Leaving Amy (Amy #2) (6 page)

“Amy, wake up.”

I unfolded the hand that was holding up my chin and shuddered with pain. It’d fallen asleep and felt quite broken, swinging on the hinge of my wrist with the sensation of a thousand needles pricking it. I sat up and looked out. It was raining, and the swooshing of the windshield wipers could’ve easily lulled me back to sleep.

“Where are we?”

“We’re about twenty minutes from the cabin. I thought it’d give you a chance not to look sleepy-eyed when we walked in.” He looked over at me, his eyes weighing heavy. “You know how it takes forever for sleep lines to vanish from your face.”

“Yeah, thanks.” I rolled my neck around my shoulders. Wesley’s new Jeep wasn’t the most comfortable contraption to sleep in. Even if it was identical to his previous one, the Limited Edition he’d ordered and waited an entire month to come into the dealership. He’d planned more for his vehicle than our own wedding.

“Your bag sounds as if there’s a squirrel inside it. All that thing did was move and vibrate. At first I thought I’d have to pull off and take a club to it. Then I realized it must’ve been your phone.”

My blood pressure elevated again, just thinking about Mark redialing my number every chance he got, between rounds at the hospital. I imagined his patients were not getting his full attention today, and it weighed heavy on my heart. In time it would get easier. Certainly with so many states between us within a short month, it would be very possible to forget me altogether.

“Yeah, but I’m not answering it. I suppose I should just turn it off.” A frown found its way to my lips as I closed my eyes, trying not to see his face in my memory.

“So, what did he do to get dumped?” Wesley turned on his blinker and checked his rearview mirror to get off the next exit.

“He’s moving to Chicago.”

“Whoa.”

Short and simple. Kind of how I felt when Mark told me.

“So he’s just leaving you?”

“Kind of. He asked me to go, but I can’t.”

Surprisingly, Wesley didn’t have anything to say about that. I drummed my fingers on the armrest and watched the rain splatter on the glass before it got carried off by the arms of the wipers. I could’ve done this for the rest of the evening.

“I noticed you were packing when I came to your apartment Sunday. Where are you moving?”

“I was moving in with Mark next week. That was until he told me he was moving out next week. To Chicago.”

“So are you still moving now?”

“I have to. The landlord has it rented to someone else. Why?”

“Where will you go?” He placed his other hand on the wheel and took the tight turn to the stoplight.

“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll find another place. I didn’t like that one, anyway. It was across town and the commute to work wasn’t the greatest. I always got trapped in traffic.”

He pulled on the inside of his thigh, shaking out his left leg a little. With one hand now covering his mouth, he spoke quietly into it. I strained to hear him. “If you had nowhere else to go, you could always move back into the house. That is, until you know what you want to do or where you’d like to live.”

He did not just say that. Offer me to go back home? Was he crazy?
After this weekend, he was going to sign me back my life. My now lonely life. The one in which I’d never truly lived alone in. Ever. I went from a college apartment with two roommates to a house with Wesley, to staying with Tom, to an apartment where Mark frequented many, many evenings, and now it would be just me. No Mark, no Wesley, and no Tom. I suddenly felt very alone in the world.

“I don’t think that’d be a good idea. You know, with the divorce and everything between us now. And anyway, won’t you be looking for a new chick now?”

“Amy, I wasn’t looking when I found Violet. She just happened to be there. Offering me an ear and a shoulder.”

“And what, pray tell, did you need a shoulder and an ear for? I’ve got both of those, you know? You weren’t begging to use mine.”

“We were in a rut, Amy. I wasn’t happy and I’m pretty damned sure you weren’t the happiest either. How many times can you stay home on a Saturday night and rearrange the kitchen cabinets? I could never keep it straight where the chips were.”

“I only did that twice, and it was because the mugs were hard to reach and then the cereal boxes started piling up. And who went and bought fifteen boxes of Boo Berry and Sugar Toast Crunchies? There was no room for Mom’s china dinnerware.”

I shook my head, picturing steam rolling off my back. “At least I was going to do something about the rut. Cabinet re-organization wasn’t the problem. If you failed to recall, I told you I was home waiting for you the night of the accident…in trampy lingerie.”

“To tell you the truth, I still have a hard time believing that.” A small dimple showed up on his chin as he smiled, probably thinking about it.

“Well, trust me, I did. And I had to sleep all night in it, on a plastic chair in the hospital. Next to your bed. Totally not what I’d imagined when I first put it on that evening.”

“No way.” A devilish smile danced across his face. He’d gone back in age fifteen years to an adolescent boy thinking about naughty pinup girls.

“Way. Wesley, I was trying to spice things up for you. You just never gave me the chance.”

The smile disappeared. “Amy, I’m sorry. I thought you were just happy to live the way we were living. You upstairs watching sappy movies about love and reading all those books beside your bed. I’ve got to tell you, Amy, life isn’t tied up in a neat bow, like those stupid movies would have you believe. People have to work hard.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “At times I thought I was going to combust or go out of my mind. How many weekends could I endure going to the grocery store with you and want more to go and do something different? How many nights could I sit alone on the couch and watch the same crap on television? It seems like I fell asleep more there than I did in my own bed. Just to wake up the next day and do it all over again. That’s not the guy I felt I was inside.” He tapped his chest.

“Oh, I see. You weren’t that guy? I’m sorry, I must’ve never been introduced to the guy inside you. You know, the one you felt was tied up and gagged? Who exactly did I marry, Wesley? Were you playing that guy because you thought I liked him? I liked the lie you were living more than the guy you really were? Exactly who was that, anyway?”

“It was me, Amy.” He banged his head on the back headrest. “I guess I just wanted to step out of our comfort zone and experience more life. Go out more, party, be wild and crazy.”

“You’re describing fraternity life. We joined the real world when we graduated from college and got married, Wesley.”

“I know that, but we weren’t doing anything spontaneous anymore. And I don’t mean checking out the new farmers’ market in the village at six o’clock in the morning on Saturday. I mean something like me picking you up from work on a Friday evening and jetting down to a beach in California. Surfing in the day and lying around a campfire at night, staring at the stars.”

“That sounds like a movie, not real life.” I adjusted the seat belt from cutting into my neck and looked away from him.
How absurd.

“Life is what you make it, Amy. We don’t have any kids. Why couldn’t we just take off somewhere?”

“We were trying to save for me a new car, Wesley, and you one of those gas weed whackers for the backyard. We were going to make a koi pond after we got it all cleaned up back there.”

“Maybe I didn’t want a koi pond. All it is is something to clean and look after, Amy. I’d rather go to the wine country, taste a few dozen types, sleep at the inns and eat fancy meals, barely making it to work by Monday. Have something new to tell the guys, something other than the new bedsheets we found at Bed, Bath and Beyond.”

Why was this all a shock to me?
I didn’t feel as if I knew the guy I had shared a same house with. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I didn’t feel like it’d do me any good. You’d just roll your eyes and tell me it was all right to go out with the guys once in a while. Have a little fun and come back at a reasonable time on Saturday night.” He turned his head and looked out his window. “I wanted spontaneous with you. But that’s not who you are.”

I felt my insides give me hints that a breakdown was about to take place. My stomach was sputtering and I got that stupid smell of ammonia in my nose. This was not the best time to be dropping by a visit to my emotional self. His little “mystery man” self could just stay trapped on his inside and not bring up any more moot points. My palms began to sweat.

“Do you think I’m a prude? That I wouldn’t have cared?”

“Honestly?” He took his eyes off the road again and looked at me with his tortured brown eyes. “No, I didn’t think you cared.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. It hurt. But my feelings were hurt more. “I did care, Wesley. You were my husband. Of course I wanted you to be happy. That’s why I bought that lingerie. That’s why I spent the first week you were in a coma trying to change my wardrobe and makeup to be someone you’d stay with when you woke up. Only I learned too late that none of that mattered. You’d found someone else.”

“So did you.”

All that could be heard was the tires cutting through the dirt road. They finally stopped and he put the Jeep in park. We were there. And not a minute too soon. I’d broken up with my boyfriend, hashed out all that was wrong with my marriage, and my wrist still felt numb from the lack of blood flow for the last few hours I’d slept on it. I’d never survive past the turkey and stuffing the next day offered at this rate.

He turned off the ignition and looked over at me. I didn’t want to return his stare but it would’ve made for an awkward trip if we’d stopped talking. We were there to convince everyone we were happily married, right?

“What?” I gave him the blankest stare I could conjure.

“We screwed up, didn’t we?”

“Royally. Now let’s go and pretend we didn’t, and get you your money, shall we?”

I needed to keep it light. I couldn’t have a bunch of reflection hanging around. As far as I was concerned, our marriage was already in the ground and a tombstone had marked it finished. I didn’t want to dissect it now.
Onward, Amy.

Margaret met us at the door. She and Jeff always tried to beat us to get the master bedroom. It was Wesley’s dad’s cabin, for goodness’ sakes. But ever since Mr. Whitfield’s death, Jeff Tillion thought it should go to the next in line. And that would be him.

“Come on in, you two. You’ll drown out there.”

She stood back from the opened front door and ushered us inside. I wiped the mass of wet hair that clung to my forehead and scraped the inside of my left eye in doing so. Wesley carried in all our bags and dropped them on the front Aztec pattern rug. I swung my shoulder bag off and looked around. Nothing had changed since the last time we were there. At least with the cabin. Its rustic charm with logs for walls and the deer antler light fixture hovering over the open living room were all very much the same. It was Wesley and me who were different.
Now just not to show it.

“How were the roads?” Margaret picked up a few stray leaves I’d managed to bring in on my wet shoes. “I told the others you might’ve gotten washed away on that last one to the house.”

“Not in my Jeep,” Wesley gloated. As if he were the one who put the thing together, bolt by bolt. He drove the thing, whoopty doo.
Stupid Jeep.

“Others?” I asked, suddenly feeling outnumbered.

“Of course, dear.” She always spoke to me as if she were my mother. And although she was made like that—blouses and cardigans, molded hairdo, and a string of pearls around her neck—I always thought she had been a little too friendly with my dad. Buttering his toast in the morning, washing his dirty clothes and ironing them before Mom could. “Claire and Nick are in the room over by the blue-themed bathroom and, well, we brought Tyler.”

I saw where she half-heartedly motioned. Her son Tyler sat on the sofa in the oversized living space, staring at the television. Some documentary about war, it looked like. Lots of army men and tanks. Someone droning on in the background about artillery and manpower. He didn’t once turn to see the commotion we were making.

“I guess I’ll take these to our room, Amy.” Wesley smiled and toted the luggage up the stairs. He’d only brought a duffel bag so there wasn’t too much to carry. Still, it left me with Margaret and my uneasiness that I was sure I wore like a blinking neon sign.

“So where’s Claire and Nick?”

Claire and Nick were staples at every function, and now that their kids were all old enough and staying away from home, they joined the annual Thanksgiving retreat. Nick was a partner in the law firm. He was a goofy guy, shy by nature, but always telling bad jokes, and Claire was always doing an eye roll and over-compensating for his delinquency. She was a professional buffer for any and all situations. When she was around, I felt as though a tiny security blanket lived and breathed.

“They went out to get some last-minute things I needed.” She scurried to the table that sat squarely beneath the dining room light in the shape of a rooster, straightening out the tablecloth. “I swear, I’m so absent-minded nowadays. Can you believe I’d forget stick butter? How could I possibly make stuffing—or anything for that matter—without butter?”

“I can see it. You have a lot on your mind. It’s not easy toting all the groceries for a feast up here. Wesley and I could’ve helped.”
Well, not really, but it sounded empathic all the same.

I looked over to the sofa. There Jeff lay, feet up in the leather recliner and one hand in the front of his pants, sleeping away. Must have been all the action from his son’s choice of television viewing or the fact he worked night and day, six days a week. Either way, he seemed very unconcerned about the butter crisis.

“Anyway, tell me how you’ve been. I haven’t gotten to see much of you at all this past summer. Mostly because I was away.” She looked out toward the sofa before she signaled me to follow her through the swinging cafe door to the kitchen. She lowered her voice. “I’ve had a lot to deal with. And among all the woes, I had damage control to maintain. I’m sure you heard.”