My Husband Played Stranger, So I Took Off the Ring novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Not Boyfriend, Brother
At orientation week Roxana finds her husband making a bed, and he introduces himself to her as a stranger, so she takes off her ring. Ends on 'I'm getting divorced.'
On the first morning of freshman orientation, I found my husband on his knees in a dorm room, tucking a sheet under a mattress.
I hadn't seen him in person for two years.
I stood in the doorway of Room 214 with a laundry basket on my hip and my cousin Bridie's lamp under my arm.
Bridie was my reason for being in that hallway.
The university was my reason for being in that building at all, because at twenty-two I was finally a freshman.
I had worked two jobs for three years to get here.
I had not told my husband.
He didn't know I'd been accepted, and he didn't know I would be on this campus.
He smoothed the corner of the sheet flat with the side of his hand, the way he always did, and he didn't see me.
A girl with red-gold curls and a gap in her front teeth was bouncing on the other bed.
"Bridie's cousin!" she shouted when she saw me. "I'm Maisie. I'm the roommate. Come in, come in, don't mind my boyfriend, he's almost done."
She hopped over to him and looped her arm through his.
"Hi, this is my boyfriend," she said to me. "He took the week off work to help me settle in."
I looked at the back of his head.
It was dark blond, and a little too long at the neck.
I knew the scar through his left eyebrow before he turned around.
I knew the gray t-shirt, because I had bought it.
The night before, my phone had buzzed on my kitchen counter.
[Business trip. Won't be home this week either.]
I had read it standing next to a sink full of diner aprons.
I had smiled at the screen, and I had not answered, because I hadn't answered any of them in a long time.
Two years ago, in the worst fight of our marriage, I had told him not to come home.
He had taken me at my word.
He turned around now with a pillowcase in his hand, and he saw me.
All the color went out of his face.
It lasted about one second.
Then he put the pillowcase down, and his face went smooth and polite.
He held out his hand.
"Hi. Nate," he said. "Not boyfriend. Brother."
Maisie smacked his arm. "I was messing with her! Everyone gets nervous when they see a tall guy in a dorm, I'm just saving them the trouble."
I stared at his hand.
He was good.
He was so good that I almost believed him, and I had been married to him for three years.
His voice was the voice he used on strangers, warm and a little bored.
His eyes didn't ask me for anything.
I hadn't known he had a sister.
In three years he had never said the word.
I put the lamp down on the desk, and I took his hand, and I shook it once.
"Roxana," I said. "Bridie's cousin."
His thumb moved over my knuckles.
It was so small that Maisie couldn't have seen it.
I knew that thumb, and for one second I wanted to hold on.
I let go.
Maisie leaned toward me and looked at my left hand.
Her eyes lit up at the plain gold ring.
"Oh, you're so pretty," she said. "But you're married already? What a shame. I was going to set you up with someone."
"Maisie," Nate said, in a tone I recognized from a hundred of our mornings.
"What? I'm sorry, it's a compliment."
Bridie came through the door behind me with a box of books and stopped.
She looked at me, and then at Nate, and she had no idea who he was.
Nobody in my family did.
I had wanted to wait until he could say my name to his father.
I looked at the ring.
I had worn it for three years.
I had never once taken it off, not in the shower, not at the diner, not on the nights I cried into a pillow that still smelled like him.
I looked at his left hand, still stretched halfway out in the air between us.
It was bare.
It had been bare for two years, and I hadn't let myself count.
So I slid the ring over my knuckle and pulled it off.
It left a pale band on my finger, and the skin there felt strangely cold.
I put the ring down on Maisie's desk, next to Bridie's lamp.
"It's not a shame," I said. "I'm getting divorced."
Nobody moved.
Nate's hand dropped slowly to his side.
Maisie's mouth fell open.
"Wait," she said. "Married? Who's married?"
She looked at her brother.
And then, very slowly, she looked at the ring.
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