My One and Only

“I see,” he said softly. And he started walking again, but he took off his coat and threw it on the ground behind him, and the gesture broke my heart.

“Nick? Please! I’m sorry.”

He didn’t stop, or pause, or answer. I followed, picking up his coat but feeling unworthy to wear it. I was ridiculous in my shiny silver tank top and high heels, teetering after my furious husband. I was also full of self-hatred. And last but not least…I was utterly terrified.

And if there was one feeling I hated more than any other, it was being scared.

You know, he’s got some nerve, a small, evil part of my brain whispered. The seeds of resentment that had been festering for the past few months suddenly found fertile soil, replacing the abject terror and sense of doom. After all, Nick was a fine one to be mad. Really, Nick was feeling abandoned? Nick? I was the one who’d been dropped into a huge city and basically patted on the head and told to go off and play and not to bother the grown-ups. I was the one whose husband had no time for me. Of course I’d found friends. Of course I’d been hungry for some attention. He sure as hell wasn’t giving me any. My box had been checked! When was the last time Nick and I had had a real conversation, huh? He didn’t want real conversations. Not with me. Nope, I was just there to do his laundry, keep the fridge stocked and be available for a quickie in the middle of the night. Some marriage. No wonder I hadn’t talked about it! Who could blame me?

Oh, Harper, don’t do this, the better angel said, but it was easier—so much easier—to be the victim. And so I built the case against Nick—I really was meant to be a lawyer—and found myself innocent. I’d made a mistake, yes, but not a huge one. Definitely forgivable, but what about his sins, huh? I let the righteous anger grow while Nick’s figure grew smaller and smaller as the distance between us grew. Fine. He didn’t want to hear what I had to say? Fine. That was nothing new, was it?

New York was quiet on a Monday night; Tribeca deserted at this late hour. Sirens, almost constant in the city, blared uptown. A single sheet of newspaper tumbled down the cobbled street, the only thing keeping me company. A bitter wind blew off the Hudson, cutting into me, bringing the smell of blood from the meatpacking companies on the West Side Highway.

By the time I reached our apartment building, Nick was already inside. I could see his dark head in the fourth-floor window—our bedroom. I let the door slam behind me and stomped up the stairs, wanting Nick to know I was primed for a fight. Opened the door to our apartment, walked briskly through the tiny kitchen and went into the bedroom.

He was furious, crackling with energy.

And he was packing.

Every thought was immediately sucked from my head. My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I watched as Nick packed with brutal efficiency. Jeans, in. Sweaters, in. T-shirts, socks, boxers…into the suitcases we’d been given for a wedding gift, suitcases that hadn’t yet been used.

The last time I’d watched someone pack this way was on my thirteenth birthday. He was leaving me, and terror rose up so fast and hard, I thought I might faint…gray speckled my vision and my legs wanted to buckle and my neck wasn’t strong enough to hold my head.

And then, just like that, something inside my heart shut off. My vision cleared. My legs and neck worked just fine. Maybe—maybe if I had fainted, or flung myself on him, if I’d begged him to forgive me, if I’d sobbed out how much I loved him—maybe we would’ve made it through that night.

But I wasn’t really the sobbing, flinging type.

“So I guess till death do us part…that was just for fun?” I said. It was the wrong thing to lead with. Obviously.

He didn’t deign to look at me. “I’m staying at Peter’s tonight.”

“For longer than tonight, from the looks of it.”

“How long have you worked there, Harper? Two months? Three?” He moved to the minuscule closet and swept out his shirts, hangers and all. “You never, never found a second to tell your best buds that you were married? Not once? In three f**king months?”

“Maybe I would have, Nick, if you’d come around. Ever.” My voice was cool.

“No wonder that douchebag was kissing you,” Nick went on. “Why not? You’re free and clear, right?” His eyes dropped to my na**d left hand, and his eyes seemed to flinch at the absence there. “Jesus, Harper,” he said, and his voice broke, and the case against him took a serious blow.

I bit my lip. “Nick, look. I’m really sorry, I am. It’s just…I just felt so freakish—”

“Freakish?”

“Well…yes! It’s just…you’re never here, Nick! You didn’t want to listen to how lonely I was, you didn’t care, all you do is work—”

“I’m trying to build a life for us, Harper!” he yelled. “Working so we could have a decent future!”

“I know, but, Nick, I just didn’t expect it to be all or noth—”

“I have to do this! I thought you understood!” He threw a pair of shoes into the suitcase. “No wonder you’ve been so…distant. You’ve been—”

“Me? Me, distant, Nick? Seriously?”

“—playing around with some 30-year-old loser who’s still waiting tables, trying to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up.”

“Not that I was playing with anyone, Nick, but could you blame me? You’re the one who was on fire to get married, and before the first week is out, you barely remember to come home.” I was yelling, too, both of us runaway trains, unable to stop.

He slammed the bureau drawer closed.

“Nick,” I said in one last effort to stay calm, to make him see, to make him stay. “Nick. Look. It was stupid and immature—”

“Stupid and immature, okay, so that’s a start, Harper. How about deceitful? How about manipulative? How about unfaithful?”

“I didn’t cheat on you! That guy, he just…kissed me. I didn’t want him to, he just did!”

“Right.”

My jaw clenched. “Okay. Believe what you want, Nick. You haven’t listened to me for months, why would you now, right?”

Ivan of the Cabbages banged on his ceiling. “Quiet, eediots!” he yelled. Nick continued stuffing his clothes into a suitcase.

“You erased me, Harper,” he said. “I don’t even exist in your life.”

“Right back at you, Nick,” I bit out.

“How can you say that?” he barked, slamming closed the lid of the suitcase. “Your picture is all over my office! Everyone knows you at my firm. You’re all I ever talk about!”

“And why is that, Nick? Because it makes you look good to have a little wife tucked away at home?”

“This is pointless,” he said, moving into the bathroom. He clattered around, grabbing his toothbrush, razor, shaving cream. He was leaving me. After that full-court press to convince me to marry him a month after college graduation, after countering all my fears with assurances that we’d last forever, after all I’d put up with since our wedding day, Nick was leaving me. The first major bump in the road, and the whole “for better or worse” clause was just flushed right down the toilet. My chest felt so tight I couldn’t breathe, and my face was burning hot.

I should’ve known. I should never have believed.

He yanked open the front door and banged down the stairs, suitcase in tow. I followed wordlessly. My brain was a roaring mess. A cab—shit, he must’ve called a cab, he was really leaving!—turned the corner and slowed in front of our building.

Nick turned to me, jaw clenched, eyes hot with anger. “You never believed we’d work, and guess what, Harper? You seem to be right. Good for you. I’ll be at Pete’s. Go back to the restaurant. Have fun with your waiter.”

At those words, I yanked off the wedding ring from my right hand and threw it at him, and the ring…my beautiful, lovely, special ring…bounced off his chest, went into the gutter and rolled into a storm drain.

“Nicely put,” Nick said, and with that, he got into the cab, and not two seconds later, he was gone.

I didn’t remember going back inside, but obviously, I did, because some time later, I was sitting on the kitchen floor, shaking so hard my teeth chattered. I didn’t fully realize I’d called anyone till I heard the groggy voice on the other end, the voice of the one I knew would help me. “I need you to come get me,” I whispered. “You okay?”

“No.”

“I’m on my way.” No questions asked. Probably, no questions needed.

I filed for divorce the very next day, sobbing for only the second time in ten years, sitting in Theo’s office. But it was for the best. Sometimes the heart needed time to accept what the head already knew.

Nick and I weren’t going to make it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

BY THE TIME WE STOPPED for the night after yes, visiting the world’s largest penguin statue, I was a little fried—from sitting in the wind and sun all afternoon, and from the memories of our brief, doomed marriage. Nick, too, was quiet, though polite.

The town we stopped in was microscopic, only one intersection (no stoplight), a town hall, a church, a hamburger stand called Charlie’s Burger Box and adjacent motel with four units, all unoccupied. Nick paid for both our rooms.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“No problem,” he answered.

“Make sure you check out the dinosaur footprints,” the clerk told us, giving me a wink. “Real big. And mind the forecast. Might get some snow later tomorrow.”

“Will do,” Nick and I said in unison. We glanced at each other, then looked away.

“Where are you folks from?” the clerk asked.

“New York,” Nick said as I said, “Massachusetts.”

“Oh, yeah? I went to Harvard.”

“I went to Tufts Law,” I answered, and we had a lovely chat about the wonders of Boston, while Nick stood silently, only contributing an eye-roll as the clerk and I anticipated a Red Sox sweep of the Yankees during an upcoming series. As Charlie’s Burger Box was the only restaurant in town, we ate there, the Harvard-educated clerk amiably doubling as the cook as he told us about working as an investment banker amassing and losing millions, then coming back home to Montana. “Never been happier,” he said. “You folks enjoy.” He passed us our tray of burgers and fries, then went back to the motel.

Nick and I ate at the picnic table at the edge of the small parking lot. Coco sat next to me, statuelike, waiting, waiting for a bite of burger, inhaling it with a snap of her cute little mouth. Occasionally, a pickup truck rattled down the road, but otherwise, we didn’t see many people.

“So is this what you pictured for your drive across country?” I asked, wiping my mouth with a paper napkin.

“Pretty much,” Nick said, not looking at me.

“Really?”

“Except for bringing you to the airport, yes. Small towns, farmland, the heart’s blood of our great nation and all that.”

“Said the boy from Brooklyn,” I added. “Who, as I recall, couldn’t get along with a simple sheep.”

It was true…one of the times Nick had visited me the summer I worked in Connecticut, we’d gone to a petting farm in the country. A sheep, assuming that Nick had some of those snack pellets in his pocket, kept ramming her nose into his groin, which made me laugh so hard I actually fell down.

I smiled at the memory and glanced at Nick. He wasn’t smiling back. Eyes somber, mouth grim. As if it required physical effort, he dragged his eyes off me and resumed staring at the endlessly flat landscape in front of us. “If we leave by eight, we should be able to make it to the airport by early afternoon,” he said.

We’d make it a lot sooner if he’d managed to hit the speed limit, but I kept those words to myself. “Great. Thanks.”

He nodded. Conversation over, apparently. Which was fine.

Since Nick wasn’t talking, I took out my phone and texted a few messages…one to Carol with a cc to Theo, saying I’d been delayed and would call them tomorrow. I had both their home numbers, but it didn’t feel right, calling on a Sunday evening. They both had families, had a hard-and-fast rule about not working on weekends (unlike myself)…they were normal, in other words. I sent another message to BeverLee and Dad, letting them know the same. Another to Dennis, just in case he worried. I felt a pang at the thought of him back on the Vineyard without me. Our relationship had been…well, comfortable. The thrum, the connection, the depth of emotion I’d had with Nick hadn’t been there with Dennis, and I’d always thought that was a good thing. More mature, more lasting, more stable. Guess it showed what I knew. Dennis hadn’t wanted to marry me, end of story. I wondered if he was feeling at least a little blue, too. I rather hoped so; what would it say if he wasn’t missing me at all?

Though it was home, Martha’s Vineyard seemed like a memory. Strange, to be so far away, in a landscape that was nothing like the familiar hills and rock walls of the island, the gray-shingled homes and scrubby pines. Here, the land stretched uninterrupted to the horizon, and the sky was a little merciless in its vastness.

“All right. I’m heading down the street,” Nick said.

I glanced down the road. “Stan’s Bar. Sounds perfect. Grab a beer, watch some baseball, soak up a little Montana color, is that it?”

“Exactly.” He paused. “You can come if you want.”

I took a quick breath. “Um…nah. I have to do some work, actually. I’ll just take Coco for a walk and hit the old laptop.”