204 Rosewood Lane - Debbie Macomber [81]
“You ready to help me load everything into the car?” he asked his son.
“Okay.” Eddie didn’t reveal a lot of enthusiasm. He slid off the edge of the bed and paraded behind Zach with an armload of clothes. Zach arranged the starched dress shirts on the backseat of his car and took the stack Eddie had brought out with him.
“Do you want to see my apartment?” he asked Allison when he returned to the kitchen.
His daughter removed her earphones and turned off the portable CD player. She stared at him a moment as though she hadn’t heard. Finally she muttered, “Are you really going to leave, Dad?”
“I’m afraid so, sweetheart.”
“But you vowed to always love Mom.”
“I know, and this is hard, but you can see that your mother and I do nothing but argue. That’s not good. We’re going through this divorce for you kids, to save you from—”
“You’re doing this for me and Eddie? I don’t think so, Dad. It seems to me you and Mom are doing this for yourselves. Eddie and I just happen to be stuck in the middle, and I hate it. I really, really hate it.” She was shouting by the time she finished. Before Zach could reply, Allison slipped the headphones back over her ears, blocking him out.
Zach saw the tears in his daughter’s eyes and they twisted his gut. He wanted to tell her that the difficulties between him and Rosie had nothing to do with her or Eddie. This wasn’t their fault.
Maybe he and Rosie had outgrown each other. That was something he’d read in an article on marriage breakdown that Janice had given him. She’d photocopied it from some women’s magazine. Maybe he and Rosie had stopped having anything, other than the kids and the house, in common, as the article suggested. Perhaps because he made a good living and they were now financially comfortable they’d lost that sense of being partners, facing the world together, creating dreams together. Lately their marriage had been filled with bitterness and resentment. All they did was make each other miserable, and that was no way to live and certainly not a healthy environment in which to raise their children.
Looking around the house one last time, Zach loaded up his remaining essentials. For obvious reasons, Rosie had been missing for most of the day. This was no surprise, seeing that she spent the greater part of every weekend with people other than her family, anyway. Nor did it upset him when he noticed the breakfast dishes still in the sink, unwashed. That was par for the course. He had his own list of sins that his wife had committed, but unless she made it impossible, he was taking the higher road and refused to drag her faults into a courtroom.
“You coming to see my new apartment?” he asked Eddie, striving for a bit of enthusiasm.
“I guess.”
“You’ll have your own room there, you know.” The second bedroom was necessary if he intended to have the children stay with him, and Zach did. He couldn’t afford beds just yet, but he’d buy them as soon as possible.
“I don’t wanna sleep in the same room as Allison,” Eddie complained.
“You can sleep in my room if you want.”
“I can?”
“Sure thing.”
That appeared to appease Eddie for the moment.
Before he left, Zach asked Allison a second time if she wanted to see his new place, but she sat with her earphones on, music blaring, and pretended not to hear him. She was angry and Zach understood how she felt. Eventually she’d come around and they’d be able to discuss this. Allison had always been closer to him than her mother.
The two-bedroom apartment was a little less than three miles from the house on Pelican Court. It wasn’t as large, but then he could barely afford to maintain two households. He’d wanted a three-bedroom place, but couldn