Chapter 2: One More Christmas of Pretending
Let me tell you about the eleven years first, so you understand what I was holding.
I met Ryan at a friend’s wedding in Dayton when I was twenty-six. He was the groomsman who danced with every grandmother. He was funny and warm and impossible to dislike, and for a long time I thought the warmth was something he had for me. It took me a decade to understand it was just something he had.
We bought a brick Cape Cod in Clintonville with a red door and a crooked maple. I teach art to third graders at an elementary school two miles away. Ryan sells orthopedic implants, which means he lives in hotels and rental cars and the passenger seat of whatever surgeon he’s taking to lunch. We talked about kids every year. Every year, Ryan said next year, when the territory settles down.
The territory never settled down.
I used to be proud of how little I needed. I didn’t need him home for every birthday. I didn’t need flowers. I didn’t need to check his phone, because I wasn’t that kind of wife, and he wasn’t that kind of man.
That’s what I was thinking, sitting on our bed with his gym bag between my knees.
Running shoes. Two pairs of socks rolled together. His travel shaving kit. A paperback thriller with a boarding pass from Phoenix marking page 210. Last December. The same week he’d missed Christmas Eve.
I opened the inside zipper pocket.
There was a second gray envelope, smaller, the kind that comes with a gift card. Inside was another card from the same jeweler. Ryan must have written it the same day, at the same counter, and then decided it was too honest to put in the box.
I recognized the capitals. I recognized the little flourish he puts on the R.
L. Be patient with me. I’ll tell her after the holidays. One more Christmas of pretending. R.
I read it so many times the words stopped being words.
One more Christmas of pretending.
So that’s what the plate was. That’s what Traverse City was, and the rental car, and tell your mom to save me a plate. One more performance for my parents, one more round of photos by the tree, one more Christmas morning of Ryan teaching my nephew card tricks while my mother told him he was the son she never had.
And then, after the holidays, he’d tell me.
He’d sit me down at the kitchen island in January and explain that he’d been unhappy for a long time, that these things happen, that nobody planned this. I could hear every word in his voice. I could hear him making it sound reasonable.
Downstairs, he was singing along to the radio while he loaded the dishwasher wrong.
I put the paperback back with the boarding pass at page 210. I zipped the pocket. I put the shoes back heel to heel, the way he leaves them. I took a photo of each card with my phone, front and back, with the jeweler’s logo in the frame.
Then I put the second card back, too.
That was the hardest part. Leaving it there. It felt like leaving a knife on the counter where he’d see it. But I knew one thing for certain: the second Ryan realized I knew, he’d start talking. He’s a salesman. Talking is how he wins.
I wasn’t going to give him the chance.
I lay down next to him that night and listened to him fall asleep in eleven minutes, the way he always does, like a man with nothing on his mind. I stared at the ceiling until two.
At 7:15 the next morning, after he left for the gym, I called my principal and took a personal day.
At 8:02, I called the only divorce lawyer whose name I knew, because she’d handled my friend Dana’s case and Dana still sent her a Christmas card.
“Marisol Vega’s office.”
“My name is Natalie Brooks,” I said. “My husband is leaving for Dallas on the twenty-third. I need to know what I can do before he gets back.”
