Lost Along the Way(15)
“No. She was one of your closest friends. Now you’re going to be a married woman and you need to start realizing that you’re a reflection on me. We don’t need people like her hanging around. It’s inappropriate.”
“Are you kidding? Reed, I really don’t think—”
“Enough, Cara!” Reed said forcefully. His eyes darted around the room to make sure no one was listening to their conversation. He never stopped smiling or rubbing the small of her back, as if the two of them were having an intimate moment instead of an argument. “I refuse to spend one more second of this party talking about this. This is not how we are going to act in public. Now, get over it, pull yourself together, and go mingle with our guests. Don’t bother me with this stupid stuff again.”
Cara was stunned by what he said, not to mention the way in which he said it, but she didn’t want to ruin her own engagement party by fighting with Reed over anything, especially not Jane. This was supposed to be a night of celebration, and she’d already had an argument with one person; adding Reed to the list didn’t seem like a good idea. “You’re right,” she said, forcing a smile. “It’s our night. I don’t know why I care what anyone else is doing.”
“Exactly,” Reed said. He planted a quick kiss on her cheek and ambled over to a group of his friends on the other side of the room as if the entire conversation had never happened. At the time, Cara chalked his mood swing up to nerves and convinced herself that he wasn’t entirely wrong. She wasn’t going to let Jane’s behavior ruin her and Reed’s party, so she shrugged it off. It simply wasn’t worth making an issue over. If this was how Jane felt about Cara’s marriage, then she didn’t need to be a big part of Cara’s life anymore.
She pushed the memory from her mind and forced herself to focus on the task at hand. She took one last look around her childhood home before she locked up and drove back to her own house, wanting nothing more than to climb into a hot shower and then go to bed. She was hoping that Reed would be working late, so she wouldn’t have to talk to him when she arrived home around 5:00, but she found him sitting at the kitchen table with a book and a glass of wine. She wiped her hand across her face to dry her cheeks, but there was no hiding the fact that she’d been crying. Her eyes were burning and swollen and she hadn’t slept well in weeks, which wasn’t strange considering everything she was going through. What was incredibly strange was that her husband didn’t seem to understand her grief. Not only did he not understand it, it actually seemed to bother him immensely.
“What’s wrong with you?” Reed asked, as if crying were some sort of mortal sin that she should repent for instead of a normal human emotion that comes from grieving the loss of her mother, the loss of her marriage, the loss of herself. She wasn’t sure which loss was responsible for these particular tears.
“I just need a minute. Today was hard. I put my mother’s entire life into boxes and threw them in storage, and the house I grew up in is no longer mine. I shouldn’t have to explain to you why I’m upset. Why won’t you let me process this my way?” She had been married twelve years, but in retrospect, twenty-five had been too young for her to get married.
“Your sulking isn’t helping this marriage any. Your mother died. That’s life. Dwelling on it isn’t helping you, and it isn’t helping me. Don’t forget, we have dinner with Cody and Tabitha tonight,” he added, tossing his copy of the New York Post on the counter and looking at her as if daring her to say she wasn’t going to go. She didn’t answer, somehow still stunned by his complete lack of compassion. He grabbed his jacket off the back of the kitchen chair. “I’m going down to the club to work out and take a steam before we go, but I’ll come by and pick you up for dinner at eight. Try to pull it together by then. No one wants to spend a night with a weepy woman. Put on some makeup. It will make you feel better.” With that he grabbed his sport coat and exited out the back door, into the driveway that abutted the patio at the back of their house.
The words should’ve stung. They should’ve ripped her soul out so that she was wearing it around her neck like a scarf. But they didn’t. If she had felt anything for him anymore, his words would’ve caused her to hide under her duvet for days and come out only for showers and glasses of water so that she didn’t dehydrate and die. But she didn’t. The only things she felt these days were empty and alone.
That f*cking club, she thought as she watched him back his Jeep out of the driveway. She’d never understand the draw of this men’s club, which of course was by design, as women weren’t allowed on the premises. It wasn’t the fact that the club excluded women that bothered her, it was the fact that it was where men went to get away from them. The only places she could go to get away from Reed were the grocery store or the dry cleaner, and neither of them provided much solace or helped her deal with her problems. Where was she supposed to go?
She ran into the bathroom and closed the door behind her, pushing in the silver button next to the doorknob to lock it. She stared at herself in the mirror, rested her hands on the ledge of the sink, and exhaled deeply enough to make her entire upper body cave in. What happened to you? she asked herself. What the hell happened to you?
When she looked up, she glanced out the window, past the flowers that lined her front walk, past the lamppost with the bulb that burned out weeks ago that she hadn’t gotten around to fixing, to the woman standing at the curb in front of her house. Her breath caught and she felt her insides churn in shock as the woman approached her front door. Cara wondered if her eyes were betraying her, or her grief was causing her to conjure ghosts. All she’d been doing lately was thinking about why Jane really pulled away. More important, she’d done a lot of thinking about how she’d not only let her go, but encouraged it, because she knew Reed didn’t like her. She suddenly remembered what her mother had said to her, asking her to reconcile with her friends, as if knowing this was going to happen. It was no apparition. For some reason that she couldn’t understand, Jane was about to ring her doorbell.