While Adam continued to bluster and rage, an icy calm descended over me. The tremor left my hands, and the emotion drained out of me like someone had pulled my plug.
“I want you out. Before I get home from work today, I want you gone. Do you understand?” My voice was a low growl, entirely foreign to my ears, but I rejoiced in my newfound numbness. He couldn’t hurt me while I was in this state.
“Fuck you!” Adam raged, pacing the room like a caged animal.
“Not my job anymore,” I said, wandering back into the bedroom to shower and get ready for work. The clock read a quarter to five, but I knew a little cafe I could waste some time in so I wouldn’t get into the office stupidly early.
It occurred to me, as I stood under the soothing flow of near-molten hot water, that sex with Adam had tapered off significantly since moving in together. He had stopped hassling me for it somewhere along the line, and I’d found life far easier handling my own orgasms. Maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that he’d cheated.
Maybe what was more of a surprise was how little I cared.
I wondered idly if I’d gone into shock. Perhaps. It wasn’t every day that one discovered the man they expected to marry had been screwing around behind their back.
I took the time to blow-dry my hair and apply a perfect face of makeup, then I dressed and left the bedroom. Adam was nowhere to be seen, but the idea of being cooped up in that space for a second longer made my heart race, threatening to break me out of the numb state I’d achieved.
Locking up behind me, I took one look at the elevator and shuddered. Not today, Satan. Instead, I ignored the fire door warnings and pushed into the emergency stairwell. Three flights of stairs later, I stepped out into the dewy predawn air. The slightest blush of sunrise peeked between the nearby buildings, promising a new day would come regardless of my already shitty morning.
Needing a distraction, I pulled out my cell as I jaywalked across a quiet intersection and called the number of the only person I knew who would be awake at this time of the morning.
“Good morning, Tater-tots, what’s wrong?”
Dorothy King—Dottie to many, but always Ma to me—had often claimed she hadthe second sight. Family lore held that the Kings had descended from survivors of the witch trials who had held true power. I firmly believed that if our family held any kind of power, we would be able to avoid the kind of messes we often found ourselves in. I also had a sneaking suspicion she was getting witches and fortune tellers confused.
“Nothing, Ma. Can’t your daughter reach out at stupid o’clock in the morning to see how you’re doing?”
“Tatum.”
“Don’tTatumme, Ma. I promise, I’m fine. How are you and Dad?”
The pregnant pause that came down the line didn’t bode well.
“He took a walk this morning.”
Shit.
“He was looking for Danny again, wasn’t he?”
I didn’t need to hear Ma’s grunt to confirm it.
“Have you told his nurse yet?”
An empty bus trundled past, and I glanced left and right before crossing the road to the beachfront boardwalk that housed several boutique cafes. I inhaled a deep lungful of sea air, then took note of the silence that stretched down the phone line.
“Ma, what aren’t you telling me?”
“I’m more than capable of nursing my husband by myself. That woman the agency sent over didn’t know how to make his soup the way he likes it. Who can’t make soup? For goodness’ sake.” Ma’s tone was all bluster. For a woman in her late sixties, she was prideful to a fault, but I had a feeling this wasn’t just about her capability as a nurse.
I settled onto a nearby bench and started in on an old argument.
“What if he has a fall, Ma? You can’t lift him with your back, and it’s dangerous for both of you, especially if he’s getting out of the house again. I can’t just fly out there and playyouto make him listen.”
When I was fourteen, my dad was my favorite person in the world. He taught me to play baseball, fix a car, and how totime my funnel cake consumption to avoid puking on the more extreme rides at the county fair. I knew I was the replacement child, but I was happy with my lot in life. But as I made my way through high school, he began to change. At first, he’d miss my baseball games or forget to pick me up from school, but his memory progressively deteriorated. He asked about Danny’s schedule or mistook me for Ma.
He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s on my seventeenth birthday.
Piece by piece, I saw the man I respected most in the world lose himself, first by days, then by decades. Ma was a trooper through all of it, the driving force who kept me in school until graduation while dealing with an increasingly difficult-to-handle husband.
She had never asked for help before, and I knew she wouldn’t now.
