Page 8 of The Sandover Beach Billionaire

Nothing could have prepared Jenna for sitting in a crinkly paper gown with no panties on as her doctor explained that she had Chlamydia. Which meant that Mark had Chlamydia, which also meant that Mark had been unfaithful. She had waited until their wedding night—they both had, she thought. And there she was, humiliated and heartbroken, finding out from her OB that her marriage with a sham.

The conversation with Mark after the doctor visit had been as shocking as the diagnosis. “What happened to the man I married? Where’s that guy?” she had half sobbed, half shouted.

“I’m sorry, Bug,” Mark had said, using his pet name for her. She had always hated it anyway. “This is me. I’m just not hiding it anymore.”

He moved out by the morning, taking very little. Apparently, he already had an apartment where he was doing all the affair-ing. Jenna had thought he was on business trips or working late. Such a cliché. She had felt so utterly foolish in the truest sense of the word.

For the past year she had lived in their condo, every day seeing the plates they picked out for their registry and the couch they bought together. The only things Mark took from the house were some clothes and a few personal things. He must have already furnished the apartment. Jenna wanted to leave but didn’t know where to go. It took her six months to even call a lawyer about a divorce. Not that she’d had any hope of wanting to reconcile, but Jenna simply hadn’t been ready. She didn’t even want anything from him. Not the condo, not anything they’d purchased together, not her ring, not one thing. After they sold the condo, she lived in an Extended Stay for a few months until she felt ready to come back to Sandover and deal with the house.

Now everything she owned was in the car sitting in the driveway. She owned less now than she had when she graduated college, which seemed shameful somehow. Even then she had an overstuffed arm chair she had purchased at a thrift store her sophomore year. Mark had insisted they get rid of it after they got married. He was too fancy for thrift store finds. That should have been a warning sign.

Could she move in here? Take over the master bedroom, paint, and redecorate?

The house felt too much like her childhood and Jenna felt childish in it. As though the moment she stepped over the threshold, she had reverted to her teenaged self. In a way Jenna wished that she could go back, to have her whole life stretching open before her again. Only, she would take the wisdom she had now and use it to keep her out of relationships with guys like Mark. Steve should have been a lesson enough in high school.

The thought of Steve reminded her of something else she had left in the car: a Fiddle-Leaf Fig plant she had brought down to give to Steve’s parents, who still lived in the house next door. The plant rode shotgun on her drive and she had named him Fred the Fig. She had talked to him on the drive.

“Terrible traffic, eh Fred?”

“This is my favorite song, Fred.”

“Come here often, Fred?”

He had looked a little worse for wear that morning when she’d gone to Bohn’s. She should have gotten him out the night before. It was too cold for Fred in the car. Now he looked even worse, but maybe Ethel could bring Fred back. “Sorry Fred,” she said as she crossed the lawn, carrying the big pot.

Gifting a house plant to your high school ex’s parents should have been a weird thing to do. But before she and Steve had started dating, they were best friends. His parents, Ethel and Bob, had been like her second parents. For years, even after the big break-up, Jenna always made time to stop over for coffee. She realized suddenly that she may have had more of these talks with Ethel perhaps than her mom. She and her mother had been close, but there was an ease with Ethel, perhaps because she didn’t have to do all the work of raising Jenna, so their relationship lacked the normal mother-daughter conflict. Regret, sharp and sudden, flared in her chest.

Now it was too late.These words were like a repeated line in the song of her life, flashing through her mind whenever she had a realization of a new layer to her loss. She tried to swallow down the thoughts. She and her mother had an okay relationship. Even if she never worked up the nerve to tell her that she and Mark were over. She died not knowing.

Did that mean she knew now? If she knew, did she care? Jenna had read a lot about heaven in the Bible, but some things just weren’t clear. It made her desperately sad to think about heaven, which made no sense. Her mother would be there and be happy. Not there and feeling sad at the state of her eldest daughter’s life. That, by definition, would not be heaven.

Ethel answered the door after Jenna’s third knock, wearing a pair of khaki pants, a red cardigan, and pearls. It had been her uniform for as long as Jenna could remember. Different colored cardigans, but always khakis or a skirt.

“Hey, Mrs. Taylor,” Jenna said. In her head, she was always Ethel. In real life, manners dictated that she was Mrs. Taylor.

Ethel grabbed her in a fierce hug. Jenna did her best not to drop Fred the Fig, who was pressed between them.

“So good to see one of my daughters back home,” Ethel said. “Come in, come in! Bob! Jenna’s here!”

“How’s my girl?” Bob said. He did not get up from his recliner, which she suspected he slept in at night as well.

Jenna took his hand, warm and dry, and gave it a squeeze. “Hi, Mr. Taylor.”

He seemed to have grown heavier since Jenna had seen him a few months before. He wasn’t moving well then, leaning on the metal arms of a walker, the kind with tennis balls on two of the legs. It now sat next to his recliner and a small side table filled with a mix of cough drops and candy wrappers, a glass of water, and the television remote.

“Tell your mother that I let the police know about those kids that were parking down at the cul-de-sac. Shouldn’t be a problem anymore, I bet.”

Jenna swallowed and gently pulled her hand away. “I’ll tell her.”

Ethel met her eyes, then motioned her to the formal living room. “Sit. I’ll bring the coffee.”

As Jenna sat down in one of the matching upholstered chairs, she noticed a framed photograph on the end table. She picked it up, feeling all the moisture from her mouth dry up as though it had been sucked away somehow. It was a picture of Steve and Anna.

It should get easier to see them together after all these years. It wasn’t jealousy, exactly. At least, Jenna didn’t want to be with Steve. She had dodged a bullet—another cheater. But just as her anger with Jackson lingered, so did her feelings of betrayal. They had been best friends, then together for a few years, talking about marriage and long-term life plans. Before Anna.

She looked almost unchanged from high school, when she had stolen Steve away. Stylish haircut, but same high cheeks, big brown eyes, and a wide white smile. This was a woman who got a man and kept him. She didn’t worry about getting Chlamydia from her husband. In another picture on the table, Jenna saw their two little girls, who looked like mini-Annas.

She had always wanted children. She and Mark got married in their late twenties and had the same argument about having kids again and again. She wanted them. He didn’t. Now it made so much more sense. And made her feel even more like she had wasted so many important years of her life in a colossal way. Her eggs might be stale by now. What was the likelihood she could meet a man she could trust, fall in love, get married, and get pregnant in the tiny window she had left? It was probably a dream best to give up on. Let the Annas and Steves of the world repopulate with beautiful babies.

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