Once More With Feeling Read Free

sweats and a navy-blue zip-up hooded sweatshirt, breathing in the competing scents of burnt coffee beans and warm milk, while staring at my husband, the man I had chosen to
spend the rest of my life with
, forced to contemplate the possibility that he was a complete and total stranger to me. Or, alternatively, a zombie in Carolyn’s evil thrall.
    I preferred the latter explanation, if I was honest.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I felt as if I choked on the words, but my voice sounded normal enough, if a little unhealthily high. Also, I wasn’t sorry. I cleared my throat. ‘Did you just call sleeping with my sister “this unpleasantness”?’ I laughed slightly. It felt like a saw and sounded worse. ‘Because I can think of other words.’
    Tim sighed. I knew every line of his boyishly handsome face, every single expression he was capable of producing, and I knew that one, too. I assured myself I was reading him wrong. Because if anyone had the right to look
resigned
, it was not him.
    ‘Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be, Sarah,’ he said. Gently, but with that undercurrent of exasperation to which he was not in the least bit entitled. Then he smiled. ‘We’re better than that, aren’t we?’
    I was ashamed of how much I clung to that, how muchmy heart swelled and my breath caught. His use of the word
we
.
    Long after we’d separated with an awkward almost-hug in the chilly parking lot, long after I had returned to the empty house on the hill and got back to the important work of hollowing out the perfect position on the sofa cushions to hold me as I brooded and shoved things in my mouth without thought, I still turned it over and over in my head.
We
. A word that did not, could not, had never, included Carolyn.
We
.
    Tim did not call or stop by to reiterate any of the things I felt sure were lurking there in that one, meaningful syllable.
We
. But I still thought it was only a matter of time before the impossibility of living with Carolyn – because he’d told me that, too, that the two of them were now
living together
in that damned bed and breakfast, right there in the centre of town where every single person we knew would be sure to see them – became clear to him. How could it not? No one could live with Carolyn. In the sixth grade I had moved down into the largely unfinished basement of our parents’ house so that I would no longer have to share the upstairs bedroom with her mood swings and melodramatic demands. College and post-college roommates, boyfriends, even that insufferable hippy she’d been engaged to briefly during her strange period in Portland, Oregon – everyone agreed that Carolyn was too selfish, too immature, too
adolescent
to live with.
    I held onto that when Tim asked to meet again, abouttwo months after he’d moved out, to discuss the quick, no-fault divorce he thought we should get. As if it were something we could just pick up downtown together from one of the specialty shops, as easy as that.
    ‘It seems to me that there is a fault,’ I said after Tim presented me with all the paperwork and explained that this was the best way out of what he called
the situation
. As if our marriage were a preposterous guy from New Jersey, all steroids and terrible hair, soon to be discarded and forgotten. He sat there as if his own faux-leather Starbucks chair were perfectly comfortable, and I had the near-uncontainable urge to throw my not-nearly-foamy-enough pumpkin spice Halloween latte at his head. ‘Your fault, in fact.’
    I actually thought it was Carolyn’s fault, but I also thought that there was a lot of grovelling Tim could do – like, any – before I let him know I understood that. I had elaborate fantasies of his extended apologies, all of which I would eventually, graciously, accept with varying degrees of longsuffering
goodness
, and all of which involved him on his knees. Or prostrate before me on a public street. In tears, of course.
Begging me to take him