Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

I’d never be able to trust anything about my life again. I would question everything Mike said, from his after-work plans to telling me he loved me. For the rest of my life, I would look back on the little moments in my marriage, the parts of my life that I thought meant something, and know that they’d been tainted.

If I was going down, I was taking Mike with me.

My hand shaking, I moved the cursor and clicked on send.

And much faster than I would have imagined, a screen popped up, cheerfully announcing, “E-mail Expo has distributed your message!”

Distributed my message. To three hundred and two of our friends, family, and clients. Complete with dancing firecracker graphics.

There was no cancel button, no retrieve function. The genie was out of the bottle. The shit had hit the fan.

“Ohgodohgodohgod, what have I done? What have I done?!” I shrieked. I made a grab for the plug on the safety strip and yanked it out of the wall because, in my panicked brain, I thought somehow that might keep the message from spreading from my computer. But it was out - now there was no taking it back.

My eyes stinging, hot tears threatening to spill down my cheeks, I sagged back against the desk chair. It was all so useless. I couldn’t go back to living with Mike in that perfect, empty house, to those pictures of him pretending to be happy with me.

I glanced at the clock. It was a little after 1:00 a.m. I had a few more hours before my friends and neighbors woke up and checked their e-mail. My stomach churning, I bounced between dreading their discovering what a blind idiot I’d been and being happy that the final layer of bullshit would drop away. All of my cards were on the table. I felt … free. I didn’t have to smile while I lapped up Mike’s stupid lies. I didn’t have to pretend. I didn’t have to care anymore. What was done was done.

The slow-burning fuse for this particular act of self-destruction had been lit sometime in the afternoon. After my disastrous meeting with Beebee, I’d driven straight to Goote’s Jewelry Shop on Main Street and placed my wedding ring set on the counter. “How much can you give me for this, Mr. Leo?” I asked.

Leo Goote, who probably wore his jeweler’s loupe into the shower, had gone to church with my parents for forty years. “Lacey, honey, you don’t want to sell your wedding rings,” he said, the papery skin of his hands buckling as he wrapped them around mine. I stared into his kind, clear brown eyes and something told me that he knew. “You don’t want to do something you’ll regret.”

Gritting my teeth together and willing myself not to cry again, I gave Mr. Leo a tight-lipped smile. “No, Mr. Leo, I do. I’m going to be doing some traveling. And I need some cash.”

Leo spent another forty-five minutes trying to talk me out of selling the platinum-set 1.5 carat brilliant cut that Mike’s father had called a wise investment when he helped Mike select it from Leo’s stock. He gave me ten thousand dollars for the set, a practically unheard of price for Leo, who prided himself on resale value.

I, did, however, use Mike’s Visa to charge an obscenely large cushion-cut sapphire to replace my engagement ring. The ring itself didn’t really make me feel any better, other than covering a rather disturbing groove worn into my ring finger. But imagining Mike’s face when he opened the Visa bill did improve my mood.

As I left, Leo offered me a butterscotch candy, patted me on the head, and told me he would hold on to the rings for me for a while in case I changed my mind. I drove home, printed out the necessary documents from DoltYourselfDivorce.com and filed them at the county courthouse. When I returned, I found a technician from the Peace of Mind Locksmith Company waiting for me in the driveway. I’d called a service from two towns over to keep Mike from being tipped off about my plans to re-key every door in the house. The technician, a stocky guy in his forties whose shirt dubbed him “Roy,” assured me this would only take an hour.

I wandered into my suddenly silly bistro-themed kitchen with the ridiculously expensive appliances. And I felt a little lost. I was so alone. I wanted my mama. It seemed wrong to go through something like this without her. When the chips were down, my mother could be counted on to tell you you’d done something irretrievably stupid, but she loved you anyway. She was well aware of our faults, but God help the person who pointed them out to her.

My parents were out of town at Daddy’s annual Phi Rho Chi reunion in Hilton Head, a bunch of old businessmen remembering what life was like when they still had hair. It was the highlight of Daddy’s year. Right up there with the week he spent hunting with the Phi Ro’s at a stocked lodge in Missouri… and the week he spent deep-sea fishing with them in the Florida Keys. Mama was a very patient woman.

I’d dialed her number on my cell a dozen times, but always hit end before it rang. As much as Daddy loved his children, he would not come home early from the reunion unless it was to bury one of us. And even then, he’d probably fly back to try to finish out the weekend. Mama had enough to deal with, pouring my dad into bed each night as the Phi Rho boys participated in the annual beer-related relay challenges. I didn’t want to put her in the position of choosing between the two of us. Besides, she’d probably need to conserve her strength for the aftermath of my little publication when she came home.

I can usually count on Emmett’s indignant wrath in situations like this. But Emmett was on a two-week trip to the Bahamas with his current boyfriend, a “freelance food service contractor” named James.

If this were a Renée Zellweger movie, my girlfriends would rush over here, alcohol and chocolate in hand, to assure me that everything was Mike’s fault, that I was perfect and I would find a better-looking, richer, more sexually expressive man in no time. The problem was that I didn’t have a lot of friends. Well, not any real friends. I knew some ladies from our Sunday school class. And I was friendly with the women in Junior League. We had couples we went to dinner with, clients that we entertained, but I didn’t have any girlfriends of my own. When you’re a couple, it’s hard finding friends that you and your husband agree on. Generally, you try to hang out with couples so no one feels left out or weird. But maybe the husbands get along but the wives hate each other. Or the wives get along great, but the husbands have nothing to talk about. It was just so much easier to hang around with Mike’s friends and their wives. It was the simplest way to get him to agree to socialize.

I let friendships with my single friends fall by the wayside because it just seemed like so much work to maintain them. Finding neutral conversational territory is a killer, especially when they’re out in the world working and your biggest problem is finding drapes that complement the new sofa. Plus, I couldn’t help but feel that my working friends judged my staying home, particularly when we didn’t have kids. The last time I had lunch with my friend Katie, a preschool teacher with three boys, she asked me what I did all day. I rambled on about appointments and meetings for about ten minutes before I realized I didn’t have a very good answer for her. We didn’t have lunch again.

I sat at the counter bar, toying with an apple from the crystal bowl we’d bought on our honeymoon in the Bahamas. I hated that stupid bowl. I’d wanted to buy a painted ceramic one I saw in the straw market, but Mike insisted on something from the duty-free shop near our departure gate. He promised it would be something we’d use for years, a story we could tell our children.

Because nothing says romance and adventure to kids like tax-free breakables bought in the airport.