Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 85399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 427(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
The fact that I don’t know how to fix this with my own damn wife says everything.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JACK
My shoes dangle over the water.
Sitting on the often-forgotten dock tucked away on one of the lake inlets, I gaze at a small hill across from me. There was once a bench that sat there and a metal camp grill that I always found odd. A friend from another family who summered here when I was a little boy helped me start a fire in it when we were ten. He’d sneaked matches from his mom’s kitchen, and I’d brought newspapers from mine. Together, we collected sticks and angled them into a cone shape. Then he struck the match.
We were so proud of ourselves. We felt like real men. Looking back on it, what an odd thing to think—that building a fire made you a man.
If only it were that simple.
A raw, angry knot sits in my stomach, refusing to budge. I can taste the bile it squeezes up my throat. My intestines churn with fiery acid.
I can’t ignore the feeling building inside me, the urgency that continues to worsen. The feeling that I need to talk to someone is overwhelming.
It’s ridiculous to begin with—what good would it do? Spread the dissension in my household outside its walls? No one needs that to happen. Problems are best resolved at home.
Yet this problem was created there too. Or, at least, it began there.
No, it really began with me. It has to end with me too.
I pick up a rock and toss it into the water.
As the day wore on, as the afternoon slipped into the evening and Lauren still hadn’t come back to the cabin, the weight of the situation became more and more unbearable. And the more I thought about it, the more confusing it became. The facts surrounding my marriage are cloudy, hazy—nothing makes sense.
And I have no one to talk to about it.
The guys from work will take my side. They’ll agree that I was working my ass off for Lauren, and they’ll say, “Fuck her if she doesn’t see that.” I can’t talk to Dad about this for about fourteen thousand reasons. And we’ve already said enough around Michael and Maddie. God knows they don’t need to be involved any more than they already are.
I don’t have anyone. It dawns on me that I don’t have any true friends. The people I work with, and for, are more business associates and employees than pals. I used to have a core group of buddies who would meet up for a drink, or we’d go camping over the weekend. But now that I think about it, they’re gone too.
A deep emptiness settles further in my soul.
“What am I going to do?” I ask the bird staring at me from the water’s edge. “Do you have any advice?”
It lifts off the bank and flies away.
“Nice.”
I plant my hands behind me and lean back, tilting my face to the sinking sun.
Maddie’s comment about her mother not being hard to understand has crept on the edges of my mind ever since she said it in the truck. “She’s not hard to understand, you know.”
Lauren used to be easy to understand. I loved her and she loved me back. It was not only easy; it was simple—the simplest exchange I’ve ever experienced. That’s what made us so good together. It was uncomplicated.
It was just me and her.
“Mom is pretty self-sufficient. It’s not like she’s sitting around waiting on someone to take care of her, you know?”
I roll my tongue around my lips.
When I think about it, really think about it, Maddie is right. Lauren has always been capable, but now it’s more than that. It truly is self-sufficiency. I can’t think of a thing she doesn’t do herself. There’s not one thing she really needs me for these days.
My throat tightens.
No one needs me anymore. Everyone in my life—Lauren, the kids, Dad, my friends—they’ve all moved on because I checked out. Me.
I have no one to blame but myself.
My stomach drops. The weight of the acid churning inside it splashes over, singeing my veins.
Lauren is this way—self-sufficient and capable, angry and bitter—because I made her this way.
“Damn it,” I groan, shaking my head to clear the cobwebs that I only now see.
I get to my feet as a stream of situations and conversations roll through my mind.
“You didn’t say I looked hot.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“No, you didn’t. You asked when I started sleeping like this.”
I wipe a hand down my face.
“I said she was hot, but that’s not what she heard. She heard me say she was acting different,” I say to no one in particular. “But it wasn’t her acting different. I was acting different.”
Sweat trickles down my back as I rack my brain for the last time I told her, prior to this, that she was beautiful. I come up empty.