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ments of me, he was still making it sound as if he was doing me a favor.
He'd betrayed me. And then compounded it by treating me like an idiot.
Or maybe I'd just lost interest in short men.
I just knew one thing, if it was dead, it was dead. No one can resurrect love once it has breathed its last.
I called James two days later and told him that there would be no recon- ciliation.
"You're letting your pride get in the way," he said. As though he'd been briefed.
"I'm not," I said wearily.
"You want to punish me," he suggested.
"I don't," I lied. (Of course, it was nice to have the boot on the other foot.)
"I can wait," he promised.
"Please don't," I replied.
"I love you," he whispered.
"Good-bye," I said.
James continued to call, maybe twice or three times a day. Checking up on me, wondering if I'd changed my mind yet--if I had, as he put it, come to my senses.
I was nice to him on the phone. It was no skin off my nose. He said he missed me. I suppose he did.
I found the phone calls a bit irritating. It was hard to believe that only three months ago I would have killed to have gotten a call from him. Now it was more likely that I would kill if the calls didn't stop.
Then I stopped being irritated, and all I felt was sad.
Life is a very peculiar creature.
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thirty-seven
I couldn't have said that I was happy. But I wasn't miserable. Or devastated the way I had been when James first left me.
I suppose I was calm. I had accepted that my life would never be the same again and would never be the way I had planned it. The things I had hoped for were never going to happen. I was not going to have four children with James. James and I would not grow old together. Even though I had always promised that my marriage would be the one that survived, the one that didn't break up, I could now accept, without too much heartache, that it had broken up.
Of course, I felt sad. Sad for the idealistic me, the one who had gotten married with such high, high, expectations. Even sad for James.
I really did feel older--and how!--and wiser.
I suppose I had learned--the long, hard way--a bit of humility.
I really had control over so little. Either in my life or in any other people's.
And if I heard someone say "Everything happens for a reason" or "When God closes one door, he opens another," it was no longer too difficult to stop myself from punching them in the face. Not difficult at all, in fact.
I didn't feel that my life was totally over.
Irredeemably altered, maybe. But not totally over.
My marriage had broken up, but I had a beautiful child. I had a wonderful family, very good friends and a job to go
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back to. Who knew, one day, I might even meet a nice man who wouldn't mind taking Kate on as well as me. Or if I waited long enough maybe Kate would meet a nice man who wouldn't mind taking me on as well as her. But in the meantime I had decided that I was just going to get on with my life and if Mr. Perfect came along, I'd manage to make room for him somewhere.
I did all the boring legal things that I should have done weeks ago. Well, maybe I shouldn't have done weeks ago. Maybe I wasn't ready then. Maybe now was the right time.
Either way it didn't make a bit of difference. The fact is they weren't done then and they were being done now.
I wanted custody of Kate. James said that he wouldn't fight it if he was given plenty of access to her. I was delighted because I wanted Kate to know her father. And I knew I was very lucky that James was being so reasonable. He could have been deliberately nasty and uncooperative and, in fairness to him, he wasn't.
James and I came to an agreement about the apartment. We decided to sell it. He was going to live in it until it was sold.
That was pretty dreadful, actually. When he received the documents from my lawyer he took it quite badly. I suppose he finally realized that it was over.
"You're really not coming back, are you?" he said sadly.
And even though I had instigated the whole thing, even though it was what I really wanted, I felt so sad also. I had a pang of intense regret. If only things hadn't turned out this way. If only things had never gone wrong.
But they had.
Tearful eleventh-hour reunions are the stuff of romance novels. They rarely happen in real life. And if they do, they usually occur when either one or both parties have had a few drinks.
No one showed any interest in buying the apartment for the longest time. In a way I was glad, because the thought of anyone else living in what I still considered to be my home was too awful to contemplate. But on the other hand, it was a real worry because money was so tight. I like to hold James responsible. He probably nabbed any prospective buyers and bored them to death with talk of tax relief on mortgages and
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suchlike. They probably fell asleep before they'd even seen the bedroom. But I shouldn't be so unkind. He meant well.
I spoke to my boss and told her that I'd be back in the saddle by early August. Now if I hadn't been feeling pretty miserable before this point, the reminder that I had to go back to work was nearly enough to tip me back over the edge.
Maybe I was in the wrong job, maybe I didn't have a true vocation, maybe I was just bone lazy. Well, whatever it was I wasn't one of those lucky people (although I just think they're weird) who get great joy from their job. At best I thought of it as a means to an end, at worst a hell on earth. And I couldn't wait until I retired. Only thirty-one years to go. Unless I got lucky in the meantime and died.
No, honestly, that was just a joke.
So, in five weeks' time, it was back to the office for me. Back to adminis- tering seven hours a day, five days a week, forty-eight weeks of the year.
Jesus!
Why couldn't I have been born rich?
Sorry, sorry, I know I shouldn't complain. I was lucky to have a job. It was just that I wished that I could have someone to take care of me and Kate. I was just fantasizing. Even if I had stayed with James I would still have had to return to work. It was simply that having to go back to work reminded me of how alone I really was now. How much responsibility I had. It was no longer just me that I was working for. A child was dependent on me.
I knew that James would provide for Kate--oh yes, I knew. Believe me, I knew it. And I had an expensive lawyer to prove it! Not that James was stingy or mean in any way. Credit where it's due, etc., etc. But the days when I could spend my entire month's salary on lipstick, magazines and alcohol had gone. Long gone.