The Friends We Keep(90)

forty-one


- 2019 -



Driving along the shaded roads was the first time Evvie and Maggie had been alone with any proper time to talk, the first opportunity for a true heart-to-heart. Evvie hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what Maggie said the night of the reunion when she burst into tears claiming her marriage to Ben had been a disaster. Maggie had described it as being filled with deceit and lies, and Evvie hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what that might mean.

She hadn’t been able to ask Maggie, had to wait until Maggie was ready to talk, even though she was desperate to know. Maybe today would be the day Maggie revealed all.

“I am so sorry we lost touch,” Evvie said, thinking about Jack.

Maggie took her eyes off the road for a few seconds to look at Evvie. “Me too. I always wondered what happened, why you just disappeared. I didn’t realize how much I missed you until you came back into my life. What happened, Evvie? Was it Ben?”

Evvie blanched. “What do you mean, was it Ben?”

“I know you never liked him. You saw something in him that I never did. I think you knew what he was really like.”

“What do you mean?” Evvie shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“Did you know about the drinking? You worked with him at that bar, remember. You must have seen it. I saw it myself, but I chose not to believe it was a problem.”

“What are you talking about, Maggie? What drinking? Weren’t we all drinking back then?”

“Right. But not like Ben. He never stopped.” Maggie took a deep breath. “I’ve never been able to tell anyone this. He didn’t die of a heart attack, Evvie. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone the truth. Not even you and Topher. He died of alcoholic hepatitis.”

“What?” Evvie’s voice came out in a shocked whisper.

“He tried getting sober. Many, many times. He did AA and various kinds of rehab over the years. He had periods of sobriety, when I thought we had a chance, that we could be happy, but they never lasted.” She pulled up at a red light and turned to Evvie. “I don’t know why I stayed, and now I don’t know why I didn’t do more. Our marriage was so broken by the end, but I didn’t know what to do. Do you know I joined a bereavement group soon after he died? But I had to leave. None of them had been through the same thing I had. I lost my husband to alcohol long before I lost him to hepatitis. I loved him and I hated him, and on the day he died I finally found the strength to tell him I was leaving him.” Tears filled her eyes as she blinked them away, trying to stay focused on the road. “I still feel guilty every day. For sending him that text, for not doing more, for not doing things differently. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for asking for a divorce on the day he died.”

“Oh, Maggie,” Evvie whispered, tears in her own eyes now as she looked out the window, in total shock. “I had no idea.” But she did have something of an idea, she realized. That perfect week after she graduated? Ben was drunk every day. But everyone was, back then; she didn’t think that was anything out of the ordinary. Granted, Evvie hadn’t been drunk. Topher wasn’t drunk very much, nor Maggie, but her week with Ben was during his vacation, and wasn’t it normal to drink to excess on vacation?

Ben had been an alcoholic. Evvie couldn’t believe it. For so many years she had held Ben Curran up as the perfect man. The one who got away. The only one who might have made her happy. The only good man she had ever been attracted to. All the others had turned out to be like her father: abusive, alcoholic, or both. And she had always thought Ben was the one man who was different, the one man who was normal. How wrong she had been! Thirty years of a false assumption disappearing in a flash. He was like all the others. Evvie was the one who had been wrong, in oh so many ways.

She thought of Jack then, how lucky she was that he hadn’t inherited his father’s alcoholism. Evvie was enough of a compulsive eater to recognize the addiction gene in others—even though she had never figured it out about Ben—but she always felt relieved that Jack didn’t have it.

Evvie turned to look at Maggie, putting a hand over hers. “I don’t know what to say. I had no idea. I thought you had the perfect marriage. I thought Ben was the perfect man.”

“No one had any idea,” said Maggie. “I went to great pains to make sure everyone thought we did in fact have the perfect marriage. I felt such incredible shame. We stopped going out, stopped seeing people, because he was always drunk. And the fights we had.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I don’t want to keep secrets anymore. I stayed in a miserable marriage because I thought I needed, I don’t know, the status of being married, and because I kept thinking that I could make him change. But the whole thing was a spiderweb of lies, and I don’t ever want to lie to people I love again. I needed you to know the truth.”

She looked at Evvie with a smile, but Evvie couldn’t look back at her. She looked out the window, wishing her heart wasn’t beating as fast as it was. Now would be the time for Evvie to reveal her own deceit, her own lies. The very fact that they didn’t have a perfect marriage might be enough for Maggie to forgive her. But she immediately realized the alternative was too terrible to imagine. Evvie couldn’t tell Maggie about Jack. Not now. Maybe not ever. She had just been offered a second chance at happiness, and she wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardize it. This secret was one she had to continue to keep.