Back in the Burbs by Tracy Wolff
Chapter Ten
I’m just about to start cooking myself dinner—a chicken breast with a side of roasted asparagus—when the full bid comes through from Mikey. Steeling myself with a large sip of wine from one of the bottles from the awesome collection I just found in Aunt Maggie’s basement, I’m not even a little embarrassed to admit discovering my aunt hoarded wine was the highlight of my year.
I open the email attachment and then squeeze my eyes shut before I can actually see any of the numbers.
And yes, I know this isn’t going to get me anywhere when I’m the only one around to look at them, but still…I’m scared. Since I walked in on Karl going down on his girlfriend, life has been coming at me extra fast.
No time to catch my breath.
No time to talk myself into whatever has to come next.
No time to hide, even for a second.
Just all crappy reality, all the time.
It’s fucking exhausting.
I take another big drink for courage—just because I have to deal with this mess doesn’t mean I have to do it sober—then peek one eye open. And nearly have a heart attack. There are more than a few numbers on that spreadsheet. A lot more. And none of them are good.
True to Mikey’s original best-guess estimate, the final bid came in at just over $26,500. He was kind enough to deduct that 10 percent friends-and-family discount, but still… It’s almost double what I have left in the bank. If insurance doesn’t come through like he thought, I’m screwed.
I shoot back the rest of the wine in my glass—I’m waaaaaay past thinking this bottle isn’t going to go fast—and force myself to look at the bid again to find something, anything I can actually afford to do without careful planning.
And the answer is simple. The dumpster. I can afford the $500 a week for the dumpster, even though my HOA doesn’t actually give a shit about what the inside of my house looks like. Just the outside with its $12,000 front porch estimate and all the rest.
Fuck it.
I drop my phone on the counter and reach for the bottle of wine. This time I fill my glass all the way up to the tippy top and drink it down in three large gulps. Then I fill the glass up again before wandering into my aunt’s family room and up to the old stereo she had, complete with turntable and CD player, under the TV.
When I was a kid, Aunt Maggie used to turn on her favorite Beatles albums and we’d dance and dance and dance around the room before having an elaborate tea party, complete with scones, finger sandwiches, and gorgeously decorated petits fours from the bakery down the street.
When Karl and I got married, I used to dream about having a child—or children—to throw tea parties for.
A daughter to dress up in sparkly dresses and whirl around the room to a special playlist I’d made just for us. A son I could use cookies and cakes and his favorite songs to bribe into dancing with me. Having kids isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally cool. But I have always wanted to be the mom version of my aunt Maggie—fun, supportive, encouraging, and basically everything I rarely found under my own roof growing up.
But Karl wanted to wait, wanted a little more time before we started a family. And now, here I am—broke, almost divorced, jobless, and childless.
Definitely not how I planned to spend my thirty-fifth year on this planet.
Then again, nothing that has happened in the past several months was how I expected my life to turn out. I used to have big plans—law school, partnership in a major firm by the time I was thirty, a solid marriage, kids to spoil with trips to the theater and the beach and maybe even Europe. I refused to settle for less.
I take another long sip of wine, even though I definitely feel the last cup kicking in. Then I open the sliding door that leads out to the patio to let in some fresh air before I drop down on the floor in front of my aunt’s incredible and extensive vinyl collection and start searching through it for our favorite album. Part of me expects it to be right in front like it always was, but it isn’t.
It’s buried deep, about a hundred albums back, behind Cat Stevens, Harry Chapin, and, randomly, a Queen album. I almost put on that iconic album but instead pull out Abbey Road—the best Beatles album ever, no matter what the internet says—with reverent hands and slide it onto the turntable. But before the needle gets to “Come Together,” my phone rings in the kitchen.
I’m halfway to ignoring it—I’m not expecting a call from anyone right then anyway—but the ringing continues, so I grab my wine and jog into the kitchen. My mom mentioned she wasn’t feeling very well when we talked yesterday. Maybe she’s feeling worse.
But it isn’t my mom. The Caller ID shows the last man in the world I would ever want to talk to again, but years of ingrained habit has me answering.
“Hi, Karl.” I hate the way my palms get damp as I wait for him to answer, the way my stomach clenches in dread. He’s just a man. Just a total asshole of a man who I used to love.
“Took you long enough,” he mutters.
“I could hang up if you prefer and you could call back,” I say, barely recognizing my own moxie. “I’ll try to answer more quickly.” Or not at all, but he doesn’t need to know that.
“Why exactly would I do that?” he demands.
“I just thought—”
“Never mind.” He talks right over me. “I only have a few minutes, but I was calling to tell you that I’m having the divorce waiting period waiver couriered over. The courier has instructions to stay. Sign the papers immediately and send them right back. I’ll file them and all this unpleasantness can be behind us once and for all.”
Unpleasantness? That’s what he calls our ten-year marriage? Unpleasantness? Even though I did everything in my power to make him happy while, it turned out, he was running around with whatever woman would have him?
The anger from earlier drowns under a wave of regret. Not because our marriage is over—good riddance to bad trash and all that—but because I wasted so much of my time, of myself, on a man who so obviously never gave a shit about me.
It makes me feel naive. More, it makes me feel tired. And small. And sad.
I worked so hard to make him happy, worked so hard to make it work, and now it’s just…over. A phone call, a swipe of a pen, done. And all I can think about is that if I’d worked so hard at my marriage only to have it fail so completely, what makes me think I have any chance at all of keeping Aunt Maggie’s house?
I slide down the kitchen wall while Karl’s voice pours into my right ear, then land with a hard thud on the linoleum floor, all the fight extinguished that damn fast. All I can hear—all I can think about—is him saying that I need him. And maybe, just maybe, he’s right.
I have a list of repairs I can’t afford. A shitload of junk that needs to be sorted through and thrown away. Property and inheritance taxes that I don’t have the money for. And reality starts to really seep in—like it always does when I’m around Karl.
It absolutely sucks, but my father was right. I need to move back in with my parents, sell the house, and use the money from the sale to pay the inheritance taxes and get back on my feet.
Is it what I want to do? Not in the slightest.
Is it what I have to do? Yeah, it is.
It’s the only logical solution. And I’m nothing if not logical—isn’t that what Karl always said about me? Boring, logical Mallory who doesn’t have an exciting bone in her body? It’s exciting to think about keeping this place, about building a life worthy of the great-aunt who used to pick me up at school on a random day once a year and take me to Bloomingdale’s to pick out an un-birthday present.
The great-aunt who used to take me to the Strand bookstore and demand that I pick out no less than three or five or seven books to read, depending on what she considered her lucky number that day.
The great-aunt who used to take me for cheesecake at Junior’s or hot dogs at Gray’s Papaya and then up to the top of the Empire State Building to make a wish as big as the city.
And now I’m such a failure that I can’t even afford to keep her house. I can’t live the life she tried to give me or the life she wanted for me. All I can do is just…fold.
“Are you even listening to me?” Karl’s voice booms through the phone, bringing me back to our conversation. “I need you to sign the papers tomorrow morning.”
“I’d like to read them first.” Not I have to read them first or I’ll have a lawyer read them first, just “I’d like to read them first.” So much for my wine-induced badassery.
“You don’t need to read them. They’re exactly like we discussed, and I really need to get this done tomorrow.”
Anger flares inside me again, and this time there is no sadness for it to get buried in. “Yeah, well, I need a lot of things, Karl. Including twenty-four hours to read the damn papers—which I don’t think is too much to ask. What’s your rush anyway?”
“I want this mistake over and done with,” he says, his voice cold in that way it always gets when I do something to displease him. “You know how you are, Mallory. If I don’t push, it won’t get done.”
“Well, I have no need to set a record for fastest paper signing in history, like you apparently do. Something tells me there’s more going on here.”
Maybe it’s the wine making a comeback or I’ve just finally reached my tipping point, but I’m not about to be bullied by this man. Not anymore.
A long silence follows my statement, and for a second, I think he might have actually hung up. But then he sighs heavily. It’s a long-suffering sound meant to remind me just how difficult and irrational I’m being—per usual. He employed it regularly during our marriage—every time I had the nerve to disagree with him on anything—and the sound of it now, when he’s clearly being the irrational one, sets off a wave of anger inside me like nothing I’ve ever felt before.
Even walking in on him mid-lick didn’t make me this angry. Nothing has. It’s lava hot and practically sentient, ready for action, to decimate the dick who sparked it.
We are getting divorced because he’s a cheating asshole, and he still thinks he has the right to order me around? To demand that I do things his way simply because that’s the way he wants it done? Simply because I’ve always bent over backward to make him happy before, no matter how unreasonable his demands were?
“I’m not signing anything until you tell me the real reason you’re trying to rush me, Karl.”
My God, I actually made my own demand. I fist-pump the air. Sure, it took an entire bottle of wine to muster up the courage, but it’s a victory nonetheless.
Karl must be as shocked as I am at my tone because for once in our miserable marriage, he tells me the bald-faced truth and leaves out the side order of gaslighting.
“Sasha and I are planning on getting married,” he says. “We want to set up an appointment for a marriage license, and we can’t do that until the divorce papers are signed.”