My Cowboy Husband Neglected Me Ignored Our Baby for Another Woman's novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Candles
Hattie sees the photo of her husband at another little girl's birthday party, brings her daughter's three candles to the kitchen, and walks out on him in front of the guests. She finds an envelope in her brother's handwriting on her father's porch.
At 8:40 on my daughter's birthday, Lottie Spears posted a photo of my husband, and by nine it had sixty-one likes from people I knew.
The picture showed my husband kneeling beside a birthday cake with her little girl in his arms.
The girl was four. She had two crooked braids and a faded stuffed horse tucked under her arm.
My husband was smiling at her with his whole face, the smile that crinkled the scar in his eyebrow.
Under it she had written that it was the best birthday ever, and thanked him for showing up.
She was the same woman who had brought me a casserole every week when my daughter had croup.
I read it standing at my own kitchen counter.
My daughter's cake sat in front of me with three candles still pushed into the frosting.
She had asked me to save them for her daddy.
She had sat at the table from five o'clock until her eyes drooped, turning her fork over and over.
She was asleep upstairs now with her boots still on, because she had refused to let me take them off.
I scrolled down to the comments.
Lottie had answered one of them: She called him Daddy tonight, first time. I about cried.
I called my husband.
It rang twice.
"Hattie. Hat, baby, I'm so sorry. I'll be home in an hour."
"You said that at six," I said.
"I know. I'm leaving now, I swear."
Behind his voice a child laughed, and a woman called out, "Jesse, where do you want these plates?"
He hung up before I could say anything else.
I didn't wait for the hour.
I put the cake in its box, wrote a note for nobody, and lifted Daisy out of bed.
She woke against my shoulder and said, "Is Daddy home?"
"We're going to get him," I said.
I buckled her into the truck and drove the six miles to the old Haskell place, where Lottie had been renting since spring.
Every window was lit.
Eight cars were parked along the fence, and Jesse's truck was one of them.
Lottie opened the door before I knocked.
She wore a pressed denim shirt and a wide, easy smile, and she took the cake box from my hands before I could say why I had come.
"Hattie, honey, come in, I was just about to text you," she said. "I told him hours ago to go home to you. Birdie wouldn't let him leave."
"I'm sure she wouldn't."
"It's nothing. I swear. He's only been so good to us because Birdie's daddy isn't around. Come have some cake."
I walked past her into the kitchen.
Lottie's sister was at the sink. Two couples from church sat at the table with paper plates.
Jesse stood by the stove with his sleeves rolled up and a dish towel over his shoulder.
Birdie sat on the counter beside him, hugging the horse.
It was a worn palomino with a patched belly, and its left ear had been stitched back on with red thread.
Somebody at the table already had a phone in their hand.
"Hat," Jesse said. His face went gray. "I was just coming."
"I know. You said an hour."
I set Daisy's cake on the counter next to the one with Birdie's name on it.
I took a lighter out of my coat pocket and lit the three candles one at a time.
The kitchen went quiet.
Daisy stood against my leg in her boots and pajamas and looked at her father.
"Daddy, I saved them," she said.
Jesse crossed the floor and went down on one knee.
His hands shook a little when he took her face between them.
"Happy birthday, sweet pea," he said. "I'm sorry. Daddy's so sorry."
"Blow them out with me?"
"Daddy, me too!" Birdie said from the counter. "I want to blow!"
Jesse looked up at her.
He looked at his daughter, and then he looked at the little girl on the counter, and for a long second he didn't say anything at all.
I waited in the quiet before he spoke.
Then he said, "Not tonight, bug. This one's Daisy's."
Birdie's mouth shook, and Lottie put a hand to her chest.
"Hattie, please, she's four," Lottie said softly. "She doesn't understand."
"Neither does mine," I said.
Jesse stood up and put his hand on my arm.
"Come on. I'll drive you both home and sit up with her. Give me ten minutes to get Birdie settled, that's all I need."
"Birdie has a mother," I said.
"Hat, she has nobody else. If I walk out tonight, I'm one more person who left her. I can't do that."
Nobody at the table breathed.
I looked at my husband, and I understood that he had already chosen, and that he thought I would stand there and let him do it politely.
So I stepped out.
"Daisy, take Mama's hand," I said.
I picked up her cake in one arm and carried her on my hip with the other, and I walked out of that kitchen without looking back.
Jesse followed me as far as the porch.
"Hattie, I'll explain everything. Please just don't go home angry."
"I'm not going home," I said.
In the truck I set the cake on the dash, lit the three candles again, and let Daisy blow them out herself.
Then I drove twenty miles in the dark to my father's place, the one house in the county that wasn't Jesse's.
I hadn't opened it in a year.
Its porch light was burning.
On the top step lay a thick envelope with my name on it, in my brother's handwriting.
Dean had been gone five years.
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