Chapter 4: The Driveway
I didn’t run. I walked across Patton Loop in my slippers, holding my phone with the video already recording, because Rhonda had grabbed my arm at her door and said, “Record. Every second. Don’t touch him.”
Travis saw me halfway across the street. He set the TV down in the trailer and wiped his hands on his uniform pants.
“Jo. Go back inside Rhonda’s. This doesn’t concern you.”
“That’s my television.”
“I paid for it.”
“June’s nap monitor is plugged into that wall.”
He turned and went back into the house without answering, and the girl was left standing on my driveway.
Up close, she was a child.
That’s the only word I had. Long bleach-blonde hair with an inch of dark roots. Chipped pink nail polish. A gold necklace so thin it looked like it might snap. She had a PX food court lanyard sticking out of her hoodie pocket, the one that says Team Member on the badge. She couldn’t have weighed more than Maddie.
“Mrs. Kane,” she said. Her voice shook. “I’m… he said you’d be at the clinic. He said you weren’t…”
“Weren’t what?”
“Living here. He said you were separated. Since last year. He said you two only stayed in the same house for the kids and you had your own room and you’d already filed.” She looked at the U-Haul. “He said we were just getting his stuff.”
“He told you I’d filed,” I said.
“He showed me papers.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I didn’t read them. He said I didn’t need to.”
Of course he did. He used to say that to me, too.
“Kaylee,” I said. “That’s my daughter’s bike in that trailer.”
She looked. The purple bike with the streamers. Maddie hasn’t ridden it in two years, but she won’t let me give it away.
Kaylee’s face crumpled. She was the age my son is, and she looked like she wanted her mother.
And standing there on the concrete, I had to admit the thing I’d been avoiding for three days.
I had let this happen. Not the affair. That’s his. But the rest of it. I’d let Travis hold every password, every account, every lease. I’d signed whatever he put in front of me at the kitchen table without reading it, because I was holding a baby or stirring a pot or too tired to care. I’d made myself so small and so useful that when he decided to leave, he could just carry me out with the furniture.
Travis came out with a laundry basket of his clothes. He saw Kaylee crying and saw me filming, and something snapped behind his eyes.
He dropped the basket, crossed the driveway in three steps, and grabbed my wrist. Hard. His thumb dug into the bone.
“Turn that off,” he said through his teeth.
“Let go of me.”
“Turn it off, Jo.”
“Travis!” Kaylee’s voice, high and scared. “Travis, stop!”
He let go. He looked at her, then at Rhonda standing on her porch across the street with her own phone up, then at the red marks on my wrist. He picked up the laundry basket, threw it in the truck bed, and said, “Get in, Kaylee.”
She didn’t move.
“Kaylee. Get in the truck.”
She looked at me. Then she pulled out her phone, unlocked it with shaking fingers, scrolled, and held it out to me.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I swear to God I didn’t know. You need to see this.”
It was a text from Travis, sent to her last Thursday.
Once she’s off post and broke, I’ll file for full custody. Judges love a soldier dad. You’ll be a great stepmom to my kids, babe.
I read it twice.
He hadn’t been planning to leave us.
He’d been planning to take them.
