Tear You Apart Read online

  The food comes on pretty plates with fancy garnish. As always with him, my appetite is not for food, but he cuts into his steak and offers me a piece, which I take from his fork as his foot rubs my calf under the table. I share my lamb and the slab of potatoes that have been ground and seasoned and pressed into a block and sliced, then fried. Everything is delicious, but none of it as lovely as the flavor of his laughter.

  Coffee, dessert. We each order and share tastes. And finally, when I can’t put it off anymore, I say, “I have to tell you something.”

  Two things happened when I was sixteen.

  First, Andrea’s parents split up. Her mom moved out, leaving behind four kids and an angry, embittered husband who had no idea how to run a house. Nobody had clean laundry or packed lunches or got to where they needed to be on time, and they spent hours alone in their big, increasingly filthy house while their father worked. And why? Because Andrea’s mom had developed what her father referred to as “a little love affair with the slots.”

  In private, Andrea told me that it would’ve been better if her mother had run off with another guy. Maybe her dad could at least get over that. What he couldn’t forget or forgive was the thousands of dollars her mom had lost in the casinos on all the trips she’d taken with girlfriends to Atlantic City, or the money she’d spent in secret on shoes and clothes and spa treatments, running up their credit card bills to insufferable, unpayable amounts. Andrea’s mom had left the family destitute with her addiction, and though she’d moved into a one-bedroom mobile home and had taken two jobs in order to support herself, she didn’t stop the trips to Atlantic City and Vegas. She couldn’t quit. Her addiction tore their family apart. To this day, Andrea had very little to do with her mom—not because she was angry or hated her, but because the woman had failed her when Andrea needed her, too many times. She’d ruined her daughter’s trust.

  The other thing was that Becky Lazar’s mother killed herself. Becky sat in front of me in English lit, and we’d gone to school together since kindergarten. That sophomore year we had the same lunch period and had migrated to the same table because she was friends with a couple kids who were friends with a few of mine. We weren’t close, didn’t hang out after school or anything, but we’d become friendly. I liked her. She was smart, with a dry sense of humor, and once she’d lent me lunch money when I’d forgotten to bring mine.

  I’d met her mom only once, a few months before, after a performance of the school musical. Becky’d had the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. She had an amazing voice. I’d gone to the show with Andrea not because either of us were into musical theater, but because she had a huge crush on the guy playing Henry Higgins. Also, it was an official school activity, so Andrea’s dad, who’d gotten a little out of control with rules, wouldn’t restrict her from it. We giggled our way through the entire show, when Andrea wasn’t sighing with the heartache of crushing on a boy who’d never give her the time of day. And after, when the cast members gathered in the lobby to sign autographs and receive flowers and generally bask in their tiny, high school level of fame, Becky waved us over to meet her parents.

  Her dad was tall, with a permanent frown and a crease between his eyebrows. Her mom was petite, and out-of-fashion in a floral print dress, and hairstyle that looked like it hadn’t been changed since she herself was in high school. She didn’t say much, just smiled and nodded at us. But she did smile, and that was all I could think about when Kathy Bomberger told me what she’d done.

  “Where’s Becky?” I’d asked, sliding my tray onto the table. “She sick today?”

  Kathy looked surprised. “No. Didn’t you hear?”

  Becky’s mother had run a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of the family station wagon into the cracked-open driver’s side window, and left the car running in the closed garage. Becky’s younger brother, a fifth grader, had been the one to find her. She’d done it in the middle of the week, on a school night, and all I could think about was that smile. She’d seemed happy enough, that one time I met her, but obviously she hadn’t been.

  That was when I really learned that smiles can hide a lot of secrets.

  I learned a lot of things that sophomore year that followed me into adulthood. The burgeoning power of sexuality, the importance of personal responsibility, how simple it is to break a heart. And also, how easily a mother can destroy her children.

  “When I had my children,” I tell Will, after the rest of this story is finished and he’s listened quietly, his green-gray eyes never leaving mine, “I vowed that I would never, ever fuck them up the way Andrea’s mom did. Or Becky’s. I’m not saying I believe in sacrificing everything for your kids or anything like that. It’s important for them to know their parents are human beings. But I did vow I would be there when they needed me. That I would never, ever let my selfishness make a mess of them.”

  I draw in a breath. Then another. I want to kiss him, but there’s a table between us.

  “My daughters are both getting married. A double wedding, something I never thought I’d be doing. They’re twins, but I always tried to make them their own people. But that’s what they want, so that’s what they’re doing. They need me, and their dad, to be there for them. They deserve that. They deserve—” My voice cracks and breaks finally, and I have to look away from him. “They deserve a mother who hasn’t dropped her basket. So if I have to white-knuckle my way through this, to make sure my kids are taken care of...if I have to...keep it all together for just a little longer... Well. Then that’s what I’ll have to do.”

  “I understand.”

  “A year,” I tell him. “I have to make it through this next year.”

  I look at him then, not sure what I expect to see. Not tears, of course. Disappointment, maybe? Will he ask me to reconsider, to stay? Will he say we can work it all out?

  Will he tell me that he’ll wait?

  “You should find a real girl,” I tell him, not for the first time.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” Will puts a lilt into the words, making them light so I can laugh and shake my head.

  “Oh, Will.”

  He leans back in his chair. “I understand, Elisabeth. I do. You have to be there for your kids, and this isn’t right, anyway. We both know it.”

  I know it. I don’t care. “Yes. Of course.”

  So formal. Now we’re done. So this is the end, and all the pretty pieces of me are dying inside.

  I let him pay the check.

  Outside, the sun’s gone down but the late summer heat weighs us. We walk along the quaint street, looking in the windows of antique shops filled with junk. The sidewalk’s made of cobblestones that threaten to snag the heels of my shoes, and I use it as an excuse to hold his hand. And then we’re at the parking garage and there are no more excuses to keep this night from ending.

  In the backseat of his car, we sit inches apart. The heat is unbearable, a sauna. The light, orangey-white, creeps in and makes it all too bright when I would rather have shadows.

  I don’t know who moves first, just that his mouth is on mine and it’s still so sweet. So fucking good I can’t stand it, and I open for him. My mouth, my arms, my legs.

  My heart.

  We’ve done more than this, but somehow this furtive, somewhat frantic kissing is more erotic than anything we’ve ever done. I am greedy for it, and him, and I want to imprint every second, every breath, into my memory forever. Because I am leaving him. Ending this.

  “We have to stop,” I tell him.

  Will’s mouth is still on mine. “I know.”

  We kiss again.

  Again.

  How can I stop this? How can it end? When everything I am and have become is wrapped up in him, when I breathe from one second to the next because I know each breath brings me closer to the time when we’ll be together?

  He i