Soaring(206)

I looked back to him. “You are not a crippled soldier, Conrad. You’re a grown man who treats women like dirt.”

“There is a reason I went looking when I had you,” he replied coolly.

I had to admit, I was curious. Just that, curious. I didn’t really care why but I’d always wanted to know what drove him from me. Not that it meant anything anymore but at least I’d have some answers.

So I sat back and flipped out a hand. “There is? Do tell.”

“You were boring.”

I stared.

I was boring?

“You didn’t want anything,” he went on. “You did your fundraisers and you went out with your friends and you doted on the kids but you had no ambition. No drive. You had a degree from arguably the best university in the country and you didn’t do anything with it. Even when the kids got older and you had more time, you just spent more time with your charities, raising money. Martine is a nurse. She has ambition. She was studying to be a nurse practitioner when I met her. She became one. She wants something out of her life.”

“Good for her,” I replied calmly. “However, for me, it might have come early, but I actually had everything I wanted from life. I grew up in a cold home where there was nothing for me but Lawrie. And early on I found a man I loved with everything I had, we made babies, and I had a home we built that was warm and affectionate and loving. I’m sorry you had a problem with me being good with just that until the day I died, Conrad. But that’s your problem. I didn’t hide these were my life’s desires. You knew what you were getting into when you married me because I shared this with you. So frankly, you’re full of shit.”

He looked again to the windows.

I kept addressing him, “And I take it Martine’s out because there’s not much further you can go as a nurse but the sky’s the limit for Tammy the neurologist? Or is she going to be ousted when you meet some woman who wants to be president?”

He didn’t look back to me.

I lowered my voice and leaned into the table. “What I’m saying, Con, is that this is a pattern. These women in your life, they have feelings. They hook their star to you and you scrape them off and that has consequences I know you understand.”

His eyes slid to me.

I kept talking.

“The issue here is you. Not me. Not all the women you banged when you looked for something exciting that wasn’t your boring wife. Or your new boring nurse of a wife. And it won’t be when you do it with your brand new inevitably to become boring neurologist of a whatever-she-comes-to-be. It’s you.”

“Amel—”

I cut him off, “And our son looks to you.”

He snapped his mouth shut.

“He doesn’t like what he sees,” I told him truthfully. “And this is not meant to be a blow, just a wakeup call, but I’m getting the sense he does like what he sees in Mickey.”

Conrad’s jaw got hard again and he looked to the window.

He knew Auden had gone to the firehouse. He might even know that Auden looked up to Mickey.

And he didn’t like it.

“You should know what you saved my mom from,” I repeated our son’s words of the day before and I saw his flinch even in profile. “That’s what Auden said to Mickey right in front of you. How that couldn’t sink in, I have no clue. But you have to sort yourself out, Conrad. If you need whatever you get from these women, do it privately so our kids don’t see. Trust me, I know the harm it can cause when you show your children you’re weak. Learn from me. But don’t learn too late and don’t take too long. They’re coming to realize that the devastation that was wrought in our lives was not down to my antics but was all about you. You’re a surgeon. You know when there’s a bleed that you need to stem that bleed before you do anything. Your relationship with your children is bleeding. Stem the bleed.”

He continued to stare out the window and I watched him do it.

When he kept doing it, I took a sip of my iced tea, replaced it and gazed around the restaurant.

This went on for some time so I decided to put an end to it.

“I want good things for our children, Con. So I’m happy you’re staying in Maine because they love you and it’s tough on them to travel in order to be with one of their parents. They’re both in high school now, which brings us to the unfortunate time in our lives of having to prepare to lose them soon. So we should do everything in our power to make the waning time we have with them the best it can be. For them. To that end, I’ll do what I can to make the relationship we have left work in order to make things easy on our kids.”