"You could have stayed."
"You were fucking another guy!"
Kelly regarded me coolly. "No, I fucked another guy. I shouldn't have. I confessed, and I apologized. I begged you to stay and go to counseling so our family could stay together. What I did was wrong, unequivocally, and I was sorry I ever did it. Am sorry." She looked away. "Will never stop being sorry."
"Yeah, you were so sorry that you did it for months, and then didn't confess until months after that!"
She snarled. "It was better than the years that you--" Visibly trying to bring herself under control, she stopped and returned to the original topic. "No, Aaron, I can't reduce your spousal support right now. I wish I could. But I just don't earn enough to keep the house without your help. If you had stayed with us, that wouldn't be--"
"I wasn't going to fucking sleep with you after that!"
"There was a spare bedroom! You didn't have to-- We could have just been roommates. You could have still been near the kids, been around them more often." Just barely loud enough to hear, she said, "That would have been a change of pace."
Always the same argument to justify her cheating. "I was trying to earn a good life for all of us."
"Bullshit. Bull fucking shit. That's-- yeah, that's what you were doing at the beginning, when we first got married, and then when May and Dean came along. And I loved you for it, that you worked that hard for us. But you were earning plenty by the time--" She swallowed. "By then. You could have worked less, eased off the throttle. We had enough. More than. It wasn't for us by then, it was for you. You loved your job." Unsaid, this time, was what she'd said many times before: that I loved it more than I loved them.
"And then, and then when you did take time off, it wasn't to spend with us. With me or with the kids. You went and worked on your car, or you hung out with your fishing buddies or you..." She shook her head.
We'd gone round and round on this. I wasn't there enough. I worked too much. I wasn't really there when I was there. That the kids were old enough that she could have gotten out and worked, but I wanted her to be a housewife; never mind that that was what she had wanted first, and that's why I had worked so much in the first place. She got bored. Depressed. Lonely. And I wasn't there, and he was.
"I'm living in a fucking shoebox and eating ramen, Kelly. I can't do this for another four years, and I don't want to disrupt the kids' lives more than you've--" I closed my eyes and started again. "Than we've already done. I want them to be able to stay in the house, too. That's why I worked so hard, for them to have a good life. But this is killing me."
She bit her lip and thought. "Let me... let me see what I can cut in the household budget. I'll try to free up some, but it might not be more than a hundred or two. I'll try, though, okay?"
"Thank you."
Kelly nodded. I stood up from what had been our kitchen table, ready to leave, when she said, sadly, "I am sorry, you know. I am. I always will be."
Unable to look at her, I simply replied, "Yeah."
-----------------------------------------------------------
"You could have stayed."
"Thanks, but I needed to be somewhere." Anywhere but across the table from Kelly. There was no way I could sit down to dinner with her and the kids and get through it peacefully.
"The lawn looks great, by the way." She had found some places where she could free up a little cash. One of them was the lawn maintenance. For a few months, she had actually mowed and edged and done all of the other things I'd done before the divorce, but she didn't know how to maintain the equipment.
It took me a couple of weekends to get everything back in order. Not just the equipment, which was badly in need of maintenance, but also the lawn and landscaping. Her hedgeclipper technique was... interesting. And she hadn't been using weedkiller or fertilizer or any of the other chemical treatments I had.
"I wanted it to look nice for the kids. And one of these days, we'll want to sell. Might as well make sure it keeps the curb appeal."
She was quiet for a moment. "Yeah, I suppose so. I never thought we'd have to leave, but you're right. One of these days..." Her sigh was loud over the phone, a hiss of breath that came out the speaker tinny and sharp. Then, she chuckled. "You were looking pretty good, too. Haven't seen you work with your shirt off in a while."
I laughed. "I've had time on my hands, and there's a gym at work. Something free I can do for an hour a day."
"Well, it's paying off." Another pause. "Are you... um, are you seeing anyone?"
After almost a year, no. I'd tried to date, but I was a workaholic with trust issues and no money. Plus, a part of me was still hung up on the past. Not on Kelly, so much, but the idea of our marriage. The idea of what I'd had. Knowing how much work it would take to get back to anything like what she and I had before she cheated seemed almost insurmountable. I wasn't ready to start the climb.
"That's not really any of your business. I'll let you know if anyone gets serious enough that they'll be around the kids."
"I'm sorry, you're right." I heard her voice change just a little, a tiny tremor in it. "Thanks again, Aaron. If you ever do want to stay for dinner, it's an open invitation, okay?"
"Okay, Kel. Thanks."
-----------------------------------------------------------
"You could have stayed."
"Did you tell your mom that?"
A groan from the other end of the line. "I'm sorry. I know she's been a bitch to you. I talked to her about it, told her you'd be there, and--"
"Of course I was going to be there! It was my daughter's birthday! What the fuck is her problem, anyways?"
"She's just trying to watch out for me." I scoffed. We had never gotten along, and I think she was secretly glad Kelly cheated. She was quite openly unhappy that her daughter hadn't found someone else yet. "I know. I know. But... look, you knew she was going to be there."
"Why? Why did she have to be?"
