Best Kept Secret (8 page)

“Well, yes,” Brittany said as she lifted the bottle and tilted it to top off my drink. “And for the money you’ll spend to up my commission.”

All the women laughed then, including me.

“Where is Leah going to preschool?” Susanne asked Hannah.

Hannah looked surprised. “She’s only two. Doesn’t preschool start when she’s three?”

“Oh, no,” Brittany said. “You need to get her registered now. Isn’t that right, Cadence?”

I nodded. “The waiting list at the Sunshine House is at least six months long. If you want her to get in, you should get her name on it.” I recognized the look of panic on Hannah’s face, remembering how intimidated I was when I first joined the group. The other women appeared so confident in their mothering skills; I felt like a freshman in a room full of MBAs. It had taken me almost two months just to decipher which of Charlie’s cries meant he was hungry and which meant he needed to sleep. Suddenly, the stakes around my choices took on a whole new weight. Breast milk or formula? Organic or processed? Cloth or disposable diapers? Home school or public? The list of potential mistakes seemed endless. It overwhelmed me.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Hannah now. “You’ll figure it all out.” I wasn’t sure if I was reassuring her or myself.

A sudden cry erupted from the other room—I knew immediately from the pitch it was my son. I set my glass on the counter with a light clatter and rushed to his side. He was standing with his arms straight at his sides, his fingers balled into fists. “She took my block!” he hollered.

Leah stood only a few steps away, a yellow block clasped to her chest. She whipped around to hide it from view. I crouched down to Charlie’s level. “Charlie, you were playing with Leah just fine a minute ago. And there are plenty of blocks for everyone to share. Why don’t you ask her to build something else with you?”

“No.” Charlie pouted.

Hannah stepped next to her daughter. “Leah, you need to give the block back to Charlie. He’s your guest.”

“No, no,” I said. “Charlie can share.” I rubbed my son’s arm. “Can’t you, Charlie?”

Charlie dropped his chin to his chest and shook his head.

I sighed. “Okay, then, I guess it’s time we go home.” I stood up
and took his hand to lead him. He pulled, trying to fight me. I don’t know what the experts were thinking when they classified two-year-olds as “terrible.” It wasn’t until his third birthday that Charlie had occasionally seemed in need of an exorcism.

“Sorry,” I apologized to the group. “He needs a nap.”

“I do not!” Charlie protested. “
You
need a nap!”

“He’s right about that,” I said with a deep breath and a forced smile. What I really needed was to get him home. He could go from pouting and cutely sassy to a full-blown tantrum in ten seconds flat, something I didn’t feel comfortable having the other women witness. I couldn’t help but feel like his behavior reflected how good a job I was doing as his mother. If he lost it, it was like having to wear a dunce cap in front of the entire class.

“Thanks for having us, Hannah,” I said. “It was good to meet both of you. Leah’s wonderful.”

“Good to meet you, too,” Hannah said, hiking Leah up onto her hip.

“Here,” Susanne said, handing me my glass. “Looks like you might need it.”

I regarded the half-full glass, everything in me screaming to grab it and drink it down, knowing how quickly it would dissolve my growing tension. “I really shouldn’t,” I said.

“All right, then.” Susanne laughed and poured the rest into her own glass. “I’ll call you soon.”

“Mama, let’s go!” Charlie said, pulling me toward the front door.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I grabbed my purse and waved to the other women. “ ’Bye, everyone.”

With Charlie strapped into his car seat, I set my hands deliberately at ten and two on the steering wheel and slowly pulled out from the curb. I drove along, quietly humming “Fruit Salad” by the Wiggles. Charlie would listen to their CDs constantly if I’d let him, and as a result, I knew all the songs by heart.

As I turned the corner to my street singing “Dorothy the Dinosaur”
under my breath, a car blared its horn long and loud, forcing me to slam on my brakes and bumping my chest against the steering wheel. I’d forgotten to put on my seat belt.

“Shit!” I exclaimed. I wasn’t going very fast, but still, my heart leapt into my throat and my eyes went straight to the rearview mirror. Charlie had zonked out within minutes of leaving Hannah’s house and miraculously didn’t seem disturbed by the jarring stop. His pink, bow-shaped lips smacked open and shut, but his eyes remained closed.

“There’s a stop sign there for a reason, lady!” the man yelled as he drove past, angrily flipping me off.

With my chest aching and adrenaline pulsing through my veins, I fastened my seat belt and took a couple of deep breaths before pushing on the gas.
I’ve turned this corner a thousand times—how the hell could I have missed that sign?

Of course, I knew why I’d missed it. I knew it from the wine-tinged, fuzzy feeling around my edges, the slightly loose, unhinged feeling in my joints. I drove down the block to my house, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles were white, keeping the speedometer below ten miles per hour. I wondered how I could have been so stupid, putting Charlie’s life in danger like that. A moment later, as I pulled into the safety of my driveway, I counted my blessings, thankful that at least I had learned this lesson without anyone getting hurt.

As the economy declined, my freelance work became so sparse I started toying with the idea of going back to Peter Baskin, my editor at the
Herald,
and begging for my old job back. But the last thing I wanted to do was go back to a standard full-time job and put my son in day care twelve hours a day. In fact, the idea made my stomach turn. I didn’t want to be my mother, but I also couldn’t get away from the sinking sensation that I didn’t want to be who I was.

Charlie turned four in August, and that November, I managed to swing a contract with
Woman’s Day
for an article about why women take back a husband after he cheats. The managing editor initially asked me to write the article on spec, which meant I would have written it in full and then they would have decided whether or not they wanted to buy it, but I managed to negotiate my way into a contract instead, including a ten percent kill fee if they decided not to publish.

On the Friday before Thanksgiving, my plan was to hunker down while Charlie was at Martin’s for the weekend and get the
Woman’s Day
assignment done. I’d finished my research and interviewed a psychology professor at the University of Washington to cite as my relationship expert, but I was still having a hard time getting the actual writing started.

I sipped at a glass of wine while Charlie ate dinner—he was leaving soon, so I figured it would be okay to indulge in front of him. For almost six months, since the day of the stop sign incident, I’d waited until after he was in bed for the night to pour my first glass.

Martin showed up around six o’clock, a full hour after the time he told me he’d pick Charlie up.

“Daddy!” my son said when I opened the front door. He ran and jumped up, throwing his bony arms around his father’s neck and squeezing hard. Martin squeezed back, lifting his child into the air, letting Charlie’s body hang straight down—a human necktie. His skinny legs floated free as Martin rotated, swinging his son back and forth. Charlie laughed.

“Sorry I’m late,” Martin said, looking just over my shoulder instead of making direct eye contact.

“Uh-huh,” I said. He knew I’d heard that phrase fall out of his mouth enough times for it to lose all meaning; I don’t know why he bothered to speak it. I took in his casual work attire, blue jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt with a Windows icon over his heart. A bitter thought floated through my mind:
I pledge allegiance to Bill Gates . . .
and to all the money that he pays me. . . .
And then I remembered that for the time being, between the proceeds of the divorce settlement and child support, Bill Gates’s money was keeping me afloat, too.

“So,” Martin said, lifting Charlie up to hug him. “Do you have his stuff?”

“It’s right there,” I said, pointing to the Spider-Man-embossed backpack by the door. I’d packed four changes of clothes and an additional five pairs of underwear for the two-day stay at his dad’s. Charlie was successfully potty trained; however, his attempts to clean himself up afterward occasionally went very, very wrong.

“Great, thanks.” He stared at the glass of wine I still held in my hand and I quickly set it on the entryway table.

“He hasn’t been eating much other than chicken nuggets and mandarin oranges,” I said. “So you might want to stop at the store and pick some up.”

“We’ll manage. We’re going over to my mom’s tomorrow.”

“Ah. How
is
Alice?” Our conversation was tense—I suddenly flashed on how my husband’s naked body used to feel pressed against mine in the middle of the night, how he’d set his wide palm across the flesh of my belly. I gave my head a tiny shake, trying to erase the image.

“She’s good.” He pulled back his head, craning to look at Charlie. “You ready, buddy?”

“Yep!” Charlie said, kicking his spindly legs in emphasis.

I leaned over and kissed my son’s cheek, rubbing his back as I did. “ ’Bye, Mr. Man. Mommy loves you.”

“Love you, too,” Charlie said.

After I closed the door behind them, I went straight to my laptop, but the words wouldn’t come. I was a fake, a fraud. I don’t know why I ever thought I could be a writer. I’d sent ten query letters out in that last two months and only picked up one assignment. Every “thanks, but no thanks” response that came in the mail felt like a nail in my professional coffin.

I sighed, leaned back in my chair, and eyed the liter of unopened merlot on the counter.
It’s cheaper in the larger bottles,
I told myself when I stood in the wine aisle at the store, debating which size I should purchase.
I’m buying them to save money.
Maybe I could have just a little more. Once I really wind down, I’ll be able to work.

I got up, walked over to the counter, and grabbed the corkscrew that lay next to the sink. I’d stopped bothering to put it away. Digging the sharp point into the cork, I twisted until the metal spiral was deep enough to anchor the lever against the lip of the bottle. The scarlet liquid flowed into the glass, and a moment later, the first swallow rolled over my tongue and around my teeth like silk; its rich, heady scent rose up into my senses and made me weak. Within minutes, I finally relaxed enough to feel like I fit inside my own skin. I set up camp with my bottle and a goblet the size of a small grapefruit, marveling at how half a bottle could fit inside a single glass.

Five rapidly typed pages later, my cell phone rang. Glancing at the caller ID, I saw Susanne’s name pop up.

“I’m just leaving the office,” she said, “and Brad took Anya to his mom’s. Can I stop by for a drink?”

I looked at the document open on my laptop, the blinking cursor seeming to mock me. My social life was practically nonexistent—a couple hours spent talking about something other than Elmo and Spider-Man was incredibly appealing. “Sure,” I said. “Martin just took Charlie to his house for the weekend.”

She blew in through the front door thirty minutes later, a bottle of Chilean merlot in hand. Her black hair was pulled back from her face with a red velvet headband. I gave her a quick hug and we settled on the couch, both with a goblet of wine.

We chatted about work and the kids, but halfway through our second glass, Susanne paused and looked down into her drink. She bit her bottom lip before speaking, managing to smear lipstick
on her front tooth. “Was divorcing Martin the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she asked. “Did it just devastate you?” The words tumbled from her mouth, falling into each other like a line of dominoes.

I swallowed and looked down, too, running the tip of my index finger over the edge of my glass. “Divorce is hard,” I began. “But—”

“There’s always a ‘but.’ ”

“It’s hard,” I continued with a small smile, “but staying with Martin probably would’ve been a hell of a lot harder.”

She blew out a long breath. “Okay, so it’s a matter of degree, then? How hard would staying be in comparison to getting a divorce?”

“Pretty much.”

“But is the thing that might be easier—”

“I didn’t say divorce is easy,” I said, cutting her off. “I said it seems to be less difficult than staying would have been.” A minute distinction, but one I felt compelled to make.

She took a sip of her drink, looking up at me over the rim. “Okay, then,” she said, after she swallowed. “Do you think choosing the
less difficult
thing is necessarily the
right
thing? If your marriage is hard, then isn’t it your duty to stay and work things out, maybe even come out stronger for it in the long run? Isn’t that the whole idea behind taking vows?”

I was silent, grappling with this idea, not sure if I was dizzy from the thought or the wine. “I’m not sure,” I finally said. “I suppose challenges do tend to teach us more, but being alone again is another form of that, right? It’s challenging.” I tried not to sound defensive, but failed.

Susanne set her glass on the coffee table, then adjusted her headband. “I wasn’t asking you to justify anything. Really. I’m sorry if it came across that way. I was more just wondering out loud, you know? Philosophizing.”

I took a deep breath, then released it, trying to erase the tension
that had invaded each cell of my skin, pulling it tight across my flesh. “Why, exactly?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you philosophizing?”

“I’m thinking about leaving Brad,” she said.

“Oh.” I finished the last swallow in my glass, then set it next to Susanne’s on the table. “I thought I picked up on some tension the last time you talked about him.” I chose my words carefully here, knowing full well how dangerous the territory can become around saying anything negative about a friend’s spouse. They end up staying together, and you’re suddenly the bitch who talked shit about her husband.