Life Without You (13 page)

A strange noise came from her end of the line.

“Did you just growl at me?” I laughed.

“So what if I did?”

“You did!” I crowed, the grin widening on my face.

“Well, I think it’s perfectly understandable,” Charlie defended.

“Don’t worry,” I said, still smiling. “I promise I’ll bring you some, okay? I’ll have Grandpa show me how to pack it up good so that I can box it and check it with my bags. Deal?”

“Bless you,” she said.

“You only love me for my meat,” I said in mock accusal.

“
So
not true,” she protested.

“It’s okay, I’m used to it,” I whimpered.

“Good night, Dellie,” Charlie chortled. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Grandpa, can I ask you something?”

We were sitting in the den, each of us having set up camp in a recliner—Grandpa in his, me in Grammie’s blue one. The television was tuned to one of his favorite prime-time cop dramas, but I was too distracted to follow the story at the moment.

No answer from his side.

“Grandpa?”

“Hmmm?” he said, my voice having finally won the battle with the television for his attention.

Or not, seeing as how his eyes had yet to stray from the screen.

“Why won’t you tell me anything about Grammie and George?”

“I did. I told you that they were engaged, but he ran off with Annabelle instead,” he said simply. “There’s not much else to tell.” His eyes were still fixed on the television. “Did you get that bike from Marge so that you can ride to the bookstore when you need to work?” he asked, clearly having moved on.

I nodded, unsure whether I should redirect the conversation back to my initial inquiry or just let it drop.

“I did,” I said, watching his face in hopes that it would help me gauge his mood. “She said to keep it as long as I needed.”

I’d decided that having one on hand would be good, even if I never got to use it. The jury was still out on that one, since I didn’t really know my way around that well, and I hadn’t ridden a bike on the road in more years than I could remember.

I took a deep breath and decided to take the plunge. “Remember how I had coffee with Annabelle this morning? I was hoping she would tell me more about George. And Grammie,” I murmured.

“Did she?”

I shook my head. “Not really. I mean,” I said, running my words quickly together before I lost my nerve, “she told me some of it, but not enough to really clarify anything. Mostly, I think it just left me with more questions,” I admitted.

“The woman meddles too much, Dellie,” Grandpa grumbled, waving his meaty paw through the air in dismissal. “And she doesn’t have anything to tell you that needs telling. It’s old, old history. It doesn’t matter now.”

How could I make him understand that it
did
matter? And not just to me, either, but to my mother and my sister, as well. We’d all lost Grammie, and now there was this part of her life that we hadn’t known about. Knowing what had happened, all those years ago, would bring her a little closer again, as strange as that sounded.

I shook my head, feeling frustrated. “It does, Grandpa. Maybe it doesn’t to you, but it does to me,” I protested. “And to Mama and Charlie.”

His eyes narrowed further as his scowl deepened. “Why?”

I shrugged. “It just does. This is part of all of us, part of our story.”

That got an eyebrow raise. Obviously, he was not convinced.

“Dellie, it’s not something you need to be worried about. It was hard for your grammie when it happened, and it took people a long time to stop talking about it,” he said, shaking his head as he turned back to the television. Obviously, he was ready to let it drop, but I felt almost overcome by heartbreak for the young woman who had been so undeservedly left by the man she thought had loved her.

“What did Grannie Rose and Papa Joe do?”

“Your Papa Joe told her she shouldn’t have been surprised that he left her the minute a prettier girl paid him any attention.”

Chapter Thirteen

“That sounds like something he’d say,” Mama said when I called her a bit later that night. I knew it was a long shot, calling her so late, but I had needed to hear her voice. Apparently, I’d lucked out.

“But that’s so cruel!” I protested.

“Papa Joe wasn’t exactly the nicest man, Dellie. Especially when it came to your grammie.”

“Why?”

Mom took a minute to consider. “That’s something I never really figured out. Mama didn’t ever seem to question it, either. It was just the way things were…and Grannie Rose never did anything about it. I think that had a lot to do with their generation. The wives were a lot more submissive to their husbands, even when they were wrong. And no one really encouraged women to stand up for themselves, you know?”

“What would you have said if something like that happened to me or Charlie?” I asked, already knowing the answer but still needing the reassurance of hearing her say it anyway.

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t tell you that it was your own fault because you weren’t pretty enough or smart enough, because neither of those is even remotely true,” Mama said. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m your mother,” she added quickly.

“Uh-huh,” I said dubiously.

“I think, though, Dellie, what I would say to you was that I was here for you, and that you could come to me with anything. I’d want to know if you were okay, and I’d want you to know that you were special and loved and not alone.”

I blinked through the tears that were pooling in my eyes. Those were the words she had offered me just last year, when my own very short-lived marriage had ended. Words she had offered me when, after months of my whole family digging through a tangled, twisted jumble of lies and secrets only to come up with more lies and secrets that seemed never-ending, my husband of eight months had been arrested and extradited on criminal charges of embezzlement. He’d forged immigration papers, his passport, his even his birth certificate, giving himself a legal claim to US citizenship as the son of an American military man who’d married a German woman and raised a family there. Every part of his identity was a lie, which meant that our marriage was, as well. It wasn’t even a legal marriage.

It was a reality that now seemed like someone else’s story, a strange and distant nightmare that I tried to forget, much like I tried to forget the man who had essentially lied his way into my life.

Not that I hadn’t been naive, in my way. I had been far too trusting of someone who I’d met online through a dating website and known only a few months when he had asked me to marry him, far too easily swept up in the fairytale romance of it all to recognize warning signs that were warring with my emotions; and I’d walked almost blindly into a situation that was dangerous in more ways than I could have ever imagined.

The romantic beginning had given me a false perception of my own feelings for him—he had made grand gestures that were every little girl’s dream, sending me gargantuan bouquets of roses, taking me to cozy restaurants—supposedly uprooting himself from the life he had in California to pursue a life with me. He whispered words of love in his thick accent, holding my hand tenderly and offering me his heart and a chance to have what no one else had ever offered—a home with him and a marriage that was supposed to last forever.

He promised me a security that I craved, encouraging me to continue writing without worry that my meager earnings would be enough. He did, after all, earn enough to support us—and so the paycheck that I did bring in with my freelance writing—an amount that, when I was single, made me keep an anxious watch over the bills—suddenly became much less concerning. I used it to pay for the things that were mine alone: the car payment on a car that I’d had for three years, some outstanding medical bills that I was slowly chipping away at, the few times I allowed myself to buy a shirt if it caught my eye and the price tag didn’t exceed ten dollars… Even so, I never asked for anything, always afraid that I was a financial burden.

Only weeks into the marriage, the romance began to be stripped away to reveal an ugly nightmare; and what love I did feel was shredded beyond repair to become fear and loathing for a man who showed himself to be incapable of truth or integrity. Lie after lie, manipulation after manipulation were threaded through every moment, worsening each day until the emotional strain was too much to bear and the blow of a punch would have seemed almost a relief from the verbal abuse that was so constantly heaped on me. Sharing a bed with him felt equal to a gamble as I wondered each night if I would make it to the next morning or if he would suddenly decide to take my life while I slept.

I’d had only my faith and my family to get me through, to offer me support and love as they tried to convince me to leave, despite my own insistence that things would eventually get better, that maybe I was only imagining things. It was not a reality they wanted for me, but a reality they knew was endangering me; and they could only wait and pray that I would leave and end things.

Why hadn’t I ended it by leaving? It was a question I’d been asked so many times I’d lost count. Sometimes not even I understood why I had stayed, so trapped by the feeling that I was somehow failing if I left, that eight months was not long enough to know for sure that the marriage was doomed. I had stayed there, letting myself be blind to the true danger I was placing myself in by staying. I dipped my red flags in bleach, hoping that by doing so, everything would turn out okay. That my fairytale would come back.

The end had come in a way I’d never expected—a way that none of us ever had—when the lies became too much for him to escape, when the power plays he had been making blew up in his face and he could no longer outrun them, with too much evidence piled up against him for someone not to take notice. In the end, his country had come to claim him, and they saved me from a fate that could have destroyed me.

The marriage was a mistake that had both cost me many things and taught me many things—I had lost my confidence in my own ability to recognize warning signs, my own sense of security in the way I thought men perceived me, my faith in my ability to find real and true love. I had believed, once upon a time, that good men existed, and that one day, I would have a marriage as strong as my parents had. Now, I had begun to wonder if I even deserved it. But one thing I knew for sure after all of it was my family’s true strength and their dedication to one another.

I could tell, from the silence on the other end of the line, that Mama must have been thinking about the same thing I was.

“Did we say the right things to you, Dellie?” she asked now, her voice hushed. “Did you feel like we were there for you, like you could come to us for anything?”

“You did, Mama,” I said, hoping she knew how much I meant those words. “And I knew. I knew then, and I know now,” I added. “I love you so much. I know it’s only been a couple of days since I saw you last, but I miss you.”

“I miss you, too, my baby. You’ll never stop being my baby, you know that?”

I smiled, feeling my insides warming. “And you’ll always be my mama,” I said back.

“You going to be okay?” It was a simple question, but a loaded one, nonetheless.

It wasn’t just about now, tonight. It was about the future, too.

It was the question of a loving mother to a daughter who had been through hell and back. The question of a loving mother who knew all too well that having unstable ground under your feet could steal life from you. The question of a loving mother whose daughter had been letting life be stolen from her—bit by bit, for years that had begun long before a bad marriage had added further complications. The question of a loving mother who was afraid that her daughter’s life would never fully be restored.

I blinked again, trying to clear my vision.

“I’ll be okay,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I’ll be more than okay.”

“I’ll be okay,” I repeated the words under my breath as I stared into the mirror the next morning. They were like a mantra now, after so many months of saying them to myself, both mentally and out loud. Sometimes they were easier to believe than others—times when I felt confident enough to remember that I’d made it through a year of life on my own after my very doomed, very strange marriage had imploded. Times when my own sheer survival felt like an act of revenge and rebellion against the man who had deceived me and my family from the very first second until the very last.

Not many people outside of my family knew. It wasn’t a story I liked to share, and it was one that not many people could relate to. So I didn’t tell them at all. Usually, if I told them anything, it was simply that I had once been married. I left the rest to them and their own imaginings, not that I expected them to give my marital status much time on their radar. People had more important things to do than that. To them, I was probably just some other random thirty-something divorcee like the rest of them, so it allowed me to blend into the background just a little more.

“I’ll be okay,” I said more forcefully this time. I blinked at my reflection.

Annabelle was right. If the look I was going for was crap-tastic, I had certainly succeeded. Pretty sure I could get awards with that one, actually.

“I’ll be okay,” I insisted, hoping that the words would sink in and be true the more I said them. I closed my eyes, trying to picture myself looking different. Looking the way I had before I had let too many things steal parts of me. Once upon a time, I had taken more care with my clothes, dressing with pride and personality. I had a great eye for style, yet to look at me now, no one would ever guess that I was a fashionista at heart. I had been letting too much of
me
slip through my fingers; and this late in the game, I had no one to blame but myself.

Get a Makeover
. I felt a deeper, more focused determination to cross that one off the bucket list than I had before I’d come to Virginia, inspired in part by Annabelle’s honest assessment of me—but mostly because I’d finally admitted to myself that the way I dressed really
was
an effort to hide, and I didn’t want to have to hide anymore.