That’s what my husband said to me on a Thursday night in October, standing in our kitchen with his coat still on.
I was at the stove stirring a pot of chili. His favorite. The kind with the extra beans and the little bit of cinnamon that he always said made it taste like Sunday afternoons at his grandmother’s house. I had the radio on. I was humming.
I didn’t even turn around at first.
“What did you say, honey?”
He didn’t repeat it. Instead, I heard paper. A soft rustle. Then the light thump of something being set down on the kitchen table.
I turned around.
Greg was standing by the table with his hands in his coat pockets. There was a thick manila envelope lying next to the salt shaker. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the envelope.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Papers,” he said.
“What papers?”
He finally looked up. His eyes were red around the edges.
“Divorce papers, Claire.”
I laughed.
I honestly laughed out loud. I stood there holding a wooden spoon dripping with chili, and I laughed, because it was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard in my life.
We had been married for twenty-two years. We had a daughter in college. We had a mortgage, a golden retriever named Biscuit, and a vacation planned to the Smoky Mountains in the spring. We still held hands at the grocery store. He still kissed me on the forehead every single morning before he left for work.
“Very funny,” I said. “Take your coat off. Dinner’s almost ready.”
He didn’t move.
“I’m not joking.”
The smile slowly slid off my face.
“Greg.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’ve already signed them. I’ve talked to a lawyer. I’m going to stay at a hotel tonight, and I’ll find an apartment this weekend.”
The wooden spoon slipped out of my hand and hit the floor. Chili splattered across the tile. Biscuit came running over to lick it up, and neither of us stopped him.
“I don’t understand,” I said. My voice sounded strange. Far away. “What happened? What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“Then why?”
He took a long breath.
“We’ve grown apart,” he said. “We’re too different now. We want different things.”
“What things? What do I want that you don’t want? Tell me one thing.”
He didn’t answer.
“Is there someone else?” I asked. My throat was so tight I could barely get the words out. “Just tell me. I’d rather know. Is there someone else?”
“No,” he said, and he said it so fast and so firmly that I believed him. “There is no one else, Claire. I swear to God. There’s never been anyone else.”
“Then I don’t understand!”
I was shouting now. I never shout. In twenty-two years, I could count on one hand the number of times I had raised my voice at that man.
He flinched like I had hit him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Then he turned around and walked out the back door.
I heard his car start in the driveway. I heard it back out onto the street. I heard it drive away.
And I stood there in my kitchen with chili on my shoes, staring at that manila envelope next to the salt shaker, waiting for him to come back in and tell me it was all some terrible, stupid joke.
He never did.
The next three weeks were the worst of my life.
I called him every day. Sometimes three or four times a day. Most of the time he didn’t answer. When he did, he was always gentle. Always kind. And always saying the exact same thing.
“We’ve grown apart, Claire. We’re too different now.”
It was like talking to a recording.
“Different how?” I’d ask. “Give me an example. Just one.”
“I don’t want to fight about this.”
“I’m not fighting! I’m asking!”
“I have to go.”
Click.
He found a little one-bedroom apartment across town above a dry cleaner. He came by the house on a Saturday morning while I was at the store and took his clothes, his books, and his reading glasses off the nightstand. He left his key on the kitchen counter, right where the envelope had been.
He didn’t take Biscuit. Biscuit sat by the back door for two days waiting for him.
So did I, if I’m being honest.
Everybody got the same explanation.
His brother-in-law. My sister. Our friends from church. The guys he played poker with on the first Friday of every month.
“We’ve grown apart. We’re too different now.”
Nobody believed it.
“Greg?” said my friend Patty, when I told her over coffee. “Greg Whitman? Claire, that man looks at you like you hung the moon. I’ve seen him do it at every single barbecue for twenty years.”
“I know.”
“Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong.”
“I know,” I said again.
The hardest phone call was to our daughter, Sophie.
She was a junior at the state university, three hours away. She called me the night after Greg told her, sobbing so hard I couldn’t understand her at first.
“Mom, what is going on? Dad called me and said you guys are getting a divorce. He said you grew apart. What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You were there!”
“I mean I don’t know,” I said, and my voice broke. “He won’t tell me either.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“He sounded weird, Mom,” she finally said. “On the phone. He sounded really, really weird. Like he was reading off a card.”
I lay awake every single night trying to figure it out.
I went through his old emails on the family computer. Nothing. I went through our bank statements for the last two years, line by line, with a highlighter. No strange charges. No hotel rooms. No jewelry I’d never received. No dinners for two at restaurants I’d never been to.
I even called his office and asked his secretary, Denise, if anything had been going on at work. She sounded as confused as I was.
“He’s been a little quiet lately,” she said. “And he took a few personal days this summer. But Claire, he talks about you all the time. Every day. I don’t understand this at all.”
Personal days. I didn’t remember any personal days.
I started going back over everything in my head. Every conversation. Every night. Every little thing he’d said or done in the last year.
There were things, I realized. Little things. Things I’d brushed off at the time.
He had gotten short-tempered. Not mean, just snappy, in a way he’d never been before. He’d yelled at a waiter once over a cold plate of eggs, and then he’d sat in the car afterward with his head on the steering wheel for ten minutes, apologizing over and over.
He’d dropped things. A coffee mug in July. A glass of wine at our anniversary dinner. His car keys, constantly.
He’d started fidgeting. Tapping his fingers on the table. Bouncing his knee. I’d put my hand on his knee once at church to make him stop, and he’d looked at me with the strangest expression. Almost like he was scared.
I had thought he was stressed about work. I had thought he was getting older. I had thought a lot of things.
But I never thought he was leaving.
“You’re going on a cruise.”
My sister Lynn said it like a doctor announcing a diagnosis. She was standing in my living room with her purse on her shoulder and her car keys still in her hand. She’d let herself in with her spare key, which she does whenever she’s decided I’m not answering the phone on purpose.
I was on the couch in Greg’s old flannel shirt. I hadn’t washed my hair in four days. There was a box of tissues on my lap and a cold cup of tea on the coffee table that I had made sometime the day before.
“I’m not going on a cruise,” I said.
“Yes, you are. It’s already booked. It leaves from Miami in nine days. Seven nights in the Caribbean. I got you a room with a balcony.”
“Lynn. I can’t afford a cruise.”
“You’re not paying for it. I am. Well, technically Rob is, but he doesn’t know yet.”
“I can’t just leave.”
“Why not?”
I opened my mouth. Then I closed it.
“Exactly,” Lynn said. She sat down on the arm of the couch and pulled my greasy hair back from my face the way she used to when we were kids. “Claire, look at you. You’re not sleeping. You’re not eating. You’ve lost ten pounds. Patty told me you called Greg’s secretary. His secretary, Claire.”
“I needed to know.”
“I know you did. But you’ve been searching for answers for three weeks, and you haven’t found a single one. If you keep this up, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. Maybe the answer is that there isn’t one. Maybe he’s just having a midlife crisis, and he’s going to wake up in six months with a red sports car and a lot of regret.”
“That’s not Greg.”
“I know it’s not.” She sighed. “That’s what scares me.”
I looked down at the tissues in my lap.
“Go,” she said softly. “Just go. Sit on a balcony and look at the ocean. Eat too much shrimp. Let somebody else make your bed for a week. Get away from this house and that kitchen table and that stupid salt shaker you keep staring at.”
I hadn’t realized she’d noticed me staring at the salt shaker.
“Biscuit,” I said weakly.
“Biscuit can stay with me. The kids will love it.”
So nine days later, I went on a cruise by myself.
I’ll be honest. The first two nights were terrible.
Everywhere I looked there were couples. Couples holding hands at the railing. Couples sharing desserts. Couples slow dancing at the piano bar to old Frank Sinatra songs. Old couples and young couples and couples on their honeymoons with matching T-shirts that said “JUST MARRIED.”
On the first night, I ate a cheeseburger alone in my cabin and cried myself to sleep.
On the second night, I made it to the dining room, sat down at a table for two, looked at the empty chair across from me, and walked right back out.
But on the third day, something changed.
I was sitting on a lounge chair by the pool with a book I wasn’t actually reading, when a shadow fell across the page.
“Is anybody sitting here, sweetheart?”
I looked up. An older woman was standing over me. She had short silver hair, enormous sunglasses, and a straw hat with a fake sunflower on it. Behind her, a tall old man with a white mustache was carrying two fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them.
“No,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“Oh, good.” She plopped down on the lounge chair next to me. “My name’s June. That handsome devil is Walt. We’re from Oregon. Fifty-one years married, and he still can’t carry two drinks without spilling one.”
“I spilled half of one,” Walt said, handing her the fuller glass. “That’s not the same thing.”
I laughed. It surprised me. It was the first time I had laughed in almost a month.
