Mike, middle child and only boy, was an angel. He was all charm with very little self-centeredness. Where Jessie was often hard on Anna, Mike was soft on her. He seemed to think he should try to take care of her now. Anna appreciated his love for her to the point of tears. Mike and Chad also had a great, close, affectionate and mutually supportive father-son relationship, but Anna and Mike had a very special bond. He was her protector and defender. He had no partner yet, rather a parade of beautiful and smart young women who wanted that job. He’d been dating Jenn, a lovely young woman, for a few months now and Anna hoped, as she had before, that it would last. One day soon he would commit, and Anna knew that while he would always love her devotedly, his passions would move to a wife who would step into the role of first female. Mike was a high school health teacher and part-time coach who wanted to be a full-time coach. And the sudden death of his father had left him in a puddle of tears—he was such a tender, vulnerable soul.
Bess was a brilliant loner who carried the weight of Asperger’s. Emotionally, she struggled. Her emotions were sometimes flat and at least minimal. She reacted pragmatically to her father’s death and seemed astonished by emotions she didn’t normally feel. Her tears of grief seemed to confuse her and her response was typical anxiety. Fortunately, she was willing to take antianxiety medication for such situations and appeared calm and even-tempered in the aftermath of Chad’s death. But Anna was at a loss as to how to act and what to expect. Bess was severely introverted, didn’t want to be touched, formed very few relationships. As a toddler, she didn’t want to be fed; she grabbed at the spoon so she could feed herself. She operated on sheer logic. She didn’t seem to need anyone. Anna constantly worried about Bess’s loneliness, for no one could communicate with her as Chad could.
Anna brought a crystal decanter to the living room and placed it on the cocktail table. She pulled two shot glasses from her pockets. She went back to the kitchen for two tall glasses of water. Then she sat beside Joe and poured. “Tequila,” she said. They clinked glasses and tossed them back. Anna wheezed and coughed; Joe smiled.
“He left behind a lot of unfinished business,” Anna said.
“Doesn’t everyone when they die?” Joe asked. “When is it okay to go?”
“When you’re one hundred and five and there’s no possibility you’ll be needed for anything else or that you have any explaining to do. There is something to be said for having your affairs in order. Chad didn’t.”
“If you don’t mind me asking...”
“Something was going on with him, something to make him inexplicably unhappy. Yet he never worked through it. He left many questions.” She lifted the delicate decanter and poured them each another shot.
“Remember when you were expecting Jessie? He was overwhelmed. Kind of quiet and sweet and pitiful, he was so happy. So vulnerable.”
She didn’t answer. “Remember when I decided to go to law school?” she said. “Mike hadn’t been potty-trained yet, Jessie was in preschool, I had to quit my job, money was a terrible problem, childcare was nearly impossible, and I went, anyway. He was furious with me.”
“Why did you go to law school?” he asked. “I mean, besides the fact that you’re brilliant and ambitious.”
“I don’t think I was those things,” she said. “It was after Chad’s affair and I was afraid that I was going to be abandoned. I had something to prove. To myself and to him. He accused me of being selfish, of not putting the needs of the family first. Said the man who stepped out on his pregnant wife! Where had he put the needs of the family when he had an affair? Remember?”
“How could I forget? In fact, if we had had cell phones back then, I might never have known. I called your house phone, asked if Chad was around, and you blurted it out, that you didn’t have any idea where he was because you caught him in an affair. You accused him, laid out your proof, and he admitted it.”
“Did you ever find out who it was?” she asked him.
Joe shook his head. “I admit, I didn’t ask.”
Not for the first time, Anna wondered how men did that. Decided not to ask, decided not to wonder.
Twenty-eight years ago, when Mike was a baby and Anna was exhausted, Chad had developed a pattern of not being where he said he would be, running late all the time, getting strange phone calls that he tried to pawn off as clients, perfume on his shirt, just the most obvious stuff in the world. She needled him constantly until he admitted he’d met someone, a colleague, he said, that he’d had a brief fling with and regretted it and it was over. It would never happen again, unless Anna kept harassing him. She couldn’t stop, though. Then he said, “Fine, do you want a divorce? Because I won’t fight you on it.”
They were overwhelmed by bills and debt, could barely make the mortgage payments, which was why Anna kept working. She was afraid to leave him or let him go. Her worst nightmare seemed to be coming true, becoming an impoverished single mother like her own mother had been. It was a dark and painful time, betrayed and isolated as she was, when out of the blue Joe called and asked for Chad and on the brink of despair she asked him if he knew. She sobbed and dumped it all on Joe and Joe encouraged her to try to patch things together for the sake of their children.
“And I decided right then and there I was going to have to build something for myself and my kids that was a little more substantial than being a legal secretary, because if he cheated once, he’d cheat again. I was never aware of another affair, however.”
“Ah, so you might suspect, but...” Joe said.
“All the signs were there. After all these years. After I sucked it up and did everything I could to make it work.”
“It was a long time ago, Anna. A lot of water over the dam. It was probably just a midlife crisis.”
“He was sixty-two! How the hell long was he expecting to live?”
Joe lifted his glass. “Much longer than he did. It took a lot of strength for you to get over it and make a good life, a good marriage.”
She just stared at him as if he was insane. “What makes you think I got over it? I never got over it. I’ve been looking over my shoulder for almost thirty years!” She sipped her drink carefully. She didn’t want to scorch her throat again.
Joe threw his back.
“Arlene and I couldn’t hold it together,” Joe said of his ex-wife. “Do you ever hear from her?”
“Never,” Anna said. “Do you?”
“A little,” he said. “It’s about the kids or the grandkids and is mostly confined to texts or the occasional email. Arlene and I were not meant to be. The divorce, though painful, was destiny. We got off to a bad start. I have two great kids and a couple of beautiful granddaughters. But I thought you and Chad invented marriage. In spite of all you’d been through.”
“Because I’m a good sport, that’s why,” she said. “And because everything I ever said about him, about us, made him look like a king. Or at least a benevolent despot.”
And in a way it was true. For years she acted as if it didn’t hurt her that he’d stepped out, found another woman and cheated. She knew exactly what it took to make him feel loved and special and she delivered, whether she felt it was irrelevant. She let it go that he was bad at remembering special occasions, that her feelings were less important than his.
“It seemed you loved him very much,” Joe said.
“Of course I loved him, but that wasn’t the reason I put so much energy into trying to make a decent marriage. It was my commitment. I didn’t expect that he’d never grow old, never get sick, never have issues. I didn’t take for granted that we’d be in love every day. Hell, there were days I hated him and I assumed he had those days, too—isn’t it inevitable? I stayed, anyway. It was Chad who was the part-timer. When it started to get challenging for him, he was always weighing the advantages of leaving. I, on the other hand, never saw any advantage in leaving. Until his latest depression. It was the last straw for me. He had everything and yet he complained. He was ungrateful. He kept saying something was missing, as though it was my job to figure out what that was and deliver it.” She shook her head. “But if he had come home in a better frame of mind... We were usually distracted by discussions of our competing schedules, some major repair or purchase we had to talk about, or if one of the kids had a problem.”
“Amazing how easy it can be to not talk about it, isn’t it?” Joe said.
“Thirty years of practice will do that for you,” she said.
“And yet, you never considered a life on your own terms?”
After a quiet moment, she said, “Because I did love him. I did. But—”
Anna’s phone chimed with a text. Are you okay? Phoebe was asking.
Perfectly fine, thanks, Anna answered.
Good. If you don’t need me, I’m staying home. Headache. If you need me, call.
Go to bed, I’m fine. Talk to you tomorrow.
She took a breath. “No one knows this but Phoebe. And now you. His last struggle with unhappiness coincided with my appointment to the bench. That had become a pattern. If I had something to be proud of, he became very needy. I was planning to suggest we live separate lives. I thought it was time he figure out how to be happy on his own.”
“Whoa!” Joe said, shocked. “After all these years?”