had no idea what was happening until we landed in Florida and I saw you featured on the 'news of the weird' portion of Inside Edition. Not your best picture, by the way.”

I glared at him.

”Which is, clearly, not the point. It doesn't matter, because Emmett's here now to make it all better.” He dragged me into the cabin's tiny kitchen, where he proudly displayed the contents of a festive picnic hamper - several bottles of vodka, tequila, rum, and mixers in a rainbow of fruit flavors, lemons, limes, a five-pound bag of mini Hershey bars and bulk-sized box of Hostess CupCakes.

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