Not Enough to Hurt

A freshly divorced man catches up with his childhood sweetheart when he returns home.

 

“You’re divorced now,” said Ma.

            “I know it,” I answered. “You don’t think I know it?”

            “All right, son,” Pop said in that patient, calm voice I’d always loved and hated. “Don’t sass your ma, now.”

            “I’m not sassing Ma, Pop,” I told him.

            Ma just shook her head. “Kids these days.”

            Pop looked at her. “Give Bill a break, Barb. He just got divorced.”

            “He knows it,” Ma grumbled. “You don’t think he knows it?”

            “You going to be staying here for a while?” Pop asked, directing his attention back towards me.

            “Yeah. Anne got the apartment.”

            “No wonder she got so mad at you,” said Ma. “You never bought her a nice house with a yard.”

            “Barb,” Pop said, “not now.” There was sandpaper in his throat and Ma shut up. Pop said to me, “You can stay here, Bill. Your ma and I, we don’t mind.”

            “Thanks, Pop,” I said to him.

            “We don’t mind,” he was repeating to himself.

 

            I met Anne Rogers when I was a freshman in college. She was a junior then, an upperclassman, but she seemed to take a liking to me. That first year, there was nothing between us happening – nothing to tell my parents whenever I came home to visit.

            The following year we started going out, and we didn’t look back after that. She stayed within reach of the college, renting a room out and working two jobs. After I graduated we moved into a nice apartment and got married. I got a decent job and for the first year and a half, Anne and I were happy.

            There were no kids. That was the problem. Anne wanted a child, someone to take care of, but nothing could make her have a baby. She started to cry more often, and I could hear her in the bathroom crying when I tried to fall asleep. Sometimes it lasted all night. When that happened, I would lie awake listening to her sobs.

            After three years of trying to have a baby Anne gave up and stopped going to work. She stayed home all day in our nice apartment, sleeping or watching television or playing with some of the baby toys we’d been given as wedding gifts. Our apartment, usually cleaned up by Anne over the weekends, fell into disarray as she fell deeper into depression. I tried to get her to snap out of it, tried to get her to a therapist so she could get help, but she refused. Anne didn’t want a therapist; she didn’t get a therapist.

            A year passed and Anne finally came out of her depression. I would have been happy had her grief not been consumed with another emotion: anger. She flared up at me whenever she had the chance. Her friends, who had helped me care for her for the past years, vanished. Some would later whisper to me that Anne had become “too much.” I couldn’t ask Anne’s parents for help, as they had died when Anne had first started college. My own parents tried to help Anne get medication for her frequent outbursts but she ignored them.

            One day I came home from work and found Anne sitting in the middle of our living room, most of the apartment trashed. Stunned, I’d screamed right there at her that we were getting divorced. She’d looked up at me with stone cold eyes and told me to go right ahead, that she would love it.

            We were divorced three weeks later.

 

            “I’m going to church today, Bill, with your ma,” Pop said to me a few days after I’d moved back in. “You want to come with us? No better time to talk to the Man Upstairs, I’d say.”

            “I’ll go with you, Pop.”

            “That’s my boy.” He helped Ma get her Sunday coat on.

            “Jim, your shoelaces are untied,” Ma said.

            Pop began to reach down to tie them but Ma hurriedly stooped and knotted them herself. “You’ll hurt your back,” she explained to him, and he smiled.

            I watched this and I wondered why my marriage hadn’t turned out the same.

 

            On the way to church Ma pointed out to Pop all the things he couldn’t see, the things his failing eyesight had kept from him. “All these birds,” she told him, waving her gloved hand through the sky. “And all these children, just running around. And all the snow’s melted. Oh, Jim,” Ma sighed, “spring really is here.”

            “Don’t I know it,” he chuckled. “You can see the birds, right, Bill?”

            “I can see them,” I told Pop.

            “He has good eyes, like me,” Ma told Pop.

            “Don’t I know it,” he answered. “You got good eyes, Bill?”

            “I got good eyes, Pop,” I told him. He grinned, the smile coming naturally to him, and he said, “That’s my boy.”

            “He has good eyes, like me,” Ma repeated.

            “Billy?”

            I whirled around because the voice was so familiar, the warmth of it running through my veins, swirling around. “Ashley?”

            “Billy Johnson!” she said with a smile that was instantly replaced with a quick blush. “Or are you not called Billy anymore?”

            “No one calls me Billy anymore,” I said to her, with just the barest hint of melancholy in my voice.

            “Oh,” Ashley said.

 

            Ashley Mortimer and I had been neighbors ever since she’d moved in when we were nine. We became best friends, riding our bikes together constantly. She had such a sweet personality, yet was quite shy. For a few years, I was her only close friend.

            Then, in seventh grade, more and more people began to notice Ashley. Girls would offer to paint her nails after school, would invite her to sit with them during lunch. Boys began to look at her.

            By that point, I got more and more friends too. People liked how I was good at baseball and I would talk to the guys from the team more and more. A few teammates told me, privately, that they liked Ashley Mortimer. This stunned me, as I had never thought of her as anything more than my best friend. Soon, however, I began to think that if I didn’t claim Ashley someone else – someone worse – would.

            We started going out in eighth grade. People called us “the charmed couple.” We were, as we’d always been, inseparable. I loved Ashley and we continued going out all throughout high school.

            Near the end of senior year, however, both of us were upset. We’d been accepted to different colleges; Ashley, of course, being the smarter one, was accepted to an Ivy League school. The day before she had to leave, she told me I could date other girls in college, that it was “to be expected.” I told her the same, not believing or trusting the voice coming out of my mouth.

            And it was during my freshman year that I met Anne Rogers.

 

            “Where are you headed?” Ashley asked me, digging her shoe into the dirt.

            “St. Francis’s Church,” I told her.

My parents, frowning a little, began to head off. “We’ll see you later, Bill,” Pop called.

            “All right.”

            “I’m going to the corner shop,” Ashley told me. Her voice was so quiet now, with only a fragment of the vibrancy that I’d always cherished in her. “Not too far from here.”

            We stood there for a while, neither of us saying anything.

            “I hear you’re a married man, now,” she said softly.

            “Divorced, actually,” I answered. “I’m divorced.”

            “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

            “We’re still friends,” I lied.

            “That’s good.”

            “What about you?” I asked. “Are you married?”

            She nodded, her knit cap sliding over her eyebrows. She pushed it back up. “Married,” she replied, “four years.”

            “Who’s the groom?” I asked half-jokingly.

            She looked at me with something in her eyes. “You don’t know him. He wasn’t originally from here.”

            “His name?”

            “George Anderson.”

            “George Anderson,” I repeated.

            “That’s his name,” she chuckled.

            “Good guy, I guess,” I said, half to myself.

            “Oh,” Ashley’s eyes filmed over. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Have you only been back here for a few days?”

            “Three.”

            “He’s not a good man at all.” 

            I stared at her.

            “He talks a lot, and none of it’s good. He works too much for us to get to know each other but he works too little to keep from leaving me alone.”

            I continued staring at the little flaws that had popped up all around Ashley Mortimer now. She used to have lush, chestnut hair that girls would have sold their pets for, but now it was several shades darker and speckled with dandruff and loose wool from her cap. Her eyes used to sparkle a gorgeous green and now they were dimmed, the light extinguished. She also looked far too small in a huge winter coat. Even her body movements, so fluid and graceful before, were hurried and almost unsteady and it reminded me of a recovering addict’s, though I knew Ashley didn’t have it in her to do drugs.

            “Does he hit you?” I asked her.

            “Does he what?”

            “Does he hit you?” I repeated for her.

            Ashley played with the frayed end of her scarf. She’d never worn a scarf before. She’d never needed to protect her neck before. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “but it never hurts.”

            “Never hurts.”

            “That’s right,” she said, her eyes challenging me to say more.

            I said nothing. My own eyes may have dampened seeing how hard Ashley’s pupils had become, how much they looked like Anne’s during the last few months of our marriage.

            “Did you love her?” asked Ashley.

            “Love who?” I answered with a question.

            “Your ex. Did you love her?”

            I shrugged. “I used to.”

            “You two aren’t friends, are you.” Statement, not question.

            I looked down. My hands were getting cold. “No, we aren’t. It was a bad divorce.”

            “That’s why you’re here, now, in your hometown.” Ashley’s voice was softer and yet it sounded stronger, too. “I didn’t want to leave this place after I graduated from college. George wanted us to move even farther away but I persuaded him to come here instead. He didn’t mind. When we first got married, he would’ve moved mountains for me.” Her eyes got wet too. “He would’ve moved mountains,” she whispered.

            “Why don’t you leave him?” I asked. “We could make a club for divorcees.”

            “My baby needs a father,” Ashley replied.

            I stared at her and her giant winter coat and I couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended.

            “Three more months,” she answered. “Three more months and I’ll be a mother and my baby will need its father.”

            “So you can’t leave him.” My mouth felt too dry.

            “That’s right.”

            We looked at each other in the way that all old friends do, and yet I felt like we were complete strangers.

            “It was nice seeing you, Bill,” Ashley said. “The corner shop’s down that road, so I’d best be leaving.”

            I wanted to tell her to stay there, so I could try to reconcile the image of her as a child with this picture of a forgotten, sad woman, but I didn’t. “Maybe I’ll see you sometime later,” I told Ashley.

            “Maybe,” she acknowledged, but I could tell she didn’t care if we ever met up again. “Bye, Bill.”

            “Bye, Ashley.”

            So I walked forward while Ashley took her little side street, and as I walked, I thought to myself, No one calls me Billy anymore.

Author's Note

Any advice is welcome!

Reviews

[Sammy]

Lovely writing, natural dialogue. Great characters.

I was reading an article about creating interest in your characters and it siad something along the lines of, don't make it obvious which one's right. The divorce thing was too one-sided - to engage us more, you could have some signs that perhaps he could have done more.

I would call this piece elegant, but that would be to downplay its humanity. I couldn't find anything wrong with this, obviously because you're an experienced writer and anything I could have picked up you've seen to ... so I'll tell you its strongest moments. The descriptions of Ashley, her eyes, her coat, her voice, all made this piece feel truly alive. The parents' relationship, the overall feel of the piece. The one thing I'd tighten up is his backstory.

Peace, Sammy