F*ck Marriage(82)

Billie,

This was always yours. I was just taking care of it in your absence.

My heart wants only good and beautiful things for you. Forgive me for not reading between the lines.



Love,

Satcher



I take longer to open the next envelope, my hands shaking. Inside is a single sheet of paper signed by both Satcher and his attorney. It takes a moment to process what I’m seeing. There is a blank line where my signature goes. He signed his share of Rhubarb over to me. I lift a hand to cover my mouth, tears stinging my eyes. Had this always been his plan? I say his name out loud.

“Satcher ... oh my God, Satcher.”

There’s a knock.

“Billie,” my mother calls through the door. “Are you ready?”

I’m not.

“Just another minute, Mom.” I have to work to keep my voice steady, but even if she heard me crying she wouldn’t have come in without an invitation. The reality of this doesn’t bother me anymore; trying to pretend the situation is different doesn’t change the situation, it just puts you in a slumber deep enough to never learn acceptance. My family is detached, and because of that, I attached myself to Woods so fiercely, hoping to find what I’d been missing my whole life. My heart is topsy-turvy as I walk to the window and stare down at the parking lot. I see Woods locking up his car. He bends his knees to check his reflection in the window. He looks so handsome in his suit. I’ve loved Woods for so long. I left my home and my family in search of adventure, New York being the epicenter of excitement and power in my mind. I’d found Woods along the way. He’d been so into me, in the way twenty-year-old men were into their twenty-year-old girlfriends. But like most women in their twenties, I’d changed ... evolved. Woods hadn’t liked the changes. In retrospect, he hadn’t been mature enough to deal with them, especially when I went from a sleepy, wholesome PNW girl to a career-obsessed New Yorker.

I move away from the window and sit in the only chair in the room.

Satcher always liked who I was—even when I was wearing the Martha Stewart dresses, even when I was a bitter bitch. How had I not seen what was right in front of me? It’s because I was obsessed with what was behind me, my future always clouded by my stiff-knuckled inability to let go.

I walk to the door, resting my palm on the rich mahogany. “Mom?” I breathe.

I hear the shuffling of feet, the swish of fabric as she comes to stand on the other side of the door. She’s been waiting this whole time, not saying anything, but there. I open the door. At first she looks surprised, but when she sees me in my dress, tears spring to her eyes. She lifts her hands and crisscrosses her palms over her heart. It’s something I’ve seen her do since I was a little girl, the emotion she cannot express verbally, suppressed into that one action. I grab her wrists and drag her into the room, kicking the door closed behind us.

“Billie, what are you doing? I think they’re ready to—”

“Shh, Mom,” I say firmly.

She falls silent, and I begin pacing the small space between the window and the mirror, wringing my hands. I tell her everything I should have told her before: about Woods cheating, about Angus and the accident ... about Satcher, and Pearl, and Jules. When I’m done, she steers me to the chair I was sitting in earlier and sits me down.

“I’m not good with words, Billie.”

It’s the first time she’s ever said something so candid to me and I’m not sure what to say so I wait for her to go on.

“But you’re my daughter and I want to be there for you. We don’t understand each other. We don’t. But I want to try.”

I start to cry and she doesn’t know what to do, so then I start to laugh.

She doesn’t laugh with me; instead, she pulls her lips into a tight line and pats me on the shoulder.

“He didn’t want to leave you,” she says.

“Woods?” I ask through my laughing tears.

“No,” she says slowly. “Satcher. When you were in the hospital, he was by your side the whole time. He got really agitated with me when I told him I wasn’t staying.”

For some reason I can’t meet her eyes. Talking about Satcher makes me feel ashamed.

“Yeah,” I say softly, thinking of the deed to Rhubarb. “He’s always been really good to me.”

“Well, there you have your answer, don’t you?”

I look her in the eyes this time, trying to understand what she’s saying.

“Mom…?”

“I didn’t know,” she says, not meeting my eyes. “About what Woods did ... if I’d known…”

I hold up my hand to stop her. “It’s not your fault. I didn’t tell you guys because I thought you’d side with him anyway ... tell me that it was my fault…”

“Well,” she says slowly. “It wasn’t. And you deserve better than to always be wondering if he’s going to do it again.”

The tears that I was holding back spill.

“I think that you’re more in love with Satcher than you’re willing to admit. And I think that marrying someone you compare to someone else is a very, very big mistake.”

I hadn’t ever thought about it like that, but how many times had I compared them over the years? Satcher spoke Spanish fluently, he started and sold companies, becoming a millionaire at the age of twenty-seven. Satcher worked with a charity that sent him to Africa two weeks out of every year. When you spoke, he really, really, listened; he wasn’t just waiting to speak. I’d been intimidated by him, I’d gone to him for business advice ... and more recently, personal advice. And when I asked him to do stupid, ridiculous things like pretend to be my boyfriend—he’d done it ... for me. He wasn’t confused by the way I changed over the years; he’d been supportive of every new personality and style I’d tried to fit myself into.