Page 3 of August
“Um… I think you might be my next-door neighbor,” Myra replied.
CHAPTER 2
“Need any help?” Gwen asked her.
“No, we’re okay. They’re just being annoying,” Elisa replied of her own children. “I thought we were done with the terrible twos. How did no one tell me there are also annoying eighteens?”
Gwen laughed and reached for her purse that she’d left on the table by the door.
“I’m the cool aunt. Want me to talk some sense into them?”
“No, they need to talk some sense into themselves. I’m trying the whole thing where I let them build their own character and act like adults, despite the fact that I want them to stop being little assholes.”
Gwen smiled at her and kissed her cheek.
“I’ll see you later, then?”
“Yeah. And thanks for lunch,” Elisa replied.
She saw her ex-sister-in-law out of the house, closed the door behind her, and sighed. She was lucky that she still had Gwen after the divorce. She’d lost most of her other friends when she and her now ex-husband had separated. They had mostly beenhisfriends anyway, but it had still hurt, and she had lost the rest of them when she had moved her and the kids to New Orleans. The kids had been seventeen at the start of the divorce process, and she had gotten full custody. Elisa hadn’t wanted to move them toward the end of their senior year, so she had stayed in the guest house behind her now-old home and let them graduate with their friends while she worked to prepare for their future. She had bought the house in New Orleans and had made near-daily trips for months to get things set up but also to just get some time away.
Yes, her ex-husband was a very successful doctor with his own practice, and he worked at least ten hours a day, if notlonger, so he wasn’t around the house, but it still felt strange to Elisa to be in the old home she had shared with him for nearly twenty years without being his wife anymore. The guest house was a full apartment, so she hadn’t needed to go in the main house often, but since her kids lived there, she’d found herself cooking dinner for the three of them, and sometimes, even all four of them as if nothing had changed and she were still married to their father. He had gotten a little used to it as well, but on top of him clearly liking having his wife back, at least in some ways, he’d decided to start dating as well. Apparently unable to wait just the couple of months before the kids were out of high school and his ex-wife was ostensibly out of his life forever since the kids were eighteen, he’d started going on dates and making it very clear where he was going each night.
“I’m picking up Samantha for our date,” he’d say after grabbing his keys by the door.
He had always made sure to emphasize the worddate, too, and he had always dressed up for those dates. He would wear a suit and one of his nicer ties with his even nicer shoes. Elisa couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a date night at all, but when they had actually made a night of it the once a year it had occurred, he’d been in jeans and a sweater, claiming he had to dress up all day every day and needed a casual night out. She’d understood and hadn’t cared, but the difference in him since they had separated had been easy to spot. She had been a little jealous, of course, but not because he’d been going on dates with beautiful women or that he’d even brought a couple of them over to the house, noting that the kids were old enough to understand that their parents were moving on.
She’d disagreed on that point. They might be eighteen, but she wasn’t sure that there was an age where any kid would be okay with their father bringing other women home while their mother was making breakfast for them. She wasn’t jealous of the other women. She knew how her husband was in the bedroom, and there wasn’t much for her to be jealous of.She supposed that might have been more because of her than him, though, and maybe these other women would enjoy his disinterest in any kind of foreplay, his insistence that he needed the stress release of jerking off in the shower every morning and grunting her out of her slumber as he did, and the five or so minutes the sex actually lasted.
Interestingly enough, he’dnotbeen okay with her purchasing a vibrator to help her own body relieve some tension. The five minutes it took him to finish never got Elisa to her own orgasm. She wasn’t sure she had ever had one with him in the whole two decades of their relationship, not even the first few times when things had been new and were supposed to be exciting. Of course, that newness had evaporated the moment the stick had turned blue, and she’d discovered she was pregnant.
Elisa wasn’t jealous of the women for being with him. She was jealous that he was able to start over, which had beenherdream all along. She’d been the one to suggest the separation and push for it to be legal because she had planned to start dating as well. She’d been the one to then send him the divorce papers because she hadn’t been able to wait anymore. She’d needed to be done and out of her marriage, out of that house, and somewhere new. At thirty-eight, she’d been finally ready to really start her life, but then, she’d thought of the kids and their school and how she would have to wait because no matter how unhappy she had been, Elisa would always put her children first.
“Mom, I don’t understand. Why can’t I get the bigger mini fridgeandthe bigger TV for my dorm?” Archie asked her when she walked back into the kitchen.
“Because we’ve already bought you a mini fridge, and you’re taking the TV from your room. It’s big enough for a tiny dorm room, Arch,” she replied, using one of her son’s many nicknames.
“Adele’s TV is bigger,” he argued, pointing at his twin sister.
“I bought it myself. I had a job, and I used some of mymoney to buy things I wanted for my room,” Adele stated.
Ever the older sibling, Adele then picked her plate up and carried it to the kitchen sink. Elisa wasn’t sure if it was because Adele was the older twin or because girls matured faster than boys, but she’d always been the more responsible of her children.
“I had soccer,” Archie retorted.
“I had tennisandtwo academic clubs. Plus, I was the salutatorian,” Adele said.
“Just couldn’t get that point-two you needed to be the valedictorian, could you?” he teased.
“I’m sorry; weren’t you ranked, like, in the hundreds?” Adele argued further. “And your TV is fine. Any bigger, and you wouldn’t have room for it.”
“I want to play video games on it. How can I be on my bed and play on a TV that’s so small?”
“You could consider studying,” Adele suggested.
Elisa laughed at the impossibility of that as she sat down in her chair.
“Yeah, right,” he replied. “Mom, come on.”
