1
The sky stretches above into nothing more than a dull flat gray surface. A single sheet of cloud blocks any real sunlight and warmth from breaking through. June has no business looking like this. This sky is for damp November afternoons and drawn-out January nights. Not early fresh-squeezed days of summer that should be rolling in with a warm western breeze.
I step out of the courthouse and suck in the warm stale air and wish for rain. Or sun. Or even a shift in the wind for that matter. But the wind and the sky and my mind all sit together in a desensitized stand-off. Nobody moving.
“Hannah.” Diane, my lawyer, hands me the folder she has clung to for this entire case. One of those brown paper accordion-style folders with a single piece of twine to keep it shut. It’s filled with the broken pieces of my life and tied together into something awfully sad. “Congrats. You’re a single woman.”
I have waited in staid composure for months to hear those words, and yet I am still waiting for them to mean something. I wait for them to roll or shift or even hurt. But like the sky, my heart remains dull. Flat. Gray. Numb.
I guess it was juvenile to expect the finalization of my divorce to send me into a bachelorette style glee where I skip out of the courthouse with my daughter in one hand, and a bare ring finger on the other. But it feels like neither grief nor elation. In fact, it doesn’t feel at all.
“Thank you,” I tell her as earnestly as I can muster and let her hug me like I'm sure she does with every other woman leaving their dickhead husbands. The final send-off, like a schoolyard of children on the last day of school. The teachers telling you to not let the door hit you on the way out.
“It’s okay to not be happy,” she says to me quietly as my family approaches. “It’s okay to let it hurt.”
I nod like she nailed it on the head. But it doesn’t hurt. I even try to imagine Ethan’s face over the video conference just ten minutes ago, where he looked like he did on our wedding day. Cleaned up, trimmed up, well kept. Smiling.
The office behind him, once Winnie's bedroom, sat tidy and organized. The walls already painted gray from her purple. His lawyer sat at his side making small talk and laughing like they planned on golfing and drinking on the green together the moment they checked this off their to do list for the day. I wonder if Maggie, his mistress, was waiting in the other room for him. Though, it should make me irate, or at the very least break my heart, it doesn’t.
A part of me always feared that nobody else would ever see the side of him that I had to live with. The side where he would shift seamlessly between controlling and easily aggravated to entirely cold and detached. The way he dismissed all of my concerns about him going out late at night and coming home at early hours of the morning, as to me being paranoid. Or worse, my fear was that hewasright. That Iwastoo sensitive. That Iwaslazy and inconsiderate.
I guess the benefit of having all of our dirty laundry aired outon a damn clothesline, is that it finally feels like everyone can see that face behind the well-kept Forrest mask. He was charming, just to win me over. He was thoughtful and inquisitive, just so he could learn ways that he could push me and bend me to his will.
But the judge knew better. And she gave me my daughter, my name and full custody. Even Ethan’s brother, Sebastian, who sat with my family in solidarity, smiled when the judge made her declaration.
Now, Mom throws her arms around my shoulders, Paul, my stepdad, pats my back and Lauren, my younger sister, scoops up Winnie into her arms, watching me closely.
“You did it.” Mom smiles at me. “I am so proud of you.”
I shrug at the compliment I'm not sure I should be accepting and allow the hugs from Paul, Lauren and her fiancé, Rhett.
“Now you just need to come visit us,” Lauren insists. “Tanner would love to see you again, I'm sure.”
I try to give her a sharp look, but the thought of Tanner softens it. Because Tanner, Rhett’s best friend, showed me a kindness that helped me realize there was so much more for me in life than an apathetic husband who worshiped at the altar of his job, his father and the naked body of his mistress.
Sebastian, my now former brother-in-law, steps over with that big brother smile of his. “I know that was hard. But you did the right thing.”
Though he is Ethan’s younger brother, he never looked or acted the part. Sebastian is incredibly tall and broad and much more intimidating than his brother.
Like every spare to the heir, Sebastian Forrest was still sent to all the same schools, held to the same standards, but still never was his brother. No matter how hard he seemed to try to prove himself.
“Thank you,” I say as he kisses the top of my head.
Winnie gives him a big squeezing hug before he says goodbye and is off to his big blacked-out SUV.
“Alright buggy.” I turn to Winnie and kiss her head. “Where do you want to go eat?”
She tips her little head to the side, questioning my questioning her. As if it was really a question.
Every Friday night is spent in the exact same way. Divorce or not. Sitting around a tiled table, eating our weight in chips and salsa at an understaffed and outdated Chili’s. Tonight is no different.
A boy a table over is being sung to for his birthday by the high-school-aged staff that look just as embarrassed about the ordeal as he does. A few suit-clad men meet over margaritas in the booth adjacent with their loosened ties. Winnie is doodling on the back of her kid’s menu, the one she has sworn she hasn’t needed since she turned five. Mom questions the waitress on substituting just about everything on her sandwich including the bread itself. Paul tells Rhett about his and my mom’s trip to Florida for the entire summer. All the while Lauren is looking at me with her brows furrowed, thinking. She’s always thinking.
“You know.” Mom sips her glass of wine, eying me. “Paul’s company is hiring.”
“Mom. Maybe now isn’t the time,” Lauren counters quickly.
“No time is ever the right time. You just need to make decisions and hope they work out,” Mom clips back, unrolls her silverware, then smooths the paper napkin onto her lap. “I mean, I wasn’t ready to go work at Paul’s when I did. And look where I ended up. If we waited to be ready, then we would never do anything.”
