Chapter Three
“What have you done for me lately? Or have you forgotten that you are still my husband?” I growled into the phone at my estranged husband. “And I know that your little girlfriend is pregnant.”
The only response he gave me was a sigh on the other end.
“Yeah, I thought so.” I closed my bedroom door and propped a hand on my hip. “Our little boy isn’t stupid you know. How long were you going to hide this from me?”
“I was not hiding the fact that Lisa is pregnant,” he sparred. “I just never told you.”
“What’s the difference?” I questioned, wondering why I ever wanted things to work with him anyway. “You have some nerve, Kevin. Not only did you cheat on me, but you lied about having a vasectomy.” Although I had become used to him not being in the house, my voice trembled as I confronted him. “How could you do that? How could you take away my ability to have children and go and have one with another woman? We decided together that we weren’t going to have any more children.”
“No Melinda, you decided. But I did have the vasectomy anyway.” He paused, almost as if to choose his next words carefully. “Just like the doctor had said … it takes a little while to take effect.”
“Oh, so after I picked up behind you and did everything around the house for those days after the surgery, the first thing you go and do is get another woman pregnant after you had healed?”
“I was there for you too, so don’t act as if I didn’t do anything after you had your tubes tied. I took off from work, played with Sean, and brought you food in bed.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do!” I shouted at him. “You don’t get a medal for doing what you’re supposed to do.” I walked into my closet to be sure that I wouldn’t disturb Sean down the hall in his bedroom. “I’m your wife!”
“Look, I know that must’ve come as a shock to you, but I never meant for it to happen this way.”
“Oh, you just kind of fell into bed with her. Are you serious? Are you really going to sit on this phone and tell me that you didn’t mean to sleep with her when you’re living with her now?”
Kevin groaned. I could tell that he wanted to just put an end to my griping, but he brought this all on himself, pretending to go to counseling sessions all the while sleeping with the very woman who gave us the referral. If I had known that she was an ex of his, I would have never agreed to take any sort of recommendation from her regardless of the fact that she was noted as one of the best therapists in the state.
“Lisa was just trying to help. True, we had a past, but that’s why she referred us to an unbiased counselor. But I didn’t know that she still had feelings for me.”
“Yeah, you didn’t know,” I mocked his sentiment. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? I mean really, you felt that it was okay to sleep with this ex-girlfriend that knew we were trying to repair our marriage?”
“Melinda, you were always angry at me for one reason or another. I don’t know … Lisa just took the time to talk to me. She was someone who asked how I was doing for a change.”
“Uh huh, and she took the time to talk you right into bed with her.”
Kevin didn’t respond at first. He took a few moments, and then said, “Look, the past is the past—”
“You just left three months ago!”
“Melinda, I am not going through this with you again.” He sounded spent, almost like it pained him to keep an even tone with me. “I just called to see if I could get Sean tomorrow.”
“You are not going to have my child around that woman. Not after what she did,” I protested.
“Now all of sudden you don’t want Sean around her when he’s been coming here for the past six weeks.”
“I had no idea that woman was living with you. Obviously, from the picture Sean had drawn, you’ve had her around him more than I thought.”
“She just moved in two weeks ago,” he explained.
“Oh, you are on some other stuff if you think I’m going to have her filling my child’s head with a bunch of foolishness.”
“That’s not why you don’t want Lisa around him now. No, it’s because you found out that she’s having my child. And need I remind you that the only reason I slept with her that night is because you pushed me out of the house.”
“So it’s my fault now? Did I undress you and escort you to her bed?” I rolled my eyes and sucked my teeth. “Give me a break.”
“Let’s not go there again.” His tone turned nice-nasty. “It’s done and she’s pregnant, but I’m going to stand up to my responsibilities.”
“What about your responsibilities here, Kevin? We have a child too you know.”
“That’s why I’m trying to keep him in my life.” He raised his voice. “It’s you that I don’t want!”
His words stung me like a bee on a honeysuckle. After years of marriage, this man spoke to me like I was some hoochie asking for a handout. When we got married, I never thought in a million years that this would be our end. I have a lot of faults, I can admit that, but none of them warrant him speaking to me the way that he has over the past few months. It’s like we became enemies overnight and now he’s moved on.
The counseling sessions were a joke. I could tell by his lame answers to the counselor’s questions that he wasn’t taking the process seriously. But if I had said that, all eyes would have fallen on me in judgment. They would have been quick to say that I needed to let him talk, that I needed to let him voice his feelings no matter how phony they sounded to me.
“I’m getting off this phone with you,” he dryly said. “Let me talk to Sean.”
“He’s asleep. Or did you forget that his bedtime is nine o’clock?”
“Don’t play games with me, Melinda.” He sighed. “I’ll pick him up tomorrow.”
“No, I don’t want you anywhere near my house.”
“My name is still on the deed,” he boasted, and then arrogantly chuckled. “And I still make the note payments. Remember?”
How in the world could I forget? He reminds me every chance that he gets. That man thinks he owns me. I looked around my closet at the empty rack where he used to hang his polo shirts and denim jeans. I remembered the day he snatched his things from the hangers. In a fit of rage because I called him out on his cheating when I caught him in a restaurant having lunch with that woman, he rushed home and gathered his underwear, jeans, shirts, all-terrain sneakers, and black spit-shined shoes into a waiting duffel bag.
He took just about everything out of the closet that belonged to him except for a couple pairs of suits. I don’t know if it was to stake claim that he still had a place in this house, or if it was to give me some false hope that he’d return when I least expected it. He also chose to leave other things scattered sporadically across the house. There were a pair of gloves here, a treasured pair of headphones there, and boxes of junk in the spare bedroom.
On that day when he stormed out to his truck, for some crazy reason, I begged that man not to leave me, but he did anyway. Between his leaving and my mother telling me that I never should have married him in the first place, I was an emotional wreck and it showed up in my job performance.
“So, like I said, I’ll be there in the morning to pick up my son. Either that or I take him for good. And you know that I’ll make good on that.”
His threatening tone dug into my heart. Without Sean, I have no one, and Kevin knew it. He was well aware of how much I had given up to be with him. I pushed my friends away, my family, just about everyone to be with him. Nobody really liked him, but I was in love. I breathed Kevin Black day and night. Knowing how big of an idiot I had become for him, I could kick myself.
“And have his clothes ready when I get there. Don’t have me waiting around.”
Just as I was about to give Kevin another piece of my mind, he saved me the trouble and hung up the phone.