Page 58 of The New Year's Party
It was twenty to midnight by Will’s watch when Bennett and Phelps disappeared into the Dog House with Doug sagging between them. Will followed them with his eyes. Should he join them? Was this his chance? Ever since his moment with Bennett, earlier in the night, when he said,Shetook my phone, the pressure inside him had been building and building.
He’d come to grips with the fact that no one could save him. On the other hand, the release of just being able to say the wordsmy wife hits me...To have his friends look him in the eye andbelievehim...
A hand clutched at his arm. Bunny’s. “I’m going to talk to Jenn,” came her whispery voice. She was so close he could smell her perfume.
With the excitement of Doug’s injury, it took Will a second to reorient. Right. The inheritance. The leak about Bunny’s abortion. Ted’s easy accusation, right on the heels of the whole arson thing: “It was Jenn.”
Of course, there was no point in Bunny talking to Jenn. What was done was done. It was too late for Bunny to get her inheritance back. Maybe it was too late for Will too. He’d never win custody. Jenn’s game was too good, her persona too perfect. His best hope was to apologize to her for eventhinking about it... play nice, like he’d done at the store with the wannabe bike thief. His life would be spent paying the backbreaking cost of the choice to stay, but he couldn’t abandon his girls.
“I’m going to confront her,” Bunny was saying in a rushed, quiet voice. “I’m going to demand the truth, just like I did with you...”
Will looked at Jenn, standing fifty or so feet away. Their gazes met, her eyes piercing through him. He had no doubt she’d told on Bunny. That was what his wife did: take the most vulnerable thing you’d done and weaponize it.
“We need to clean up,” Hellie was announcing as she picked her way toward the mess of broken plates. “We can’t just leave this in the yard. One of Phelps’s kids could get hurt... Will, you and I could make quick work of this.” There was a tinkling sound as her shoes crunched against the ceramic.
“I can help too,” said Olivia.
Yes, he could clean up the broken plates... Jenn might go back to the house... then he could slip into the Dog House without her knowing, say his piece...
“No, it’s too dark,” said Jenn in a bossy voice. “We can do it in the morning.”
“Hey, it’s almost midnight,” said Allie. “We only have fifteen minutes to pour the champagne.”
“Let’s turn on the Chicago countdown,” said Ted, just as a loud yelp came from the shed. “And let’s give those guys some privacy, eh?”
Will gave a final helpless glance toward the Dog House as Bunny grabbed his arm hard and the whole group headed back to the house. She kept talking, but he couldn’t quite focus.
“...and if she admits it, I really do think I have legal recourse... though God, Will, I wouldn’t want to hurtyou...”
Emotion swirled through Will. But it was pointless emotion.He was a merry-go-round, as indecisive and lost as he’d been fifteen years ago. Going nowhere. Bashing his head against the same immutable problem. Jenn. Familiar images flashed through his brain like a slideshow. Strangling her. Smothering her. Or a little shove down the basement stairs...
His stomach turned. No. This was Jenn’s work too. She liked to poke the monster in him. If he let it loose, he was just letting her win in a different way.
“...so I think maybe HIPAA laws might protect me? Anyway, there’s a lawyer I know in Nashville, a friend, well, more like an acquaintance, he does pro bono women’s rights work—I think this counts as a women’s rights issue, doesn’t it? Reproductive rights and stuff? And—”
He shook himself mentally. Yes—it was too easy to imagine how Jenn would have betrayed Bunny. It would have started, like Ted suggested, with Jenn overhearing a conversation between Will and Bunny. Jenn feeling some kind of righteous fury. Then, calling her old Sunday school teacher and mentor, Mr. Max.Mr. Max, your granddaughter Bunny needs your prayers...It would be a prayer request, wouldn’t it? That’s how she would have shared it.
Just like she’d shared Will’s stuff.
Will and I need your prayers...
She hadn’t even told Will they were meeting their church’s elder board, a little over a year ago. He’d thought they were going to an evening prayer meeting about funding for the new church annex. “Where is everyone?” Will said, confused, as Jenn led him down the hall and into a meeting room, where eight men at a table turned to watch them walk in. The smell of drip decaf was in the air.
“What’s going on?” said Will.
“I’m sorry, Will, but I don’t feel like I can carry this alone anymore,” Jenn said, gripping his arm tight, as if she thought he might run. “We need help.Youneed help.”
“Why don’t the two of you take a seat,” said Pastor Graham.
Will hadn’t discovered he liked to wear dresses until a year or so before that.
He put on the dress as a joke, thinking he could have a tea party with one of the girls and they could have a good laugh. The frisson of excitement up his legs, up his spine, as he looked at himself in the mirror and swished the skirt back and forth was a surprise. A welcome surprise too, because he’d been having trouble.It’s parenting, it wears me out, he explained to an unhappy Jenn, whose sex drive was as strong as ever. But it wasn’t parenting, or tiredness. It was having to perform for Jenn, who liked him to be wild over her. Tough.Masculine, or at least her version of it, which for so long he had accepted as the exclusive version. And... that just wasn’t Will.
“I need you to pursue me,” she’d said tearfully over the years, more times than he could count. “The man is supposed to pursue the woman.” She read him Bible verses. She went on about his lack of leadership. And... this killed him to remember... he’dagreedwith her. He was defective. Weak. Not the man God intended him to be. He’d prayed for so long,Justchange me, God, make me into the man I’m supposed to be for my wife...
The afternoon he tried on that dress, he’d thought, foolishly, it might be the answer to his prayers. He put on the dress again later that night. Sat on the edge of the bed when Jenn came in. Said in a shy voice, “I thought we could try something new.”
That’s when his marriage went from challenging to full-on nightmare.
