When I Cut Off the Payments, My Mama's Boy Husband's Family Panicked novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Night Before

I read it four times.

Then I typed, "I'll be there."

I sat up in the dark next to Evie for a while with the phone in my lap.

Six o'clock tomorrow.

A country club ballroom full of Burgesses in linen.

And me, walking in with a three-inch binder.

I went downstairs.

My mother was still at the kitchen table with her tea, like she'd known.

"Go," she said, before I'd opened my mouth.

"I didn't say anything."

"You put your shoes on, Julie. Go. I've got her."

Lyle was on his porch steps again when my headlights came up the gravel.

He had two bowls of ice cream, one in each hand.

"She texted you," he said.

"How did you know?"

"She asked me for your number at nine and told me not to ask why." He handed me a bowl. "I'm a builder. Not an idiot."

"What kind is this?"

"Butter pecan."

"That's an old man's ice cream."

"I'm thirty-six," he said, and sat down on the step. "I've earned it."

I sat down next to him.

It was a warm night, and the crickets were going in the fields.

The big white house at the front of the drive had every light on.

"My mother's been on the phone with your mother-in-law's church for two hours," Lyle said.

"Ex. Almost."

"Almost-ex mother-in-law's church."

"What's she saying?"

"Mostly, 'Bless her heart.' Which in my mother's mouth is a declaration of war."

I laughed into my ice cream.

Then I didn't laugh, and he noticed, because he always did.

"Say it," he said.

"I'm scared."

He waited.

"Not of Ron. I'm scared of tomorrow. Of what I'm going to look like."

"What are you going to look like?"

"Like the woman who walked into a twenty-seven-year-old's rehearsal dinner with a binder." I put the spoon in the bowl. "Evie's going to grow up and somebody's going to tell her about it. At a party. At school. Your mom's the one who blew up that wedding."

"Is that what you think you're doing?"

"I think that's what it'll look like."

He set his bowl on the step.

"Can I tell you something about my divorce?"

"You told me. Four years. She wanted somebody else."

"I told you the end." He rubbed his thumb along his beard. "I didn't tell you how I found out."

I turned to look at him.

"Her sister's Fourth of July party. Forty people. She stood up after the fireworks and told everybody she was leaving me. Then she told me. In that order."

"Lyle."

"Half the people there already knew. Her whole family knew. For months. Nobody said a word to me. They said they didn't want to cause a scene."

He looked at the lit windows of the big house.

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