We got through those years. Neither of us was raised to quit. And divorce in my eyes was quitting. David’s too. So we worked on our marriage. Gritted our teeth through the tough times and savored the good.
There were bad years, the worst year being my parents dying in a car crash. It rocked both our worlds. Unlike me, David was close with his in-laws. They were the kind of parents he never got. Warm, goofy, hardworking, generous. They lived two hours away and visited regularly. They were the best grandparents to our boys. Jax only got two years with them, didn’t get any memories.
Their death broke me in different ways. It put a hole in my world. But it repaired cracks in my marriage, brought David and me back together. We were a team again.
I got pregnant with Jax when Ryder was ten. A big age difference. Something that most people thought would’ve rocked David and me. But it didn’t. Jax did what he was born to do. Made the world lighter. Happier.
Ryder adored his little brother. Took his job as protector seriously. Our family was perfect, or as close to it as we could get.
Then David walked out the door to grab some beer. He needed to cool off because we had been in a fight. Not even a bad one. It was stupid, really. I’d been pissed he was late for dinner. He was pissed that he’d come home to a bitchy wife after working a fifty-hour week.
So he went to cool off.
And never came home.
Perfect blew up in my face.
“Have a good day, sweetie,” I said to Ryder, not kissing him on the cheek because I knew I was pushing it with the ‘sweetie’ comment in the drop-off section of the Black Mountain High School.
It didn’t look like a regular high school, of course. Its bricked exterior and the mountains serving as a backdrop gave it the rich, private school vibe that parents paid thousands of dollars a year for.
The kids wore uniforms. Uniforms, that, to me—public school peasant—looked like they were suited to Hogwarts, not a school in small town America. Then again, this wasn’t exactly the cliché small town. Black Mountain was home to some of the most beautiful views I’d ever seen and some of the wealthiest families I’d ever known. Again, that’s not saying much since I came from a blue-collar background and didn’t exactly rub shoulders with the elite.
The elite which sent their children here, to this renowned school with an excellent reputation and at least five Range Rovers in the parking lot at any one time.
The work was hard, and it was designed so each student could get into whichever Ivy League school they fancied.
I thought it was all a bit much, really. I’d never said that out loud, of course. David went to this school. His parents were large donors. It was turning into a legacy. It was about prestige. Appearances. It was just another aspect of our lifestyle, curated, careful, as was the Range Rover I drove. The three-thousand-dollar purse in the backseat, the diamonds at my ears, the three-hundred-dollar sneakers on my feet, the sparkling wedding ring I hadn’t found the strength to take off.
I had on large designer sunglasses just in case someone got any ideas to approach the car while I was dropping my son off.
Ryder wasn’t the kind of teenager who was ashamed to love his mother. We were friends. Good friends. I’d treated him more like a friend than a son in the months after David’s passing. A sin on my part, putting far too much of my adult grief on my teenager’s shoulders. Even though they were broad and strong, they were not designed to hold the weight of his semi-alcoholic, on the wrong side of sane, broken, mother.
I was trying my absolute best to figure out a way to stand tall. How to be the pillar of this family like David had been. I was trying to be the mother I used to be. Didn’t she do it all? She worked out at five in the morning to keep her body tight, before the house woke up. She researched all the new diets that were meant to help with brain development and packed lunches accordingly. She wasn’t on the PTA, of course, because no fucking way was I that bitch.
But I made my husband coffee. Kissed him goodbye. Gave him one blow job every two weeks. I took my youngest son to whichever class he had signed up to that month. Made sure my oldest was thriving, was comfortable in his skin—I didn’t have to do much to parent him these days anyway. I stocked the pantry, managed our finances, because no way would I be the wife that had no idea her wealthy husband was either mortgaged to the hilt or embezzling money. David was doing neither, thankfully—and I also ran a successful social media account and blog.
I had a glass of wine with dinner every night.
Sometimes two.
Other times the whole damn bottle.
The only time I cried was in the shower, when I sat at the bottom of the enormous, tiled thing, and the water washed away my tears, the sounds of the multiple jets stifling my sobs. My sons did not know my sorrow when my parents died, they did not see the cracks in the marriage that David and I deftly repaired with the help of a very expensive therapist.
We both wanted to give our boys a realistic view of the world beyond their privilege, but we definitely didn’t want to project our mountain of issues onto them.
But David went and ruined it all by dying, so it was all fucked.
“Don’t forget it’s parent-teacher conference night,” Ryder said, jerking me back into the present. I was dropping him off at school because he’d just gotten his license and would be driving David’s car once it was out of the shop. It had been in there for who knew how long because despite this town not having one but three juice bars, there was only one fucking mechanic.
“Of course I haven’t forgotten,” I lied.
Ugh. Parent-teacher conferences. I fucking hated them. David did that duty. He was happy to go and rub shoulders with his Black Mountain alum, walk the halls, soak up the nostalgia.
As always, my son sensed my unease. Something moved in his eyes. He glanced toward the building, students milling around with their neatly pressed uniforms and designer school bags. “Mom, you don’t have to go.”
My eyes snapped to my son. My strong, empathetic, beautiful son. Staring at me with softness, love, and too much knowing for a boy his age.
“Of course I have to go,” I said, forcing strength into my voice. “I have to figure out which teachers to bribe to get you into college.” I winked.
“Ah, you can save the bribes to pay for the private security you’ll have to employ once Grandma finds out I’m not going to college,” he returned.
I grinned, thinking of the absolute displeasure she would have at knowing her brilliant grandson would not be attending an Ivy League in a year.
A year.
My beautiful boy would be old enough to enlist in the army—he was a pacifist and a free spirit—and to vote—which he was extremely excited about. Already he was a political activist and I’d stood next to him at many pride parades and protests.
He would leave me. Well, he wouldn’t if he thought I still needed him. Which I totally fucking did. But that wasn’t what being a mother was about, selfishly holding on to your children, keeping them from seeing the world and realizing their potential.
“I’ll handle your grandmother. Don’t you worry,” I told him.
David and I had just ignored his mother when she talked about her relationship to the Dean at Yale or the Admissions Council at Princeton. Me, because I couldn’t be bothered with the bloodbath when I could’ve been drinking martinis, and David because he was still holding out hope that Ryder not wanting to go to college was a ‘phase.’