Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [97]
“I don’t know.” He bit off each word, and I realized that he wasn’t just angry, the way I’d seen him a few times over the years, when the bill collectors would call, or the time he’d been passed over for a promotion. He was way past angry. He was furious . . . and it scared me.
He got to his feet. “I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll go stay with my mom for a while.”
“You do that.” The words were out of my mouth before I could think about them, but it only took me a moment to realize that this was the right choice, maybe the only choice. Angry as he was, I didn’t want to be around him, and I didn’t want the boys around him, either.
“This was a mistake,” he said, walking past me without sparing me a glance. Questions swirled in my head: Would he come back? Would he see the boys? Was this a separation? Did he want to get divorced? But I didn’t ask any of them. I just stood there, frozen, unbelieving, as he climbed up the stairs, packed a bag, climbed into the car, and drove off into the dark.
INDIA
It started out a day like any other chilly, gray-sky April morning. I woke up feeling Marcus’s lips on my forehead, hearing the soft clink as he set down a cup of tea beside me. “How is the mother-to-be?” he asked, and I smiled. Neither of us was trying to pretend that the situation was anything other than what it was, but Marcus still treated me like I was expecting. We had the ultrasound pictures stuck to our refrigerator with a magnet; we sent Annie downloadable recordings of our voices reading the baby stories and singing lullabies, and kept a calender marked with red Xs through each day before the baby’s arrival hanging on my dressing room door.
Once Marcus was showered and dressed and off to work, I padded to my dressing room and pulled on the workout clothes I’d laid out the night before—tights and running pants, a long-sleeved Under Armour shirt with a fleece jacket on top of it.
My trainer met me in the lobby, and we jogged across the street, across the wide sidewalk through the gap in the stone gate and into the park for the usual ninety minutes of torture. Back at home, my breakfast was waiting for me on a tray: a white china plate covered with almonds, dried apricots, a peeled, cored apple cut into slices so thin they were translucent, and a hard-boiled egg. I looked longingly at Marcus’s soaking tub before skinning off my sweaty clothes. It wasn’t as if my shower was Spartan: the water assaulted me from a half-dozen nozzles and there was a marble ledge, specially designed so I’d have a place to prop up my foot while I shaved my legs. Some couples had his-and-hers sinks. Marcus and I had his-and-hers bathrooms. “It’s the secret of a happy marriage,” I’d told Annie. “That, and Viagra.” The truth was, Marcus liked to visit me in my bathroom, knocking on the door in his bathrobe. Sometimes he’d slip into the shower with me, getting his hands slick with soap and running them over my body, and sometimes this would lead to sex, but, more often, he’d just pull up the chair from my vanity and sit by the shower, talking about nothing and everything, his children, his colleagues, the next trip we’d take. At first I’d been shy about letting him see me backstage—he didn’t need to know that I used concealer or plucked my eyebrows—but, after a while, I found that I genuinely enjoyed his company, and I looked forward to those mornings more than any other part of the day.
By ten o’clock I was out the door, dressed, hair blown straight, makeup applied. In my office, I sipped a latte and returned calls and e-mails for an hour and a half, revising a press release announcing my jewelry company’s new line of charm bracelets (“The perfect gift for Mother’s Day!”), calling to confirm receipt for the invitations we’d sent for a cocktail party in honor of a bridal magazine’s new editor, their fourth in three years. I was taking my assistant Daphne to lunch at Michael’s. Then I’d head to the salon for a bikini wax and a facial. On Friday, Marcus and I were flying to the Bahamas for the fiftieth birthday of one of