Page 85 of First Date: Divorce
“How did you know my mom says she’s happy being married to Mark?”
“Your lack of experience with people getting divorced.If they were headed that way, you’d’ve said,” he whispered, “Sorry if I overdid it.What don’t you like about your— About Mark?”
She was quiet so long he thought she might not answer, then her whisper came.“My mother always dressed and groomed to perfection.Maybe my … plainness was reaction after watching the time and effort she put into her appearance.Always with the goal of finding a guy — the guy — who would take care of her.”
Her voice seemed to strengthen without getting any louder, as if she mastered whispering word by word.
“Since she’s married Mark, though,” she continued, “she doesn’t get new clothes, doesn’t get her hair and nails and face done, doesn’t do them herself the way she used to, no matter how tight money was.She doesn’t think she’s worth it anymore, all because she’s married to Mark.”
He turned his face toward her.“Marriage doesn’t have to be that way.It can be two people as a team.”
She rolled her eyes toward him, a glimmer in the darkness.“Like you and Hilary?”
“Notlike me and Hilary.”He added the emphasis without increasing his volume.“That’s why we’re divorced.But I’ve seen a lot of marriages that are.Look at Orion and Izzy.”
“Mark and Mom are not Orion and Izzy.I keep telling her she should ask for money for those things.He spends on himself.But she says she can’t.She’s hiswife.”
“Sounds like a dirty word to you.”
She hesitated.“Close.”
“Yet it’s what your mom wanted.”
She made a sound.The whisper equivalent of a snort.“Yeah, what she wanted.She once said everything would have been better if she’d married the boy who got her pregnant — who saddled her with me—”
His turn for a whisper-grunt of objection.
“Don’t go all dewy-eyed about how she was blessed to be a mother.She did that enough on her own.Her life would have been better if she hadn’t been a single mother.But not at the cost of marrying the guy who—”
She broke off, apparently realizing her volume had nearly topped their safe whisper.
Eric thought she’d retreat then, close the door on sharing.
Maybe she thought so, too, because a pause stretched before she said as quietly as ever, “The boy pushed her.She’d never call it that, but it was date rape.When she came up pregnant, he acted like it was all her doing.Like a hundred or two hundred years ago for heaven’s sake.And her parents were just as bad.Her father threw her out.Her mother went along with it.And then she’d send these cards and things, Mom’s birthday, my birthday, Christmas.Always with a little money in them.Money she’d sneaked away from her husband because he’d forbidden any contact with Mom.
“Never a return address — couldn’t risk that.What if it got sent back for any reason.Couldn’t have that, because then her husband might find out she’d defied him.”Bitterness edged her whisper.“Mom always cried when they came, as if her mother did something great for her.Cried even harder when they stopped coming a couple years back.She had me search — she could have asked Mark, but she didn’t want tobotherhim.I found her mother’s obituary online.”
She turned her face toward him.
“And you know the real kicker?The obituary said she was a widow.I looked that up, too.And her husband had died seven years earlier.Sevenyears.She could have seen Mom.Visited her.For God’s sake at least called her.Instead, she stuck with being thewifedoing her husband’s bidding.”
Without words, the sound of her harsher breathing came clearly.
“That sucks.”
She hiccupped something between a breath and a sob.“Yeah, it does.”
“You do know not all marriages are like that.”
She said nothing.
“I could tell you about my family, but unless you saw them for yourself there’d be no reason to believe me … But you have seen Cully and Jessa, Ellyn and Grif, along with the others — Kendra and Daniel, Luke and Rebecca, Cambria and Boone.”
“Not all people who jump off cliffs die, either.But I’m not jumping off a cliff because of that.”
He felt her words as if they were physical.Which made no sense.He’d seen the bottom of the cliff up close.
“It’s a big topic for whispering,” he said.“We better get some sleep.”
