Page 38 of My Favorite Lost Cause
“I’ll get over it,” he says.
I don’t even know who this calm man is, the one who isn’t telling me a thousand ways I’m a disappointment.
“So you’re in town tonight and tomorrow, and then you’re gone again?” I ask.
I hear the clatter of keys dropping onto a counter. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m going to LA for most of next week.”
I wince. A better wife would have come home to see him before he left.
How many times, though, has he left when he didn’t need to? How many times could he have invited me along and didn’t? A million.
“Are you going to take the dogs back to Lori?” I ask. There’s a regrettable note of worry in my voice, wheedling. I just can’t help it. “I can arrange to have them brought out to Brooklyn if that helps.”
“It’s not an issue,” he says firmly.
It’s not an issue…how?
“What do you mean?” I ask, sitting up, because I know he’s not taking them with him.
“Look,” he says, “I didn’t want to get into this tonight, but those dogs have caused us nothing but arguments for the past year and we don’t have time for them. So I gave them to Elodie’s kids. Belated birthday presents. Hadley was fucking over the moon. She thinks you’re the best aunt ever now.”
“That’s a joke, right?” A hysterical laugh burbles out of me, but I’m already clutching my chest as if I know it’s true.
“No. If you actually cared about them, you wouldn’t have fucking left. They named them Buddy and Lolly. Everyone’s very happy.”
My stomach has dropped so far I’m not sure it can be found. It has to be a joke.
“You didn’t,” I whisper.
“Come on, Maren, those were fucked up names. Echo and Narcissus? You namedsiblingsafter mythological characters who were in love. Little incestuous, don’t you think? Then again, maybe that’s what you intended, given how you and Charlie act around each other.”
I can’t even address that. It’s so ridiculous and irrelevant. I press a hand to my chest. My God. How disastrously wrong I was when I went through with the wedding.
“How could you have done that to me?” I ask. “You know how much I love them.”
“Yeah, so much that you left them at a kennel for a full week.”
It wasn’t a kennel. They were with Lori, who they know and adore and?—
“You got too complacent with them,” he continues. “They made you feel like you were already a mother, so you took your eyes off the prize. Now you can fully focus on IVF.”
There’s a buzzing in my ears. Fully focus? He wants me fully focused? I’ve been so goddamned focused that I gave up my joband my independence. So focused that I let him mock me in public, implying I was too spoiled to work.
I stopped running.
I gave up drinking and coffee and nights with my friends.
I turned myself into a fucking wreck over whether my green juice had too much sugar.
What has he given up? Not a fucking thing. This wasn’t even about the dogs. It was about wanting to pull one more thing from me, a punishment for going to Oak Bluff in the first place.
Well, fuck Harvey. Fuck Harvey for constantly suggesting things about me I could change without ever changing himself. Fuck Harvey for suggesting that travel was the issue so that I would quit working, that running was the issue so I would quit running, that the one cup of coffee I allowed myself was the issue so I’d give that up too. Fuck Harvey for doing his level best to take everything away from me without taking a single thing away from himself.
I want children more than I want anything in the world, but not if it means raising them with a monster like him.
“Fuck you, Harvey,” I tell him. “I want a divorce.”
And then I hang up the phone and start to wail.
