Page 29 of Happiness for Beginners

He rolled onto his back in defeat.

I answered. The room was quiet. Dead quiet. I put the phone to my ear. “Mike?”

“Ellie?”

I hated it when he called me Ellie.

“Can I come over?”

I sat up to hunch over the phone.

“What’s wrong?” I said. “I’m out of town.”

His voice had that tremble to it that he only got when he was overwhelmed. “I just took a swig of a Jack and Coke,” he said.

His favorite drink. “Why are you calling me? Why aren’t you calling your sponsor?”

“I can’t find him. He’s not answering.”

I met Jake’s eyes and gave him a shrug of apology. He looked away. “Hold on,” I said into the phone.

I stood up and straightened out my sleep shirt to compose myself. I could feel Jake’s eyes on me as I walked to the bathroom and closed the door behind me. “How much of a swig?”

“I spit it out,” he said. “I was at a party and I saw a half-empty glass by the sink. Somebody else’s half-gone, melted drink. I just picked it up and poured it in. But then I didn’t swallow. I coughed it back out.”

I put down the toilet lid and sat on it. “That’s great, though, Mike. You did great.”

“I don’t feel great. I feel like hell.”

“Where are you?”

“Walking around. I had to get out.”

I leaned forward on my bare knees and tried to adjust to the change of scene. From the soft bed with Jake in a swirl of something that could only be described asblissto the hard, cold, fluorescent bathroom alone in fifteen seconds. It was quite a shift. I didn’t know what to tell Mike. I hadn’t talked to him in months. “I think that’s part of it,” I said at last. “That’s the process.” I had no idea what the process was.

“Can’t I come over for just a few minutes? I miss you.”

“I told you. I’m out of town. I’m driving to Wyoming.”

He paused. “Why?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’m going hiking.”

“Hiking?” he said. “Have you ever been hiking?”

“No,” I said. “That’s the point. I’m doing something new.”

Mike let out a long sigh. “Helen. I can’t believe how much I love hearing your voice.”

I softened at that. I believed him. “I’m sorry you’re struggling so hard.”

And with that little tender moment, one of the truest ones to happen between the two of us in years, Mike did something he had never done even once the whole time we’d been married. He started to cry.

Once he started, he did not stop. He cried with abandon—with a fervor I had never heard from him. He cried like it was the first time he’d ever done it. Or like it might be the last. The force of it was paralyzing. I couldn’t move under the weight of the deluge. By the time he was all cried out, I’d been stuck in that bathroom for over an hour.

What can I say? Next time your ex-husband finally decides to unleash every emotion he had pent up for six years of marriage, see how efficiently you shut him back down. Why did he pick this exact moment? Did he sense that I had somehow, just, at last, set off to become a new person beyond his grasp? Did some faint radar in his brain tell him I was about to give myself to someone else? The timing was absolutely uncanny. He couldn’t have picked a better moment if he’d bugged the room.

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