imperfect endings by Zoe FitzGerald Carter

Author:Zoe FitzGerald Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jack

While we’re waiting for our flight home the following Monday, I call Jack on my cell phone, knowing he’ll be up and getting ready for work.

Standing where I can keep my eye on Clara and Lane, who are happily eating enormous muffins from Starbucks and watching the planes come in, I listen to the burr of the phone, soft and oddly comforting in my ear. I imagine my husband eating his breakfast in our sunny, rust-colored dining room, and I long to reach across the table and smooth the wild shock of hair over his forehead, reassure him that soon I’ll be home for good and— patience, patience —love him and be his wife.

The receiver is lifted noisily just as the answering machine clicks on, and Jack’s irritated voice barks, “Hello?” and then, “Shit. Hang on.”

We both wait for the message machine to click off.

“Did I wake you?”

“Yeah … you did. What time is it?”

“It’s after eleven, East Coast time. I figured you’d be up by now.”

“Mmmm.” He yawns noisily. “Must have forgotten to set the alarm.”

This is unlike Jack, who maintains a highly regular morning routine: shower, breakfast, work by eight-thirty. But he’s a night owl by nature and likes to stay up working or reading until three or four in the morning, especially when I’m not there to remind him to come to bed. Other more disturbing possibilities of what he might have been doing flit across my mind, but I dismiss them. Our marriage has been at a low ebb for months, but I still trust him. I have to. I don’t have the energy or will to win him back. Not now, not yet.

They announce our flight just as he starts to say something.

“Sorry. What did you say?”

“Forget it. Just tell the girls I love them and miss them.”

“Okay.” Ordinarily I would have said, Hey, what about me? Don’t you love me? But I’ve lost the right to joke about such things. I can’t demand what I can’t give.

I must have met other nice men in my life, but Jack was the only one I ever really noticed or fell in love with. Before him, it was all losers and bad boys.

The most compelling of them was Liam, a tall, sexy keyboard player with whom I fell horribly, obsessively in love at the age of twenty-one. We met in a bar in the seedy Boston neighborhood where I’d moved to finish up college. He lived down the street from me in a crowded third-floor walk-up that he shared with the other members of his rock band. When he wasn’t working, he would hang around on the street corner waiting for me to get back from class, which seemed incredibly romantic at the time. In fact, being with Liam felt like being in some cool movie, edgy and intense, and not quite real.

But the good times faded fast and within a year we’d established the following pattern: he would cheat on me, I would break up with him, and then he’d pull out all the stops and desperately, passionately win me back.

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