• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 551 0

man. Not only was such a relationship complicated and risky but it was simply wrong. A woman she did not know would be terribly hurt. Bridget knew firsthand how this worked. Had she not been terribly hurt herself six years earlier, when Arthur had walked out on her? Arthur had simply announced, an hour before Matt was to return home from school, his palms open as if he were merely reporting scientific fact, that he was leaving her. The news had been so shocking that Bridget had not been able to comprehend his words, in the same way she had not been able to understand calculus her first year in college. She could see herself as she’d been that afternoon—head shaking back and forth, mouth open, asking soap-operatic questions she would not have believed possible: Who is she? When did you meet her? How long? Where? What about Matt? The answer to this last question so enraging Bridget that she threw the nearest thing to hand, her pocketbook, the lipstick and hand cream and coins and supermarket receipts spilling out on its journey from her arm to Arthur’s chest and then dropping to the floor as he made no effort to catch it. He no longer had any interest in her handbag or its contents or in her. He would sue for custody of Matt.

“On what grounds?” Bridget had asked.

“I can support him,” Arthur had said simply, “and you can’t.”

Knowing it was a cliché even as she said it, Bridget had uttered the truest thing she knew: Over my dead body.

And it had been an ugly war, love turning to hatred overnight; in a month to disgust; in a year to pity; and finally to indifference. Bridget, her resources stretched and pummeled, had won the first two battles. Miraculously, a third had not been necessary. An arrangement had been agreed to: Matt would see Arthur on alternate weekends and for a month in the summer.

(Bridget waited, like a scientist studying lab rats, for Matt finally to act out the playlet written for him that afternoon. Where, for example, was his rage? Apart from the Incident with the Alcohol, Bridget so far had detected nothing. Matt left for his month with his father with a quick fraught hug—and until this year, tears in his eyes—and returned happy, seemingly undamaged and ready to resume his normal life. Of course, Bridget thought, visiting his father was his normal life, just as Bill’s presence now was, children being remarkably flexible about their givens.)

Perhaps not all children, though. Bill’s daughter, Melissa, had decidedly not been flexible. Nineteen and intractable, she had taken her mother’s side, which Bridget thought perfectly understandable. Bill saw his daughter, a sophomore at Boston University, for dinner as often as he could. Bridget had met Melissa only twice, once before the diagnosis, once after, and each occasion had been disastrous. The revelation that Bridget had cancer had not produced, as Bill had hoped, a chink in the ice but rather had made Bridget somehow repellent to Melissa, a diseased thing that should not be further exposed to her father.

Bridget cringed when she recalled their second dinner together in Boston. Bridget still didn’t know why Melissa had agreed to the meal. Perhaps Bill had coerced her in some way that Bridget was not allowed to know. During dinner, Melissa made a point of talking, when she spoke at all, only to Bill, and of inserting her mother into the discussion whenever possible. It was as though Bridget was not present, though her presence was implied in every reminiscence, in every bulletin from home. Melissa looked directly at her father, locking eyes when she spoke to him, as if trying to communicate an urgent message. Come back.

Bridget asked questions and received one-word answers. It was maddening, she thought, because she could see that in another universe she and Bill’s daughter might have had true affection for each other. Melissa would be easy to like. Battle-ready armor protected an essential sweetness. Melissa had shiny dark hair that fell in a sheet down her back and would, from time to time, fan across her shoulders. She had as well a fetching way of