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He cut a sharp glance in my direction.
“I didn’t say I could live with the arrangement and be with you, but I won’t fault you for your honesty.”
“It wasn’t her.”
“But you did sleep with someone else.” Each word was a bullet. “I don’t need you to tell me anymore.”
“Please.”
“Please what? Please take your confession like I’m your priest? Please forgive you? Please what?” I hissed and dropped the cloth.
“Take my confession. Absolve me of my sins. Forgive me.”
“Your sins are your own and I don’t want to hear it. You can wear that weight alone. I don’t want to know. In fact, I need not to. I don’t want to see a picture of her, I don’t want to imagine what it was like—the two of you together. What you were thinking about her, if you thought about me, if I matter to you. If I’m as pretty as she is. If she’s skinny and if that’s why you wanted to fuck her instead of me. No, I don’t want it.”
Even though I already knew that it was April he’d been with. If he didn’t speak it aloud, I could pretend it wasn’t true. It was still all circumstantial until it spewed out of his mouth like that gallon of rye he’d drank and the stench would hang in the air just the same.
I hated her in that moment. I hated her so much I could taste it like the coppery tang of blood on my tongue.
“I don’t want it either and it’s rotten, Claire. Rotten and sour.”
“Whatever you did isn’t something that happened to you. It’s something that you did all on your own. You did it, you chose to do it. No one had a gun to your head.”
“You did.”
I snorted. “What are you talking about?
“Losing you. It was the gun to my head and I just pulled the trigger.”
“You’re so full of shit you can’t even smell it anymore.” I fled back to my room and if I was smelling my own bullshit, I’d admit that I wanted him to chase me.
I wanted him to say that he was sorry, it had all been a lie, some kind of test—and I guessed it was a test.
April would say he just needed to be saved. He needed to be loved no matter what.
I did love him. I wouldn’t stop loving him.
But could I live with him banging other women every time he felt the least bit insecure so he could test me?
No. I couldn’t.
The distance that had started as a small fracture had been like the dancing of tectonic plates. There wasn’t just a small creek between us now, it was a glacial gorge. There’d be no shoving us back together.
I shook my head at the train of my thoughts. That was overdramatic and theatrical. Adults weren’t supposed to behave that way, but I wasn’t feeling much like an adult. This growing up business was bullshit.
I never thought I would miss being a kid. I couldn’t wait to grow up because when I grew up, I was going to do “all the things.” At least, that’s what I told myself while I was watching cartoons. I was going to be beautiful and rich, I was going to have a great job, and I was never, ever going to treat my kids the way my mother treated me.
I was going to have babies and I was going to love them so much that they couldn’t help but know they were amazing. And I’d never make them write down what they ate on a piece of paper, I’d never judge them for what they put in their mouths or how much.
A memory of a forgotten Sunday dinner washed over me—all the long hours in the kitchen with my mother. All the delicious things laid out to tease and tantalize, and I could have none of it.
It was all for some new man she’d met and she was afraid that he wouldn’t want her if he knew she had a fat daughter. I wasn’t allowed to eat for two days, fasting, she’d said. As if three days of only drinking water would make up for eating only macaroni breakfast, lunch and dinner for weeks on end so she could afford to have cigarettes, pedicures and get her hair done.
And as if having a fat daughter was worse than being one of those women who couldn’t define herself without a man.
I remembered the way my mother always smelled of that Dollar Store perfume and in that moment, I almost missed her.
Because it would be her voice in my head telling me if I could just lose some weight, life would be so much better. It was easier to hear it in her voice than my own.
Her voice I could ignore.
But I supposed it really was her voice—it had taken up residence in my body like a parasite, suckling all the joy out of everything like marrow from my bones. The worst part was that I’d let it and I didn’t know how to make it stop.
14
I couldn’t avoid April forever, even though I wanted to. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just leave it alone. I was done.
