“That’s not true. I have cherished you, too.”
“You don’t even know me, Tammy.”
She waved me off and rolled her eyes. This conversation was peeving her and I was sure she thought this too would blow over and she’d be back to vintage shopping, tea parties, and wreaking havoc in no time.
“I do know you, John. I know you well enough to know you’ll be back to your senses soon,” she said.
“Tammy, look, I’m not going to do this with you. I’ve never been a man of many words, so I don’t intend to argue with you. However, I encourage you to take my words at face value. When I tell you it’s over, please understand our marriage is over.”
“It’s not…” Tammy said faintly before her words trailed off.
“We’ve come to the end of the road.”
Tammy stepped closer to me. “Please, John.”
“The way you treated our son’s fiancé was the last straw.”
Her face wrinkled into a deep frown. “So this is about that untrained heifer that came into our home and acted like she just got out of the zoo? Hmph, I guess she had no choice. Her mother swings from the same branch. Both of them are donkey asses in my opinion.” I glared at Tammy and she backed down. “John, I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I just know we can get past everything that happened at dinner. All we have to do is keep those people out of our house.”
“Our house,” I said as I imagined hearing Clara’s laughter bounce from the walls of the room we were standing in. “Tammy, you will never be able to undo enough of the damage you’ve caused in order to measure up to the woman you call an animal.”
“I knew it! I knew this was all about that damn Clara.”
“Part of it is,” I admitted.
“Oh, Johnny, you think you still love her?” Tammy laughed. “You’re an old man still auditioning for a part in the Romeo play. This is all really cute.”
“Only a woman who has never loved her husband would make jokes and think this matter is cute.”
“It’s cute because you walked away from her forty years ago and now all of a sudden you’re in love.”
“Well, let’s see how cute it is when I divorce you and move her into this house.”
“Try it and I will own Turner Enterprises outright,” Tammy said.
“You can talk about our marriage and try whatever you want, but when it comes to my business you already know you are locked out of any type of payday, so I don’t know why you’re exciting yourself with the idea of owning Turner Enterprises,” I said coolly. On any given day, Tammy and I had ninety nine problems, but her taking my business would never be one.
“You think you have everything working in your favor, huh? We’ll see about that, Johnny.”
“I’m not going to entertain any ideas you may have about Turner Enterprises. And what I feel for Clara is well above your ability to understand. I never stopped loving her, not for one minute.”
“Johnny, don’t you say these things to me! You can’t love her. You married me, remember? Must I pull out the photo albums and remind you who you are, who you’ve been for the past four decades?”
“That won’t be necessary. I know who I am… a man who made choices based upon what his family and society had to say. I married you because my father insisted you were the one for me.”
“Rubbish, we dated and you asked me to marry you because you wanted to marry me. No one twisted your arm, so don’t rewrite our history.”
“Tammy, I was trying to get Clara out of my heart back then. You helped ease the pain, but your friendship never healed my wounds. I spent all these years with a Band-Aid over a wound that needed surgery. Seeing Clara last night and holding her in my arms was like finding a surgeon who offered a procedure that could heal me, at last. I have to get her back, so I can finally heal.”
The weight of my words caused Tammy to back away from me and shrink down into her chair once again. Her gaze was distant as she recounted our life together.
“Forty years, I have given forty years to you. I could have danced amongst the greats. I could have opened my own studio. I could have done a lot of great things with my life, but I spent my best years with you.”
“All you have to do is listen to your words. What’s inside will come up. You just said you could’ve been doing something great, but instead you were with me.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said moving forward in her seat. I held up a hand to stop her from rising.
“I don’t blame you for your regrets. You should’ve been doing what you loved many years ago,” I said as I looked into her aged eyes that had grown so weary. “We both made sacrifices and put aside what we really wanted to make our parents happy. We gave all we w