Chapter 15

Peace and quiet descended on the beach house that afternoon when Hazel Marie and Binkie took the little girls—including Latisha—to the movies, while the men, including Lloyd, went to a boat show. That left the house to LuAnne and me—the first time since being there that we’d had time alone.

We sat on the front porch in rocking chairs with glasses of lemonade on a table between us. A steady ocean breeze kept the heat from running us inside, while a few gusts now and then rattled the dry fronds on the palm trees.

“Julia,” LuAnne said, “coming here was the best thing I could’ve done. I’m so glad you talked me into it.”

I couldn’t recall having had to exert much persuasion, but I nodded and said, “I hope it’s been good for you. Getting away from a problem always puts things in a different light, don’t you think?”

“It certainly has for me,” she agreed. “And,” she went on with a certain amount of satisfaction, “it has for Leonard, too. He’s begging me to come home.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Every day. He calls me, Julia, although I admit I called him first. I had to tell him there were some things in the freezer he could heat up. And of course how to heat them. I declare, I think the man would starve if he had to feed himself.”

“Maybe you should let him,” I murmured.

“Well, doesn’t everybody deserve a second chance?”

“I suppose, but does that mean he’s confessed everything and asked for a second chance?”

“No, it doesn’t,” LuAnne said, gritting her teeth. “And, Julia, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t remind me. If I expect to ever get over this and put my marriage back together, it sure won’t help for you to keep bringing up what he did.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I said, stung by her jab at me. “I’m just concerned for you, LuAnne. If you try to overlook what he’s done and pretend that everything’s fine, it’ll do nothing but eat away at you. Because there’s no way you can just forget it happened.”

She looked down at her hands, turned her wedding ring on her finger, then said, “I know that. But he keeps saying he’s done nothing wrong and has no reason to confess or to ask for forgiveness. So it’s up to me to decide if I can live with that. And I don’t know if I can or if I can’t.”

She lifted her head and squinted out toward the ocean. “I know it’s better to get it all out on the table,” she went on. “But if he simply refuses, what can I do? He thinks our marriage is just fine.”

“Just fine! When he’s seeking solace from another woman? What about her, LuAnne? Do you want a third party in your marriage? I don’t see you or any other woman being happy with that. I sure wouldn’t be.”

“Well, that’s what you don’t understand,” LuAnne said with a tiny bit of smugness. “You never had a chance to confront Wesley Lloyd with what he did, so now you want me to do what you weren’t able to do. You’re reliving your problem through me.”

I just hate it when somebody presumes to psychoanalyze me, but I did my best to brush it off. Sighing, I gave up and agreed with her.

“You may be right,” I conceded. “But let me tell you this—if Leonard is smart, he’ll never sleep well again. Because, LuAnne, if you let it fester inside, you’re going to have fits of anger that’ll come over you all of a sudden and no telling what you’ll want to do. They used to come over me when I least expected them, and, I’ll tell you, it’s a good thing that Wesley Lloyd was already six feet under.”

She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, then her shoulders began to shake as she tried to muffle the laughter. Finally she laughed out loud. “Oh, Julia, you don’t know how often I’ve wanted to skin Leonard alive. But I didn’t know you felt that way about Wesley Lloyd. I mean, you’re always in control. You never get mad, and you take things as they come without flying off the handle.”

“Ha! You wouldn’t believe some of the daydreams I’ve had about Wesley Lloyd—not recently, I admit, because I’ve put him to rest for good. But, honey, I’ve lashed him with a whip, pulled out all his hair, and turned him naked out of the house—all in my imagination.”

She sputtered and said, “I’ve done every one of those things to Leonard, too, including braining him with an iron skillet. If Leonard knew what I’ve been thinking, he wouldn’t want me within a hundred miles of home!”

We were both laughing by that time. But when LuAnne excused herself to go to the bathroom, I found myself wondering why we’d been laughing. There was nothing funny about her situation and certainly nothing funny about Leonard’s denial of guilt.

I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what the need of solace would entail, nor what was involved in the actual application of it, either. It was plain to me, though, that when a husband goes outside his marriage to have his needs met—be they for solace or whatever else—then that marriage is in trouble.

Yet LuAnne seemed to have decided that she might be able to live with sharing Leonard, the thought of which made me wonder just what either woman saw in him. I wouldn’t have had him on a silver platter, but, I reminded myself, to each his own.

“Julia,” LuAnne abruptly said as she came back onto the porch, “who am I kidding? There’s no way in the world that I can just let it go on like this. And why would Leonard think that I could? It just doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking.”

“Well, I wish you’d say so. It doesn’t help if you just agree with everything I say. I need some options, some possibilities, not just platitudes and automatic agreements with whatever I bring up.”

I declare, LuAnne was the most contrary woman I knew. She’d just slapped me down for saying what I thought, but the minute I agreed with her, she wasn’t happy with that either. To tell the truth, I knew better than to get between a husband and a wife—whatever I said could come back to haunt me and ruin a friendship, as well.

“I’m just here to be a sounding board, LuAnne,” I said, drawing back. “I’ll tell you what I think when you want to hear it, but mainly I’ll try to keep my opinions to myself.”

“Well, don’t do that! I may not agree with your opinions, but I do want to hear them. You might come up with something I never thought of because you’ve been through it.”

“Not exactly,” I pointed out. “I never had to decide whether to leave Wesley Lloyd or to put up with what he was doing. As you just reminded me, he was already gone, so I didn’t have a decision to make. Listen,” I said, putting my hand on her arm, “I hope you’re praying about this. You’re making a decision that will affect the rest of your life.”

“Oh, Julia,” she said, wiping away an overflowing tear, “I hate to admit this, but you know what it comes down to?”

“What?”

“Money. It comes down to money. If our retirement fund would support two households, or if I could support myself, I would leave him flat. I am so angry with him I can hardly stand it, and when he tells me that she—whoever she is—has nothing to do with me, I could strangle him. But . . . Well, wait.” She jumped up, wiping her eyes, and ran into the living room, coming back with a box of Kleenex. “Sorry. I can’t stop crying. Every time I think of the mess I’m in, I just start boo-hooing all over again.

“Anyway,” she went on, mopping her tear-streaked face, “the thought of looking for a job just does me in. Who would hire me at my age? I’m not trained for anything and I can’t do anything. Well, maybe I could be a lunchroom lady and wear a hairnet, but, Julia, I couldn’t stand that. But the worst thing is thinking of being a divorced woman and knowing that everybody would know why I was divorced. I never pictured myself as a divorced woman—there’s such an unfortunate aura about not being able to hold on to your husband. People always wonder what you’d done to ruin your marriage.”

“Oh, LuAnne, I don’t think that’s true in this day and age. We know a lot of people who’ve been divorced, and we don’t think anything about it.”

“Maybe you don’t, but I do.”

“Well, think of this. I expect if we knew the real situations of a lot of people, there’d be a lot more who aren’t divorced but who wish they were.”

“I expect you’re right,” she said, surprising me with her agreement. “But I can tell you why they aren’t—they can’t afford it. It’s too much trouble and it’s too expensive. Like, for instance, I’d have to find a place to live because you know he won’t move out. And did you know that when you rent an apartment you have to pay both the first and last month’s rent at the same time? And then you have to pay a moving company, which means deciding what furniture I want and what Leonard will need, and it all gets to be too much.”

“Well, if you really want my opinion, that’s easy. If it were me, I’d leave him the recliner, the television set, and the remote. And take everything else. Oh, and,” I said just as a reminder, “you could leave him that shaving kit, too.”

“Hah! Do you know what he said when I asked about what I found in that thing? He said I shouldn’t have been snooping around. Can you believe that? Snooping is what you do when you clean house—you don’t clean up, you clean out. And throw away what you don’t need, which is what I did with those nasty underpants.”

Now, see, that’s where LuAnne and I differed. I would’ve never thrown out such an obvious item of guilty evidence. I would’ve figured it would play a prominent role in any legal case I wanted to bring. But LuAnne didn’t think that way. She went on the premise that if something wasn’t around, it didn’t exist and she wouldn’t have to deal with it.

I wanted to tell her that that same attitude would work on Leonard, too. If she didn’t have to put up with him every day, he’d soon fade away. Out of sight, out of mind, you know.