“It’s good to be with you, Jez. Thanks for being here for me.”
In the elevator, the cell phone rang again but he made no move for it. Benjamin stirred at the noise but didn’t quite wake up.
“Don’t you need to get that?” she asked.
“Nah. It’s probably just Barnes again. The guys are getting together tonight but I told him I needed to spend some time with my family.”
I would have been crazy to divorce this guy, thought Jesamyn. But who the hell is he?
Ben woke up long enough to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas. She knelt down on the floor beside him as she tucked him into bed and kissed him on the head.
“Mom?” he said as she turned off his big light and flipped on the aquarium night-light. “Do you like Dad again?”
She quashed the rise of guilt and smiled. “I’ve always liked your dad. He gave me you. And I love you more than anything.”
He looked into her eyes and gave her that smile, a carbon copy of his father’s. Irresistible.
“I love you, too,” he said, turning over.
She closed the door mostly, leaving it slightly ajar the way Ben liked it, and moved quietly down the hall. She heard the tone in his voice before she saw him leaning in the doorjamb to the kitchen, talking into his cell phone like he was making out with it. That tone, that sweet, coaxing tone she knew so well.
“Not tonight, baby,” he said, his voice low. “I’m working. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. Hey, and honey, don’t call anymore tonight. You’ll get me in trouble with my boss.”
She felt her stomach bottom out and she remembered… a dozen other overheard phone calls, the nights he said he’d made a collar but there was no overtime in his paycheck, once an earring in her couch. Each time it had hit like a blow to the solar plexus. Tonight was no different. She put a hand against the wall. She couldn’t believe he could still do it to her, run her through a gamut of emotions in just a few hours. Was she really this weak, this stupid?
In a way she was relieved, because it meant she was right about him all along. She had come to believe that he was pathologically unfaithful, that it wasn’t part of his makeup to be present for her and Ben. He wanted to play; he wanted to party. He didn’t really want to be a husband and a father, not full time anyway. This was why she’d decided to end their marriage. She hadn’t been wrong. Small comfort, but she’d take it.
She picked up his coat off the couch and stood behind him, waiting for him to feel her there. After another sickening few seconds of him cooing on the phone to whomever it was he was cooing to, he flipped the phone shut and turned around.
“Uh-” he said. He looked stricken. “That was Barnes. We were just fooling around.”
“Oh, spare me, Dylan,” she said, handing him his coat. “Just go.”
“Jez, please,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “I really need you guys right now.”
“Key,” she said.
“What?”
“Give me that goddamn key before I take it from you. And you know I can.”
He looked at her and his eyes went from pleading to angry.
“This is why we’re not married anymore, Jesamyn,” he said, reaching into his pocket and fishing out the keys. “No understanding, no compromise.”
She let go of a little laugh. “There are some points on which people are not expected to compromise,” she said.
He fumbled with the keys, his jacket over his arm, took one of them off the ring and handed it to her. His face had flushed red and she could see a vein pumping in his temple.
“Both of them,” she said forcing herself to keep her voice down. “The apartment door, too.”
He sighed and took another one off the ring. She tested it in the door; the lock turned.
“I’ll follow you down and check the other one, too. If you don’t mind.”
“You don’t trust me?”
She gave him a smile. She locked the door behind her and they rode the elevator down together in a cool silence.
“I can’t believe I thought-” she started and then clamped her mouth shut.
“You and I haven’t been together in a long time, Jez,” he said softly. “I have every right to be involved with someone else. I didn’t know things were going to heat up between us again.”
She shook her head and didn’t respond further. The doors slid open and she walked quickly to the outside entrance and tried the key. When the lock turned, she stepped aside and held it for him.
“Jez, let’s talk about this.” He spoke softly, reaching for her hand. She folded her arms across her chest.
“Dylan, everything that needs saying between us, we said a long time ago. I was just suffering from some kind of temporary insanity. Clearly.”
He walked onto the street and stood looking at her through the glass. He was so handsome and the girl in her loved him so much, she could imagine herself throwing the door open and running into his arms. She wanted to, even now. Instead, she turned and walked coolly for the elevator door though she wanted to run, catching it just before it closed again. She rode up, staring at her reflection in the mirrored doors, her body tense, her mouth pressed into a straight, hard line. She looked hard at the woman glaring back at her. Only her eyes betrayed the terrible sadness and disappointment she felt. She just made it into the apartment before she started to cry. She cried quietly, her head against the door, careful not to wake her son.
Twelve
Maybe fifty people had gathered in front of The New Day building. They stood in the cold, smoking cigarettes, drinking from paper coffee cups. A thin girl, very young with bad acne, stood with shoulders stooped, shivering against the cold. A woman wearing a three-quarter-length wool coat over a business suit clutched a soft briefcase to her side and looked around with a frown on her face, like she was somewhere she didn’t want to be. A smallish man with slicked-back hair, wearing creased jeans, a faux leather jacket and matching loafers, laughed nervously as he tried to make conversation with a pretty black woman.
Lydia stood off to the side, leaning against a maple tree and listening to the quiet conversations that cropped up between strangers waiting for a common event. People seemed nervous, excited, tentative. She had to wonder why they’d come here. What were they seeking? Her eyes fell on the thin girl with the bad skin. The girl hunched her shoulders in, stood away from the crowd. She seemed sad and tired. It was contagious; Lydia started to feel that way, too.
After a while, a willowy woman in the white tunic and blue jeans Lydia had seen on the website opened the large wooden doors and people filed inside. Lydia lingered outside awhile, moving behind the tree. She wanted to be among the last to enter and sit toward the back. She hoped that her baseball hat and wire-rimmed glasses would keep anyone from recognizing her, though Jeffrey had been skeptical. He’d given up the argument and they’d parted angry with each other.
She hung back with the smokers and entered with the last of the people to walk through the door. They walked through the foyer and Lydia chose a seat as close to the door as possible, gratified that no one seemed to notice her. She had a row to herself and watched as people took tea from an urn on a table off to the side, dumping packs of sugar and creamer into their paper cups. People chattered a little at first, then grew silent. A definite tension built as people waited, started to get impatient.
“You’re here because you want to change your life,” said Trevor Rhames loudly as he entered the room from an unseen door to the side. “But you don’t know how.
“People always think it’s the things they don’t have that are making them unhappy. ‘If I can just get this, or buy that, or have that, then finally I’ll achieve real peace and joy.’ What they don’t realize is that it’s leaving things behind, wanting less that is the secret to true happiness.”