EIGHT
The house I had been desperate to keep suddenly became the most unbearable place I could imagine being.
“You can come stay with me in New York for a while,” Zoe had said the day after Thanksgiving. I had managed to pull myself off the floor before she and Jack got home from dropping off Rose, and I had not told either of them what had transpired with Adam. But they were smart enough to know that his walking around the neighborhood on an eighteen-degree night meant it couldn’t have ended well. Now instead of gloating that she had told me so, my daughter was inviting me to disrupt her overpacked schedule.
“I really appreciate the offer, sweetie,” I said to Zoe. “And maybe I’ll take you up on it at some point. But I can’t just call off work and fly to New York right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because Terry is counting on me to be at work.”
I could tell she was trying hard not to roll her eyes at me. “Screw Terry. For once in your life, Mom, it would do you good to focus on what you want.”
I had done exactly that with Adam, and look where that had landed me. “Zoe Halfmoon Harris, that is not appropriate,” I said.
She scrunched up her nose. “Yeah, well, screw Terry, and screw Dad, too. I don’t know what happened between you, but I know it wasn’t good.”
No, it wasn’t. I felt like I had been buried up to my neck in the sand and was watching the tide begin to roll in. But I didn’t want to give my children reasons to resent their father. “I’m going to be fine,” I told Zoe. “Just wait and see.”
The afternoon after Jack and Zoe returned to New York, I drifted through the house like a ghost, a large glass of wine in hand. Five o’clock was hours away, but what was the point of self-care now?
Once bustling with noise and activity and real live humans, our home had become a museum of Harris family history. The faded red walls of Adam’s home office bore dark rectangles where his diplomas had hung. Our bedroom was strewn with clothes, which I could not bring myself to hang in my half-empty closet; across the hall, Jack’s bedroom was stuffed with belongings that he swore he would retrieve as soon as he settled down. Then I let myself into Zoe’s room. The quilt Rose had paid someone to sew using fabric scraps from Zoe’s old baby clothes was draped across her daybed. The sight of it made me want to weep. I had been so fortunate to raise two healthy, interesting children, but my fortune seemed to resurrect as loss. How had it all flown by so fast?
Zoe had taken most of the framed photos from her old dresser, but had left behind one of Adam, Jack, Zoe, and me, decked in outlandish Christmas sweaters that Adam’s brother, Rick, had bought us as gag gifts.
It was a rare photo of me, and I had been ridiculously happy when it was taken. Of course I had; I had been with the people I loved most.
I was still staring at the photo when the phone rang. I assumed it would be Rose. But caller ID revealed a local number I didn’t recognize, and I was curious enough to pick up.
“May I please speak with Maggie Harris?” The person on the other end sounded like she was going to ask me to share a few pertinent details about my identity so that an almost-legit-sounding company would claim to lower my mortgage rate while enabling a woman in Arizona to purchase bedazzled Victoria’s Secret thongs using a credit card registered in my name.
“Yes,” I said cautiously. “May I ask who this is?”
“This is Barbara Kline from Bridgewater Travel. I’m calling on behalf of Mark Johnson, who arranged your upcoming trip to Rome. Mark is no longer with the company, so I’ll be working with you from here on out.”
The woman may as well have reached through the phone and slapped me, and I stood there blinking. In the chaos of the past few months, I had completely forgotten about the romantic trip I had planned back when I was under the impression Adam and I were happily married.
“Maggie?” said Barbara kindly.
“Um. My husband and I—” Don’t have a future together. “We can’t go anymore,” I said, and took a swig of my wine.
“That’s a shame. Are you absolutely sure? Of all the trips I’ve put together, the Rome excursion is one of my absolute favorites. Even in December, you’ll still have plenty of sun, and because it’s not high tourist season it’s one of the best times to see the popular destinations like the Colosseum and the Vatican.” Barbara paused. “I’m sure Mark told you this, but unfortunately, the deposit is nonrefundable.”
Rome was supposed to be our big trip—the one Adam and I had been waiting for. International travel was out of the question when the kids were young, and later their teenage schedules and Adam’s unceasing workload made it only slightly more feasible, which is to say it never happened.
When Jack went to college, Adam and I had flown to Argentina for a week; the day after I arrived, Jack had a meningitis scare that turned out to be an especially bad case of the flu, and though Rose was able to step in and we didn’t fly back early, I had been racked with guilt the entire time. That put us off long flights for a while.
But with the kids officially on their own, last year Adam and I decided we would finally do it up properly for our next anniversary. Rome was Adam’s idea—he had visited with his parents when he was young and wanted to return. I was eager to see the frescoes painted on cathedral ceilings and dine on pasta that had been made that day.
Mostly, though, I was looking forward to a week with my husband in which legal caseloads and grocery runs and the countless humdrum demands of our everyday life were not present. It was supposed to be a chance for us to connect the way we used to and, I secretly hoped, to rekindle our flame.
“Are you sure my husband didn’t cancel in time for a refund?” I asked Barbara. It wasn’t like Adam to forget something like that. Then again, it wasn’t like him to be a bald-faced liar and ruiner of lives, either, so what did I know?
“Unfortunately so. I attempted to contact him earlier in the month and didn’t hear back. I’ve tried to call you a few times as well, with no success. Did you get the email I sent last week?”
I had not, probably because I hadn’t opened my computer. Nor had I bothered to listen to my voicemail; I was too wrapped up in preparing for Thanksgiving and my ill-fated reunion with Adam.
I wandered from Zoe’s room back into my bedroom and sat down on the bed. The mattress was a lumpy old queen. I had wanted to replace it with a king for years but had read online that a smaller bed was better for marital intimacy. (So much for that theory.) Lord, how I had come to hate this space.
I was about to tell Barbara that we would have to forfeit the deposit when Zoe’s words came back to me: “For once in your life, Mom, it would do you good to focus on what you want.” I still wanted to go to Rome. So why shouldn’t I? “Since the deposit is nonrefundable, is there any chance you could change the reservation?”
“I may be able to do so, depending on availability. Are you and your husband eyeing a particular week?”
“Actually, it would just be for one person. Me.” Adam wasn’t the only one who had gone and lost his mind. But if there was ever a time to act irrationally, it was now.
“Of course,” said Barbara, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a hint of glee in her voice. She added, “I love taking trips on my own.”
I had not traveled on my own for leisure since—ever. “Really?”
“Oh yes,” she twittered. “There’s nothing better than exploring by yourself. The places you’ll go, the people you’ll meet—you just don’t have the same sort of serendipity when you’re traveling in a pair. Of course, as a woman you must be careful.”
Spontaneously signing on to a solo trip to Rome—which I would need Adam to pay for, even if he didn’t yet know that—was 180 degrees from careful. But I had spent my whole life avoiding risk, and a fat lot of good that had done me.
“I’ll do my best,” I told Barbara. “How soon can I go?”
“One second.” Barbara put me on hold. When she returned, she said she could arrange for me to leave in a week and a half if I was willing to pay a $200 change fee. (I wasn’t, but Adam would have to.) Then she went over the itinerary to see if I wanted to adjust any of my plans.
Adam and I had settled on a relatively unstructured trip that included a few guided tours. I told Barbara I would skip the Vatican trip we had signed up for—I could see that on my own—but keep the ancient-ruins expedition. “You know,” said Barbara, just before we got off the phone, “the last time I was in Rome, I went on this wonderful culinary tour in Testaccio. It’s one of the best food neighborhoods in the city, and it isn’t as touristy as Campo de’ Fiori or Trastevere. You’ll go to a traditional Roman bakery, a restaurant that only serves pasta, a cheesemonger—”
“Sold,” I said. “Please put it on my husband’s credit card.”
I hung up feeling simultaneously triumphant and terrified. I was almost as excited about Rome as I had been about seeing Adam at Thanksgiving—but this time he wouldn’t be there to deliver yet another unpleasant surprise.
Except . . . who was I, heading across the Atlantic on my own and sticking my almost ex-husband with the bill?
I didn’t know anymore. But maybe I would find out in Italy.
When I got to work that afternoon, I told Terry I would need to take the second week of December off.
“I would have appreciated a little more notice,” he said stiffly, holding up a crown for inspection.
I almost said I was sorry for springing my vacation on him, but it wasn’t true. “Terry, I haven’t taken a nonholiday off in almost two years, and this time of year is always incredibly slow. Besides, it’s kind of an emergency.”
He kept staring at the porcelain tooth. “Are you having a health problem?”
“Yes. Menopause,” I said dryly. I wasn’t sure what had gotten into me, but I was not in the mood for Terry.
He placed the tooth back in its case. “That’s not amusing.”
What was not amusing was that a medical professional either didn’t know or didn’t care that the question he had just posed was illegal. “May I have the time off or not?” I said.
Terry turned to me. “Maggie,” he said, his voice as cold as his blue eyes, “I ask for very little from you.”
This was untrue. In the past three years, Terry had required me to learn two new accounting systems—both of which, as I had warned him, were useless and quickly abandoned—on my own time. He also routinely asked me to stay an extra fifteen minutes to run a payroll report or do some other task that could have waited, and on every single occasion had to be reminded why my paycheck was slightly higher than normal.
Of course, Terry asked very little about me, and maybe that’s what he had actually meant. Inappropriate health question aside, I could not think of a single occasion in which he had inquired about my personal life. To him, I might as well have been a Waterpik. Or, you know—invisible. “So is that a no?” I said, cocking my head.
Terry, who seemed taken aback by the way I was looking at him, cleared his throat. “Yes.”
Something strange was brewing in me. It almost as though all of the anger I had bottled up after Adam left had been fermenting and was now far more potent. “I’m not actually clear on what your yes means, but I’m going to plan on not being here. I’ll put in extra time this week and the beginning of next to make sure everything is set up so there are minimal interruptions.”
He was peering at me over the edge of his bifocals. “I don’t think that’s the best way to keep your employer happy, do you, Maggie?”
I glanced around the office for a moment, considering my next move. Then I said brightly, “Well, Terry, as it happens, I’m finding that trying to keep other people happy isn’t working out so well for me. And in fact, this place makes me the opposite of happy, and your patronizing response to my simple vacation request put that in stark perspective.”
I opened my desk drawer, retrieved the pens I had purchased for myself because Terry stocked the kind that bled all over your hand, and carefully closed the drawer again. Then I removed my key to the dentist office from my keychain and put it on my desk next to a discarded X-ray. Terry was still staring at me over his glasses. I smiled at him like the crazy person I had become. “Best of luck to you, Terry,” I said. “I quit.”