“Well, you’ve suspected...”
“God, why didn’t you stop me? I must have been out of my mind!”
Gerri just reached out and gave Andy’s upper arm an affectionate stroke. As she recalled, Andy couldn’t be stopped.
Andy had been the divorced mother of a fifteen-year-old son when she met Bryce a few years ago. He was younger by ten years, sexy and eager, possessing at least eight of the ten requirements to deliver instant happiness to a forty-four year old woman. He made her feel young, beautiful, desirable. Bryce was good with Noel—they were like a couple of kids together—one of the few men she’d dated who had taken to her son quickly, easily. He had a good job in pharmaceutical sales, though it required considerable travel. She fell in lust with him and for a while there was an orgasmic glow all around her.
Andy was far from straitlaced, but she wouldn’t live with Bryce because of Noel, a touchy and vulnerable teenager. Plus, there was the matter of an ex-husband and his wife to contend with—Andy didn’t want anyone making an argument for custody under those circumstances. And of course, she was in love with him, so she married him.
Bryce quickly emerged as immature, selfish, short-tempered, inconsiderate, in no way prepared to cohabit and, indeed, had no experience in cohabitation. He knew exactly how to treat a woman to get into her pants, how to send her to the moon night after night, but couldn’t share the day-to-day workload or be accountable to a partner. He didn’t like being questioned about where he’d been nor could he say for certain when he’d be home. The relationship with Noel deteriorated; Bryce became exasperated by the noise, mess and back talk associated with teenage boys. This had the effect of turning Andy, who was by nature a humorous and agreeable woman, into a demanding, suspicious, resentful nag. They were like water on a grease fire. Everything was always about those buttons—you push mine and I’ll push yours.
Bliss hadn’t lasted even a year for Andy, but she’d hung in there for three. She’d been talking about a separation and divorce for two years now and whenever she’d get close, two things stalled her out. One, Bryce knew how to turn on the charm when he wanted to and he could treat her to short periods of good behavior laced with hot sex. And, two, it just isn’t easy to be forty-seven and acknowledge yourself as a woman who had twice failed at marriage.
“You’re going to be late for work,” Gerri said. “Let’s pull it together.”
Andy shook her head. “I called in divorced,” she said. “I need a day or two. I have to get my bearings, pack up his stuff, call the lawyer, close the joint accounts.”
“This is really it, then?”
“I was through a long time ago. There were just times I thought divorcing him might be more painful than living with him.” She blinked and a tear rolled down her cheek. “I guess I’m beyond that now.”
“You’ll be all right,” Gerri said gently, earnestly. “You were all right before—you’ll be all right again.”
“It’s so hard,” Andy said. “When you don’t have anyone.”
“Yeah, I know,” Gerri agreed. “Yet it’s harder when you have the wrong one.”
* * *
You’re not forty-nine and married twenty-four years without having helped a few friends through the big D. Each one had left a mark on Gerri’s heart. Even the fairly simple, straightforward ones were gut-wrenching. To promise to love forever and find yourself pulled into that dark world of animosity and vengeance as you tore the promise apart broke the strongest men and women into pieces. And one of the roughest in Gerri’s memory was Andy’s divorce from her first husband, Rick.
They’d moved into this little bedroom community in Marin County at about the same time fifteen years before. Andy and Gerri had both been the mothers of four-year-old boys who’d become instant friends. Gerri had also had one-year-old Jessie balanced on her hip and a couple of years later there was a hot lusty night when birth control was the last thing she or Phil considered; that night produced Matthew, and a vasectomy for Phil. Andy, however, stopped with Noel, her only child.
Young, energetic working mothers in their early thirties with tight bodies, small happy children, virile husbands, great things looming in their futures, they became good friends immediately. Gerri was working a large slice of Marin County for Child Protective Services as a case worker and Phil, a bright young assistant district attorney, had to commute into San Francisco daily, on occasion staying overnight. Andy was a middle school teacher at the time, married to a teacher and coach from a local high school.
Andy’s divorce came when Noel was ten. It was sudden—what seemed a balanced and content marriage went sour overnight. Rick was unhappy and distant, they were in counseling, then separated, the divorce was quickly final and, before anyone could blink, Rick was remarried to someone who’d been in the periphery of his life all along—the school nurse at his high school. Clearly he’d chosen his second wife before dispensing with his first.
Gerri and Phil, as happily married couples will do, had blistering fights over Andy and Rick’s marital problems, each taking their gender’s side; for a while it tore everyone apart. In the end Phil relented and they kept Andy, lost touch with Rick, seeing him only occasionally when he came back to the neighborhood to pick up Noel for the weekend. Andy’s recovery was much more difficult. It was a couple of years before her bitterness eased enough to allow her to date. In the years since she had advanced herself to middle school principal.
Meanwhile, Gerri and Phil settled into a routine, if you can call it that when you have three kids in seven years and two demanding jobs doing the people’s work, jobs that required commitment and a strong sense of justice. Neither of them punched a clock; both of them were tied to pagers in the old days and cell phones now, backing each other up as well as they could. Their lives could be chaotic—children in dangerous situations that had to be investigated or rescued by CPS or crimes against the people that fell into Phil’s bull pen didn’t happen on a nine-to-five schedule. If Gerri failed to do her job well, a child could be at serious risk and if Phil slacked even a little, the bad guy got away. Phone calls from the police to either of them came at all hours.
Gerri would think back to the beginning with longing from time to time. A bright young social worker with a master’s degree in clinical psychology marries a handsome young lawyer four years her senior, a man who’s already being noticed by the district attorney and the attorney general—they were often referred to as the Power Couple. It was predicted that one of them would land in state politics; they were still fixtures at official state and political events and fund-raisers attended by movers and shakers. Their hours in their offices and in the field were long and hard, but in addition they managed to keep up with the kids—band, choir, PTA, neighborhood watch, gymnastics, ball games and track meets, concerts, and enough sleepovers and car pools to dull the brain of any card-carrying parent. They had to tag team these events—if Gerri had to table a case load to attend something for the kids, the next time Phil might have to push some trial work on a younger assistant D.A.
“Right after the last pancake breakfast of my high school career, I’m going to take a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue into the garage, sit in my car and drink it right out of the bottle until I can’t focus,” Phil had said after one of his father-duty assignments.
That was one of many things that had held them together through twenty-four years of pressure—humor. Phil, when he wasn’t mentally and emotionally tied to some case, could be very funny. And Gerri had a cynical wit that could make him laugh until he cried or farted. They had a remarkable partnership and friendship that was the envy of many. Their own personal appraisal was that they were busy, overworked, tired and somewhat dull—but they were doing a damn fine job nonetheless and had come to worship boredom as a great alternative to chaos.
Gerri had known from the beginning that Andy’s second marriage wouldn’t work. Bryce might’ve been thirty-four when they married, but he was not grown-up enough for family life. He had his business trips, his buddies he liked to run with, a long and ingrained history of never answering to anyone