For lullabies that soothe my girl to sleep.
For the lake that helps us relearn each other’s bodies.
For a chance never to stop learning Molly Marks.
And I’m grateful for this hope.
This chance to hope, and hope, and hope.
PART SEVEN
November 2021
CHAPTER 32 Molly
It’s two days before Thanksgiving and I’m scouring my perennially unkempt house. It always takes everything I have to prepare my home for Seth, a man who folds his socks into stackable rectangles and has a toothbrush just for grout. After five months of going back and forth between each other’s houses I am mostly inured to his shrieking at the appearance of stray crumbs and his habit of bleaching my sink. But this is the first time we’ve spent a holiday together, and I want it to be perfect.
I take a break to check my email. I’m waiting to hear back from my dad and his director on the latest draft of Busted. I sent it weeks ago and haven’t gotten any notes. The director, Scott, usually responds right away. The radio silence is making me uneasy.
But there’s nothing—just some emails about other, smaller projects I’ve been working on—so I commence the dreaded task of steam-mopping my floors.
My phone rings—Dezzie—and I pounce on it, eager to wail to a sympathetic ear about my fear of being judged dirty by society’s most hygienic man.
But she’s sobbing.
“Oh my God,” I say. “Babes. What is it?”
She doesn’t say anything. She makes a noise like she’s suffocating.
The first thing I think about is Seth. They’re both in Chicago. Maybe something’s happened to him, and she’s been tasked with telling me. Every day, now that we’re so close, visions flash before my eyes of losing him. A plane crash. A car wreck. An undiagnosed heart defect. So many things that could strike at any moment to take this unexpected joy away from me.
“Dezzie!” I say. “What’s wrong? You’re scaring me.”
“It’s Rob,” she chokes out.
I feel a sharp, shameful relief that whatever horrible thing this call is about, it’s not Seth. And then an overwhelming wave of guilt that this is my reaction to my best friend’s hysteria. I’m seeing more horrific visions. I think of Covid. I think of cancer. I put my fingers on the table and press them down to make myself talk instead of spiraling.
“What’s wrong? Is he okay?”
“He’s leaving me.”
“Wait, what? Leaving you?” I’m sure I heard it wrong.
I have frequently entertained the thought that Dezzie might benefit from taking some time apart from Rob, who has continued to devolve from a goofy model husband into an erratic, booze-soaked stranger. It never once occurred to me that he might leave her.
“He got some woman pregnant, and he’s filing for divorce,” she says raggedly.
I stare at my phone like it’s radioactive.
“What the fuck? Rob cheated on you?”
“Yes! With some woman from his grad program. He said it was just a fling, but now that there’s going to be a baby, he needs to try to make it work. With her.”
All I can think is: no. No, no, no. This cannot be happening to someone I love.
Not to Dezzie, of all people.
She’s about to start her second round of IVF. She and Rob refinanced their house to pay for it. I suspect her desire for a child is the reason she’s stayed with him this long.
That, and she loves him.
However difficult their marriage has become, there are years and years of love between them.
I want to fly to Chicago and stab him in the neck.
“I’m going to die,” she gasps out.
No, Rob is. Because I am going to murder him.
But I bite that thought back because it isn’t what she needs to hear right now.
“Oh, honey, no you’re not,” I say. “It’s going to be okay. You have me and Alyssa and your parents and all your friends and we love you so, so much and we will be there with you every step of the way, no matter what happens.”
Even as I say it, I know it might not be enough. It took my mother years to glue herself back together after my dad left her. Two decades to trust another man.
When someone you’ve been with for so long turns on you—changes into something unrecognizable—it makes you question your own reality. What did you miss? What did you do? And if it can happen once, what will keep it from happening again?
“I don’t know what to do,” Dezzie says hoarsely. “He’s just gone, Molly. He literally took a duffel bag and left. Just like that.”
