My Ex-Husband Mocked Me for Bringing a Date to His Halloween Party, Saying ‘No Man Would Ever Date Someone Like…
Part 1: The Pumpkin on the Counter
“Christy and I are throwing a Halloween party at our new house,” Jason said, before I’d even finished saying hello.
I was standing at my kitchen counter with a paring knife in one hand and a half-gutted pumpkin in front of me. Ben had drawn the face on it in black marker that morning: two triangle eyes and a mouth with exactly three teeth. It was 6:40 on a Thursday, and I still hadn’t started dinner.
“Sounds fun,” I said.
“All the parents from the kids’ school are coming as couples.” He paused just long enough for it to land. “But don’t worry, you can come alone. Nobody expects you to have anyone anyway.”
I set the knife down. A string of pumpkin pulp slid off the blade onto the cutting board.
“Was that supposed to be kind?”
“Christy says you’re sensitive about these things. I’m trying to make it easy for you.”
Fifteen years of marriage teaches you a language. In Jason’s, an insult always came wrapped like a favor, with a bow on top and a receipt tucked inside so you could see how much it had cost him.
We’d been divorced for six months. Last January, I’d found a $318 hotel charge on our shared credit card for a Saturday night when he’d told me he was at a dental supply conference in Columbus. The woman with him was Christy, his secretary, who was thirty-one and had once brought a lemon cake to our Christmas party.
He never apologized. Not once. When I asked him why, standing in our bedroom with the statement printed out in my hand, he sighed like I was the one wasting his evening.
“I told you to lose the baby weight faster,” he said. “Men are visual. I want an attractive woman by my side, and you’re not that anymore.”
I was forty-one. I worked full-time as a billing coordinator at a pediatric clinic, I had a ten-year-old and a six-year-old, and apparently I was also supposed to look twenty-five forever, somewhere between packing lunches and fighting the insurance company over Ben’s ear tubes.
The strange part was that I didn’t miss him. I missed the man I’d thought he was, the one who used to leave sticky notes in my coat pockets. That man, it turned out, had mostly been my imagination doing him favors.
To everyone else, Jason said we had “grown apart.” Whenever I tried to correct the story, he lowered his voice and reminded me not to upset the children. And somewhere along the way, our daughter, Ava, started watching our faces the way people watch the sky before a storm.
“Mom?” Ava was in the kitchen doorway, one sock on, one sock off. “Was that Dad?”
“Yep.”
“Are you coming to our Halloween party?”
Before I could answer, Ben barreled in behind her wearing a plastic pirate hat that slid over one eye. “Please come. Christy’s doing a haunted maze. Ava says I’ll cry, but I won’t.”
“You cried when the toaster popped,” Ava said.
“It surprised me!”
They both turned to me with the same face, hopeful and braced at the same time.
“Of course I’ll come,” I said.
They cheered so loudly that the dog next door started barking.
Later, after they were asleep, I sat at the table beside the half-carved pumpkin and let myself dread it properly. Jason and Christy had bought a big colonial on Linden Court in September, the kind with a three-car garage. Ava and Ben hadn’t stopped talking about their new bedrooms there, one painted lavender and one painted like the inside of a submarine.
Christy had a son, too, a boy I’d never met. Jason only mentioned him in passing. The two of them were still living at her old place near the boy’s school until the renovations were finished, and in the meantime Jason kept texting me photos of the new kitchen backsplash as if I’d asked.
Once, at school pickup, Christy had tilted her head at me and said, “You know, there are amazing fillers now. For the lines around the eyes. Someone might actually notice you.”
I’d smiled, said nothing, and buckled Ben into his booster seat. I swallowed all of it for the kids. But I could already picture walking into that house alone, in a costume, while Jason watched me from across the room like a man checking whether a bet had paid off.
Two days later, my friend Nina showed up at my door with a bag of mini peanut butter cups and an opinion.
“Bring a date,” she said, dropping onto my couch.
“From where? The produce aisle?”
“I’ve met men in worse places.” My phone buzzed on the coffee table, and she leaned over without an ounce of shame to read it. “Who’s Daniel?”
“An old friend. We knew each other in college and reconnected recently.”
“Is he single?”
“Yes.”
“Then ask him.”
I nearly spilled my tea.
Daniel and I had lived on the same dorm floor at Ohio State a lifetime ago. In August, we’d both reached for the same paperback at a bookstore on High Street, and since then we’d met for coffee every couple of weeks. We talked about books, about starting over in our forties, and about how strange it felt to cook dinner for fewer people.
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