Page 76 of Maybe in Another Life

“Get. Your. Shit. And leave,” Gabby says. Her voice is strong and stoic. She is a force to be reckoned with.

Mark considers fighting back more; you can see it on his face. But he gives up and goes into the bedroom.

“You’re doing the right thing,” I tell her.

“I know that,” she says.

She sits down at the dining-room table, catatonic once again.

Charlemagne starts walking toward us, but Gabby sees her before I do.

“No!” she shouts at the dog. “Be careful.”

She stands up and gently walks over to Charlemagne and picks her up. She carries her in her arms over the broken plates. She sits back down at the table with Charlemagne in her lap.

Mark flies through various rooms in the house, getting his things. He slams doors. He sighs loudly. Now seems like the time to start realizing that I never liked him.

This goes on for at least forty-five minutes. The house is silent except for the sounds of a man moving out. Gabby is practically frozen still. The only time she moves is to reposition Charlemagne in her lap. I stand by, close, ready to move or to speak at a moment’s notice.

Finally, Mark comes out into the living room. We stare at him from the dining-room table. “I’m leaving,” he says.

Gabby doesn’t say anything back.

He waits, hoping for something. He gets nothing from her.

He walks to the front door, and Charlemagne jumps down onto the floor.

“Charlemagne, no,” I say. I have to say it twice before she stays put.

Mark looks at her, clearly still confused about why there is a dog named Charlemagne in the house, but he knows he won’t get any answers.

He opens the front door. He’s almost gone by the time Gabby speaks up.

“How long has this been going on?” she asks him. Her voice is strong and clear. It does not waver. It does not break. She is not about to burst into tears. She is fully in control. At least for this moment.

He looks at her and shakes his head. He looks up at the ceiling. There are tears in his eyes. He rubs them away and sniffs them back up. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. His voice, too, is strong. But it is full of shame; that much is clear.

“I said, how long has this been going on?”

“Gabby, don’t do this—”

“How long?”

Mark looks at his feet and then at her. “Almost a year,” he says.

“You can go,” she says.

He turns away and does just that. She goes to the window to watch him leave.

When he’s finally gone, she turns to me.

“I’m so sorry, Gabby,” I say to her. “I’m so sorry. He’s an asshole.”

Gabby looks at me. “You slept with somebody’s husband,” she says. She doesn’t need to draw any direct conclusions from this. She doesn’t need to say out loud what I know she’s thinking in her head.

“Yep,” I say, both owning my actions and feeling deep shame for them. “And it was wrong. Just like this was wrong.”

“But I told you it didn’t mean you were a bad person,” she says. “I told you that you could still be a wonderful, beautiful person.”

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