The Push(50)

And then I left. I went to bed. I wondered if you’d be gone in the morning, but a few hours later, or maybe it was just one, I felt your side of the mattress move.

“I’m not seeing her anymore.”

You’d been crying. I could hear the thickness in your nasal. There was nothing inside me. No relief. No anger. I was just tired.

In the morning I brought coffee to you in bed before Violet woke up. I sat next to you while you drank it.

“We lost enough when Sam died,” I said. You rubbed your forehead. “You never dealt with your grief properly. You’ve never faced it.”

I waited for you to speak.

“Sam isn’t why our marriage is falling apart. He doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

The door to our bedroom opened and Violet walked in and stared at us. You looked at me slowly, your sleepy eyes now as wide open as hers. And then you looked back at our daughter.

“Morning, honey,” you said.

“Breakfast?” she asked. You left the room behind her.





60





It had been a stupid place for me to leave it. Under the bed. I’d tossed it there when I heard you come home midafternoon. You never took notice of the books I had lying around anyway. And I hadn’t thought of her, if I’m being honest; I barely existed in her world, and she barely existed in mine beyond the logistics of the routine we kept.

I don’t know why I bought it. I knew it wouldn’t help, but it felt like something I could do to try to make it real. To make me feel something other than desperately curious. Two months had passed since I confronted you about the affair. And all I could think about was: Who is this woman? What’s she like? You refused to say a word about her—all I knew was that she’d been your assistant. The woman you’d taken our daughter out to lunch with.

Every time I asked you to tell me more, you shook your head and said only, quietly, “Don’t.”

I found the book in her backpack. Surviving an Affair: How to Overcome Betrayal in Your Marriage. Violet was eating yogurt at the kitchen counter, her after-school snack, and looked up as I stared at it in my hands. I didn’t know what to say to her—she was ten. Could she have known what an affair was? I thought of the older kids at school whom she wouldn’t have hesitated to ask.

“Why did you have this?” I asked nervously. She raised her eyebrows knowingly and went back to stirring her bowl.

“Answer me.”

“Why did you have it?”

I walked away.



* * *



? ? ?

An hour later, I knocked on Violet’s door and asked if we could talk. She spun her desk chair around slowly and looked at me blankly. I held the book out and said that I wanted to clear something up—that this book was research for something new I was writing. That we should talk about what this grown-up word “affair” meant—what she thought it meant. That I didn’t have this book because there was something wrong between her mom and dad. That we loved each other very much.

“Okay,” she said. And then she put her head back down to her workbook.

I knew she knew who the woman was. Maybe that day you took Violet to your office wasn’t the only time they’d met—I didn’t know what secrets you two kept. It was so strange to me that she’d never used the unicorn pencil or eraser the woman had given her. She’d kept them on her bedroom shelf, on display like trophies, prized possessions that must have meant more to her than I had realized.

I threw the book in the trash can outside, and I wondered about other lies I could tell her that would corroborate the one I’d just told. I wanted to walk back in there and convince her, with the authority that a mother should have, that she was wrong. I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of woman a husband cheated on. And despite my ten years of resentment for the relationship you and Violet shared, I didn’t want her to believe you were the kind of man who would do that.

I was hanging on to my family by a thread, I knew. But I had to. I had nothing else left.

When you came home that night, I touched you with affection when I thought she might be looking, and I called you “honey” instead of your name. I slipped in beside you on the couch while you watched the hockey game. I put my hand on your lap and my chin on your shoulder, and I called her into the room to ask if she had handed in the money for the school pizza lunch. She glared at me and looked down at my hand on her father’s thigh and shook her head just slightly, just one sharp back-and-forth, just enough to tell me she knew what I was trying to do. She had a remarkable ability to make me hate myself.

One month later—three months after I discovered the affair—I woke up on a Sunday and I knew. We were over. We needed to stop pretending we would simply float past this, like it was something unpleasant on a riverbank. The sitter took Violet out for the afternoon and we went to the bar down the street.

“You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?”

You looked out the window and then impatiently waved for the server. I asked you again if you could just, please, tell me about the woman. Tell me why you loved her. You didn’t avoid my eyes. You looked like you were talking yourself through the decision of how much to tell me, what secrets you were willing to part with. An urgency welled inside me and I could no longer be there across from you—we needed to get this done. I wanted you gone.