Page 30 of Between the Shady Groves
“I gave you rocks to haul around?”
“You were giving me…things that made you feel like you loved me, and you didn’t care how it made me feel. Or you expected me to feel a certain way and didn’t bother to take time to check and see if what you did actually made me feel the way you thought it would.”
She got too many feelings in there again, and she lost him. She could see it in his eyes.
“So… You just made me supper. I assume you did that because you love me. I am sitting out in my truck in front of your house to make sure that no one breaks in. Are you not assuming that I’m doing that because I love you?”
“Yes. I’m assuming that you love me. But if I had dumped a bunch of rocks on your plate and set it in front of you, you wouldn’t have appreciated it, right?”
“Yeah,” he said slowly, nodding once, but obviously the light was not dawning.
“All right. But if I put actual food that you like on your plate, you’re going to see that as a good thing from me, right?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. So I need you to sit with me, to take off work, to show me that I’m more important than your job and your business when I’m sad, and I want my husband to put his arm around me and tell me that it’s going to be okay. That’s how I feel loved, not when you sit in front of my store protecting me from something that’s not there.”
“We already went through this. It’s when you let your guard down?—”
“I know. But I don’t see a threat, so for you to do that, you’re actually making yourself feel good. You’re not really making me feel good.”
Fifteen
His mouth opened, but she could see him rolling it around in his head. Could see him realizing that what he was doing was actually gratifying himself, and yes, he was showing love, but he was showing it in a way that made himself feel good.
“So, I think I get it. I’m saying ‘I love you,’ and you’re hearing…nothing?” he said, sounding uncertain and then puttering off at the end. Like he wasn’t sure.
“Yeah. I can see that you’re doing it because you love me, but it doesn’t mean as much to me as if you would have come home from my mother’s funeral and said, ‘I’ve taken a two-week vacation, would you like to go somewhere, or would you like to just sit here on the couch together?’”
“You really wanted me around for two weeks after your mother died? I felt like you got irritated if I spent more than five minutes in your presence.”
“I was irritated. Sad. Just little things brought memories back, making me cry. I wasn’t crying because of you. I was crying because I felt okay and comfortable in front of you.”
“I wondered about that, because you couldn’t shed a tear at the funeral. It was weird that you didn’t cry at all, and then we got homeand were alone together and you couldn’t stop. It kinda made me feel like it was my fault that you were crying.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel like anything was your fault.”
She did understand how he might have gotten confused. And maybe if she had told him why she was crying, that would have alleviated some of his confusion.
“If you had known that I wanted you to stay, I’m pretty sure you would have stayed. But what I really wanted was for you to know that I wanted you to stay without me telling you that I wanted you to stay.”
“That is messed up,” he said, and despite the seriousness, to her anyway, of the subject matter, she laughed.
“It’s not that hard. I feel like it says that you care about me if you know what I want without me having to tell you.”
He took a deep breath then and blew it out.
She waited for a bit, and then she said, “When you see a problem at work, the problem doesn’t come up to you and say, ‘hey, this is what the problem is, and this is what you need to do to solve it.’ No, you have to think about that problem, you have to figure it out, you have to try something and maybe that doesn’t work, so then you try something else, and then you finally figure out a solution, and you’re pretty pleased and proud of yourself. It was fun for you, you were engaged, you cared about it, you showed that it was important to you by sitting there and figuring it out until it was solved.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly, cautiously, maybe because he heard the anger in her voice. She tried to modulate it.
“But when you see me, you see me crying, you’re like ‘oh, I gotta get away from that, I gotta go to work and get away,’ and you don’t think ‘hey, I need to figure out what’s wrong. I need to figure out what I need to do.’ You don’t spend one extra second thinking about anything that you could do for me. You just go bury your head in things you enjoy and expect me to take care of myself.”
“Well, you are an adult,” he started.
“And you’re my husband. What’s the point in having a husband if I don’t have a partner? Someone who cares about me? Someone who sees a problem, and instead of trying to figure out what he can do to alleviatethe situation, he just flees. Wouldn’t I be better off here in Raspberry Ridge, opening my mother’s bakery and taking care of myself, since I’m an adult?”
There. That was really what she wanted to say. There was no point in her staying married, because he didn’t care. That’s what she saw.
