On Halloween, My Husband Kissed His Mistress, and Our Daughter Chose Her Over Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Mine

At her best friend's kitchen island Joanna reads the parents' chat and Connor's text, writes a list of what is hers, and meets Roz's quiet brother and his carriage house, until Pippa texts that her father says she is sick.

Roz opened her front door at ten o'clock in a bathrobe.

She had a green clay mask on her face and a rolling pin in her fist.

"If this is a Halloween prank, I'm hitting first," she said.

"Connor changed the locks," I said.

Roz looked at my face, and at the empty driveway behind me.

She put the rolling pin down on the hall table.

"Get in here."

She didn't ask me a question until I was sitting at her kitchen island.

I had a mug of tea in front of me that I couldn't taste.

Then she asked all of them.

I told her all of it, and she only interrupted me once.

That was at Pippa's hand closing around Brynn's, and Roz stopped chewing her cracker.

Then she swore for a long time.

"I'm going to kill him," she said. "I'll do it with a florist's knife, in the cooler."

"Roz," I said.

"Then I'll deliver him to his mother in a nice arrangement."

"Fine. After the divorce."

My phone buzzed on the island.

It was the Dunmore Elementary parents' group chat, forty-one new messages.

Someone had posted the video from the stage, and it already had a caption.

Cutest Salem family EVER! 😍 Pippa's face!!

Under it, another parent had written: Wait, isn't Joanna the one who ...? followed by three of the little wide-eyed faces.

Nobody had finished that sentence yet.

Roz took the phone out of my hand, read it, and set it face down.

"You are not reading the comments tonight."

"They're going to read me tomorrow," I said.

"Then they can read a woman who slept."

I didn't sleep.

I lay on the futon in Roz's sewing room, among her piles of fabric.

At midnight my phone lit up.

Connor: You embarrassed Pippa tonight. Come home in the morning and apologize to her.

Connor: Thank Brynn for stepping in. We'll all move past this.

He had written it to me as though I were the one who had done something.

I read it three times.

Then I got up, found a legal pad on Roz's desk, and wrote across the top: MINE.

It was the only thing I could think to do that wasn't crying.

Under it I wrote the sewing machine, my grandmother's cedar chest and my mother's ring.

Then my patterns, the garment bag, my car title and Pippa's baby book.

I stopped at that one for a long time.

Then I wrote my daughter's name at the very bottom and underlined it.

I did not write: thank Brynn.

At six, Roz's doorbell rang, and a man's voice outside said, "It's me. I know it's early."

Roz opened the door in her bathrobe, mask washed off, hair standing straight up.

"Abe. It's six in the morning. You could have texted."

"You said the sink was leaking." He was already carrying a toolbox into her kitchen.

He was a big man in a canvas jacket, with a tired, careful face.

There was sawdust in his dark hair, which needed cutting.

He set two paper cups of coffee on the island, one for each of us.

He didn't say a word about me sitting there in yesterday's jeans.

"This is my brother Abraham," Roz said. "He fixes things and doesn't talk. Abe, this is Joanna."

"Hi," Abraham said.

"Hi," I said.

That was the whole conversation for about five minutes while he lay on his back under her sink.

Roz leaned on the counter beside me and said, very low, "He has a carriage house behind his workshop."

"Nobody lives in it," she said. "It has a bed, a woodstove and a door that locks."

"I can't take your brother's house."

"It's not mine, it's his." She put her chin on her fist.

"And he'd never bring it up himself," she said. "He'd die first."

From under the sink, Abraham said, "It's eleven hundred a month."

Roz and I both stared at the cabinet.

"I'd pay it," I said.

"First of the month," Abraham said.

He slid out and wiped his hands on a rag. "I'll leave the key on the porch rail."

He picked up his coffee, nodded once to me, and walked out the back door.

"See?" Roz whispered. "He talked."

I laughed for the first time since the gym, and it hurt my ribs.

Then my phone buzzed again, and my laugh stopped.

It was a text from Pippa's number, from the phone Connor had given her for emergencies.

Three lines.

Dad says you're sick.

Are you?

Please don't come to the house today.

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