Feels Like Falling Read online

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s just that I feel like everyone is talking about me.” I paused. “No, I know for sure that everyone is talking about me.”

  Diana nodded knowingly as she began to throw expired items into the trash can. “That’s a bad feeling. I know all about that.” She picked up a jar of jelly, read the label, and tossed. Then she said, “When I was little, kids used to talk about me and pick on me all the time. When we were in foster care, there were some years I didn’t have more than two or three changes of clothes, and at this one house no one would brush my hair, so it was a rat’s nest, and I always had holes in my off-brand shoes.” She paused and took a breath. “But worst of all, we got free lunch—and breakfast—which might as well have been a target on my back.…” She trailed off, and I felt like my heart had stopped beating. I couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to any child. “I got picked on real bad, but it made me strong too, you know?”

  “Jesus, Diana. That is not the same thing.”

  She shrugged and turned toward the sink, rinsing a bottle and setting it back on the counter. “Well, no. I guess it isn’t, because that was a long time ago and it was really more about material things, and this is more about your life—”

  I interrupted her, feeling sick. I couldn’t believe what she had been through, what she had endured. I’d had no idea. “No, I mean, that is real, true trauma. I’m just being a brat, and I’m old enough that I shouldn’t care.”

  Diana leaned over the counter toward me. “You know, hon, everybody’s got their own problems. I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours, the mailman’s got his.”

  “Davy?” I gasped in mock horror. “Not Davy!”

  We both laughed.

  “For real,” I said. “I am so sorry you had to go through that.” I could feel tears coming to my eyes. I was so grateful that I could take care of Wagner. “Gosh,” I added, “I think it has been hard not having my mom this past year, and I’m a grown-up. I can’t imagine doing it as a child.”

  I was giving her a subtle opening. I didn’t want to say, So, what happened to your mom? But I was so curious. Diana was spraying the counters now, wiping them with rags I had made from Wagner’s old, threadbare T-shirts during my brief, post-split Martha Stewart phase. I had a feeling Diana had a hard time standing still. She wasn’t taking the bait. But then she stopped dead in her tracks and looked me straight in the eye. “There comes a point when we all have to learn to survive on our own, Gray. Mine just came early.”

  I bit my lip. There was so much truth in that. This was my moment, I guessed. I was learning to survive on my own. No husband. No mother. Not even Wagner here to bring joy to the hard days. Just me on my own two feet.

  She turned and started spraying again. “We got smart, though, one of my foster brothers and me. I got picked on because of my hair not being brushed, and he got picked on for smelling bad. We were too young to get jobs, so we spent weeks collecting cans. We got on the free bus and took all those cans down to the recycling center in our backpacks and some old grocery bags we’d found around the house, and we got up enough money to buy a hairbrush for me and some deodorant for him.”

  “Damn, Diana.” I felt sick to my stomach again. I hadn’t been getting a Porsche for my sixteenth birthday or anything, but I had had two parents who loved me, who made sure I always had what I needed even if it meant they had to sacrifice something for themselves.

  “Just having my hair brushed didn’t fix anything. It didn’t keep the kids from picking on me. But it gave me the confidence to face the bullies.” She turned and smiled at me.

  I guessed that was what I needed too. I needed to find what would give me the confidence to face the bullies. “My mom always used to say people picked on people they were jealous of, but it isn’t true, is it?”

  Diana shrugged.

  “I mean, when they were making snide remarks about my being a bad wife and mom when I was building my company, I could write it off as jealousy, but now…”

  “I was lucky,” Diana said, “because I found my best girlfriends right around that bad time in foster care. We took care of each other. We still do.”

  “Your ride or die,” I said, smiling.

  Trey came bounding into the kitchen in a pair of Lululemon gym shorts and a T-shirt. “I heard you call?” he said. “Oh, yum, a Diana smoothie.”

  “I didn’t call you.”

  “You said ‘ride or die,’ ” he said. “That’s me!” I patted his arm. He was my ride or die. I didn’t know what I would do without him. Trey looked over my shoulder. “Why are you reading those e-mails? Those e-mails are in my inbox.”

  “Well, I was up and you weren’t.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “It’s seven-thirty. It’s okay not to return e-mails at seven-thirty.” He slammed my laptop, poured some smoothie for himself, and said to Diana, “I don’t know what to do with this one. I think she would work herself completely to death if it weren’t for me.”

  “Hey! I was about to log how many hours I slept in my chart,” I protested.

  “What are we talking about?” Trey asked, as if I’d said nothing. He thought my spreadsheets were a little overzealous.

  Diana and I shared a glance. “Nothing, really,” I said, though that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  “Have you filled her in on what a loser Greg is?” Trey asked.

  I groaned. “No Greg talk. I don’t want to think about him or even hear his name today.” The only side benefit to Wagner’s being gone for three weeks was that I didn’t have to deal with Greg.

  “It takes a certain kind of man to be married to a successful woman,” Diana said. I didn’t take it as an insult, but Trey evidently did. He rushed to my defense.

  “Are you kidding me?” Trey countered. “It’s 2020. Who cares who’s most successful? It’s about being partners.”

  “Honey, you’re a whole different generation,” Diana said.

  “I don’t even know if that was it, though. I mean, yeah, I was more successful, and I know it bugged him, but he benefited from my success more than anyone.”

  “It’s an ego thing,” Trey chimed in.

  “Yes!” Diana agreed. “Maybe that’s why Harry stole my savings and gambled it all away. He inherited his momma’s house, but I was paying the bills. If I had more money than he did, I had more power. I could leave. I didn’t have to depend on him.”

  I nodded, realizing how vastly different our lives were and how, even still, the themes were kind of the same. “Yes!” I said. “That’s so true.”

  Trey shook his head. “So what you two need is to find men who aren’t threatened by your innate goddesshood.” He paused, putting his finger to his lips. “Like maybe someone a little younger… maybe someone who isn’t scared of a strong woman.”

  I cut my eyes at him. “What do you know?”

  He shrugged innocently.

  Marcy burst in practically singing, “Girls’ night tonight! Oh, hey, Diana.”

  I gasped. “Oh my gosh! I totally forgot I have girls’ night tonight.” I looked at Diana pleadingly. “Um, do you think you could throw together a few appetizers?”

  Diana nodded. “Sure. Of course. What do you want?”

  These were the kinds of decisions I could no longer handle. I made decisions all day, every day. I told people what to do and how to do it. Today I just wanted someone else to deal with it. I shrugged. “Just make what you would make if you were having girls’ night.”

  Diana nodded. “Perfect. Easy enough.”

  With that, I grabbed my laptop—and my Trey—and headed up to the office to get some work done, leaving Diana and Marcy to work out the particulars.

  * * *

  When you get divorced, you have to choose one of a few well-established personas. Well, maybe some people don’t choose per se. Maybe they just are. There’s the bitter divorcée who blames her ex-husband for every single thing that’s wrong on the entir
e planet. The one who wallows in her self-pity forever, refusing to reclaim her life. There’s the divorcée who immediately jumps into another serious relationship like nothing ever happened. And there’s the one who goes through a wild phase, dating every inappropriate man (or woman) she can get her hands on. I had to choose which kind I was going to be before the kind I didn’t want to be chose me. So I settled on the free-spirited divorcée and practiced saying in my mirror, “It was a beautiful period of my life and now it’s over.”

  That was my external persona. Outwardly, I was fine. Fine, fine, fine. I was grateful for our years together, for Wagner, for what Greg and I had shared, and now I was happy we could both move forward. Inside, I was anything but happy. I was sad to have lost someone I had shared so much of my life with. I was scared that I would never find anyone else and would be alone forever. I was embarrassed that I had to walk around, the woman scorned, with every Southerner and her mother doing the thing I hated the very most: pitying me. And, most of all, I was furious. Furious at Greg for not being able to keep it in his pants. Furious at Brooke for being such an opportunistic hussy. Furious at myself for being the kind of woman who calls another woman an opportunistic hussy and, worst of all, for falling for a man who I knew deep down, even from the beginning, could never give me the kind of partnership I wanted in this life.

  And now, speaking of lifelong relationships, I was wishing that I hadn’t checked my e-mail one last time before my friends arrived. But I had. And the note at the top of my inbox was a charming one from my sister. Trey must have been busy, because he was pretty adamant about immediately transferring any e-mail from Quinn into its own secret folder in hopes that I would never see it. It wasn’t his worst idea, but the inevitable moment of reckoning had arrived. The subject line: My Previous E-mails.

  I hadn’t read her previous e-mails because I knew what they said and, well, I didn’t want to hear it. But now I couldn’t help myself. I fell on the sword.

  Dear Gray,

  I know you don’t want to hear what I have to say, but I promise you it comes from a place of love. God doesn’t like divorce, and I am only thinking of you when I urge you to reconcile with Greg, to save your marriage. Think of Wagner. Think of your family. And, most of all, think of your immortal soul.

  Love,

  Quinn

  I know everyone handles grief in a different way, and I guessed this was how Quinn was handling our mother’s death. But to go from being the ultimate party girl—and the ultimate devoted sister—to being solely focused on Elijah Taylor and his church was so extreme.

  People almost always know when they are about to cry. There are warning signs: the tears welling up, a lump in the throat. Reading Quinn’s e-mail didn’t give me any of that. In fact, I only noticed the tears after they’d already started. Which made me realize that, despite my cool exterior, I fell into the divorcée category of total and complete mess.

  I heard Diana’s voice saying, “Gray,” and she was beside me before I could pretend I wasn’t crying. The natural reaction to another person’s tears is to ask them what’s wrong. Diana didn’t ask. She sat down in the chair on the other side of my desk, looking right at me, and said, “Honey, I know it feels like your life is falling apart. Hell, your life is falling apart. But my life falls apart all the time, and what I’ve realized is that when your life falls apart, the universe is just teaching you how to trust.”

  This time I felt an ironic laugh coming. “Oh yeah,” I said sarcastically. “My divorce is doing wonders for my ability to trust.” (Bitter divorcée had arrived for another visit.)

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Not other people, honey. You. When the shit hits the fan, you’re the woman left standing; you’re the one left holding the bag. And you learn how strong you are. You figure out real quick that nobody’s going to fix your life but you. Nobody else is in charge of your happiness.”

  That sounded plain lonely to me, and I braced myself for more tears.

  Diana looked at me sideways. Again, no hug, no sympathy. But she was kind enough not to compare our situations. She easily could’ve pulled the You think you have problems? card, but that would’ve gotten us nowhere.

  “Are you going to sit in your room and cry? Or are you going to get your ass up and take on the world?”

  I’ll be honest. I wanted to sit in my room and cry. But then Diana got up to leave and said, “The only person who gets to pick how you feel is you.”

  Was that true? Was I choosing this? And if I was, could I stop?

  When I heard Diana’s footsteps again, I thought she had decided she was going to have to come extract me from my chair of pity. But then she appeared with a plate. It contained a Ritz cracker with a blob of something that I thought I remembered from my childhood as being Easy Cheese, pigs in a blanket, saltines with what appeared to be melted marshmallows on top, and those jalapeño poppers from the freezer that Wagner and his friends liked that I only let them eat when I needed cool mom points.

  When I looked up, her face mirrored my confusion. “For your girls’ night,” she said. “Thought a taste test could get you out of here a little quicker.”

  I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. I mean, uncontrollably, tears running down my cheeks in the best possible way, laughing at the idea of prissy, perfect party-planner-to-the-rich Mary Ellen walking into my house and, instead of being greeted by prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, grabbing a whing-ding, which is what my mom called saltines with cheese and a marshmallow on top.

  Girls’ nights at Mary Ellen’s were always the most extravagant and over-the-top—and the most shared on social media. Every seemingly random get-together was a self-promotion opportunity. 9:08 a.m: “Arranging the flowers for #girlsnight with @grayhoward!” 10:42 a.m.: “Cupcakes for #girlsnight arrived from @spouterinnbakery. Aren’t they gorgeous?” 12:01 p.m.: “Putting the final touches on the bar for #girlsnight. Don’t you love paper straws? #partyon.” 12:14 p.m.: Block further notifications from @maryellenentertains.

  I had two choices. I could run to Friendly Market and throw together a fancy cheese plate and try to salvage my friends’ opinions of my party skills. Or I could stick with Diana’s version of appetizers and not hurt her feelings. And her apps were kind of campy. There was a theme.

  “Are you having some sort of fit?” Diana asked.

  I think that was when I realized how much I’d made the past several months about everyone else. Walking into the club that first day had felt like getting a bad report card—and having it read over the PA system for the entire school to hear. I was Gray Howard. I was successful. I was self-made. My ultimate idea of success as a child had been being able to go to the Dollar Tree and pick out something I didn’t expressly need. But I had made it big. I was happy. I was proud. And I was acutely aware that there were more than a few people out there who couldn’t wait to revel in what was, to date, my largest failure.

  When you are in a marriage—or a divorce—sometimes it’s impossible to see outside of it. When you’re in your house sitting across the kitchen table from the man who used to be your world trying to reconcile how he became a stranger in such short order, all you can think about is your intensely private anger and your very personal pain. You forget that you are going to be subject to the merciless scrutiny of the outside world, that the comments and questions and snide remarks being hurled at you from all directions can be almost as bad as your husband’s unfaithfulness. I knew I shouldn’t let other people’s opinions affect me. I shouldn’t care.

  But I was a human being. So of course I did.

  But I was tired of caring about other people’s opinions. I popped one of Diana’s pigs in a blanket in my mouth. It was delicious. And I figured, why not? My friends should love me even if I served them Cheez Whiz crackers.

  Diana was still looking at me expectantly. Then a light bulb went on. “Oh,” she said. “When you said to make what I would make for girls’ night, that’s not exactly what you were expecting.”
>
  I smiled at her. “No, no.” I paused. “Well, I mean, sure, it’s not exactly what I was thinking, but that’s okay. I’m laughing because when I was pregnant with Wagner I couldn’t eat anything—I mean, not anything—without getting sick. So my mom melted cheese on saltine crackers and put marshmallows on them and browned them in the oven. It sounded gross, but then they were all I could eat. These made me think of her.”

  I felt tears springing to my eyes again and decided either I had some serious PMS or I had officially, once and for all, lost my mind. Diana smiled. “That must be nice,” she said. “To have all those memories with your mom.”

  Yup. Memories. I had a lot of those. “And then she left me when I needed her the very most.” I laughed cruelly.

  Diana cocked her head to the side. “Sister, you are mad.”

  I was taken aback. “I’m not mad. The woman died, for heaven’s sake. She didn’t leave me on purpose.”

  She looked skeptical. “Well… Look, anger is a natural reaction to death. I was mad at my mom for a long time.”

  “So she died?” I asked.

  Diana waved her hand, which I assumed was a yes. “But, Gray, you can’t move past being angry if you can’t admit that you are.”

  “I’m not mad!” I protested. “That’s ridiculous.” Who did this woman think she was? I didn’t have to keep her around. “My mother was my best friend. Don’t ever say that to me again.”

  Diana put her hands up in defense and walked out of the room.

  My mind was reeling. What right did she have to put something that awful on me? But, well… was she right? Was I mad? I mean, my poor mother had died of cancer. Who would be mad at that? But when I felt that familiar burning near my throat, I realized that maybe that’s what I was. I was saying, “Oh my gosh, am I mad?” just as Trey breezed in.

  “Why are we not dressed?” he demanded.

  I suddenly felt very, very tired. I leaned my head all the way back until it touched the chair and I was looking at the ceiling. I didn’t want to tell Trey about my potentially insane reaction to my mom’s death, so instead I said, “Quinn.”