“This is the gold rush of health care, Callie. I promise you the money will come, but in the meantime, we gotta go!” Thomas yippee-ki-yayed, attempting to marshal his troop of one.
I remember, at that moment, wanting to take a pickax to Thomas’s skull and his claim of riches at the expense of my dreams.
Years have passed between Thomas’s life-changing declaration and now. To a half-naked me, he lays down another proclamation: “No. You don’t know what I have to tell you, Callie.” His tone is harsh, and his eyes are fixated on a couple of crumbs on the table.
“Yes, I do. You got the CEO position, right?”
“I didn’t.”
“After all that time going back and forth to New York? How’s that possible?” My voice rises in panic, but I pull it back down. I don’t want Thomas to think I’m attacking him without all the facts, but I’m not taking our house off the market either.
“I wasn’t going to New York.” Thomas’s eyes briefly seek mine and immediately return to the errant breadcrumbs.
“I’ve been in London,” he continues. “I wasn’t in the running for CEO of LonGev. Since the sale, the writing has been on the wall. The new parent company was always going to appoint one of theirown people to CEO. So I’ve been flying back and forth to London, interviewing at a competing company. I had to lock in an offer there before I became another casualty of the LonGev deal and was forced into some mediocre severance package and lengthy noncompete.”
While I don’t appreciate the same duplicity from Thomas that landed us in Sacramento in the first place, I know I need to balance my disbelief with some empathy, given the pressure my husband must have been under to secure a job worthy of the time he had invested in LonGev. England was not New York, but it sure as hell wasn’t Sacramento, and I could ask Cathy Culpepper for a London agent recommendation.
Stale smoke stench aside, I extend my arms to take Thomas’s hands in mine. Right now, I’m willing to tell him that we will be alright. That Europe will be an adventure, and that I can only imagine how stressful the past couple of months must have been while he was figuring out what was best for our family, for our future. Who knows? Maybe I will even dust off my dormant journalistic writing skills and start an online expat newsletter. Internally, I’m livid at being kept in the dark, but I know, in this moment, compassion is what Thomas needs, so I relax my face into a mask of assurance. I will make my husband pay, at a later date, in the form of London real estate.
“And, Callie ... I ... I’ve met someone. Eugenie, my recruiter.”
“Oh. Is she the one in charge of helping us with the relocation?” I’ve heard from college friends who live the expat life that moving overseas can be overwhelming, so it’s imperative to have someone highly capable on the other side of the ocean managing all the details.
“No,” Thomas corrects firmly. “Listen to me. I’vemetsomeone, and her name is Eugenie.” I take my hands back and shift my right and then left thigh. The only sound in the deafening silence of the dining room is my skin peeling off the leather chair.
“I—I don’t understand.” My voice stammers even though my gut knows precisely what Thomas is saying.
“Come on, Callie. You don’t need me to spell it out for you.”
“Uh, yeah, I actually do.” My whole body is starting to vibrate with the information my brain cannot process.
“Okay, then. Our life together has become, well, boring. Predictable. Too quiet. I’ve grown in a different direction, and it’s clear to me that I want more out of life than you do. I need more than this.” Thomas waves his arms around the room where I have spent more time than I care to admit cooking for him, serving him, listening to his every lament about LonGev.
While I thought Thomas and I had developed a bond over our collective boredom in Sacramento, apparently what Thomas was really bored of is me. How this was possible, and how long his affair had gone on, I have no idea. None. After John and then Andrew left for UC Berkeley, my caretaking focus turned solely to Thomas. For well over two decades, I’ve catered to his every want and need, and as far as I knew, Thomas neverseemedunhappy.
“Really, Thomas? I think you can do better than the tiresome cliché of ‘We’ve grown apart,’” I bite back, desperate for a cigarette to calm my shaking hands.
“Well,” Thomas hesitates, blowing out a big breath. I lift my eyebrows, insisting he continue, lay his pieces all out on the table. “Since John and Andrew left, you’ve lost your appetite for life.”
“What the fuck does that mean, you pretentious assho—”
“You’ve totally let yourself go, Callie,” Thomas spills, cutting me off. “And frankly, it started long before the boys left home. You don’t care about yourself anymore. You don’ttake careof yourself. It’s like as the kids grew up,yougave up.”
I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me.
“I want to make sure I’m hearing you correctly,” I overarticulate, feeling my lips stretch as I pull my thoughts together. “After I gave upmyjournalism career,mylife in New York to followyourprofessional gamble to the dullest city in America,andafter I raised two amazing sons for you to brag about,andafter remodeling this house I never liked, not once but twice, at your insistence, I might add”—I realize mycomplaints are becoming lengthier and I’m stressing the wordandat the top of each lungful of air, but I keep going, relinquishing grammar for gravitas—“andafter I did all that work to sell your mother’s place in Virginia and get them settled in a beautiful apartment in Sarasota, but did your witch of a mother ever say, ‘Thank you’? No! She did not!Andspeaking of moms, I am the sole support for my own declining mother, who I dragged out here because of your job. And now you want to punish me for not looking thirty-five at fifty-two because every fucking minute of my every fucking day has been focused on taking care of every-fucking-one else? I didn’t realize having a few wrinkles and errant hairs were a hall pass to fall up another woman’s skirt!”
“Callie, it’s not about a few wrinkles. I have those too. And Ineverasked you to stop your life for me and the boys.”
That is some twisted selective memory Thomas is employing to justify his decision to destroy our family because I’ve gone up a few sizes in jeans. “Uh, you most certainly did when you moved us out of New York.”
“Fine. I will take responsibility for moving us out of New York, and I admit that we moved for my job, but you made the choice not to make a life for yourself in Sacramento. You’re the one who put your ambitions on hold for some day when we might return to New York.”
“You said it was only supposed to be for a year. Two, max!”
“And life changes, Callie. For everyone. Jesus, neither one of us is the same person we once were.” As Thomas rakes his hands through his hair, it hits me that some other woman has been running her hands through it too. It’s so unfair that his salt-and-pepper hair looks sexy, whereas mine costs me $300 quarterly to cover up. “But instead of embracing the change that comes with age and making the best of it, you let it get the best of you. For years I’ve kept my mouth shut while you abandoned things that used to interest you. Including yourself.” Thomas thrusts his hand in my general direction so there is no mistake, at our table of two, whom he is talking about.
I can’t fathom that after twenty-five years together, Thomas is going to walk away because I look my age. “So what, exactly, is it that you want, Thomas?”
