Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

Daddy was never what you’d call a hands-on father, but he’d never been so distant. When he was disappointed in us, his usual MO was to tell Mama and have her relay the message. Even when Emmett finally, quietly, came out to my parents, Daddy told Mama to tell my brother to be careful. And that was about it.

Daddy seemed to be employing more of a scorched earth policy these days. I think he believed if he made the situation uncomfortable enough, I would give up this whole silly divorce and go back to my own house. He was particularly irritated by the way Mama had managed to insulate me from the phone calls, the insistent visitors, Wynnie’s repeated efforts to talk some sense into me.

“You’ve got to quit coddling the girl,” I heard him grumble through their bedroom door on one of my nightly wanderings around the house. “She needs to face her own music. Personally, I don’t blame Wynnie and Jim for being pissed. Or Mike. Do you know what kind of jokes they’re making about Mike and Beebee down at the golf course? And Lacey? I just don’t understand what was going through her head when she did this. We didn’t raise her to -”

“To what?” Mama demanded. “To stand up for herself?”

“To make a damn fool out of herself,” Daddy countered. “How would you feel if somebody wrote this sort of thing about one of our kids, Deb?”

“Keep your voice down,” Mama hissed. “And our kids wouldn’t be sleazy enough to cheat.”

“Well, if Emmett does cheat, he’d better not tell Lacey about it; God knows what she’d do.”

“Walt, are you upset because you’re embarrassed or because you want her out of the house?”

“Well, she’s never going to leave if you keep stuffing her with pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches!” he cried.

“Oh, she’s not even eating them,” Mama said. “She doesn’t eat anything. She doesn’t sleep. She just wanders around the house all night, which is why you should keep your voice down!”

I backed away from the door. I didn’t want to hear any more. I was going to have to leave the house, soon. Besides the loser factor, I couldn’t stay at my parents’ house, causing tension and problems for the two of them. There were enough failed marriages in our family.

As I watched my parents’ marriage from a newly enlightened adult perspective, I noticed little things about them I hadn’t before. Little things, like when my dad got my morn a glass of water, he ran the tap for a while, to make sure he was getting her the coldest, least faucet-tasting water possible. Mike used to just stick a glass under the tap.

My parents had that something. Something Mike and I didn’t have. I didn’t know what it was and that was what was driving me insane. I’m not going to say Mike was a total monster. I mean, there was the year that he got me an air purifier for my birthday, but only because I’d mentioned that the infomercial was interesting. I shared some blame in that. We had no connection. No dependence on each other, no real intimacy. We started dating in high school because we ran in the same circles and our parents approved. We got married because that was what you were supposed to do when you’d been dating for a while and were graduating college. It seemed like the next step and we couldn’t think of a better one.

There were things I didn’t expect, a rush of longing when I smelled Tide detergent, a scent that would forever remind me of Mike’s shirts. Not having someone to rub my cold feet against under the covers. Someone to eat my pizza crusts, which I always left behind and Mike called the “pizza bones.” But I think these were signs that I needed a roommate, not Mike. Or maybe a neutered cat.

Yes, Daddy drove Mama nuts with his constant need to be around his stupid adolescent college buddies. But reconnecting, nay, dwelling, on his past kept Daddy happy. And that made Mama happy.

She compromised, she didn’t settle.

I woke up the next morning to find that my car had been towed. Mike had removed my name from the title more than a year before and I just hadn’t noticed. When I called the county clerk’s office to try to order a copy of the title paperwork, I found that Mike had also managed to cut off my American Express, my Visa, and my MasterCard. I was still on the phone with MasterCard when Mama came into the kitchen wearing a bathrobe, staring in horror at the morning edition of the Singletree Gazette.

She turned the front page toward me so I could read the headline, “Scorned Local Woman Sued for Scathing E-Mail.”

“Oh… no,” I groaned, dropping the phone on its cradle.

Reporter Danny Plum, whose byline hovered over my own personal nightmare, was an industrious little bastard. He’d found the bridal portrait we’d included with our wedding announcement years before in the newspaper archives. It was front and center, just under a smaller subhead reading “Widely Forwarded Anti-Adultery Missive Sparks Divorce, Community Debate.”

Mama’s face was as white as the newsprint. “Baby, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know he was writing it down. I’m so sorry.”

I took the paper from her shaking hands. “Unable to return to her marital home, Mrs. Terwilliger is reportedly staying with her parents, rarely leaving the house except to consult her attorney, Samantha Shackleton.” I read aloud. “When contacted by the Gazette, Mrs. Terwilliger’s mother, Deb Vernon, insisted that many wronged wives would follow in her daughter’s footsteps, ‘if they thought of it.’

“Everybody thinks Lacey’s gone crazy, but that’s not true.

She knew what she was doing,’ Mrs. Vernon said in a phone interview. ‘She was just pushed too far. And yes, she overreacted a little bit. It happens to the best of us, but I don’t want to comment. Of course, if Mike didn’t want to be publicly embarrassed, he shouldn’t have run around town chasing some hussy like his pants were on fire … but I don’t want to comment. I just wish people would mind their own business. Really, I have nothing to say.”

My mother cringed as I made a sound somewhere between a groan and call of a dying crane.

“I declined comment! Declined!” she cried. “And he’s twisting what I did say all around! I’m going to strangle that little weasel reporter!”

I picked up the ringing phone without thinking about who could be calling. Samantha’s voice, frustrated and weary, came through the receiver. “I know I didn’t specifically tell you not to have your mama defend you to the press, but I thought I made it clear that you needed to keep a low profile.”

“Mama says she declined comment,” I told her, giving Mama an exasperated look.

“Did she say ‘off the record’?” Samantha asked. “Those are the magic words. Unless she said, ‘off the record,’ anything she said, even in passing conversation while she was declining comment, can be quoted. You should know this stuff. I thought you had a background in journalism.”

“Yeah, the ethical kind, where reporters don’t screw people over when they say they’re not interested in being quoted. She didn’t mean it, Sam. Mama couldn’t stop him from writing a story, but she wasn’t trying to make it any worse. Of course, it would have been helpful if she had told me she talked to a reporter in the first place.”

“I didn’t want to upset you,” Mama whispered. “I was trying to screen your calls!”

“Why would they want to write about a divorce case in the first place?” I asked. “Don’t I have the right to privacy?”

“When Mike filed suit, this became a matter of public record. This is not good, Lacey,” Samantha said. “Mike is made to look like the injured party. And he managed to decline comment, through his lawyer, so he seems to have some sense… and tact. Your mama, as well intentioned as she may be, made it look like you don’t have any remorse and that you feel justified in what you did. You’re the harpy first wife. It’s not exactly a sympathetic role. This probably won’t improve our position in court.”