Every Other Weekend by Margaret Klaw

Author:Margaret Klaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press

The sauce—onion, garlic, tomatoes, and zucchini—is bubbling on the stove when Samara walks in the front door. “Smells great,” she says. “I’m starving.”

“Yeah, me too,” says Owen, who is sitting on the couch next to an empty beer bottle and a stack of Modern Farmer magazines. “But we need to talk first.”

Samara tugs her black sweater up over her head and dumps it on the kitchen table along with her backpack, shakes out her hair, and sits down next to him. “Okay,” she says. “What’s up?”

Owen hands her the envelope, already opened. “A guy came to the door looking for you, like an hour ago. Since you weren’t here, he gave me this.”

“What is it?” Samara asks, taking a sheet of paper out of the envelope. Owen doesn’t answer. Samara looks at the paper. “Oh, shit,” she says. “I’m supposed to go to court? To testify in Jake’s custody thing? Fuck.”

“Exactly,” says Owen. “Like, why are you involved in this? How did you get in the middle of this bullshit? A custody trial? People fighting over their children like they’re property? It’s disgusting. This has nothing to do with us. You’re not going to go, right?”

Samara looks down at the paper again and then up at Owen. “I don’t think I have a choice,” she says. “It’s from the court. It says I’m ordered to appear. I need to call Jake about it.”

“Well, that’s bullshit,” says Owen, standing up and starting to pace around the living room. “What’s going to happen if you don’t? And don’t call Jake about it. Samara, you can’t get involved in this. What do you have to do with Jake’s fighting with his ex-wife about their kids? Zero. Nothing.”

Samara is silent.

“Right?” says Owen, leaning down toward her, the volume of his voice amping up a notch.

“I mean, you’re right, in a way,” Samara says, slowly folding the subpoena and putting it back in the envelope, “but the thing is, he’s a really good dad. And she’s a bitch. She’s trying to take custody away from him.”

Owen jerks upright and jumps back from the couch. This is confirming, in a big way, the misgivings he’s been starting to have about Samara’s relationship with Jake. It’s different than their other secondary relationships have been. It’s more private. Aside from the one night they were all together with Kara and Grady, he’s only seen Jake a couple of times in passing, and from the little bit Samara has told him—and now that he thinks about it, it really is just a little, little bit—it doesn’t seem like Jake has any real interest in polyamory. Jake is just some straight guy having a midlife crisis who is into dating a younger woman. And that’s a problem. That’s not the kind of relationship he and Samara agreed to have. It isn’t that all their secondary partners have to be polyamorous themselves, but they have to accept the lifestyle—they have to buy in and understand how it works.

This relationship, Owen thinks, is too closed.

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