The closer Nora got to her old house, the deeper the dread sank in her gut. This was what she’d wanted, what she had told Ben she was going to do. Divide their possessions in a calm, equitable, and adult manner and then go their separate ways.
She pulled into the driveway, parking behind Ben’s sedan. It was empty, which meant he must have gone inside. She sat in her own car for a minute, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, and thought of how she had been here just a month ago.
There’d been birthday flowers on her doorstep and a trio of pumpkins for Halloween. The kids’ toys had been scattered around the yard, with Sarah’s bike forgotten against the house. And smack dab on the center of the front door had been the bright yellow paper that turned everything upside down.
Now the lawn had browned as November took a firm hold. The flowers, the pumpkins, the toys, and the bike were all gone, and so was the auction notice. If she ignored the sign at the edge of the drive, she could almost believe the house was back to normal.
She drew in a deep breath before getting out of the car, carrying a pen and the list of furniture she’d made weeks ago. With any luck, she could do this quickly and without arguing with Ben.
The first thing she noticed when she opened the front door was music, coming from the toolbox-shaped boom box she had bought Ben three or four Christmases ago. Aerosmith, singing “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” If she closed her eyes, she was back in Tommy O’Brien’s basement, sitting beside Ben, joking about sugar rushes and ginger ale and wishing this guy with an amazing smile would kiss her already.
Why did that song have to be on right now? Why couldn’t it be some Justin Bieber nonsense song she didn’t even like? She figured whatever radio station was playing it had a sick sense of timing.
“Ben?”
“Back here,” he called. “In the kitchen.”
She took her time walking down the hall, drinking in the pictures of the kids hanging on the wall and the end table with a fine layer of dust and a collection of clay projects the kids had made. To the right was the living room with the dark blue sofa she and Ben had bought together when she was pregnant. They’d sat on it so long that she’d fallen asleep in the store and bought it half out of guilt.
When she’d left him a month ago, the living room had been a mess of toys, laundry waiting to be folded, and stacks of junk mail on the coffee table. All of that had been whisked away, the space tidied, and now the room shone. She was surprised and grateful he’d cleaned, even if nothing was packed. At least not having to deal with stuff strewn everywhere would make moving easier.
This weekend, the pictures on the sofa table would be in a box. The pillows she’d embroidered during one crazy nesting urge when she was pregnant stuffed in another, and the jigsaw puzzle she and Ben had spent a rainy weekend assembling, gluing, and then hanging on the wall would be broken in pieces in the trash. All of this would be moved someplace else or sold. Her life, her children’s lives, in boxes and on trucks.
A profound sense of loss washed over her. As much as she wanted to blame Ben for all of it, the truth was that she was just as much at fault. For burying herself in work, for thinking she could handle it all, and for refusing to ask for help when she was over her head. She’d thought she was taking care of everyone when in fact she’d been trying to hold back a tidal wave with a wall made out of cardboard.
She turned away and continued down the hall. She rounded the corner into the kitchen, expecting to trip over the lip between the wood floors of the hallway and the old tiles they’d been meaning to tear up. But there was no lip. There was only a smooth transition from wood to slate gray tiles.
For a second, all she could focus on was the tiles. Twelve by twelve, with swirls of blues and white that wove in and out of each other in a wild, unpredictable pattern. When she’d seen them on the wall in Home Depot, she’d told Ben they looked like the ocean on a stormy day. He’d promised Nora that someday she would walk in her kitchen and that ceramic sea would be beneath her feet.
Now it was. But for some other woman. Some other family, who would buy this house on Monday morning.
She raised her gaze, taking in the whitewashed birch cabinets, the pale granite countertops, the deep white farmer’s sink with the oversized sprayer faucet. Every detail one she had chosen, imagined, dreamed of. It was the kitchen she and Ben had planned—done and ready and smelling like new beginnings.
Ben was standing by the sink, his hands in his pockets and his face unreadable. He had changed out of his work clothes and had on a clean pair of jeans and a freshly pressed pale blue cotton button-down shirt. Why did he have to look so damned good? And why did she still have to be so damned attracted to him?
“What do you think?” he said.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and willed the tears in her eyes to stay back until she left. “It looks great. Whoever buys the house is going to love it.” She forced a brightness into her voice that she didn’t feel. “Did you do the work?”
“Yup.”
In the background, Aerosmith yielded to Elton John, another of her favorite artists, singing “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.” She could hear the sounds of a school bus stopping out front and the roar of kids getting off and going home. “Why did you do all this work? I mean, they’re auctioning the house off in three days. Surely the bank wouldn’t care what the kitchen looked like.”
“Well, when you go to get a mortgage, they want the house to have more equity, and a finished kitchen and deck and a renovated master bath are all things that increase the value.” He pushed off from the sink and moved closer to her. “Makes it easier for a bank to agree to a loan.”
“You finished the deck? And the master bath?” Both were projects that they had talked about, but he’d never started. She’d given up asking about them long ago, around the same time she’d given up on the two of them.
“Let me show you, Nora.” Ben put out his hand, and without thinking, she took it and walked with him across the sea of tile to a pair of French doors so new they still had the sticker in the corner citing all the benefits of triple-pane glass. They looked out over an expansive deck with built-in bench seating and a pergola waiting for some ivy or clematis to weave in and out of the beams.
“It’s gorgeous.” That lump in her throat only grew, along with a tide of anger. She kept trying to push it down because yelling at Ben wouldn’t accomplish anything. She needed to be strong and calm. Get through this tour of the house that was no longer hers, divide up the furniture, and make arrangements for custody going forward.
“Wait till you see the bathroom.” He pivoted, taking the back way off the kitchen to the narrow stairs that led directly to the master.
Nora had loved this staircase, a throwback to the days of maids and butlers. Halfway up the stairs was a little nook, maybe for resting a heavy tray or an extra load of linens; she never really knew. The staircase was barely wide enough for her, and Ben had to turn a little sideways to navigate the cramped space.
Five steps from the top, she stopped and dropped his hand. She didn’t want to round that corner and see the room she used to share with her husband. She didn’t want to peek at the bathroom that used to hold his shaving cream and her makeup, and hundreds of mornings where they wove in and out of each other as they got ready, in a practiced dance only married people mastered.
“Ben, forget it. Let’s just go back downstairs and go over the inventory list.”
“Not until you see this, Nora.” He reached for her hand again, but she pulled it back.
“What’s the point? All it does is make this worse. I’m watching everything I dreamed about disappear like it was a mirage, and the closer I get, the less real it is. I don’t want to know what some other woman’s bathroom is going to look like. I don’t want to picture her rolling out dough on granite countertops that I fell in love with in the store.”
“Then don’t.” He turned away and continued up the stairs. Then he opened the door and stepped into their master bedroom.
She could go back downstairs or follow him. Leaving wouldn’t accomplish anything. She was still carrying the damned list, with not a single check mark on it. Was he purposely trying to torture her? Drag it out until she cried uncle or something? The Ben she knew had never been malicious, but they said divorce brought out the worst in people.
The master bedroom was just as neat and tidy as the rest of the house. The bed was made, the half dozen decorative pillows she’d loved and Ben had hated stacked in a descending triangle down the front of the white comforter. The armchair that had been perpetually full of Ben’s dirty laundry was ready for someone to sit in and pick up the novel sitting on the small cherry occasion table beside it. Her slippers were sitting beside his, two by two, as if they could step into them and back into their marriage.
The door to the bathroom was open, and she could see the dark cherry cabinets she’d picked out, the cream tile with the green diamonds joining the corners, the twin sinks with matching oval mirrors and the chrome sconces casting a soft light onto the countertop. The space where the floor met the cabinets glowed. Just like the kitchen, every single element was one she had remarked on, some in passing. Had Ben paid that close of attention? Or was this all some weird coincidence?
“You even put in the lighting beneath the cabinets,” she said.
“So you won’t trip at night if you have to get up.”
Nora closed her eyes and shook her head. The tears, the anger, the frustration bubbled inside her, rising and boiling like a volcano. She didn’t want to imagine herself washing her hands at that sink or slipping into her slippers because the tile floor was cold in the winter. “Why are you showing me this, Ben? I don’t care. I won’t ever be walking into that bathroom again.”
“Indulge me for one more minute, Nora. Just one.”
“No, Ben. This whole thing is a waste of time. Just check what furniture you want, and I’ll get out of here.” She tried to thrust the list at him, but he ignored it. “If you want all of our stuff, I don’t care anymore. I just want to leave.”
“One more minute. Please. Then we can talk about armchairs or sofa tables or whatever you want.”
It was the please that got her, the note of vulnerability in his voice. He took her hand again and gently tugged her into the room and then around the corner.
The bedroom was a funky shape, sort of a rectangle with an extra square-shaped nook beside the closet. They’d talked about a hundred different ideas for that space. Expanding the closet or adding a vanity table, but the one that Nora had lobbied for over and over was a door and a balcony, with a tiny porch where she and Ben could sit outside at the end of the day and watch the sun set over the trees. Ben had argued about how much work it would be, talking about structural needs and building permits, but all she’d seen was that Romeo and Juliet balcony she’d always wanted when she was a little girl.
And there, as if merely remembering it brought it to life, was a glass door that led to a tiny porch with a railed balcony that looked out over the trees. A small café table sat in the center, flanked by two chairs. A familiar white box sat on the table.
She glanced at him, confused, half ready to run, half beginning to hope again. “Ben…what is all this?”
“What you asked me to do, Nora.” He gave her a smile and led her onto the balcony with him.
Almost every day in November had been cold, another New England winter trying to get an early foothold with temps dipping into the thirties and forties. Today had been warm, with the sun bright and happy, and the pleasant temperature had held all afternoon. It was exactly the kind of day she had envisioned when she’d talked about adding the balcony. The view was just as she’d pictured it, too, high above the speckled autumnal trees, spanning the gray and brown checkerboard of rooftops, and in the far, far distance, the city of Boston, outlined in hazy gray.
“Ben, what is this?” she asked again.
He didn’t reply. Instead, he reached over and lifted the lid of the box. The sides parted, as they were designed to do, revealing the cake inside. Ma had ordered those boxes from a specialty company because they reduced the hassle of lifting the cake out and smearing the frosting. Nora had watched Bridget put this very cake into that box just a few hours ago.
“You’re the one who ordered the torta? Why?”
“Because it was the cake we had at our rehearsal dinner,” he said, as if it was a matter-of-fact thing to re-create that moment, not something weird when they were meeting to discuss the division of their assets. “There were little fake diamond rings attached to the ribbons, if I remember right.”
“I found some that looked like my ring and used them for a fun little gift for whoever got that slice.” She could hear the laughter of her sisters, the chatter of her bridesmaids, the happy hum of conversation at the party. She remembered catching Ben’s eye across the room when she was cutting the cake and seeing a deep, sweet love in those brown eyes.
This time she kept her gaze on the cake because she was afraid she’d see indifference if she looked into Ben’s eyes. She was daring to hope, and that, Nora already knew, was a foolish, dangerous thing to do. “But this isn’t a rehearsal dinner, and I don’t need this trip down memory lane, especially when we’re getting—”
He put a finger over her lips. Her heart stuttered. “Please pull the string, Nora.”
A long gold ribbon spiraled out of the center of the cake. She hadn’t put it there, and she didn’t remember Bridget doing so. Ben must have added it himself after he picked up the cake, though she couldn’t fathom a single reason. She realized now why he’d asked her to go get Jake from school and drop the kids at Ma’s—it had probably given him just enough time to stop by the bakery before he came here and set up this elaborate tableau. The urge to flee, to resist this desire to believe in him one more time, rose inside her again.
“Don’t you want to know what’s attached to it?” Ben asked, as if he’d read her mind and knew she was about to bolt.
Okay, so a part of her did want to know. If only to get to the bottom of what he was doing and why he had gone to so much trouble. Then again, this was Ben, who did everything in a big way. Even, it seemed, their divorce.
Nora tugged the ribbon. It slid easily out of the cake, landing with a soft clang on the metal table. She stared at the object for a second, confused. “That’s a house key.”
“Yes, it is.” Ben wiped the almond cream off the key and then handed it to her. “In fact, it’s our house key.”
“I don’t understand.” She turned the key over in her palm. “We don’t own this house, Ben. Why…what…?”
“We do own this house. Today, tomorrow, and for the next thirty years.”
Her mind couldn’t wrap around his words. She’d talked to the bank and the lawyer. She had seen the sign on the front lawn. “What about the auction? They’re going to be here in three days, Ben.”
“It’s not going to happen. I forgot to take the sign down, but I’ll do that tonight. I have to tell you, I was sweating it. I didn’t know if I could pull this off in time, but everything came together at the last minute and”—he put out his arms—“the house is ours again.”
Take the sign down. Pull this off. Everything came together. The house is ours again. She tried to put the pieces in order, but his words and the facts she knew jumbled in her mind. “But…the bank refused to work with us. I called. I even had a lawyer call the bank, and they wouldn’t talk to him, either.”
“I found another bank, Nora. And I got another mortgage.” Ben kept on talking, and Nora stared at him, hearing the words but not understanding how they could be true. “I had to put down some money, but with the added equity from finishing the kitchen and bathroom, I had just enough.”
“Money? What money?” She gasped and put a hand over her mouth. “Oh God, please don’t tell me you gambled with the kids’ college fund.” It was the only sizeable pile of cash they had left. The one thing she had refused to touch.
“I didn’t gamble with or on anything,” Ben said. “Except the chance that you could fall in love with me again and we could keep our family together.”
She wanted to step into this fantasy with him and believe it would all be different going forward. But Nora had history with Ben. A history that said he was just making another grand gesture, and in a week or a month, she’d find out that it was all based on a wing and a prayer, and her life would tumble down another rabbit hole. And they both still wanted different things—Ben with the big family, Nora with the urge to figure out who she was when she wasn’t a wife and a mother. “It’s too late, Ben. I’m sorry. I can’t do this again. I just…can’t.”
She started to turn away, and he stopped her. His hand on her arm was warm and tender, and a part of her wanted to lean into that touch.
“I have never known you to quit anything, Nora O’Bannon.” He paused a beat. Downstairs, the radio shifted into Bryan Adams’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” another song she loved. “Why are you quitting us?”
“I’m not. You did.” Now the tears did come, rushing forward like a waterfall held back too long. She let them fall, no longer caring if he saw that she was upset. She was tired of arguing, tired of fighting, tired of feeling like this entire thing was an uphill battle. She didn’t want to fall for the balcony and the bathroom and the cake and the damned mix tape. She wanted to guard her heart, keep it from breaking again, so she threw up the familiar walls. “You quit us when you gambled. And you quit us when you started spending every Friday and Saturday night with someone else.”
“That’s where you think I’ve been every weekend? With someone else? Nora—”
“Ben, stop. Just stop.” She put up her hands and started to back away. She couldn’t look in his eyes and listen to his voice and believe him. Not again. “This is all going to go away next month or next year. I can’t fall into that trap a second time. We don’t even want the same future.” She pivoted away from him.
Except maybe a part of her did. She had sat in that diner this afternoon, seeing Magpie’s glow of anticipation and joy, heard her excitement about starting a family, and realized how much she wanted her family back. All four of them, together again. Sledding down the town hill in the winter, picking the ugliest pumpkin from the pumpkin patch, dashing in and out of the cold Atlantic Ocean. All the things they used to do and then stopped.
“I pulled away from you, from everyone,” Nora said. “I shut you out.”
“I know you did. You were hurt, and when you’re hurt, Nora, you withdraw like a turtle into her shell.” He brushed a lock of hair off her forehead and smiled down at her. “I should have tried harder.”
“We both should have.” She shook her head and backed up. “Maybe it’s too late, Ben.”
“Don’t you want to know why I quit gambling?”
She was halfway across the bedroom, ready to leave, when Ben spoke. She paused, closed her eyes, and let out a long breath before turning back toward her husband. “Does it matter? Because the reason you started is still there. Your family was boring, and whatever you found in that casino was better than us. I have news for you, Ben. Raising a family sometimes is boring as hell. There’s dishes and homework and soccer games. Times I wanted to scream if I had to do one more load of laundry. You escaped all that, and you went into those casinos, and you left me here alone.”
“I know.” His eyes were sad, his shoulders low. “And I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”
“And so I filled in those gaps with work and lists and organizing,” she went on, the words a waterfall tumbling out of her mouth. Admissions she had kept tucked in her heart for months. Years. “I kept telling myself I had it all under control, and it was all going to be fine. I didn’t tell anyone about what we were going through and I didn’t ask for help because…because I was ashamed.”
He tried to reach for her, but she stepped out of range. “Nora, I never meant to make you feel that way.”
“You didn’t do it. I did. I failed, Ben. I failed…” And now her voice broke, and the truth that she had hidden from her husband, her children, her family, and herself came rushing forward to fill that space. It wasn’t all Ben’s fault, and it wasn’t all because he’d bet on a hand of cards. “I failed all of you. I thought I was doing all the things a mom and a wife is supposed to do. The dishes and the laundry and the job. I kept this tight grip on schedules and sorting the frigging socks, instead of letting any of you know that it was too much and I was drowning every single, solitary day.”
He took her hands and pulled her to him. “I knew you were, and I deserted you. I kept thinking if I could make more money, I could solve all our problems. Hire a maid or let you cut back at the bakery. Now I realize that we didn’t need the money, Nora. Or the schedules. Or the lists. Or more kids or a bigger house.” He rubbed his thumb over her lip, a tender gesture he’d done a thousand times before. “We needed each other.”
She wanted to believe that he meant those words. That going forward would be about the two of them, raising their family, having room between them for their own selves. The future she had once dared to imagine, before that winter day when she lost everything.
“Where did the money come from, Ben?” she said. “The down payment for the new mortgage. The countertops and cabinets and tile.” Please don’t say you won it in a casino.
“Every Friday and Saturday night for the past year, I’ve been working for Jim Harcourt on a house he wanted to sell. He was building it on his own, without the company backing. He and his brothers had a falling out, and Jim wanted to test the waters but also keep it on the down low. He didn’t have much to finance the project, so I agreed to help, in exchange for a cut of the profits. Jim’s always been good to me and brought me in on plenty of projects, so when he said he needed help, I was there. I didn’t tell you because…”
“We had stopped talking.” The day Nora moved into the guest bedroom had pretty much been the last time she and Ben had a conversation with any kind of substance. After that, they became two passing ships, exchanging the bare minimum of words. She’d never asked about those weekend nights, and he’d never volunteered the information.
“And I didn’t want to let you down again. If the house didn’t sell, I would have wasted all those hours for nothing. I would have screwed up yet again, and I couldn’t bear to do that. I had already hurt this family so much. Too much.”
“We both did,” she said softly. “I hurt us as much as you did.”
“You, Nora, were amazing. You did nothing wrong. You held us together when I was lost. All I wanted to do was make that up to you, to show you that I didn’t want to lose you or our family or this house.” He smiled at her, a wide, happy smile like the one he used to wear all the time. “So I kept on working with Jim, pouring hours and hours into that project. The house he and I built did sell, and my share was enough to pay for the supplies here and the down payment on the new mortgage. As for the bank, Jim called in a few favors and found a sympathetic loan officer willing to take a risk on us.”
She stared at her husband as if he were a stranger. Ben, the one who had never been serious, the one who had ignored the bills, had kept his head down all this time, trying to save something that she had already given up on. “You really pulled this off?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t step in when I should have. I’m sorry I left you to deal with all this for far too long. I’m sorry I left that day and didn’t know what you were going through. I should have been here, Nora. For all of it.” He drew in a breath and paused a moment, dropping his gaze to the lazy circle his thumbs drew on the back of their joined hands. “After I went to rehab, I felt like such a failure. What kind of father gambles away his paycheck? The guilt crushed me. Paralyzed me. And so I let you shoulder a burden that should have been shared.”
Failure. It was a feeling Nora knew well. The two of them, hiding the truth from each other, from themselves, so afraid that it would all fall apart if they were honest. In the end, it had anyway, and now, in this first real and true conversation she’d had with her husband in years, she could feel the beginnings of healing. The knitting of a new connection, one built out of the common experience of being battered and bruised by life and bad decisions.
“You mentioned that the reason you wanted to keep our family together was because you wanted somewhere to belong. That that was what you were looking for when you married me.” She sighed. “I was looking for the same thing, Ben, when I married you.”
“But you have a huge family, Nora.”
“One I never felt I really belonged in. Because I was lying to them every single damned day of my life. I was the one who had it all together. Had the perfect life with the husband and the kids, and now even a dog. But then, one day, I told them all the truth, and I thought they would look at me differently the next day or tell me where I’d screwed up. But no one did. My sisters and my mother loved me and hugged me and kept on telling me stupid jokes. What kept me from belonging was all that work I did to keep up this image that was so far from the true picture, I couldn’t seem to find my way home again.” She looked at the key in her hand. It was heavy, solid. “I want to go home, Ben.”
His face fell and he stepped back. “Okay. If you want to go over that list, I guess we can.”
Home. It wasn’t a place; it wasn’t a set of countertops or a balcony off the bedroom. It was something she had already had and didn’t see, like she was Dorothy in a black-and-white world. She looked at the man she had loved for most of her life, the man she had almost thrown aside, the man who had the same eyes as the children they had created, and realized she had nearly gambled away everything that mattered.
“Everything can stay here, Ben. It all fits where it is.” She stepped into Ben’s arms and nestled her head in the crook of his shoulder. He was solid and strong, and she had forgotten that about him. She had seen the man who let her down for so long that she’d missed seeing the man he had transformed into. The man who was strong enough to be her partner, and the only man who knew her just as she was, with her lists and her planning, and loved her all the same. She was home, and so was he. “And I fit right where I am too.”