“You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” I tell her.
“I know. There’s more, and it’s hard to tell you why. There was a situation.”
I’m not sure if it’s because I know my sister well enough to get what she means, or if it’s because her expression is that revealing and any stranger would know just by the way she says it.
Lyle had an affair.
I don’t want to believe I’m right.
In an instant, I’m twelve again, and we’re alone: me, Mom, Kate, and Jordan. Mom is in the kitchen crying against the counter because she can’t keep it together, and I’m trying to pull Kate and Jordan’s attention away from her, distracting them so that they wouldn’t have to take the burden on themselves.
I pull myself from the memory, back to the present.
“What happened?” I ask.
“It was one of his students.”
Lyle’s a professor at USC teaching in the Film/TV department, so he never had a shortage of opportunities. But I’m livid that he finally took advantage of one.
“I found out a couple of weeks ago,” she adds. “You know, he’s always played poker with some guys in his department, and I thought he was texting back and forth with one of his buddies. I never really thought about it. I guess that shows what an idiot I am, but one night, I saw that he’d left his phone in the kitchen, and I grabbed it to take it to the bedroom. It buzzed, and when I set it down on the nightstand, I saw this message that said, ‘Miss you, too’. Obviously I didn’t think that one of his gambling buddies was missing him that much, so I picked it up and went back. Back four months.”
Meaning he was out having a field day while she was raising their child.
My face flashes with heat.
I want to hurry out of this restaurant, hunt him down, and beat the shit out of him. I have this need to defend my sister’s honor. If we were back in the 1800s, I’d fucking grab my gun and have a duel with him because fuck this bullshit.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “At first, I took his phone into the laundry room and replayed the past year, thinking, ‘Was it because I was pregnant? Was I distant? What did I do?’”
“You didn’t do anything.” My tone is so serious, I sound threatening.
“He found me in the laundry room, and that was pretty much the end. She was in his intro class. A freshman. Some blonde thing who liked to send pictures of her boobs.” Her face trembles before tears start sliding down her face. She wipes at them quickly. “Sorry.”
“Kate, you don’t have a goddamned thing to be sorry about.”
I pull her close to me again, and she tucks her head against my shoulder.
As the waiter approaches, I shake my head at him. He nods, his expression sympathetic as he moves along quickly.
Kate takes a deep breath. “God, I thought if we met in public, this would be easier.”
“Is everything okay outside of that? Do you get the house?”
“That’s the tricky part. I can’t afford to live in our house, even with him paying child support and alimony. Not on my salary at the school, so I’m moving in with Mom and Dad.”
“What?”
She looks at me nervously because she knows how I feel about this. This is something she really knew she had to keep from me.
“No.”
“I have to. Just for a while. I’ve already been staying with them since I found out. I haven’t gotten my things yet.”
“How can you even think that, considering—”
“I’m not thrilled about it, Mikey. I didn’t think I’d be on my own in my mid-twenties, but I don’t have a choice.”
The despair in her eyes, the hurt, the pain. I know I need to be sympathetic, but all I can think is that she needs to keep away from their toxic environment. She needs to keep Roger away from it. He shouldn’t have to be around their bickering and moaning—the sadness of their bitter, dead love. I remember the love being there when I was really young, but whatever was there died a long time ago, and now they keep up the charade.
