“No,” I answer honestly. “You don’t.”
Something isn’t right. This isn’t just a fight. There seems to be something deeper happening.
“Because I’m not.” She turns now to face me and leans against the counter, her posture no longer snide but defeated, as if she can’t take this back and forth anymore, and she’s throwing up the white flag. “I haven’t been happy for a while.”
I swallow hard. I’ve noticed a change, but I thought that maybe she was taking a second to adjust to our new house, our new life.
“Happy with me?” I ask.
“Happy with my life,” she says with a sigh.
“What does that mean?” My heart trembles in my chest.
“I haven’t been happy for months now, and I thought . . .” She pauses, her voice catching in her throat. “I thought that maybe it would get better. That we would get better. But we’re not.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, my throat growing tight. “Babe, we’ve been fine. We made love this morning.”
“No, we fucked, Ryot. Fucking has never been an issue between us. But fucking isn’t going to make me happy. You can fuck me all you want, but at the end of the day, it won’t put a smile on my face.”
“Then what will?”
“A healthy marriage, and that’s not what we have.” Pulse thundering, I try to steady my shaking legs. “We are anything but healthy.” Her head drops forward as she grips the counter behind her. That ominous, doomsday feeling falls over me. She’s avoiding eye contact with me. The air around us stills as the tension grows thick and muddy. She quietly says, “I want a divorce.”
The room spins around me in slow motion, squeezing the air from my lungs in one fell swoop, leaving me gasping.
“What . . . what did you just say?” I can barely hear my own voice over the hammering of my heart. My mind whirls, trips, tumbles, and struggles to comprehend the words that came out of her mouth. There’s no way.
Did she really say divorce? She couldn’t have . . . right?
When her gaze lifts to mine, her mouth thins, and with no expression in her eyes, she repeats, “I want a divorce.” She opens one of her vanity drawers and pulls out a yellow envelope and sets it on the countertop.
“What the fuck is that?”
Still dead in her eyes, she says, “Divorce papers. I had them drawn up last week. I’m asking for absolutely nothing. I don’t want your money—”
“Our fucking money,” I say.
“It’s your money, Ryot. You’re the one who played in the Major Leagues, and you’re the one who cashed in on the endorsements, so that’s your money, not mine. And I’m not about to sit here and argue with you about it. I don’t fucking want it. All I ask is to keep my car and half of the sale from the house in Chicago since I’m the one who did the renovations.”
“Hold the fuck on for a second,” I say, trying to wrap my head around all of this. “You want a divorce?”
“Yes. Everything is done. You just need your lawyer to look it over and then sign it.” Everything is done? When did she start?
“The fuck I will,” I say, moving closer to her. “I’m not about to sign divorce papers without knowing where all this is coming from. I love you, Myla—”
“Don’t, Ryot. Don’t say that shit when you don’t mean it.”
“Of course I mean it!” I shout. “Don’t fucking tell me how I feel.”
“If you loved me, then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Maybe if you talked to me—”
“I did,” she yells. “Several times, Ryot. You haven’t been paying attention. You’ve been so focused on life after baseball and how you can satisfy your drive to be successful. Meanwhile, you’ve forgotten about me. You’ve forgotten about our life. You’ve forgotten your promises, and no amount of communication will take away the bitterness I have toward you for that.” She pushes off the sink and blows past me.
“Myla, wait—”
“Sign the papers, Ryot. End this for us, so we can both move on.”
And then she’s out of the bedroom and halfway out of my life.
“Wow, you look like absolute shit,” Banner says as he sits across from me at Café Lola with coffees in hand for both of us.
After Myla retreated from the bathroom, I tried to coax her to talk to me, but she shut down once again. Last night was the first time we chose to sleep apart since we were married. When I woke up this morning, the divorce papers were on her pillow with a note that said, “Sign them today.”
I tossed them to the floor and told Banner to meet me in half an hour.
With my thumb and index finger, I rub my tension-filled brow. “Myla asked for a divorce last night.”
Cup midway to his mouth, Banner pauses. “What the actual fuck? Is this some sort of prank?”
“Why the hell would I joke about this?” I slouch in my chair.
“Fuck, I don’t know. Why?”
I slowly shake my head.
You haven’t been paying attention. You’ve been so focused on life after baseball and how you can satisfy your drive to be successful. Meanwhile, you’ve forgotten about me. You’ve forgotten about our life. You’ve forgotten your promises, and no amount of communication will take away the bitterness I have toward you for that.
“She wouldn’t talk about it. All I really know is that she’s very unhappy and has been for a while. She gave me the divorce papers and then slept in the guest room.” Loneliest night of my life.
“Jesus. I’m sorry, man. Are you going to sign—”
“No,” I shout and then quiet my voice when I’m snapped back into reality. There are people around us. I don’t need them listening in on my private conversation. “I don’t want a divorce.” A divorce would fucking break me. Losing Myla would break me.
“Did you tell her that?”
“I mean, I think I made it pretty clear. I tried to tell her I loved her, and she immediately shot me down.”
“Dude.” Banner rubs the back of his neck. “Fuck. I did not see this coming.”
“I had no fucking clue either. What do I do?” I ask. “I knew she was acting weird, but a divorce? That’s the last thing I expected. Have I really been that busy, that blind to the situation?”
“I don’t know, man . . . maybe . . .” Banner shrugs just as I spot someone approaching us.
“Did the meeting start without me, boys?”
Penn Cutler.
One of my best friends and former teammates and the reason I came up with the idea of The Jock Report. It’s the reason we moved to California and probably why I’ve been so blind to what’s been going on with my home life.
Just to splash you with some quick backstory—boring I know, but it’s needed—Penn and I played with the Chicago Bobbies a few years back. I tore my rotator cuff and couldn’t recover despite my many attempts, and Penn . . . well, his haunted past drove him off the pitcher’s mound. A former alcoholic who attended rehab during the off-season, he was picked apart by the media, season after season. One bad game and they assumed he was back to drinking. It got to the point where the Bobbies couldn’t manage the press anymore, so Penn cut ties with them before they could cut ties with him. And that was how his career ended.