Five Years of Marriage to Mr. Bradford novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fifth Anniversary
At their anniversary dinner Leonard takes Imogen's call and asks Leah to accept his escorting her; Leah says yes without a fight, hears him say Imogen's name in his sleep, and signs the papers she printed a year ago.
At our fifth anniversary dinner, my husband's phone lit up with Imogen's name, and he took it in front of the whole restaurant.
The waiter had just set down the champagne.
Leonard looked at the screen, then at me.
"I have to take this."
"Of course," I said.
He stood and walked past the window tables toward the corridor by the coat check.
I watched him go.
Leonard Bradford was thirty-six and tall, and he had never been late for anything.
He had booked this table in June.
He had remembered the candles and the lemon tart and the date.
The couple beside us had been toasting their own anniversary until the phone rang.
Now the woman was looking at her husband, and he was looking at his bread.
Everyone in that room knew what a husband's face looks like when he takes a call from the other woman.
I got up and went to the coat check for my scarf, which gave me a reason to stand ten feet from him.
He had turned to the wall, one hand pressed to his forehead.
"No, I'll be there," he said. "Saturday, I said I'd be there, and I will."
A voice came through the speaker, low and a little rough.
"Len, are you sure she won't mind?"
"She won't mind. Don't worry about her."
Don't worry about her.
I found my scarf and walked back to the table and sat down with my hands in my lap.
When he returned, he put the phone face down beside his plate.
"That was Imogen."
"I know," I said. "I saw the screen."
He picked up his fork and put it down again.
"Her knee needs another operation. It's on Saturday, in Philadelphia. She has no one to go with her."
"That's hard for her," I said.
"I'd like to go. I'd stay with her through the recovery. And there's the benefit on Thursday, she'll need someone to take her arm. She can't manage the stairs alone."
I waited for the rest.
He took a breath.
"I need you to be understanding, Leah. I know how it looks."
For five years, this was where I argued.
I had argued about the Christmas gifts she sent, the birthday dinners he took her to, and the weekend she called him from Vermont and he drove up to get her.
I used to say, "She is your past, and I am your wife."
He used to say, "You're being unfair," and he was always very patient about it.
I looked at the candle between us.
"Of course," I said. "You should go with her."
Leonard stared at me.
"That's it?"
"What else is there?"
"You're not upset."
"You said she has no one. I understand."
His mouth opened and closed.
I cut my lemon tart into four equal pieces and ate one.
It was very good.
He didn't touch his.
In the cab home he held my hand, and it was the first time in months he had held it without being asked.
I let him.
Nothing in my face changed.
That was the part he couldn't stand.
We never took his car, and he never drove after dark.
In five years I had not once seen him behind the wheel at night.
A car service took him to every dinner, and he paid for it without comment.
He said he had a bad eye for headlights.
I had stopped asking.
There was another thing I had stopped asking about.
Every year, on the third of October, he flew somewhere for work, and every year I went to Worcester alone and stood in the cold with my brother's friends and a hundred candles.
This year, the third was the Saturday of Imogen's surgery.
So this year he would not even need a reason.
In bed, I lay on my side and counted the streetlight shadows on the ceiling.
Leonard slept on his back with one arm over his eyes.
At two in the morning, he spoke.
"Imogen."
I didn't move.
"Imogen, I'm sorry."
His voice broke on the last word.
"Please don't."
Then he turned over and slept on, and his hand with the old burn mark on the thumb lay between us on the sheet.
I looked at it for a long time.
At six the sun came up through the blinds, and my phone buzzed once on the nightstand.
I took it into the bathroom and locked the door.
The email said that my visa for the Irish-language program in Galway had been approved.
I had studied for fourteen months at night, with my headphones in and my husband asleep.
My teacher, Fiona, had told me over video, "Go. He won't notice you're gone until the kettle's cold."
My brother Danny had saved for a summer in Galway when he was twenty-two.
He never got on the plane.
I was thirty, and I was going in his place.
I opened the drawer under the sink, where I had kept the folder for a year, and took out the divorce papers I had printed back in the spring.
I had never signed them.
I signed them now, on the lid of the toilet, in blue ink.
So I stepped out.
My flight left Boston at 10:40 on the night of the third, and my husband would be in Philadelphia, holding another woman's hand.
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