My husband had twins with my best friend. I signed the divorce papers without a word. Then he went to his mother’s house, and she went white and said, “She still hasn’t told you about that?”
He spent seven hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars of my money on a narrative.
And Bernadine.
She comes to my house on the first Sunday of the month. She has since July of last year.
We do not talk about her son much. We talk about her garden, which is enormous, and about a hip she needs doing.
In October, in my kitchen, she said the only thing she has ever said to me about 2002.
She said: “He was nineteen and he sat in that car afterward and he didn’t cry. And I thought, he’ll deal with it in his own time.”
And then: “And I let a nineteen-year-old set the timetable, and then he was twenty-five, and then he was thirty-one and getting married, and by then I’d left it too long to say it without it being a betrayal of him.”
She said: “Everything after that was me being too late to do the right thing without doing a wrong one.”
I have thought about that more than almost anything else in the last two years, because I am forty-one and I have watched several people I love do a version of it.
