I PULL UP in front o f Mimi’s house, parking right behind my mother’s Rover. I check my phone before I get out of the car.
Liv never texted me back.
It was a rhetorical question anyway. I don’t believe for one second that she wants me to stop. She’s capable of walking away when she wants. She’s proven it.
I want to give her everything she deserves, and I will. Prom is coming. Almost at the end of the school year. After the debutante ball. Near graduation.
I’ll face everything, then. I guess I just thought this would be easier. I thought it was just sex. I didn’t expect…to never want to walk away.
I type out a text. Send me a pic.
I wait, a cool breeze sweeping through the trees as the sun starts to set. I’d stayed at school, knowing Liv had rehearsal today and then had to babysit her nephew, and did my homework in the library, killing time before my weekly meeting with Mimi.
Her reply rolls in, and I click on the image she sends.
A bowl of penne pasta with white sauce, artichokes, and chicken.
I roll my eyes. Of your face, please?
A few seconds later, I see her beautiful lips, a faint blush red, puckered to the camera next to a forkful of penne.
I smile. She must be eating dinner. That mouth is mine in ten hours , I say.
I’ll be done with my pasta by then , she assures me. Because it and me are having a total relationship without you right now.
I send her a kiss emoji with a heart and head into my grandmother’s house.
“Mimi?” I call out, setting my bag down and straightening my sweater vest and Polo underneath. “I’m heeeeere.”
No one answers, and I drift through the living room, den, and dining room, looking.
“Mom?” I say loudly.
I see movement outside, and I walk through the solarium, toward the patio outside.
“That has never been an option,” Mimi bites out.
I halt, moving to the side, behind a fern. My mom and grandmother sit at the patio table on the other side of the glass, the open door next to me allowing their voices to drift inside.
“My family is miserable,” Mom tells her.
“Then, fix it. For God’s sake, I’m not against divorce when it improves a woman’s situation,” Mimi fires back, “but leaving Jefferson Collins and letting some other woman win… How could you live with yourself? What are you teaching Clay?”
“That perhaps she should know when to walk away?”
“A divorce is failing,” Mimi says, “and you are both better than that. And don’t act like you don’t still love him.”
A divorce? I stand there, unmoving. My mother’s actually considering divorce. I thought maybe a trial separation after I graduated, but… Have they already started the process?
“And when my father cheated on you?” Mom asks her. “Do you still think you won anything?”
“Oh, honey.” Mimi picks up her glass of lemonade, the pristine blue of the pool in the yard beyond. “I knew exactly what I was getting into. And I knew exactly what I would get in return.” She takes a drink and sets the glass back down. “Some days were almost unbearable, but I’m still here and those women aren’t.”
My grandfather cheated on Mimi? I guess I’m not shocked. I didn’t know the man well. He passed when I was seven. But Mimi wears it like a badge—the fact that she was his wife.
She goes on. “You will never regret keeping your chin up and making the sacrifices it takes to maintain the life you have spent years building. She will come into your home, not because he loves her, but because he misses you and can’t be alone. Once a man becomes used to being taken care of, he can only live that way. He’ll replace you out of necessity, not desire.”
She . My father’s mistress.
“She will come into your home,” Mimi continues, “and parent your child and spend your money and drive your cars. Fix it.”
My chest rises and falls with shallow breaths. Everything’s changing .
I back away from the patio, heading back into the house and ball my fists.
I knew about the other woman. I even thought there might be more than one. Who could blame him? My mother was a bitch and made the house unbearable, trying to control everyone and everything, and we were all suffocating under the clothes and the makeup and the standards, but…
Is he actually leaving her? Is he making a new life without us?
Is he leaving me with her?
Or is she leaving him? It sounded like my grandmother was trying to talk her out of something.
Where do I go when I come home for holidays? They don’t know me anymore. Do they even want me around—my mother forced to keep up appearances, and my father forced to support a family he no longer wants?
Jesus, do they even know I’m still here?
I rub my hands up and down my face, drifting down the hallway, past all our photos that my grandmother will keep up, because we look like a happy family, and my grandfather looks like a doting husband.
I drift, until I find my way upstairs and in my grandmother’s room, veering straight for the hidden cubby drawer in the mantel of her fireplace.
Reaching inside, I dig out the stack of letters I’d found there when I was eight that now make a lot more sense since Macon told me about Two Locks—the old, abandoned farm on Harley Creek my family owns where he said my grandmother hid her affair.
I stare at the stack—more than fifty letters probably—yellowed with age and secured with a white ribbon. At the time, I’d thought it was adult stuff. Letters were how old people communicated, thinking my grandmother was much older than she was and didn’t have a phone or some shit.
I never thought they were romantic gestures.
I hold the tattered envelopes, sifting to the bottom of the stack and take note of the postmarks and dates.
They start in 1983. They end in 2017.
Thirty-four years.
Carefully, I set them back in the cubby as something I don’t like winds through my stomach, making me feel like I’m in a place I don’t recognize. Surrounded by strangers.
I don’t want things to change. I won’t recognize my life, and I’ll be lost. Nausea rises up my throat, and I groan. I don’t like this feeling.
I want my father back. I want my mother and Mimi to be proud of me.
I want our life back together.
Without telling them that I’m leaving, I jump back in my car and think about going home—or to Liv—but in minutes, I’m in front of Wind House instead. The parking lot is empty, and Mrs. Gates’ car isn’t in the driveaway.
I park and drift past the door I usually come in during business hours, sneaking through my same window and down into the basement. I switch on the lights and look around, finding it empty and quiet, all the tables vacant and the tiny hum of the coolers making the only noise in the room.
Such a sharp place. Hard and cold, and I don’t know why I find it comforting.
I walk over and put my hands on the sterilized steel table Alli laid on all those weeks ago, images running through my head that she’s now ash. Gone.
Forever.
If she could go back, would she make the same choice? It makes sense to suffer for who you are rather than who you aren’t, but ultimately, nothing is as bad as dead, right?
There’s only so much a person can take. We all have a limit.
Without thinking, I hop up, sit on the table, and swing my legs over before laying my whole body down on the freezing metal table.
I settle my back in, molding myself to the surface, and rest my legs slightly apart with my hands at my sides.
Everyone that lays here is dead. They don’t get to stare up at the stark fluorescent lights and let it sink in that their shot is over. That was it.
I’ll be here someday. Done. Never to speak or love or kiss again.
What will I regret?
What if I’m alone?
