The Almost Sisters(42)
“Don’t be gross,” she said, and then she moved in close to me. She put her hand on my arm, and when I covered it with my hand, her fingers felt like icy sticks. I leaned in, and she bent closer to whisper, “He betrayed me.” She barely got those three words out, as if each were a serrated knife she had to shove up her throat and out her mouth.
“How? How did he betray you?” I asked, getting frustrated. All that buildup, and for three words that told me nothing about Jake that I didn’t already know. “Come on, Rachel, what? Did he build a doomsday device? Is he secretly a cannibal?”
She dropped her hand and wrapped her arms protectively around her middle. “I’m not comfortable talking about money.”
That was not what I expected. It was better, actually. I hoped it was a money thing, because that seemed fixable in a way that cheating often wasn’t.
“So he’s in some kind of debt?”
She squeezed herself tighter. “Yeah. All kinds. The Nissan dealership is done. We’re close to losing the house. Last night I told the real estate agent I’ve been talking to that we were ready put it on the market. I had to forge Jake’s signature, and I left the papers in the mailbox for her on my way out of town. I should have done it earlier, but I didn’t think I could stand the questions from my neighbors. She’s probably at my house right now, hammering a sign into my lawn.”
Now it made sense that she’d let Lav and me fly down coach. I’d even paid for both tickets, and Rachel—she who was always prearranging with waitresses to get the lunch tab and offering to replace my entire wardrobe with “some grown-up clothes”—had for once allowed it.
“I’m so sorry. What about his dad’s old business?” I asked.
“I don’t know. If the house sells quickly, and for a good price, he can maybe salvage it. Pieces of it. It’s not my problem.”
I boggled at her. “Not your . . . ? Rachel, if you and Jake got into—”
“We did not get into anything,” Rachel interrupted, and there was so much frost in her tone that I felt it, a crystalline bite in my lungs as I sucked in breath. “Jake got us into trouble all by himself. He never gave me so much as an inkling. He let it get bad and bad and worse, and he hid it, and he borrowed to cover it. For God only knows how long, Lavender and I have been living in a house of cards, while Smiley Daddy took us to Greece. He bought me an eight-hundred-dollar pashmina, and he couldn’t pay the mortgage.”
“Okay, that’s bad,” I said.
It was a sin that Rachel especially would have a hard time forgiving. Jake had . . . well, he had Rachel-ed her. He had taken his stuffed bunny to the laundry closet and cried there, with Rachel locked out, not even knowing. It was stupid, too, because if he’d told her when the trouble started, Rachel could have fixed it. She could have fixed the living hell out of it, then started a budgeting blog and landed on Good Morning America.
It was a very Jake Jacoby thing to do, however. Not that I was taking his side. I would never take Jake’s side, even if he tripped and staggered by accident into the right. But this time I could see it. I could even understand it. Jake had reinvented himself for Rachel. He’d defined himself as this self-made successbot who followed trends in man fashion and cared a great, hollering deal about March Madness. Back when he was JJ, he and I hadn’t even known what March Madness was; I still wasn’t entirely clear on it. Jake Jacoby was such a fundamentally dishonest construct, it was a miracle that lying about debt was all he’d done.
Still, it was all he had done, sounded like, and screwing up with money seemed forgivable. I recognized betrayal when it crossed my path, and fronting to stay successful in your wife’s eyes did not rise to that level.
“That’s very bad, but he’s the only dad Lavender’s ever going to be issued.” Even as I said it, I realized what a hypocrite I was. Batman was the only father Digby would ever have, and a complete unknown. I wouldn’t even look at him on Facebook, but here I was advocating father’s rights for an absolute known jackass. This was not about me, however, so I soldiered on. “You could fix this.”
She snorted. “My marriage, you mean? ‘Can I fix it?’ is not even the question. You’re missing the point.”
“Okay. What is the point?” I asked.
She flicked at the air with all ten fingers, as if the answer were hanging in the atmosphere around us, obvious.
“He never told me. He never planned to tell me. He was going to—” Her voice broke, and she clenched her eyes shut, as if Jake were standing right in front of us and she could no longer bear to look at him. “He was going to stick us with it, me and Lavender. Disappear and leave us in his mess.”
“Oh,” I said, a long-drawn-out syllable, full of a dawning understanding. It was what Rachel’s mother had done when Rachel was three months old. It would hit her so hard and so directly that I wondered if her own history hadn’t made her jump to that conclusion. I asked her, “Are you sure that’s what he meant to do?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, ice cold. “I was looking for an old recipe in MS Word, and I found a draft of a blubbering letter he was writing. It read like a suicide note. Leia, I thought it was a suicide note, but then I started digging in his browser history and e-mail, and he’d used our last dimes to buy a plane ticket to Oregon. Ticket. Singular. Just him. If I hadn’t had a craving for Nana’s lemon bars, he would have been gone.”