The Secret Ingredient for a Happy Marriage Read online

  Bridget grinned. “That’s awesome, Magpie! Congratulations!”

  “Yet another kid I can buy drums for at Christmas,” Abby said. “Nora’s still thanking me for the ones I gave Jake. Aren’t you, Nora?”

  “Almost as good as the bugle you gave him for his birthday,” Nora said. “I’m glad I only have one evil sister.”

  Abby laughed. “Wait till you see what I buy him and Sarah this Christmas. I’m thinking violins.”

  Nora leaned over and drew her sister into a hug. From now on, she’d be there for Magpie. For the doctor’s appointments and the first steps and all the crazy, stressful, joyous days ahead. “I’m so excited for you.”

  Magpie met her gaze. “Are you really? I was so afraid you would be disappointed that I did something so stupid.”

  “You are going to be an amazing mom, Magpie.” Nora hugged her sister tighter. “I mean it. You’re going to be great.”

  “So, tell us more. When are you due? Do you know what you’re having? Do you have names picked out?” Bridget asked.

  “The doctor said around the middle of June. And no and no. I’m still figuring this out.” Magpie’s smile wobbled. She turned to face their mother, who, from announcement until now, hadn’t said anything. “Ma?”

  All four girls swiveled to look at their mother. Nora braced herself for the lecture about premarital sex, the sin of having a child out of wedlock, the whole fire-and-brimstone thing. Ma had mellowed over the years, but Nora didn’t think she’d changed that much.

  “I think”—Ma paused—“what you did was a big mistake.”

  Magpie sighed. “I know, Ma. I didn’t think and—”

  “Bringing a child into the world isn’t a decision that should be made lightly. You have no idea what a responsibility it is.”

  “I don’t. But I’m hoping all of you will help me.” Magpie reached out, and the other O’Bannon girls grabbed her hands and assured her they would be there, especially Nora, who was the closest, both literally and figuratively. Just as she had when Magpie was little, she would protect and help her sister.

  Nora knew how hard parenting could be. She knew the challenges ahead of Magpie, but she also knew the joys. She had seen Magpie with her niece and nephew and had no doubt that her younger sister, with her heart of gold and abundant love, would be just fine once her child arrived. Maybe this would be the thing that would keep the wanderlust-filled Magpie home for more than a few weeks.

  “I’m sorry, Ma. I know you’re disappointed and probably going to tell me that I’m going to hell,” Magpie said, “but I love this baby already and I’m not going to—”

  “But I also think,” Ma interrupted, putting up a hand to stop Magpie’s words, “that it’s time I stopped judging people as harshly as a winter storm. And…it’s about damned time another one of my girls had a grandchild for me to spoil.” She reached across the table, took Magpie’s hand, and smiled at her youngest daughter. “The road you’re choosing is a hard one, Margaret. I’ve raised children alone. But you are strong and smart, and you have all of us here to help you. We’re O’Bannons. That’s what we do.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The closer Nora got to her old house, the deeper the dread sank in her gut. This was what she’d wanted, what she had told Ben she was going to do. Divide their possessions in a calm, equitable, and adult manner and then go their separate ways.

  She pulled into the driveway, parking behind Ben’s sedan. It was empty, which meant he must have gone inside. She sat in her own car for a minute, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, and thought of how she had been here just a month ago.

  There’d been birthday flowers on her doorstep and a trio of pumpkins for Halloween. The kids’ toys had been scattered around the yard, with Sarah’s bike forgotten against the house. And smack dab on the center of the front door had been the bright yellow paper that turned everything upside down.

  Now the lawn had browned as November took a firm hold. The flowers, the pumpkins, the toys, and the bike were all gone, and so was the auction notice. If she ignored the sign at the edge of the drive, she could almost believe the house was back to normal.

  She drew in a deep breath before getting out of the car, carrying a pen and the list of furniture she’d made weeks ago. With any luck, she could do this quickly and without arguing with Ben.

  The first thing she noticed when she opened the front door was music, coming from the toolbox-shaped boom box she had bought Ben three or four Christmases ago. Aerosmith, singing “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” If she closed her eyes, she was back in Tommy O’Brien’s basement, sitting beside Ben, joking about sugar rushes and ginger ale and wishing this guy with an amazing smile would kiss her already.

  Why did that song have to be on right now? Why couldn’t it be some Justin Bieber nonsense song she didn’t even like? She figured whatever radio station was playing it had a sick sense of timing.

  “Ben?”

  “Back here,” he called. “In the kitchen.”

  She took her time walking down the hall, drinking in the pictures of the kids hanging on the wall and the end table with a fine layer of dust and a collection of clay projects the kids had made. To the right was the living room with the dark blue sofa she and Ben had bought together when she was pregnant. They’d sat on it so long that she’d fallen asleep in the store and bought it half out of guilt.

  When she’d left him a month ago, the living room had been a mess of toys, laundry waiting to be folded, and stacks of junk mail on the coffee table. All of that had been whisked away, the space tidied, and now the room shone. She was surprised and grateful he’d cleaned, even if nothing was packed. At least not having to deal with stuff strewn everywhere would make moving easier.

  This weekend, the pictures on the sofa table would be in a box. The pillows she’d embroidered during one crazy nesting urge when she was pregnant stuffed in another, and the jigsaw puzzle she and Ben had spent a rainy weekend assembling, gluing, and then hanging on the wall would be broken in pieces in the trash. All of this would be moved someplace else or sold. Her life, her children’s lives, in boxes and on trucks.

  A profound sense of loss washed over her. As much as she wanted to blame Ben for all of it, the truth was that she was just as much at fault. For burying herself in work, for thinking she could handle it all, and for refusing to ask for help when she was over her head. She’d thought she was taking care of everyone when in fact she’d been trying to hold back a tidal wave with a wall made out of cardboard.

  She turned away and continued down the hall. She rounded the corner into the kitchen, expecting to trip over the lip between the wood floors of the hallway and the old tiles they’d been meaning to tear up. But there was no lip. There was only a smooth transition from wood to slate gray tiles.

  For a second, all she could focus on was the tiles. Twelve by twelve, with swirls of blues and white that wove in and out of each other in a wild, unpredictable pattern. When she’d seen them on the wall in Home Depot, she’d told Ben they looked like the ocean on a stormy day. He’d promised Nora that someday she would walk in her kitchen and that ceramic sea would be beneath her feet.

  Now it was. But for some other woman. Some other family, who would buy this house on Monday morning.

  She raised her gaze, taking in the whitewashed birch cabinets, the pale granite countertops, the deep white farmer’s sink with the oversized sprayer faucet. Every detail one she had chosen, imagined, dreamed of. It was the kitchen she and Ben had planned—done and ready and smelling like new beginnings.

  Ben was standing by the sink, his hands in his pockets and his face unreadable. He had changed out of his work clothes and had on a clean pair of jeans and a freshly pressed pale blue cotton button-down shirt. Why did he have to look so damned good? And why did she still have to be so damned attracted to him?

  “What do you think?” he said.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat and willed the tears in her eyes to s
tay back until she left. “It looks great. Whoever buys the house is going to love it.” She forced a brightness into her voice that she didn’t feel. “Did you do the work?”

  “Yup.”

  In the background, Aerosmith yielded to Elton John, another of her favorite artists, singing “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.” She could hear the sounds of a school bus stopping out front and the roar of kids getting off and going home. “Why did you do all this work? I mean, they’re auctioning the house off in three days. Surely the bank wouldn’t care what the kitchen looked like.”

  “Well, when you go to get a mortgage, they want the house to have more equity, and a finished kitchen and deck and a renovated master bath are all things that increase the value.” He pushed off from the sink and moved closer to her. “Makes it easier for a bank to agree to a loan.”

  “You finished the deck? And the master bath?” Both were projects that they had talked about, but he’d never started. She’d given up asking about them long ago, around the same time she’d given up on the two of them.

  “Let me show you, Nora.” Ben put out his hand, and without thinking, she took it and walked with him across the sea of tile to a pair of French doors so new they still had the sticker in the corner citing all the benefits of triple-pane glass. They looked out over an expansive deck with built-in bench seating and a pergola waiting for some ivy or clematis to weave in and out of the beams.

  “It’s gorgeous.” That lump in her throat only grew, along with a tide of anger. She kept trying to push it down because yelling at Ben wouldn’t accomplish anything. She needed to be strong and calm. Get through this tour of the house that was no longer hers, divide up the furniture, and make arrangements for custody going forward.

  “Wait till you see the bathroom.” He pivoted, taking the back way off the kitchen to the narrow stairs that led directly to the master.

  Nora had loved this staircase, a throwback to the days of maids and butlers. Halfway up the stairs was a little nook, maybe for resting a heavy tray or an extra load of linens; she never really knew. The staircase was barely wide enough for her, and Ben had to turn a little sideways to navigate the cramped space.

  Five steps from the top, she stopped and dropped his hand. She didn’t want to round that corner and see the room she used to share with her husband. She didn’t want to peek at the bathroom that used to hold his shaving cream and her makeup, and hundreds of mornings where they wove in and out of each other as they got ready, in a practiced dance only married people mastered.

  “Ben, forget it. Let’s just go back downstairs and go over the inventory list.”

  “Not until you see this, Nora.” He reached for her hand again, but she pulled it back.

  “What’s the point? All it does is make this worse. I’m watching everything I dreamed about disappear like it was a mirage, and the closer I get, the less real it is. I don’t want to know what some other woman’s bathroom is going to look like. I don’t want to picture her rolling out dough on granite countertops that I fell in love with in the store.”

  “Then don’t.” He turned away and continued up the stairs. Then he opened the door and stepped into their master bedroom.

  She could go back downstairs or follow him. Leaving wouldn’t accomplish anything. She was still carrying the damned list, with not a single check mark on it. Was he purposely trying to torture her? Drag it out until she cried uncle or something? The Ben she knew had never been malicious, but they said divorce brought out the worst in people.

  The master bedroom was just as neat and tidy as the rest of the house. The bed was made, the half dozen decorative pillows she’d loved and Ben had hated stacked in a descending triangle down the front of the white comforter. The armchair that had been perpetually full of Ben’s dirty laundry was ready for someone to sit in and pick up the novel sitting on the small cherry occasion table beside it. Her slippers were sitting beside his, two by two, as if they could step into them and back into their marriage.

  The door to the bathroom was open, and she could see the dark cherry cabinets she’d picked out, the cream tile with the green diamonds joining the corners, the twin sinks with matching oval mirrors and the chrome sconces casting a soft light onto the countertop. The space where the floor met the cabinets glowed. Just like the kitchen, every single element was one she had remarked on, some in passing. Had Ben paid that close of attention? Or was this all some weird coincidence?

  “You even put in the lighting beneath the cabinets,” she said.

  “So you won’t trip at night if you have to get up.”

  Nora closed her eyes and shook her head. The tears, the anger, the frustration bubbled inside her, rising and boiling like a volcano. She didn’t want to imagine herself washing her hands at that sink or slipping into her slippers because the tile floor was cold in the winter. “Why are you showing me this, Ben? I don’t care. I won’t ever be walking into that bathroom again.”

  “Indulge me for one more minute, Nora. Just one.”

  “No, Ben. This whole thing is a waste of time. Just check what furniture you want, and I’ll get out of here.” She tried to thrust the list at him, but he ignored it. “If you want all of our stuff, I don’t care anymore. I just want to leave.”

  “One more minute. Please. Then we can talk about armchairs or sofa tables or whatever you want.”

  It was the please that got her, the note of vulnerability in his voice. He took her hand again and gently tugged her into the room and then around the corner.

  The bedroom was a funky shape, sort of a rectangle with an extra square-shaped nook beside the closet. They’d talked about a hundred different ideas for that space. Expanding the closet or adding a vanity table, but the one that Nora had lobbied for over and over was a door and a balcony, with a tiny porch where she and Ben could sit outside at the end of the day and watch the sun set over the trees. Ben had argued about how much work it would be, talking about structural needs and building permits, but all she’d seen was that Romeo and Juliet balcony she’d always wanted when she was a little girl.

  And there, as if merely remembering it brought it to life, was a glass door that led to a tiny porch with a railed balcony that looked out over the trees. A small café table sat in the center, flanked by two chairs. A familiar white box sat on the table.

  She glanced at him, confused, half ready to run, half beginning to hope again. “Ben…what is all this?”

  “What you asked me to do, Nora.” He gave her a smile and led her onto the balcony with him.

  Almost every day in November had been cold, another New England winter trying to get an early foothold with temps dipping into the thirties and forties. Today had been warm, with the sun bright and happy, and the pleasant temperature had held all afternoon. It was exactly the kind of day she had envisioned when she’d talked about adding the balcony. The view was just as she’d pictured it, too, high above the speckled autumnal trees, spanning the gray and brown checkerboard of rooftops, and in the far, far distance, the city of Boston, outlined in hazy gray.

  “Ben, what is this?” she asked again.

  He didn’t reply. Instead, he reached over and lifted the lid of the box. The sides parted, as they were designed to do, revealing the cake inside. Ma had ordered those boxes from a specialty company because they reduced the hassle of lifting the cake out and smearing the frosting. Nora had watched Bridget put this very cake into that box just a few hours ago.

  “You’re the one who ordered the torta? Why?”

  “Because it was the cake we had at our rehearsal dinner,” he said, as if it was a matter-of-fact thing to re-create that moment, not something weird when they were meeting to discuss the division of their assets. “There were little fake diamond rings attached to the ribbons, if I remember right.”

  “I found some that looked like my ring and used them for a fun little gift for whoever got that slice.” She could hear the laughter of her sisters, the chatter of her bridesmaids, the hap
py hum of conversation at the party. She remembered catching Ben’s eye across the room when she was cutting the cake and seeing a deep, sweet love in those brown eyes.

  This time she kept her gaze on the cake because she was afraid she’d see indifference if she looked into Ben’s eyes. She was daring to hope, and that, Nora already knew, was a foolish, dangerous thing to do. “But this isn’t a rehearsal dinner, and I don’t need this trip down memory lane, especially when we’re getting—”

  He put a finger over her lips. Her heart stuttered. “Please pull the string, Nora.”

  A long gold ribbon spiraled out of the center of the cake. She hadn’t put it there, and she didn’t remember Bridget doing so. Ben must have added it himself after he picked up the cake, though she couldn’t fathom a single reason. She realized now why he’d asked her to go get Jake from school and drop the kids at Ma’s—it had probably given him just enough time to stop by the bakery before he came here and set up this elaborate tableau. The urge to flee, to resist this desire to believe in him one more time, rose inside her again.

  “Don’t you want to know what’s attached to it?” Ben asked, as if he’d read her mind and knew she was about to bolt.

  Okay, so a part of her did want to know. If only to get to the bottom of what he was doing and why he had gone to so much trouble. Then again, this was Ben, who did everything in a big way. Even, it seemed, their divorce.

  Nora tugged the ribbon. It slid easily out of the cake, landing with a soft clang on the metal table. She stared at the object for a second, confused. “That’s a house key.”

  “Yes, it is.” Ben wiped the almond cream off the key and then handed it to her. “In fact, it’s our house key.”

  “I don’t understand.” She turned the key over in her palm. “We don’t own this house, Ben. Why…what…?”

  “We do own this house. Today, tomorrow, and for the next thirty years.”

  Her mind couldn’t wrap around his words. She’d talked to the bank and the lawyer. She had seen the sign on the front lawn. “What about the auction? They’re going to be here in three days, Ben.”