Starting Over by Mia Malone

 

Prologue

Starting over

Rosie

Ten minutes to midnight, I decided on my New Year’s resolution.

“Next year, I won’t be this lonely,” I mumbled and tried to smile, which I failed completely at.

It sucked to hear the fireworks outside. Hurt to know that people were hugging and laughing while I was alone, curled up in bed with my dog.

No one had sent me cheery wishes of future happiness yet, but my grandmother had called earlier in the day, and my children would text me.

I told the kids that I wanted to be at home, didn’t feel like socializing, wanted the dog to be in a safe place... but the truth was that no one asked me what I was going to do or if I wanted to join them.

I’m not a bad person and honestly thought there were people who liked me.

It made me feel a little bit stupid to realize that for more than twenty-five years, there were a lot of people I thought were my friends, and all that time, I was just someone they tolerated so they could hang out with Saint Richard.

My ex-husband isn’t a saint, of course, but listening to them, I sometimes wondered if they knew him at all.

Or me.

Richard is a good man with a fantastic capacity for listening and saying exactly what you want to hear. He always agrees with just about anything, and when he doesn’t agree, he simply smiles and nods and waits patiently until someone changes the topic.

This makes him very pleasant to be around and an absolutely fantastic friend, but in all honesty, a pretty crappy husband.

Back when we talked about things, he used to rant about how angry he was when he didn’t get that promotion he wanted or how disappointed he was with the opinions some of our friends and all of his family held. I learned over the years to never say anything to anyone about what he told me because if I did, he just mumbled something about a misunderstanding and smiled sweetly.

Making me look like a fool at best and, more often, an ass.

So, instead, I listened to what he talked about at our kitchen table after a little too much wine and smiled back at him, murmuring something inane about how I knew how he felt.

The thing is, I did know how he felt and often agreed with him. I just couldn’t for the life of me understand why he simply sat back and did absolutely fucking nothing about it.

He knew that and was quite happy with me communicating every decision and every goddamned piece of bad news to our kids, or family, or yeah... anyone, really.

And it followed a similar script every time.

Friend: We’d love it if you could come for a dinner-thing we have next Saturday. We’ll have some drinks, and I know it’s a long drive, but you can stay the night.

Richard: That would be nice!

Me (in a mumble): Charlie has that tennis thing, remember?

Friend: Great! We’ll fire up the grill, make some ribs.

Richard: I love ribs, and <friend’s husband> cooks them to perfection.

Friend: That is such a lovely thing to say.

Me: Except, Charlie has a tennis game early that Sunday morning.

Friend: It’s fantastic that your kids are so active!

Richard: They are amazing. I’m so proud of them!

Friend: You are such a great dad, Richard! Couldn’t one of the other parents pick up Charlie?

Richard (looking expectantly at me): Rosie?

Me (wondering if he’d had a mini-stroke and forgotten what he’d said to our daughter a few weeks earlier): I’m afraid not.

Friend: Are you sure? It would be so much fun if you came!

Richard: You always have such great parties.

Friend: Thank you! So, why don’t you –

Me (fed up with the whole situation): Yes, I agree. It would have been great, but Charlie is playing in the club championship, and we promised to be there.

Richard: Did we?

Me: Yes.

Friend (side glance at me): Maybe you could find a solution? It would be so much fun!

Richard: We’ll talk about it and get back to you.

Me (next day, on the phone, after fifteen minutes of Richard talking about how his ribs were better anyway and how much he looked forward to watching our daughter play): Hey, I just wanted to confirm that we’re so sorry, but we won’t be able to join you for dinner.

Friend: Huh.

So, to everyone around us, I was the one calling the shots. They didn’t realize that the shots were ours and not mine, and I didn’t know how to tell them without sounding like a whiny bitch.

Our friends sometimes said something flippantly about how masculine I was and how surprised everyone was when they met me and saw how girly I looked. Then they laughed as if it had all been a great joke. Except, they weren’t jokes, or perhaps just not funny ones.

Not to me, at least.

I also wanted to be the nice one who smiled and agreed.

And I also wanted to get drunk and dance.

We’d been to plenty of parties over the years, so I could have, of course, but we had the girls and the dogs, and I felt that someone needed to be responsible. It hadn’t felt right to get sloshed in front of the kiddos or be tired, angry, and hung over the next day. At least not both of us, so I mostly ended up the designated driver.

Sure, Richard drove us home sometimes, but somehow it was always from the kind of couples’ dinners where they served a glass of white with the starter and another one /possibly red, which I didn’t like/ with the entree.

He isn’t an alcoholic, far from it, but he likes a good party.

I used to like a good party too.

After more than twenty years with Richard, I wasn’t even sure how to be that person anymore, but I wanted to find her again.

She had been fun.

I liked her a lot more than the woman I was now.

So did our friends, apparently, because when Richard and I decided to split up and told everyone that we were friends and how there were no sides in this divorce, they all smiled and nodded.

And invited him to their get-togethers.

Then he crashed with his bike three months after our divorce.

Initially, it seemed that the consequences would be devastating, and everyone rallied around me as I tried to hold everything together. The kids were so scared, his parents completely devastated, and no one seemed to know about his health insurance or where to find the paperwork. For the sake of my children, I stepped in and handled all the practicalities. The first week, I got so many text messages and ran out of vases for all the flowers delivered to my home. In the middle of everything going on, it felt good to know that I had that, at least.

When they slowly woke Richard up a week later, flowers started arriving at the hospital. Two months later, when he was back in his condo and living life much like he had before his mishap with the Harley, my phone was silent again.

And then it was New Year’s Eve, and I was curled up on my bed with a dog I relied on a little bit more than what probably was healthy.

“Next year,” I mumbled and slid a hand over the soft hair on Blue’s back. “We won’t be this lonely next year, Blue. I promise.”