His Third Wife

“Kerry?” she called. “You okay? Where are you?”

“Here.” I managed. There was no need for me to say where exactly. She knew.

“It’s six in the.... He didn’t come home?”

“No.”

“Kerry, why didn’t you call me? You don’t need to do that right now. Not in your condition.”

“I just want this to stop,” I said sorrowfully.

“I understand, but right now just isn’t the time. You have other things to take care of.” She paused. “I know I sound crazy to you, but I just don’t want anything to happen to you or the baby. You understand that, right?”

“Yes,” I said, with my voice cracking. “But I’m just tired of this crap. I mean, what the hell, Marcy? Why? Why is Jamison here with this woman?”

“I don’t know that. I can’t answer that. Only Jamison can.”

“Exactly.” I felt a twist of anger wrench my gut. Again I went from feeling sorry for myself to being angry that I was there in the first place. Jamison was my husband and he was cheating on me and I wasn’t going to just sit in a car and let it go on. I slid on my flip-flops and opened the car door.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t. But, again, my emotions were driving. I was spilling out like that hot wax and before I knew it, I was charging up the walkway.

“Just don’t do anything foolish,” Marcy said before I hung up. Later I’d think about how crazy that sounded. How could I possibly do anything more foolish than what was already being done to me?

The little cracked doorbell seemed to ring before I even pressed it. It chimed loud and confident, like it wasn’t past 6 AM and the sun hadn’t already begun to rise behind me. It was quiet. The only noise I heard was my heart pounding, shaking so wildly inside of me that I couldn’t stand still. I waited for another five seconds which felt like hours. My husband was on one side of the door and I was on the other. Our wedding bands and my large belly were the only signs we were connected. I looked at his truck again. It was the only piece of Jamison I could see from where I was and my heart sank a bit farther. The shine of the paint, the gloss on the wheels, it looked so happy, so free, so smug, so complete. Everything he wanted. I was tired of making this all so possible for Jamison. Making his life so comfortable, so happy. His perfect wife, carrying his perfect son. I was alone in my marriage and I was tired.

I began pounding on the door then. Ringing the bell and then pounding some more. My fist balled up and it pounded hard like a rock threatening to burst through. Someone was inside and they were coming out. If there were children inside, a mother and father, a dog, a parrot.... I didn’t care. They were all getting up and out of that house.

A small, light brown hand pulled back the sheet of weathered lace covering the square at the top of the door. A woman’s face appeared. Her eyes were squinting with the kind of tired worry anyone would have over a knock at the door at 6 AM. I’d seen those eyes before, and before she widened them enough to see who I was, my fist was banging at the glass in front of her face. I was trying to break it and if I could break it, I’d grab her face and pull her through the tiny square.

“Tell my husband to come outside,” I hollered, my voice sounding much bigger than I was. She looked surprised. Like she never expected to see me or hadn’t known Jamison even had a wife. I pressed my face against the window to see inside. To see if Jamison was there behind her. The flap fell back down over the little window and I heard heavy footsteps. I was beside myself. Had totally let go of whoever I was. My baby grew lighter, as if he wasn’t even there, and a thunderbolt inside shocked me into action.

“Jamison!” I shouted heatedly. “Jamison, come outside!” I began banging on the door again. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I knew it was her. Coreen Carter. I saw her only once before in my life. But when she came to the door that time to let Jamison in, I learned her face the way a victim does her victimizer.

She was what most men would consider beautiful. She had short, curly red hair. From the car I thought it was dyed, but up close I could tell it was her natural color. Fire engine red, like the truck, from the root. She had freckles of the same color dotted around her eyes and her skin was the color of Caribbean sand. Really, she looked nothing like me. In fact, we were complete opposites. My hair was so black and long, most of my friends called me “Pocahontas” growing up. My hair wouldn’t dye and most days it wouldn’t hold a curl of any kind. And if the skin of the woman in the window was the color of Caribbean sand, then mine was darker than the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii. My mother didn’t like to talk about it, but my grandfather on my father’s side was half Sudanese, and while he died long before I was born, my father always said the one thing he left behind was his licorice color on my skin and my perfectly shaped, curious almond eyes.

My cell phone began ringing. I opened it, certain it was Marcy making sure I hadn’t killed anyone, but it was Jamison.

“Jamison,” I said, looking again in the window to find him. What was this? What was going on? I felt far from him already. Now he couldn’t even come to the door?

“Kerry, go home.” His voice was filled with irritation.

“What?” I asked. “Are you kidding me? Jamison, come outside.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He sounded as if I was doing something wrong, like I was out of place.

“I don’t want to do this here. It’s not right,” he said.

“Not right? Not right to who, Jamison? Her? I’m your wife!”

“I know that.”

“No, you don’t because if you did, I wouldn’t be standing out here in my nightgown, eight months pregnant. Or did you forget about that?” I started banging on the door again. Thinking of my child made me furious. I wanted that door down. I’d forgotten all about where I was. People were starting to come out of their houses, but I didn’t care. I wanted it to stop and Jamison being on the phone from inside the house wasn’t making it any better.

“Kerry, she didn’t do anything to you. Just go home and I’ll be right behind you.” He was whispering like a schoolboy on the phone with his girlfriend late at night.

“I’m not going home. You come out here now or I swear I’ll bust the windows in your car and set it on fire if I have to.” I couldn’t believe the things I was saying, but I felt every syllable of them. At that moment I was willing to do anything, and Jamison must’ve felt it too. He hung up the phone.

The door opened fast, like he’d been standing on the other side the whole time. Jamison stood there alone, dressed in a pair of boxers I’d bought him.