The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

threw the book in the trash can outside, and I wondered about other lies I could tell her that would corroborate the one I’d just told. I wanted to walk back in there and convince her, with the authority that a mother should have, that she was wrong. I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of woman a husband cheated on. And despite my ten years of resentment for the relationship you and Violet shared, I didn’t want her to believe you were the kind of man who would do that.

I was hanging on to my family by a thread, I knew. But I had to. I had nothing else left.

When you came home that night, I touched you with affection when I thought she might be looking, and I called you ‘honey’ instead of your name. I slipped in beside you on the couch while you watched the hockey game. I put my hand on your lap and my chin on your shoulder, and I called her into the room to ask if she had handed in the money for the school pizza lunch. She glared at me and looked down at my hand on her father’s thigh and shook her head just slightly, just one sharp back-and-forth, just enough to tell me she knew what I was trying to do. She had a remarkable ability to make me hate myself.

One month later – three months after I discovered the affair – I woke up on a Sunday and I knew. We were over. We needed to stop pretending we would simply float past this, like it was something unpleasant on a riverbank. The sitter took Violet out for the afternoon and we went to the bar down the street.

‘You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?’

You looked out the window and then impatiently waved for the server. I asked you again if you could just, please, tell me about the woman. Tell me why you loved her. You didn’t avoid my eyes. You looked like you were talking yourself through the decision of how much to tell me, what secrets you were willing to part with. An urgency welled inside me and I could no longer be there across from you – we needed to get this done. I wanted you gone.

I walked home briskly, with my coat clutched at my chest. I brought up the suitcases from the basement. I packed all of your clothes neatly inside and zipped them shut. I called a moving company and booked four large packing bins and a small moving van to arrive the next day. I found a pad of sticky notes in your desk drawer and I walked through the house and stuck one on each item we shared that I wanted you to take: the small rolling island in the kitchen, the record player, the set of dishes from your parents, the runner in the front hallway that had marks from the shoes you never took off when I asked you to, the sofa in the living room that had been imprinted with the shape of your ass for years, the green glass vase, the chopping board stained with the blood of red meat, the chairs you commissioned for the dining-room table that hurt everyone’s backs, all the furniture in your den, and most of the art in the house. And then I went to the closet in your den and found the tin of blades. I took the longest one and wrapped it in a silk scarf, and I put it in my bottom drawer.

‘I don’t care where you stay tonight. Just come back tomorrow to pack everything else.’ I even kissed you good-bye, a habit, a reflex of a married woman. As I walked up the stairs I thought of Sam’s things. Everything we kept that had belonged to him was in boxes in the basement. Maybe you would want something – a blanket, a toy. Maybe I should ask you. Maybe you were owed the faint smell of him still lingering in the fabric after nearly three years. I turned on the tap of the bath and took my clothes off. The sound of the water had muffled your footsteps and so the sight of you in the doorway startled me. I clutched my breasts and turned away. You felt like an intrusion now. All those years, and now you felt like a stranger.

‘What about Violet?’ You didn’t take your eyes off me as I stepped into the tub. The water was too hot, but I forced myself lower.

‘What about her? This is your doing. You can figure out what to tell her.’

You looked up and away, as you did whenever I said something that made you wish I wasn’t so stubborn or vague or difficult or indecisive. Or flippant. Or sarcastic. Those were some of the things you didn’t like me to be. You rubbed your forehead. I seemed to make you tired. I seemed to make you wish I hadn’t ever existed at all.

‘I’ve tried my best to keep this from her because I don’t want her to think badly of you. I don’t want things between you two to change,’ I said. ‘But I think she knows.’

I waited for your reaction. I wanted you to be grateful to me, to concede that you were the one doing this to us. But all you said was:

‘I want to share custody. And split the time evenly.’

‘Fine.’

You watched me slip into the tub until my whole body was magnified under the water. You stared at me, the woman you’d been inside for twenty years. I wondered if you might try to come in with me. If despite all my faults, all the ways I disappointed you, you still wanted to feel my skin one last time. I looked up and felt nothing for you – not love, not hate, not anything in between. Is this what the end was supposed to feel like? There