He’d only driven to the end of the block when it occurred to him that he had not done anything wrong. He still wanted to take a shower, and he didn’t want to take it in a hotel. He wanted to take a shower in the house that he had worked over sixty hours a week for over twenty years to pay for. So he drove back to the house and yelled this at my mother, his breath turned to vapor in the open doorway to the garage.
My mother agreed, according to my father. Or at least she understood he was right. She left for a hotel. She took only a suitcase the first time she left. Five minutes later, she came back for Bowzer, and all of Bowzer’s medicine, worried, she said, because my father was unfamiliar with the dog’s complicated care routine. My father admits she was contrite and dignified in both of her exits. Of course, he added, with no real malice, she could afford to be contrite at that point. She still had her credit cards.
The next afternoon, forty-two miles away, I went on my second date with Tim Culpepper. We went sledding on dinner trays I stole from the dining hall, and then spent an hour making out in his car, the heaters on high, Nick Drake on the little stereo. After he dropped me off, I was still so happy, and smiling so much, that people next to me on the elevator looked uncomfortable. When I got to my room, my phone rang. I had to tuck the cold dinner trays under one arm to get my phone out of my coat pocket. It was my sister calling from San Diego to tell me about the Sleeping Roofer. I stood still in my doorway, the light of the hallway bright, my room still dark, the phone pressed against my ear. My mittens were wet from the snow.
“Are you still there?” she asked. “Veronica? Did you hear me? Mom and Dad are getting divorced.”
The dinner trays fell on the toe of my boot, and then clattered on the linoleum floor. I said, “What? No they aren’t.” I had just talked to my mother the week before. She’d been worried about my scratchy throat, my sniffy nose. It was just a cold, but she’d wanted me to go to the doctor. She didn’t think I was getting enough sleep.
“I just got off the phone with Dad,” Elise said. “He’s already talked to his lawyer.”
It was a typical Elise response: irrefutable, no way out. I did not argue again. But when she told me about the Sleeping Roofer, I silently shook my head, not believing her at all. I could not reconcile the idea of it with all I knew of my mother. She was not a careless person. She smiled a lot, but not just at men. She smiled at old ladies. She smiled at squirrels. She was not a seductive flirt. Our neighbor, Mr. Shunke, would whistle at her when she was out gardening, but she would only roll her eyes. She wore comfortable shoes. She read magazines that had mostly recipes. And more importantly, she had been my mother. I had grown up with her kindness, taking it for granted, using it up.
“I have to go,” Elise said. She wasn’t crying, but her voice was quiet. “Charlie’s home, and we have dinner plans with someone at my firm. I’ll call you later.”
I was still holding the phone, staring at it, when Tim Culpepper knocked on my door. I’d left my hat in his car. He held it out to me, looking uncertain and very tall. I said, “My parents are getting a divorce.”
He came in and sat next to me on my bed, and spent much of the rest of the evening listening to me say, in so many different ways, that I was just really, really surprised, that I had not seen this coming at all. He said, “I don’t know what to say.” But he kept sitting there. I told him I was sorry for crying in front of him when he hardly even knew me. He said, “Oh come on, if I had a dollar for every girl who pulled this…” But he looked at my eyes and didn’t make any more jokes.
I didn’t want to call either my mother or my father. I didn’t want to hear them say it, and I didn’t know what I would say.