Not Perfect(66)

“Beef chow fun?” Toby said, when he’d finally gotten some control.

The server came again.

“Moo shu chicken?” he asked. They were beyond being polite. Toby just pointed to the table without saying a word.

“Would you like me to roll it?”

“No, no, we can do it,” Toby said.

The waiter bowed his head and went back through the curtain.

“So my husband disappeared,” Tabitha said.

Toby sucked in his breath.

“He always traveled a lot for business, but one morning, months ago, I woke up and he was gone. There was a note, but it didn’t say where he was going. I haven’t talked to him since.”

“Wow,” Toby said. “That’s a lot.” But as always, he said it kindly.

“Yeah, it is a lot,” Tabitha said. “I’ve tried him. I’ve called, I’ve emailed. I just, I don’t know how to find him. I . . .” She stopped, deciding she wasn’t ready to tell him or anyone about the call to the hospital and the realization that Abigail was dead. Or the possibility that Stuart’s connection to Abigail had been ongoing.

“Oh,” Toby said.

“I should add that things were not great when he left,” she said, because she thought Toby deserved that explanation. “Actually, they were never great. Never. I wanted them to be, and he was kind and polite, but there was always something missing. The night before he left we had . . . words . . . well, a fight, but I never thought he was going to just leave. I thought, stupidly, that we were finally being honest. What we talked about, what he told me, sort of put our entire marriage into perspective, and that was a strange relief somehow. That was partly why it was such a shock when he went away without a trace. That and a few other things. But overall our marriage had been, I’m not sure what the right word is . . . strained? Devoid of passion? I don’t know. But I never expected this to happen. I never expected him to leave us and not look back.”

Unbelievably, the server traipsed out of the kitchen once again.

“Peking duck?”

Toby and Tabitha looked at each other, first with serious looks, then questioning ones, and then they were all-out laughing. They didn’t even try to answer the server or respond to him. He just stood there, holding the lacquered-looking duck out toward them. Finally, Toby moved some things around and pointed to an empty place.

“Would you like me to roll it?”

They were laughing so hard they couldn’t talk. Tabitha worried she was spitting a little.

“No, no,” Toby said, though he was hard to understand. “We can do it.”

“As you wish,” the server said and walked away.

“Hey,” Tabitha said, when she calmed down a little. “That’s from The Princess Bride. I like that he said that. I hope he doesn’t think we were making fun of him.”

“We kind of were,” he said.

“Well,” she said. “We were making fun of his timing, I guess. I’m sorry about that.”

“I’ll make it up to him,” Toby said. “I’ll leave a big tip.”

They both looked at the food, but neither reached for any.

“Do you want to pack it up?” Toby finally asked.

“That would be perfect.”





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Tabitha walked directly home and, as soon as she put all the leftover Chinese food in her empty refrigerator, went right to her computer. She googled, “abandonment,” and tons of varying but similar definitions came up, basically describing her life for the last few months. She knew this, and it didn’t help. She googled, “legal abandonment,” and it was pretty much the same, just with fancier words until she got to the phrase “with the intention of not reclaiming it.” Huh. That stopped her. There was no question that Stuart had voluntarily left everything—the apartment, his things, his children, her—but did he plan to come back and reclaim it? That was the big question, right? But there must be a limit to how long someone had to wait to see. She was just googling, “abandonment limit,” when she got a text. It was from Toby.

You home?

Yes

Can I call you?

Sure

Two seconds later, the phone rang.

“Hi!” she said, clicking the images off her screen. She didn’t want to talk to Toby and think about abandonment at the same time. “I was going to call you later. Thanks for lunch. It was really nice.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, and she wondered if the call had dropped.

“Yeah,” he said, just as she was taking the phone away from her ear to see if it was still live. “It was really nice. That’s sort of why I’m calling. I have a crazy idea.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I think the first question is, how much time do you have?” he asked.

For some reason, it seemed to her that whatever answer she gave would be important. And while she thought he meant how much time did she have now, before the kids came home, she couldn’t help but also think about how much time she had before Stuart came back to reclaim things or until enough time would have gone by before she would be free. She wished she’d had just a few more minutes to do more research and figure that out.

“How much time do I have?” she repeated the question back to him. “Do you mean now?”