Don’t.
He sat back down.
The college girl next to me let out a long, shaky breath.
“That,” she whispered, “was the most savage thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”
“I’m not sure it was the right thing,” I said.
“Ma’am,” she said. “It was so the right thing.”
She held out a little bag of pretzels.
“Do you want these? I feel like you should have these.”
I took the pretzels. I don’t know why. I couldn’t eat a single one. I just held the bag.
Megan stayed in the restroom for almost forty minutes.
A line formed outside the door. A man knocked. Tasha came over and spoke through the door in a low voice. Finally, the door opened and Megan came out. Her face was gray and blotchy. Her mascara was all down her cheeks. Her claw clip had come loose and her hair was hanging in her face.
She didn’t look toward the back of the plane.
She didn’t go back to row two.
She went and sat in an empty jump seat at the very front, near the cockpit door, and Tasha brought her a cup of water. She sat there with her head in her hands for the rest of the flight.
Ryan sat alone in row two.
He didn’t turn around again.
About halfway through the flight, Tasha came all the way back to row twenty-seven. She crouched down in the aisle beside the Bears fan, who was still somehow asleep.
“Hon,” she said quietly. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I said.
She nodded. “The gentleman in 2B asked me to give you this.”
She held out a folded napkin.
I didn’t take it.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
Tasha looked at the napkin. Then at me.
“Want me to throw it away?”
“Yes, please.”
She didn’t argue. She didn’t look at it. She just stood up and crumpled it into the trash bag on her cart.
Then she put a hand on my shoulder, just for a second.
“My ex did the same thing,” she said quietly. “With my cousin.” She shook her head. “You’re doing better than I did. I threw a shoe at him.”
“Did it hit him?”
“Right in the face,” she said.
I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It just came out. It turned into a sob halfway through.
Tasha handed me a stack of napkins and walked away.
I cried the rest of the way to Chicago. Quietly. With my face turned toward the college girl so nobody else could see.
She put her headphones back on, but she didn’t turn on any music. I could tell. She just sat there next to me, so I wasn’t alone.
At one point she reached over and held my hand on the armrest. Didn’t say anything. Just held it.
I never even learned her name.
When we landed, I was the last one off the plane.
I wanted it that way. I sat in my seat in row twenty-seven while everybody else got their bags and shuffled off. I didn’t want to have to walk past them. I didn’t want them to see me up close.
By the time I got to the front, they were both gone.
Tasha was standing by the door.
“He waited,” she said quietly. “On the jetway. For about ten minutes. Then she pulled him away.”
“Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”
“Go see your mom,” Tasha said. “I hope she’s okay.”
My phone had forty-three notifications when I turned it back on.
Twenty-one missed calls from Ryan. Twelve texts from Ryan. Eight texts from Megan. Two from Emma. One from Ted Dombrowski.
I opened Ted’s first.
She’s out of imaging. They think they caught it in time. She’s asking for you. Well, she’s trying to.
I opened Emma’s.
Mom is grandma ok. Uncle Dave picked us up. Lily is crying. Jake ate a whole pizza.
Mom also why did dad just call me and ask if you were ok. He sounded weird.
I didn’t open Ryan’s.
I didn’t open Megan’s.
I walked straight out of O’Hare to the taxi line and got in a cab and gave the driver the address of Edward Hospital in Naperville.
My mom was in a room on the fourth floor.
She looked small in that hospital bed. Smaller than I’d ever seen her. There were wires on her chest and an IV in her arm and a tube under her nose. The left side of her face was drooping a little.
But her eyes were open.
And when I walked in the door, she saw me, and the right side of her face lifted into a crooked half-smile.
“Lau,” she said. Her voice was slurred and thick. “Lau-ra.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my head on her shoulder and cried.
She lifted her right hand and patted my hair. Slowly. Clumsily. The way she did when I was little.
“Sh,” she said. “Sh. I’m. Here.”
The doctor came in about an hour later.
He was young, with glasses and a calm voice. He said it was an ischemic stroke. A blood clot in her brain. Ted had found her in time, and the paramedics had gotten her to the hospital quickly, and they’d given her a medicine to break up the clot.
“She’s lucky,” he said. “Very lucky. There’s damage, but it’s not as bad as it could have been. With physical therapy and speech therapy, I think she has a good chance of getting most of it back.”
“Most of it?”
“Most of it,” he said gently. “It’ll take time. Months. But she’s a fighter. I can already tell.”
My mom made a noise from the bed. A sort of grunt.
“She says she agrees,” I translated.
The doctor smiled.
I didn’t tell my mom about Ryan that night.
She was too tired. She kept falling asleep in the middle of sentences. And I didn’t want to put that on her.
But around ten o’clock, after the nurses came through and the lights got dimmed, she woke up and looked at me for a long time.
Then she lifted her right hand and touched my left hand.
My bare finger. The white dent where my ring had been.
She looked at it. Then she looked up at me.
She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, really.
But her eyes asked.
I shook my head. “Not tonight, Mom. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
She held onto my hand. Hard. Harder than I would have thought she could, with half her body not working right.
Then she said one word. It took her a long time to get it out.
“Bas-tard.”
I laughed so hard a nurse poked her head in to check on us.
I finally read Ryan’s texts at midnight, sitting in the plastic chair beside Mom’s bed while she slept.
Laura please call me
I’m so sorry
I didn’t get your message my phone was off
Is your mom okay
Please call me. Please. We need to talk
I can explain
It’s not what you think
Ok it’s what you think but it’s not the whole story
Laura please
I’m at the hotel. I’m not with her. She left. She went to the airport. I’m alone
I’m coming to the hospital
Which hospital
Laura which hospital
I typed one message back.
Do not come to the hospital. My mother had a stroke. She does not need to see you. I don’t either. Go home and take care of our children. I’ll be home when I’m ready.
Then I turned off my phone.
Megan’s texts were worse.
Laura I’m so sorry
I never meant for you to find out like this
I never meant for you to find out at all
That came out wrong
Please let me explain
I love you. You’re my best friend. You’re my sister
Please don’t tell Dave
I read that last one four times.
Please don’t tell Dave.
My mom had just had a stroke. I’d watched her kiss my husband on a plane. And the thing she was most worried about was whether I’d tell her husband.
I didn’t answer her.
I didn’t tell Dave that night.
I wanted to. I sat there at midnight with my thumb over his name in my contacts.
But I kept thinking about him at the school pickup line. Picking up my three kids. Feeding them dinner. Putting Lily to bed in their guest room. Telling them their grandma was going to be okay.
He didn’t deserve to find out from a text at midnight.
He deserved to find out from his wife.
The next morning, at 7:15, Dave called me.
“Laura,” he said. His voice was flat. Strange. “Megan’s home.”
I closed my eyes.
“She got in at three this morning,” he said. “She was supposed to be in Indianapolis until Thursday. She came home in the middle of the night, crying, and she sat on the kitchen floor and she won’t tell me what’s going on.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She keeps saying your name,” he said. “She keeps saying Laura knows. Over and over. Laura knows. Laura knows.” He took a breath. “What do you know, Laura?”
I sat in that plastic chair beside my mother’s bed and looked out the window at the parking lot.
“Dave,” I said. “I think you should ask her where she really was.”
There was a long silence.
“Was Ryan in Chicago this week?” he said slowly.
I closed my eyes.
“Yes,” I said.
The silence went on for a very long time.
Then I heard something I’d never heard before in twenty years of knowing him. Dave crying. A big, gentle man, crying quietly into the phone.
“How long?” he finally said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, Dave. I found out yesterday.”
“How?”
So I told him. All of it. The plane. The laugh. The kiss. The box.
When I got to the part about the note, he let out a sound that was halfway between a sob and a laugh.
“Save one truffle for Dave,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I wrote that.”
“No,” he said. His voice cracked. “No. Thank you. Thank you for thinking about me.”
It came out, little by little, over the next few weeks. The way these things always do.
Megan told Dave everything. Or almost everything. She was a terrible liar under pressure, it turned out. She always had been. In college, she’d confess to eating my yogurt before I even noticed it was gone.
It had been going on for two years and four months.
It started at our beach trip in North Carolina, the summer Lily turned seven. One night, after everyone else was asleep, Ryan and Megan stayed up on the deck drinking wine. Talking. About their marriages. About how they were both unhappy. About how nobody understood them.
I was asleep upstairs, twenty feet away.
After that, it was the trips.
Not all of them. Ryan really did travel for work. But about once a month, a “real estate conference” would line up with a “sales trip,” and they’d meet in a hotel in Chicago or Indianapolis or Cleveland.
Two years and four months.
Every Friday night dinner. Every birthday party. Every Christmas Eve. Every summer at the beach.
They’d been sitting across the table from me and Dave the whole time.
Ryan came to see me at my mom’s house on the fourth day.
I’d told him not to. He came anyway. He drove all the way from Ohio.
I was out on the front porch drinking coffee when his car pulled up. Mom was inside, napping. She’d been discharged the day before. Ted and his wife were bringing over casseroles at a rate of about one every three hours.
Ryan got out of the car and walked up the front walk. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
He looked terrible. He hadn’t shaved. His eyes were red. He was wearing the same navy jacket.
“Laura,” he said.
“I told you not to come.”
“I know. I had to.” He looked up at me. “Please. Just let me talk.”
I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no either.
He took that as a yes. He always did.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I waited.
“I know that’s not enough. I know nothing I say is enough.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t even know how it happened. It just… happened. We were both unhappy, and we were both lonely, and—”
“I wasn’t lonely,” I said.
He stopped.
“I wasn’t lonely, Ryan. I wasn’t unhappy. I thought we were fine. I thought we had a good life. I slept in your T-shirt when you were gone.”
His face crumpled.
“That’s the worst part,” I said. “Do you know that? It’s not even the sex. It’s not even the lies. It’s that I was happy. I was happy, and I didn’t even know I was the only one.”
He sat down on the bottom step. He put his face in his hands.
“I was going to end it,” he said through his fingers. “I swear. I was going to end it after this trip.”
“You’ve been saying that to yourself for two years and four months, haven’t you?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did she know?” I asked. “About my mom? Did she get my voicemail?”
He looked up.
“She got it,” he said quietly. “When we were in the airport. Before the flight.”
“And?”
He didn’t want to tell me. I could see it in his face.
“Ryan.”
“She turned off her phone,” he said. “She said… she said we’d deal with it when we got back.”
I set my coffee cup down on the porch railing very carefully.
“My mother,” I said, “was lying on her kitchen floor. And my best friend got a voicemail saying she’d had a stroke. And she turned off her phone and got on a plane with my husband.”
“Laura—”
“And you didn’t check your phone at all.”
“I turned it off,” he said. “Before the flight. So you couldn’t… so nobody could call.”
So I couldn’t call.
“I want you to leave,” I said.
“Laura, please, let’s just talk about—”
“I want a divorce, Ryan.”
He stared up at me from the bottom step.
I didn’t know I was going to say it until I said it. But once it was out, it felt right. It felt like setting down a bag of groceries I’d been carrying for too long.
“You don’t mean that,” he said. “You’re upset. Your mom—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t use your sales voice on me. I’ve been married to you for eighteen years. I know that voice. That’s the voice you use on hospital administrators.”
His mouth snapped shut.
Behind me, the screen door creaked.
Mom was standing in the doorway. She was leaning hard on her new walker with the tennis balls on the feet. Her face still drooped on one side. She was wearing her pink bathrobe and Ted’s wife’s knitted slippers.
She looked at Ryan for a long time.
Ryan stood up. “Pat. Hi. How are you feeling? I’m so sorry about—”
My mother lifted her right hand and pointed at his car.
“Go,” she said.
It came out slurred, but it was very clear.
Ryan looked at her. Then at me.
“Go,” Mom said again. Louder.
He went.
The divorce took nine months.
It wasn’t pretty. They never are. Ryan hired a lawyer who tried to argue that since I’d “abandoned the family home” to take care of my mother, I shouldn’t get the house. My lawyer, a sixty-year-old woman named Barbara with silver hair and a voice like a drill sergeant, shut that down in about four minutes.
“Your client,” she said to his lawyer, in a conference room, while Ryan sat there red-faced, “lied to his wife about his travel for two years and four months. He used company expense accounts for hotel rooms shared with another woman. We have the receipts. Would you like to continue this argument, or would you like to talk about a fair settlement?”
They talked about a fair settlement.
Ryan’s company found out about the expense accounts. I didn’t tell them. It came out in discovery, and his lawyer couldn’t keep it buried. They let him go quietly. No scandal. Just a letter and a cardboard box.
He got a new job selling cars at a dealership in Westerville. He lives in an apartment by the highway.
He sees the kids every other weekend. Emma barely talks to him. Jake is getting better. Lily still loves him, the way nine-year-olds love their dads, without asking a lot of questions.
I’m glad. I don’t want her to hate him. He’s still her father. He’s still a good father, in a lot of ways. He was always good with them.
He just wasn’t good with me.
Dave and Megan split up too.
Dave moved out in the spring. He got a small house on the other side of town. He told me later that the worst part wasn’t the cheating. It was that she’d turned her phone off. When she found out my mom had a stroke.
“Twenty years,” he said. “She’s known your mom for twenty years. Your mom came to our wedding. She knitted our first baby a blanket.” He shook his head. “And Megan just turned her phone off.”
Megan tried to see me three times.
The first time was two weeks after Chicago. She showed up at my front door with flowers. I didn’t open the door. I watched her through the window. She stood on the porch for ten minutes, crying. Then she left the flowers on the step and went home.
I gave the flowers to my neighbor.
The second time was a letter. Four pages, handwritten. I read it once. It was mostly about how unhappy she’d been with Dave, and how Ryan understood her, and how she never meant to hurt me, and how she’d been so depressed, and how she missed me every single day.
At the very end, she wrote: I still have the bracelet. I wear it every day. I’m never taking it off.
I put the letter in a drawer. I didn’t answer it.
The third time was six months after Chicago.
I ran into her at the grocery store. In the cereal aisle, of all places. I came around the corner with my cart and there she was, standing in front of the Cheerios.
She saw me. She went white.
Her hair was shorter. She’d lost weight. She looked tired. Older. On her left wrist, there was a faded pink bracelet. The other half of mine. The one I’d cut off with a college girl’s sewing scissors.
“Laura,” she said.
I stopped my cart.
For a long time, neither of us said anything.
“How’s your mom?” she finally asked.
“She’s better,” I said. “She’s walking without the walker now. She’s talking almost normally. She still gets her words mixed up sometimes when she’s tired.”
Megan nodded. Her eyes filled up.
“I’m glad,” she whispered. “I’m so glad.”
“You turned off your phone,” I said.
She flinched like I’d slapped her.
“I know.”
“She was on the floor, Megan. And you knew. And you turned it off.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I know. I think about it every day.”
I looked at her for a long time. My best friend. The girl who dragged her mattress into the hallway with me at four in the morning. Who held my hand for twenty-two hours of labor. Who taught Lily how to French braid.
The woman who’d been sleeping with my husband for two years and four months.
“I can’t forgive you,” I said. “Not right now. Maybe not ever. I don’t know.”
“I understand.”
“But I don’t hate you,” I said. “I thought I would. I wanted to. I just don’t.”
She started to cry, right there in the cereal aisle. A woman with a toddler in her cart gave us a wide berth.
“I miss you,” Megan said. “I miss you so much.”
“I miss you too,” I said. And that was the truth. “I miss who I thought you were.”
Then I pushed my cart past her and went to the next aisle.
I haven’t seen her since.
Mom moved in with us in the spring.
It was her idea, actually. Which shocked everybody, especially me.
“Ohio is still too flat,” she said, sitting at my kitchen table one Sunday with her coffee. Her words were clearer now, but slower. “And too full of Buckeyes. But you’re here. And the kids are here. And I don’t want Ted finding me on the floor again.”
So she sold the house in Naperville and moved into our downstairs guest room. She brought her book club books and her tomato seeds and her terrible collection of ceramic roosters.
Lily helped her plant the tomatoes in the backyard. Jake carries her groceries in without being asked. Emma, of all people, does her speech therapy exercises with her every night at the kitchen table, reading out loud from a book of tongue twisters.
“She sells sea shells by the sea shore,” Mom says. Slowly. Carefully.
“Good, Grandma. Now faster.”
“She sells. Sea shells. By the—oh, for crying out loud.”
Emma laughs. Mom laughs. I stand at the stove making dinner, listening to them, and I think about that hospital room in Naperville, and the doctor saying most of it, and how close I came to losing her.
On a day when two other people decided I didn’t matter.
About a year after Chicago, I flew again.
It was the first time since that day. Mom and I were going to Naperville for Ted’s eightieth birthday party. He’d insisted. He’d sent an invitation with a picture of himself in his old firefighter helmet.
I was nervous at the gate. My hands were shaking. Mom noticed.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
She looked at me with her crooked smile. “Liar.”
We walked down the jetway together. She was slow. I didn’t rush her.
When we stepped onto the plane, I looked up toward the front. At row two. Out of habit. Out of something.
There was an old man in 2A, reading a newspaper. And a teenage boy in 2B, asleep with his mouth open.
That was all.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
Mom squeezed my arm.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re in the back.”
We were in row twenty-six. One row up from where I’d sat that day.
During takeoff, Mom held my hand on the armrest. Her grip was strong now. Almost back to normal.
“You know,” she said, as the plane leveled off, “I’ve been thinking about your little box.”
“Oh, God, Mom. Don’t.”
“No, I mean it. Ted told me. Ted tells everybody.” She shook her head slowly. “I keep thinking. My daughter. Sitting in the back of an airplane. Finding out her husband and her best friend were cheating on her. While her mother was in the hospital. And instead of screaming, she sat there and made a little present.”
“It wasn’t very nice,” I said.
“No,” Mom agreed. “But it wasn’t screaming, either. You didn’t make a fool of yourself. You let them do that.”
She patted my hand.
“Your father would have been very proud of you,” she said. “He would have also probably punched Ryan in the nose. But he’d have been proud.”
When the flight attendant came by with the cart, I asked if they had any chocolates.
She dug around and found a little box. Not gold. Just plain brown cardboard, with two milk chocolate squares inside.
I paid for it. I opened it. I gave one to my mom.
She looked at it. Then at me.
“Sea salt?” she asked.
“No. Just milk chocolate.”
“Hm,” she said. She ate it anyway. “Not as good.”
“I know.”
“Next year,” she said, “I want the good ones.”
“I’ll get you the good ones.”
“Eight of them.”
“Eight of them, Mom.”
She smiled her crooked smile and leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.
I still have the six truffles, actually. The ones I took out of the box that day.
I wrapped them in a napkin and put them in my purse, and I never gave them to her, because by the time she was able to eat chocolate again, they’d gone stale.
But I couldn’t throw them away. I don’t know why.
They’re in a small plastic bag in the back of my kitchen drawer. Next to my wedding ring, which I’d gotten back in the divorce. Ryan’s lawyer had sent it in an envelope.
Sometimes I take them out and look at them.
Not because I miss him. I don’t anymore. Not really.
But because they remind me of something.
That I was on that plane for my mom. That was the whole reason I was there. That’s what I was carrying in my lap that day. Not anger. Not revenge. Eight chocolates for a woman lying in a hospital bed, who needed me.
Ryan and Megan were on that plane for themselves.
I was on it for somebody I loved.
And in the end, that’s the only thing that really mattered.
