His First Wife

When she left the room, I got up and went into the kitchen to fix myself a sandwich.

Pulling the ingredients from the refrigerator, I saw that Jamison had moved himself from the den to the kitchen too. He was sitting at the kitchen table looking just as stupid as he had in the den.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Talk?” There was a mix of sarcasm and comedy in my voice. I didn’t know why though. It just was. I didn’t want to talk to Jamison, but really inside I did. I hated him, but I still loved him. I wanted him to stop talking to me, but really I missed talking to him. I missed him. How could I feel all those things at once? But that didn’t stop me from having an attitude. I was still mad, and wanting to talk or not, the attitude was staying.

“We can’t go on like this, not speaking,” he said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

“Look, I don’t want to have Thanksgivings here. And that’s it.” I spread the mayonnaise on the bread in quick jerking strokes, nearly slicing it in two.

“Not that, about everything. We never spoke about it. About what happened.”

“Hum,” I said, putting two extra slices of cheese on the bread.

“Look, just come over here and sit down,” he raised his voice. “I need to get this out.”

“Oh, now you want me to sit down so you can get stuff out?” I slammed the sandwich down on the counter. “Okay then, if that’s what this is about. You want me to sit and listen?” I walked over to the table and sat next to him. “What do you have to say?”

“Kerry, come on, can’t we just be adults about this?”

“Adults? I’m sorry, I’m just remembering the other time I was supposed to meet you at this table to talk and you weren’t even here,” I said. “Do you remember that?” I paused. “No, don’t answer, maybe you can recall all the other times I tried to sit down to talk to you about what was going on and all you could say was that it was nothing and that I should stop being paranoid. Do you remember that?” I paused again. “No—don’t answer that either. Because maybe you can recall when I asked you to talk to me right in front of that bitch’s house and you couldn’t . . .” My voice cracked and just like that I was crying. “No, you wouldn’t talk to me then. Do you remember that?”

“Stop it,” Jamison said, reaching over to grab my hand. “Just stop.” We sat in silence as I cried and tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.

“I didn’t mean for none of this shit to happen,” he continued. “It just did.”

“How, Jamison? How could something like that just happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“We were married. And happy. I mean, what would make you do that?”

Jamison looked away.

“We were happy, right?” I said.

“I wasn’t unhappy,” he said. “But I wasn’t happy. I’m not going to say that’s what it was, because I’m a man and if I wasn’t happy with you, I know how to open my mouth and say it.”

“Then what was it?” I wiped my tears and sat up in the seat.

“Kerry, you’re my wife and I swear to God I don’t want another wife, but—” he said, “we just don’t seem to connect on a lot of things, and it bothers me so much that sometimes I don’t even want to talk to you.”

“We don’t connect? On what?” I asked.

“Come on, it’s not necessary to give an example,” he said.

“Yes, it is. If you say we don’t connect, then tell me why.”

“See you’re making everything I say an absolute and it’s not like that. We do connect. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be married. If we didn’t, I wouldn’t be in love with you,” he said. “But sometimes we don’t connect and our differences come up and it makes me feel like I’m alone. Like I’m married to someone who could not care less about how I feel.”

“How you feel about what?”

“The business—”

“Oh, the business,” I said, cutting him off. “Here we go with that again.”

“See, that’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “That brushing me off when you know how much I care about my business.”