A Marriage Worth Fighting For

But even as he thought this, he realized his attitude was a little out-of-date. He was thinking back to that sizzling week in Las Vegas and the vacations they’d taken together early in their marriage, before they’d decided to try for a baby. Those times stood out in his memory like a series of magazine-perfect honeymoons, four or five of them, some only a couple of days, others a week or more. Las Vegas, Bermuda, Paris, Aspen, Martinique.

He could call up a thousand pictures. Alicia in a red bikini with her luscious breasts bouncing as she walked along a tropical beach and her blond hair shining brightly in the sun. Himself taking the bikini off in the privacy of their suite, by pulling at that saucy string bow that only just held things together in the front. Lying back in a foaming private spa together, champagne within reach. Sitting across the softly lit table from her at a three-star restaurant, anticipating the moment when they would get back to their Paris hotel room and he could pull her into his arms.

At home, lately, sex had been different, he realized. They were both tired. He needed the release but didn’t need the slow, sensual build. It was over in minutes, and even though he was vaguely aware that she didn’t show the abandonment she once had, he put this down to the same priorities that dampened his own performance—just do it and get some sleep.

While he was burning with the knowledge that he would miss her body in his bed the way he would have missed air or gravity, she seemed to be implying that she wouldn’t miss their lovemaking at all. For the first time, it occurred to him that maybe she’d left him for the worst and hardest reason of all.

She’d found another man.

At the very thought, he felt as if someone had knifed him in the gut.

When he dragged himself into bed at ten o’clock, he felt her absence like an illness, and when he woke up at three after a couple of hours of unrestful sleep, he found he was holding her pillow in his arms as if he was cradling his own pain.

It smelled of her hair and her shampoo … it just smelled of her … and he was surprised that she’d left it behind now that he thought about it. Very surprised. She almost always took it with her when they went away, cramming it into a suitcase or nestling it into the corner of the backseat in the car. Its presence in their marital bed spoke to him, helped him, even though he couldn’t work out what it said.

He almost slid the pillow back to its rightful position on her side of the bed, but then in a moment of … he didn’t know—weakness? hope?—he pulled it closer again and hugged it like a child, or like an ardent lover, until sleep came over him.

Chapter Six

“What’s happening today, Mommy?” Abby wanted to know, five minutes after she woke up.

“Well, we need to go to the store. And I thought we might check out the library. Then we’ll come home and make cookies, hey?”

“Cookies!” Tyler said.

“Won’t that be fun?” Alicia agreed brightly.

It would. And also a nightmare. Faking having fun with your kids was harder than faking an orgasm, and, yes, Alicia had done both.

Like a good wife and mother, she felt guilty about both, also.

But, oh, yesterday had been so hard!

All she’d wanted to do was curl up into a tight ball of misery and sleep for about six months, in the hope that when she woke up again, the pain would have gone away and the rest of her life would miraculously make sense.

But you couldn’t do that. Children didn’t let you.

She loved Abby and Tyler so much, and since leaving MJ she’d been feeling it in her heart and her stomach and her bones to an almost feverish extent. She wanted to hug them against her body fifty times a day. She wanted to gaze and gaze at them. Her marriage to MJ had been worthwhile a hundred times over, no matter how ugly their divorce might be, because of these two.

She’d been saying “I love you” so often that at one point yesterday Abby had sighed theatrically, put her hands on her hips and told her, “We know that, Mommy.”

She loved them, but they were exhausting, and the little guilt monitor in the back of her brain kept telling her that she’d taken the easy way out, until now.

Taken the trophy wife way out, by leaving the kids with Maura or, before her, Kate and Robyn and Sveta, for hours and hours at a stretch, paying for endless mommy-and-me classes and toddler gym classes and toddler swim classes, so that—whether it was mommy and me, which it was sometimes, or Nanny and me, which it was too often—the kids were packaged into organized activities that left most of the real work to someone else.

Since leaving MJ was so much about not wanting to be a trophy wife anymore, she couldn’t take the easy way out now.

Oh, she wasn’t such an idealistic fool as to be attempting this without MJ’s money behind her. She’d married him in the first place as an escape from the grinding poverty trap, and she had no intention of taking a step backward into the trap’s evil jaws. But she was going to be as honorable about it as she could, taking only enough from him to ensure that his children were raised in the comfort and security he would want for them. Would insist on, in fact.

She wasn’t awarding herself very many points for this attitude, right now, but, still, it was something. It was better than she’d seen from some of the other women in her circle—like Anna, for example, who’d openly spoken of taking her ex to the cleaners, whether to anyone else’s eye the man deserved it or not.

The day went by.

Slow.

Boring.

Exhausting.

Punctuated by tiny diamond moments of rightness that she tried to lock into her memory to treasure later on. Abby singing a cheesy pop song to Tyler in the backseat of the car on the way to the store, her little four-year-old vocal cords valiantly attempting to mimic the electronic yodeling sound. Both of them with dabs of cookie dough on their noses when she let them lick the spoon and the bowl. The short-lived interlude of peace when they sat down at the table and ate the cookies, with milk for the children and a mug of steaming coffee for herself.

When Tyler went down for a nap, her first thought was simply “Thank heaven!” but when she turned to look back at him in the twin single bed that seemed so big for him and found his eyes already drifting shut, she had to pause and just watch him for a few moments because he was so precious and beautiful. His taffy-brown hair was so silky and fine on the pillow. His cheeks were so plump and pink.

They were so easy to love when they were asleep. Tyler would be giving up the daytime nap soon, because it had begun to push his bedtime at night later and later. For now, the time was precious. He was adorable … and thank goodness she had a break from him.

At six in the evening, just as she’d managed to get a home-cooked meal of spaghetti with meat sauce onto the table, there was a text from MJ. Coming tonight. Away early. Get to you nine-ish.

Tonight?

“There are bits in this,” Abby said. She was frowning and indignant about it, and her blond ponytail needed refastening or she would end up with dinner in her hair.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Alicia said as she jumped up to rewind the bright pink elastic.

“Bits,” Abby repeated, as she submitted to the procedure. “Of stuff. In the sauce.”

So much for Alicia’s attempt to insert stealth vegetables by chopping them up small. The weird thing was, Abby and Tyler both liked raw vegetable sticks with store-bought dips.

“It’s just carrot and celery,” she said, sitting down again. “I don’t like sara-lee.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Not cooked.”

“Well, how about I put a blindfold on you, and then you won’t know it’s there.” She jumped up again—even though her legs didn’t want to move for a second time, with MJ’s text still echoing through her mind and draining her strength—and pretended to get a dish towel to tie over Abby’s face.