Deconstructed(13)

At the end of the day, Ruby had walked in with a caramel macchiato and glanced at the yellow roses sitting majestically on my desk.

“You got me a macchiato,” I’d said.

Ruby looked down at the drink and then up at the bags under my eyes. “I figured you needed it.”

“Why?”

Ruby looked real hard at me. “I ate the chicken salad, too.”

I took three swallows of my sugary drink and said, “I think Scott is cheating on me.”

Ruby’s eyes turned to glittering topaz gemstones. “Then we need to take that sonofabitch down.”

Something about the way she came so quickly to my defense, like we were a team, made things a little better. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know Ruby well, but her proclamation checked a box for me. She made me want to do something about Scott.

So here we sat in my grandmother’s convertible.

Ruby kicked her Converse shoes up on the dash, drawing my attention from the blurry binoculars to her, framed against the darkened street where Stephanie lived. My assistant sipped wine from a foam cup. I had sort of bribed her to come with me with booze.

“Tell me again why we’re doing this?” she said.

“I want to—” I paused, trying to think why I had insisted we sit five houses down from Stephanie Brooks’s house at nine p.m. I didn’t finish the thought because I wasn’t exactly sure. All weekend I had fantasized about catching Scott with his pants around his ankles. Visions of me storming into Steph Brooks’s bedroom, melodramatically slapping Scott, and telling him he’d hear from my lawyer had danced like sugarplums in my head. Then he’d trip over said pants around his ankles, chasing after me, begging for forgiveness.

But now that seemed ridiculous.

But still, I wanted to see the evidence for myself.

How did I relay that to Ruby?

“If you see him with her, it will make it real?” Ruby asked, her voice as soft as the night gathered around us.

I blinked away sudden tears. Thank goodness she understood that I needed to see his infidelity with my own eyes. Even if I sort of knew the truth.

Scott was probably cheating on me.

And despite my constant proclamations about how strong our marriage was, the fat truth was that Scott and I weren’t in love. Oh, we loved each other in the way you love a person who makes a life with you, who shoulders the hard stuff with you, who shares the shampoo, the dishes, and the kid with you. But I was no longer “in love” with Scott.

And he wasn’t “in love” with me.

I mean, obviously.

“You’re right. Something inside me needs to see him with her. I don’t know why,” I said finally.

“What if you don’t see him tonight?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t figured out what to do yet,” I said. Truthfully, I hadn’t absorbed what all this would mean for me. For our daughter. For the safe life we’d made. Felt like too much to take in.

“Cricket, if he’s cheating on you, you have to have a plan. You have to—”

“But it’s not that simple. I have Julia Kate to think about it. We’re a fam—”

“You can’t let him get away with this. I mean, you’re not going to overlook him screwing around, are you?” Ruby didn’t look so much like the quiet creature who slunk around the antique sideboards. She looked bold, bristling with outrage, and interesting. I liked this Ruby. And note to self: be careful giving Ruby wine; she gets feisty.

“No, but . . .” I didn’t want to say what I had been thinking because Ruby couldn’t understand. She wasn’t married, didn’t have a daughter, a mortgage, a life like mine. “My life is complicated.”

More bristling from Ruby. “Everyone’s life is complicated. You can’t run from this.”

“I’m not. It’s not like I’m going to pretend this away. I just don’t know what I’m actually going to do yet.”

Okay, so I had thought about D-I-V-O-R-C-E and even sung it in Tammy Wynette’s voice in my head. I had even imagined moving out of the brick house on the golf course and finding something cute and less like the big house I’d never wanted in the first place. Julia Kate and I could be happy in a cute three-bedroom in South Highlands. Eventually my daughter would be okay with no club swimming pool and no cruising the streets in a golf cart. Maybe. But even so, the idea of breaking apart our safe little world hurt too much to think about. And it would get messy. Julia Kate would be devastated. People would look at me with pity. And since Scott and I held investments in both our names and he owned half the building Printemps was in, our split wouldn’t be simple. At all.

“It’s already done, you know,” Ruby said.

“What?”

“Change. It’s happened. You can’t stick your head in the sand.”

I wasn’t. Not really. “I’m not.”

“Instead of doing this, you should hire a professional.” Ruby sounded so certain. How did she know these sorts of things? She was so young. And nothing like the woman who stayed out of my way at the store, glancing at me as if she expected me to snap at any minute.

No, this woman had teeth. And confidence.

“Why would I pay someone to catch him when I can do that myself?” I asked.