“This is a four-bedroom house, Dani,” he had said in response to Noah’s comment. At that point Alex looked to Noah and said, “We’ll make it work. You’ll get your own room.”
Ethan’s reaction to the news was different. He was quiet. He came up to me later in my bedroom and said, “Did you want this too…the divorce?”
I wondered what his perception was. We kept a lot from the kids but they were no strangers to our trivial arguments and the general sense of unrest in our house. Still, I felt they were too young to understand that the marriage type of love is not always forever and it’s not unconditional.
“Yes, I do, Ethan,” I had told him. He simply nodded and looked down. Was he looking for a hero and a villain? “There’s no bad guy in this story, babe.” I could barely choke the words out.
He had looked up at me, blinked, tears in his own eyes, and said, “Okay.”
I had hurt him by telling him the truth. Another parenting decision I would go on to question endlessly. Would it have been better to lie? To give him a narrative that would make the pill easier to swallow?
The conversation currently happening in the kitchen sounds light, so I take it as a cue to go down and get some coffee.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I look off to the left and notice the blinds in the front room are open. I try to remember if I left them that way the night before. It was one of my pet peeves that Alex would be seemingly oblivious to the blinds open at night on the front-facing windows. It made our house feel like a fishbowl to the neighborhood. I always closed them when it got dark and opened them in the morning, but they were open already.
As Ethan passes me on the stairs I turn to him and say, “Did you open the blinds in the front?”
“No, Dad did. Are you leaving soon?”
“In about an hour,” I say. “Why, you trying to get rid of me?”
He laughs once and heads up the rest of the stairs. In the kitchen, Noah is wrapping up a conversation with Alex about space junk as I walk in. Noah looks up and scatters like a startled animal. Our kids are, understandably, in a constant state of avoidance when Alex and I are in the same room.
“Has he actually talked to you about what’s going on?” I say to Alex after I’m sure Noah is in his bedroom.
“Yeah, he asked me if the rules were going to be different when I was here alone with them,” Alex says without looking up.
He’s buttering an English muffin directly on the countertop. It’s disgusting and quickly forming a crumb-covered grease smudge on the granite.
I breathe deeply in and out of my nose. He glances up, “What?” he says.
“Nothing. Did you open the blinds?”
“Is that okay?” he snaps.
“You know it’s okay. I was just asking.”
With a mouth full of muffin he says, “Noah’s fine. He isn’t melodramatic, thank god.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Without waiting for an answer, I continue, “Avoiding his feelings is not healthy for him.”
“Moping around can’t be any better.”
“This conversation is pointless.”
“As are many of our conversations.”
I choose to ignore him as I pour myself a cup of coffee. With the mug in one hand, I open the cabinet under the sink and reach for the Windex to clean Alex’s grease smudge. Then I hesitate.
I don’t have to worry about this shit anymore. I’m leaving, going to a place where there are no grease smudges, no crumbs on the counter, no derisive looks.
Alex is watching me. “You don’t have to worry about the grease and crumbs on the counter anymore, Dani.”
The gift of mind reading comes with the long-term relationship territory. “Well, I will on Wednesday, won’t I?” I say.
“I’m sending the cleaning company from the clinic here every Wednesday morning to do a once-over before your scheduled noon arrival. They’ll also go to the apartment every Sunday morning to pretty up the place up for you, your highness.”
“How much is that costing?”
