Every Wrong Reason(6)

Kara noticed immediately. “I’m sorry, Kate. I didn’t mean to… to upset you. I just thought… It’s been four months, babe. Nick hasn’t even reached out to you. Not really, anyway. I thought you might be ready to move on.”

Ready to move on after four months? Was that all it took to get over the last ten years of my life? To delete seven years of marriage? I had been with Nick in some form or capacity for a decade, but I was supposed to erase him completely from the important parts of my heart in four months?

How?

I wasn’t against the idea. In fact, I would have loved to forget about him and the poisonous relationship we’d created. I would love for this pain in my chest to dissipate and the sickness that seemed constant and unrelenting to ebb.

But it wasn’t that easy. I couldn’t shake our relationship or the hold he had over my heart.

Not everything about him was bad. In fact, most of him was good and beautiful and right. But with me, he wasn’t those things and I wasn’t either.

But how was I supposed to let go of him? I loved him. I loved him for ten years and knew nothing else but loving him.

How could I walk away from him and even entertain the idea of another man after everything I had been through? I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to date again, let alone so quickly after my last relationship failed.

No. Epically failed.

Nick was supposed to be my forever. Nick was supposed to be my “until death do us part.” And now that the rest of my life had taken a sharp, life-altering turn, I didn’t know where I was headed anymore.

I was lost.

I was rudderless.

I was floating in a sea of confusion and hurt. I needed something to tether me, to pull me back to shore. But I knew, more than anybody else in my life that I wasn’t going to find that with a new man.

“It’s okay,” I told Kara with a throaty whisper. “I just wasn’t… I wasn’t expecting that from him.”

She squeezed my forearm and gathered her thoughts. “I know that what you’re going through with Nick and everything is intense, but you’re still young. You’re still gorgeous. You still have a lot of life left to live. I don’t want you to give up, just because the first try wasn’t successful. You’re a catch, friend. You have to know that Eli isn’t the only man lining up to take advantage of Nick’s colossal mistake.”

“The divorce was my idea,” I reminded her. “I’m the reason we ended it.” The words felt like stones on my tongue. I felt their gritty, dirty wrongness and I wanted to spit them out and wash my mouth out with something cleansing.

Something like bleach.

Or battery acid.

“Yeah, maybe,” she sighed. “But he should never have let you get away with it.”

Something sharp sliced against my chest. I felt the same way too. If he had really loved me, he wouldn’t have let me go through with it. Right? If he really wanted things to work out between us, he wouldn’t have moved out.

He wouldn’t have stopped talking to me.

He wouldn’t have left.

Desperate to change the topic, I pushed through a back door and blinked against the bright fall sunlight. “So, lunch?”

“Yes!” She smiled at me. I could see the concern floating all over her face, but she held her tongue in an effort to keep me together. “Garmans has the freaking best pastrami on the planet.”

I would never understand how Kara could eat so much and stay so thin. She didn’t have to do what the rest of us did, which was an insane amount of cardio and a universal ban on sugar. She could eat whatever she wanted.

I looked at a piece of chocolate and my thighs started jiggling.

It was like an alarm system for my flab.

Well, until recently.

We hurried across the lengthy parking lot and busy Chicago street until we reached the tiny corner deli that boasted whole pickles with every purchase and sandwiches the size of my head. It was a favorite spot for everyone that worked on this block, but especially for the teachers at Hamilton. When given the choice of bad cafeteria food, a quickly packed lunch from home or a thickly-meated, moist-breaded, delicious deli sandwich from Garmans, the choice was obvious.

But after an incident last spring, in which a group of students had left school to corner and threaten a teacher off school grounds, our administrator had banned teachers from leaving campus during the school day and so technically we were sneaking out and breaking rules.

Hamilton was located in one of the under-privileged sections of Chicago. We were firmly in the city proper, not skirting the affluent suburbs or near a wealthier area of downtown. No, Hamilton was directly in the middle of gang violence, low-income housing and race wars.

I’d been offered jobs at some of the more stable schools in the city and even one at a prestigious private school in a well-off suburb. But when I chose Hamilton, it was with my heart. I had examined all of my options, and I knew that taking this job was a risk professionally, but I couldn’t deny that I felt something meaningful for these kids.

I wanted to make a difference. Not the kind that you see on TV or that moves you in a heart-warming movie, but a real difference. I wanted to empower these kids with knowledge that would never leave them and tools for a future that was beyond this neighborhood. I wanted to inspire something inside of these neglected teenagers that had all of the odds stacked against them and had to fight to just show up on a daily basis.