My Husband's Girlfriend Read Free Page A

mistaking my silence for weakness, thinking I’m a stupid, defenseless wife who never fights. I’ve learned to pick my battles, and I guess Vette couldn’t understand that, just like she couldn’t understand my wanting to create a nursery for Neil’s son.
    “If we have a room here,” I explain to her, “then Neil won’t have an excuse to go over there with
her,
right?”
    “There you go again. Why can’t you just say her name?
Danielle.
Her name sounds a little like
Neil.
How cute,” Sharvette says sarcastically.
    I jump up out the bed and balance a tray in my hand that holds my glass, a fork, and an empty plate.
    “Oh, so you wanna go wash dishes now, huh? You’re a real trip.” Sharvette hands me her juice glass and I stare into its emptiness.
    “No, I take that back, Anya. You are a journey.”

2
----
    Neil
    When my son was first born, I stared at him like he was a newly discovered
treasure. And he was. I love my daughter, Reese, but fathering a son makes me feel like I’ve done something right for a change. Now, I’m not so stupid that I think having a son redeems me from my sins, but his birth was the most positive thing that’s happened in a long time.
    So many stressful events have gone down, sometimes I feel like I’m living someone else’s life and I’ve been looking through their window. If anyone would have told me I’d be skanking it up with a young project secretary and we’d eventually have a baby together, no way I’d believe it.
    But sometimes instead of watching the movie, your life becomes the movie. And here I am, thirty-six years old, graduated from high school at age sixteen, supposedly intelligent (MBA from UT-Austin), gainfully employed (fourteen years’ experience at Texas Medical Center, pulling in six figures a year), a member of a well-known church called Solomon’s Temple, and I have so much anguish, I fear being around firearms, butcher knives, or large skillets. Things that are already dangerous look more menacing. So everything around me becomes suspect even if I don’t want it to be.
    Overall, Anya seems to be holding up well. She hasn’t said a lot lately. When she’s not rearing our daughter, she stays busy vacuuming, dusting, Windexing, cooking, washing and folding clothes, and even doing gardening (and she hates getting her hands dirty). But I know my wife. She only cleans when she’s livid. She takes to a broom when she’s upset. All nervous energy. It’s either clean or scream, and I’d rather come home to a spotless house than a woman who has her mouth wide open and is shouting profanities as loud as she can. Don’t get me wrong. Our getting into it doesn’t happen every day, but it’s happened enough for me to detect that thick level of tension inside our home.
    At first I wanted to run from my problems, just up and leave Anya, quit my job and start all over, maybe in Atlanta or someplace where there’s so many people that I’d feel invisible. But I’ve decided to stick around. I want to “be a man.” Not turn into a loser who takes to a bottle seven days a week, crying in my beer, and living inside my pain.
    Call me idealistic, but I also want to be a good father to my precious new son and try to balance things with Danielle in a civilized manner. What helps me cope is the fact that Dani is so chilly, so cool. She’s sweet, smart, and most important, she’ll kiss but won’t tell.
    When she got pregnant and started wearing maternity clothes at work, I told her I could act happy for her, but she shouldn’t expect more than that. I could play the concerned-coworker role around the office, but no, I didn’t want my supervisor or colleagues to know I was the daddy. That would be suicide without the gun. And I was relieved when Danielle said, “Sure, no prob.” She never hemmed me up for money, didn’t ask for a commitment; she never begged for much of anything. Being there when our son was born was the least I could do. Plus, I am proud of