Once More With Feeling Read Free Page A

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    ‘Do we really want to drag all this out?’ Tim asked, interrupting my favourite fantasy, which featured him somewhat bruised and battered and writhing on his stomach in the driveway. In the rain.
    He smiled in that way that made his blue eyes dance and his dimples show. He reached over and put his handover mine, right there in front of half of the town, and I thawed a little bit, like a fool.
See?
I wanted to shout at all the pricked ears and averted eyes that surrounded us.
See? We are still a
we!
We are!
    ‘Are we
those
people?’ he asked softly.
    And I still wanted to impress him. I still wanted to show him that
I
wasn’t the one who was unreasonable, who made impossible demands.
I
could never be
those people
, whoever they were. Just like I could never be the notoriously demanding, high-maintenance, haughty and sister-betraying Carolyn.
    A week or so after that, Tim and I met to discuss the
shape
our divorce would take. It could be so much worse, I told myself, as we sat there awkwardly in a more secluded mid-range restaurant this time, a gesture that I found suspicious at best, as Tim was not the sort to think of such things. I was the partner in our marriage responsible for
gestures
. I could feel the controlling, deceitful hand of Carolyn hovering over everything, and told myself
that
was why I couldn’t bring myself to so much as pick at the warm bread the waiter had delivered to the table in a big, fragrant basket.
    We would save ourselves the trauma of a long, drawn-out, agonizing divorce proceeding, Tim said. I wouldn’t fight him for anything, he said,
right, Sarah
? Because
we
weren’t like that.
We
were reasonable, logical people, and a big battle over hurt feelings – well, who did that serve?
We
could share everything. The law practice too, of course!Why should our careers take a hit simply because our marriage hadn’t worked out as we’d planned?
    We, we, we
. I felt
noble
. I nodded along, earnestly. He’d cheated on me,
in my own bed, with my sister
, and yet I sat at the tiny table too close to the busy kitchen and felt
gracious. I’ll show him how reasonable and logical I am
, I thought fiercely, as if our divorce were a competition and I could actually win it.
    And I was sure that when this insanity with Carolyn died down, Tim would wake up from this spell he was under and remember just how easy I’d made all of this. He might even
thank
me, I thought smugly. I drove back to our dark, empty home with visions of Tim’s thanks dancing in my head, like bloated pre-Thanksgiving sugarplums.
    Shockingly, the thanks didn’t come.
    But … it could be worse, right? Luckily, everyone I knew was appalled. Scandalized and horrified. They told me so at the supermarket, at stoplights. The joys of living in a mid-sized village in the Hudson Valley were that everyone I met in the course of my day knew the whole of my business. More to the point, they also knew all there was to know about Carolyn. And there was so much to know. Carolyn’s entire history of shocking, self-obsessed, her-needs-above-all-else behaviour, was laid out and dissected in detail over the produce section in the grocery or in the shampoo aisle at the drugstore, and, everyone agreed, no one could possibly trust that Tim now that he’d proved himself to be such a terrible judge of character …
    Until Carolyn announced their wedding plans, to take place in roughly six months, which was, I couldn’t help but note, just about how long it took to get a no-contest divorce in the state of New York.
The minute the divorce goes through
, is what she meant when she waxed rhapsodic about a June wedding. I wondered if there was fancy wording for that sentiment that she could include on the invitations.
    If so, I felt certain that Carolyn would find it. And use it, with as much shame as she’d exhibited thus far: none.
    ‘I know that somewhere deep inside of you – even if it’s buried right now – you’ll understand that we