My divorced neighbor told me, “I’m going to steal your husband, so you might as well start preparing for divorce…
The moving truck pulled up next door on a Tuesday morning in May, while I was standing in my bathroom counting gray hairs.
There were eleven. I’d counted them twice. I was forty-eight years old, and I’d just found out that week from my doctor that the hot flashes waking
me up at three in the morning weren’t the flu. They were the beginning of something. Something that comes for every woman eventually. Something that made me feel, standing in front of that mirror in my old blue bathrobe, like the main part of my life was over and I’d missed the announcement.
I leaned close to the glass. I looked at the lines around my eyes. The little sag under my chin. The gray coming in at my temples like frost on a window.
You look tired, I told my reflection.
My reflection didn’t argue.
Downstairs, I heard my husband in the kitchen. Irvin. Clattering around with the coffee maker. Humming. He hums when he makes coffee. He’s done it every morning for seventeen years. Always the same song. “Moon River.” Badly.
I smiled a little. Then I heard the beeping outside. The loud, steady beep of a big truck backing up.
I went to the bathroom window and pulled back the curtain.
A huge white moving truck was backing into the driveway of the house next door. The Hendersons’ old house. They’d moved to Arizona in March to be near their grandkids. The house had been empty for
two months. A real estate sign had been in the yard. Then, two weeks ago, a SOLD sticker.
A silver car pulled in behind the truck.
The door opened, and a woman got out.
She was tall. Slim. Long dark hair that fell in perfect waves past her shoulders. She was wearing white jeans and a pale pink blouse and big sunglasses. She stood in the driveway with her hands on her hips and looked up at the house like she was deciding whether it was good enough for her.
Then she took off her sunglasses, and she looked over at my house.
Right at my bathroom window.
Right at me. In my old blue bathrobe with my eleven gray hairs.
She smiled. And waved.
I let go of the curtain like it had burned me.
My name is Janet Morrison. I’ve lived on Willowbrook Lane in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, for fourteen years.
I’m a dental office manager. I’ve worked at the same practice for nineteen years. I know every patient’s name and which ones lie about flossing. It’s not a glamorous job. But I’m good at it, and the dentists would fall apart without me, and they know it.
Irvin is a high school chemistry teacher. He’s taught at Westfield High for twenty-one years. He’s tall and thin and a little stooped from years of leaning over lab tables. He has big glasses and a gentle face and a laugh that comes out in surprised little bursts, like a car that won’t quite start.
The kids at school call him Mr. Morrison to his face and “Professor Beaker” behind his back. He knows. He thinks it’s hilarious. He has a coffee mug that says PROFESSOR BEAKER that a student gave him in 2009, and he drinks out of it every day.
He’s not handsome. Not the way men in movies are handsome. He’s goofy and awkward and he wears socks with sandals in the summer and he tells chemistry jokes that only he understands.
I’ve loved him since I was thirty.
We met at a wedding. My cousin’s. He was a friend of the groom. He spilled red wine on my dress during the toast and was so horrified that he spent the whole reception trying to get the stain out with club soda and salt. He explained the chemistry the whole time. Something about tannins and sodium.
The stain never came out. But by the end of the night, I didn’t care.
We got married a year later. We had our daughter, Maddie, two years after that. She’s sixteen now. She’s smarter than both of us and she knows it, and she rolls her eyes at everything we say, and I’d die for her without thinking twice.
Seventeen years. We’ve been through a lot. A miscarriage before Maddie. My mother’s long illness and death. Irvin’s back surgery. A year when money was so tight we ate spaghetti four nights a week.
We were good. We’d always been good.
But I’ll be honest. Lately, I’d been wondering.
Not about Irvin. About me.
When you’ve been married seventeen years, you stop seeing yourself through the other person’s eyes. You just see yourself in the bathroom mirror at six in the morning. Gray hairs. Lines. Hot flashes. A body that’s had a baby and a miscarriage and forty-eight years of gravity.
And you wonder if he still sees the girl at the wedding with the wine on her dress. Or if he just sees the tired woman in the blue bathrobe.
I’d never asked him. I was afraid of the answer.
I baked her a pie.
That’s what you do on Willowbrook Lane. When somebody moves in, you bring something. Mrs. Pratt across the street brought me a lasagna when we moved in fourteen years ago. I’ve been bringing pies ever since.
Peach. It’s my best one. My grandmother’s recipe, with a lattice top and a little cinnamon in the filling.
I walked it over that afternoon. The moving truck was still in the driveway. Men in blue T-shirts were carrying furniture up the front steps. The woman was standing on the porch with a clipboard, pointing.
She saw me coming up the walk. She smiled again. The same smile she gave me through the bathroom window.
“Oh my gosh,” she said. “Is that a pie? Did you make that?”
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said. “I’m Janet. I live next door.”
“Vanessa,” she said. She took the pie. She held it up and looked at the lattice. “Wow. This is gorgeous. Nobody’s ever brought me a pie before. I didn’t think people actually did that.”
“They do on Willowbrook Lane.”
“I guess they do.” She looked at me for a moment. Up and down. Not in a mean way. Just looking. “Do you want to come in? It’s a disaster in here. But I’ve got a coffee maker unpacked. That’s the important thing.”
I went in.
The house was full of boxes. Boxes everywhere. Stacked in the hallway, in the living room, in the kitchen. Some of them were labeled in neat black marker. KITCHEN. BEDROOM. BOOKS. BATHROOM.
Vanessa made coffee. We sat at her kitchen table, which was the only piece of furniture that had made it into the kitchen so far, surrounded by boxes.
She told me she’d just gotten divorced. Six months ago. She was forty-four. She’d been married for fifteen years. No kids. She’d been living in a condo downtown since the divorce, and she hated it, and she wanted a real house with a yard. She worked in pharmaceutical sales. She traveled a lot.
“So what happened?” I asked. “With the divorce? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Her smile didn’t move. But her eyes went somewhere else for a second.
“It just didn’t work out,” she said. “You know how it is. People grow apart.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She waved her hand. “Best thing that ever happened to me. I’m free now. I can do whatever I want.”
She said it brightly. Like an advertisement. Like something she’d practiced.
I didn’t believe her. I don’t know why. Something in her voice.
“Can I help you unpack?” I asked. “I’ve got the afternoon off.”
She looked surprised. “Really? You’d do that?”
“Sure. It’s what neighbors do.”
So I spent three hours that afternoon helping Vanessa unpack her kitchen. Dishes. Glasses. Pots and pans. A very expensive knife set. We put things in cabinets. She told me about her job. I told her about Irvin and Maddie. She laughed at my stories. She had a nice laugh, when it was real.
Near the end of the afternoon, I went out to her garage to break down some empty boxes for recycling.
In the corner of the garage, there was a box I hadn’t seen before. A big one. It was taped shut. On the side, in angry black marker, someone had written one word:
DUMP.
It was sitting next to the garbage cans. Waiting to go out to the curb.
The tape on one corner had come loose. The flap was bent up a little. I could see inside.
It was full of photographs. Framed ones. Loose ones. And on top, a big white leather photo album with gold letters on the cover.
Vanessa & Mark. June 14, 2008.
A wedding album.
I stood there in the garage looking at it.
I don’t know why I did what I did next. I’ve thought about it a lot. I think it was because of my own wedding album, sitting on the shelf in our living room, with a photo of me in a dress with a red wine stain on it. I think it was because I’d heard something in her voice in the kitchen. Something brittle. Something that sounded like a woman who’d put her whole life in a box labeled DUMP and told herself she was fine.
I took the wedding album out of the box.
I didn’t take anything else. Just the album.
I carried it home under my arm, wrapped in my cardigan. I put it on a high shelf in my closet. Behind my winter sweaters.
I told myself that someday, maybe, she’d want it back. People throw things away when they’re hurting. Then they regret it. I’ve seen it happen. My mother threw away every photo of my father after he left, and she spent the last ten years of her life asking me if I had any.
I didn’t tell Vanessa. I didn’t tell Irvin.
I just put it on the shelf. And forgot about it.
For a while.
The first few weeks were fine.
Vanessa came over for coffee a couple of times. She brought a bottle of wine one Friday night, and the three of us sat on our back patio and drank it. She was funny. She told stories about crazy doctors she’d met in her sales job. Irvin laughed his surprised little laugh. Maddie even came out and sat with us for a while, which almost never happens.
After she left, Irvin said, “She seems lonely.”
“She does,” I said.
“Divorce is hard,” he said. “We should keep inviting her over.”
I agreed. I thought it was a nice thing to say. That’s the kind of man Irvin is.
Then things started to change.
It was small at first.
She knocked on our door on a Saturday morning. Irvin answered. She was standing there in workout clothes, a tight black tank top and leggings, with her hair in a ponytail.
“Irvin, I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said. “But the cabinet door in my kitchen came off its hinge. I don’t have any tools. And I don’t know the first thing about cabinets. Could you possibly take a look?”
Irvin looked back at me. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee.
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