Secrets over Sweet Tea (8 page)

His words were loud and clear.

“What does it take for you to get it through your thick skull? I’ve tried to tell you nicely, and that doesn’t work. So you leave me with no choice. I’m not going to humiliate myself again. For whatever reason, sex doesn’t work with us. It just doesn’t. And you can live in your fantasyland hoping it will get better, but
that’s not going to happen. I won’t live through the humiliation or the look on your face as if I’ve shattered your world.”

He reached for a towel and rubbed his face. “Now I’ve got to go.”

The worst part was that she knew what he was trading her for, what he was always trading her for. Yes, he would go to the training center, get some rehab, and maybe ride the bike. But after that, he had an afternoon of drinking planned. By the time he got home tonight, he would be drunk. Why? Because he could. He was in a season where he could sleep it off before anyone else but her encountered him. And the pit he was digging was getting darker and deeper as the days and months and years ticked by.

She tried to stay soft, to defuse the anger any way she could. “Tyler, I don’t think it has to be this way. If you’d just quit drinking, I—”

“I don’t
want
to quit drinking.” His face was red now, his anger palpable. But he was in complete control as he let the painful words spew. “I like drinking. I like the way it makes me feel, the way it doesn’t make me feel. I like everything about it. What I don’t like is living with a woman who can’t just leave me alone and let me be the man that I am. You can walk around in your goody-two-shoes world and be judgmental about Heather and Jeff, but at least Jeff can breathe now.”

He kept ranting as he went into the closet and began to pull his workout gear from a drawer. “What we did here, Grace, was nothing but a huge mistake. We just made a huge mistake.”

She followed him into the closet, shaking her head as she did. Tyler had been mean to her before but never this mean. “We didn’t make a mistake,” she said. “I knew you were the man
I was supposed to marry. You can say it was a mistake if you want, but I will never believe that. Never.” She was crying now.

He, however, was seething. He wouldn’t look at her as he dressed, grabbed his running shoes and car keys, and stalked out of the closet.

She followed again as he left the bedroom and headed for the garage. “Tyler, don’t leave like this. Let’s talk. This is crazy. We can make—”

He slammed the door in her face. Her heart pounded in her chest as she stared at the white-painted wood in front of her. This strange door now carried the same familiarity as the doors in every home before it. It didn’t matter where they lived or what new start they tried to make—new houses, new cars—none of it made a new life. No, that had to be chosen, didn’t it? Just as Scarlett Jo’s husband said today, it was all a choice. And Tyler had made it clear what he was willing to choose.

She walked to the bedroom she had set up as her home office. The house was silent, but pain and disappointment clanged through every vein in her body as they made their way to her heart.

Heather and Jeff were divorcing because they didn’t try. But she had tried everything she knew. She had prayed. She had fasted. She had believed. She had loved. She had sacrificed herself. And yet here she was with a man who not only didn’t want her but was now convinced their life together had been a mistake.

She lay down on the thick wool fibers of the plush carpet and wept. She hated that she was weeping—again. There had been moments when she thought for sure there would be no more tears. And yet each time Tyler rejected her, each and every
time she set herself up to be rejected, they fell as fresh and new as if that rejection were the first.

Miss Daisy came up beside her and licked her face. Grace let her hand sink into the soft fur of her faithful companion. Some people wondered how someone could call an animal their child. But she knew how it could happen. When you were forbidden to have children because of a spouse who refused to be a true companion, an animal like this easily became something more. And so she’d let it.

“I can’t do this anymore.” She wasn’t talking to Miss Daisy now. The carpet muffled her words as they poured out to the one true Companion who had faithfully listened to her through each one of these painful outbursts.

“Honestly, I can’t. If you would just tell me that there will be a miracle down the road, I’d stay forever. I’d walk this out however I needed to. But you know. You know if Tyler truly desires healing or if this is going to be the cycle for the rest of our lives. And you also know what it would take to release me.

“I can’t just leave a marriage—you know that. I can’t be Heather. I can’t be Jeff. I’m a fighter. I’ll go to the bottom of this if Tyler will go with me. But I honestly don’t know what you’re asking of me here, what you want me to do. So, Father, show me, please. If this is over, give me what I need to let go.”

She had never prayed a prayer like that before. And she had no idea if she was prepared for the answer.

“How do you do it?” Zach studied the silky strands of dark-brown hair laced between his fingers. “How do
we
do this?”

“How do we do what?” She nestled warmly against his side on the couch. His office provided a safe place for Sunday afternoon encounters.

“How do we do our jobs, have dinner with our families, and then come here as if none of that exists?”

She turned on her side and looked at him. He loved her dark-brown eyes, the exact color of her hair. “The same way countless people do it, Zach. We shut out everything else, pretend it doesn’t exist. Because this is what makes us happy. It makes me happy, being with you. This is where I feel alive.” She leaned in and kissed him.

He returned the kiss, pulling her close, breathing in her scent. He knew exactly what she meant. These moments made him feel alive too. This was what made getting up in the morning worth it these days.

“I make you happy, huh?” he teased her.

She giggled playfully. “Yes. But I have to go.”

He tightened his hold. “No. You aren’t going.”

She kissed him softly and scooted away from him. “I have to. If I’m supposedly at the store and don’t come home with something, he’s going to wonder how that happened.”

Zach raised himself up on his elbow. “Do you ever think he suspects anything?”

She sat on the edge of the sofa and buckled her shoes. They had those pizza slice–looking heels. His daughters called them wedges. “Sometimes,” she said. “I’m always the most nervous when I see him right after we’ve been together.”

“You get nervous? You don’t act nervous with me.”

She stood and straightened the edge of her blue blouse, then leaned over and ran her hands through his hair, brushing it to the side. “I’m not nervous with you. It’s out there in the real world where I get nervous.” She kissed him softly. “I’ll see you soon.” With that, she grabbed her handbag and slipped out the door.

In the real world.
This wasn’t the real world for either of them, was it? There were no bills here. No fussing children. No nagging wife or preoccupied husband. This was easy. She didn’t dictate his day or demand explanations. She just enjoyed him. He hadn’t been enjoyed in a long time.

But he wasn’t stupid. He witnessed the tsunami effect of relationships like this one virtually every day. He knew what they had together was based on illusion.

What would their life look like in the real world anyway? Family dinners. A mortgage. In-laws. All he was doing was acting out a fairy tale that in the end would hold nothing but heartache. Familiar shame spread through him like the cancer that it was, burrowing into the places where some semblance of life remained.

Just a few hours ago he had been sitting in church—a church where he’d invested his time and energy since it started two years ago. And just a few hours before that he’d woken up in his bed with his wife, the woman he’d promised to love and honor.

How did he get from there to . . . here?

He had always tried to be a good guy, do the right thing. He’d even saved himself for marriage, something a lot of the guys in his Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at college couldn’t claim. He’d been a leader on his college football team, someone his teammates respected. He was a well-thought-of lawyer, a man others came to for advice.

This sinking had happened so gradually. Little by little, he’d found himself seeking comfort in places he’d never dreamed of visiting. And now here he was. Sprawled on the sofa in his office as if he had no common sense, no self-worth, no moral compass. No better than some of the jerks whose marriages he’d helped dissolve over the past few years.

Mental battles like this made him want to tell Caroline—just lay it all out there and let the chips fall. He wanted something to shake her, to awaken her to the fact that he existed. That he wanted to love her—or at least at one point had wanted to love her. Because what they’d had at first was real. When they first met, she was vulnerable and captivating. She was crazy about him and trusted him. But she could never break free from the
strong arm of her mother or her own brittle perfectionism, and she could never forgive him for his shortcomings. Sometimes he wasn’t sure there was room in her tightly controlled life for him. Maybe she wouldn’t even care if she learned the truth.

He knew better, though. She would care. And he couldn’t stand the thought of seeing her hurt. Of watching his children realize he wasn’t the man he had claimed to be. Or worse yet, of the pleasure Adele would take in realizing he really was the failure she thought he was.

He got up from the sofa and put on his clothes, then ducked down the hall to the bathroom and studied his reflection in the mirror. The blue Izod shirt clung to his chest in the right places and made the blues of his eyes explode—at least Caroline used to tell him that when he wore this color. At forty-two he still had something to offer, and if Caroline couldn’t see it, there was someone who could. Someone he made happy.

What amazed him was how he could make someone so happy and feel so miserable at the same time.

“Scarlett Jo, did you have more coupons for Tylenol Precise?”

She put her hands on her full hips and gave a big smile to “my Ted,” as she liked to call him, the manager of the Rite Aid up the street from her house. “Are you flirting with me or trying to give me a good deal?”

His smile was just as broad. “Scarlett Jo, you know I take care of my couponers. That Tylenol stuff is free this week if you’ve got that coupon from the newspaper.”

“I’ve got this.” She opened her three-inch binder and pulled out the Rite Aid sheet she’d printed off the Southern Savers
website. Learning to navigate that site—the full extent of her computer savvy—had paid off big-time. In fact, if she ever met the person who started that thing, she’d pick her up off the ground and plant a kiss right on her. That woman had given Scarlett Jo the ability to feed her family on a preacher’s salary without mortgaging her youngest child. Though there were days when she’d be willing to do that with almost any of them.

“I’ve got me six coupons right here,” she said, waving her stack.

“Well, go enjoy yourself. Let me know if you need anything.”

“You know I will.” Scarlett Jo wasn’t what you would call an extreme couponer. She couldn’t walk into a store and get a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff for free. But she had learned how to pay little or nothing for toothpaste, toothbrushes, and deodorant. And today she would be getting six bottles of Tylenol Precise for free.

She was still flipping the pages of her binder when Amanda, her young chocolate-haired bombshell of a jogging neighbor, rounded the end of the aisle. As soon as she saw Scarlett Jo, there was no denying the slight look of panic on her face.

Scarlett Jo loved a challenge like that. She scooted her cart up next to Amanda and didn’t even pretend to avoid the woman’s stares at her large binder. “Last week I came in here and got me ninety-three dollars’ worth of stuff for six dollars and sixty-two cents.”

“With those?” Amanda pointed at the binder as if it had the plague.

“Yep. Have you ever couponed?”

Amanda’s expression made it clear she thought Scarlett Jo had just asked the stupidest question ever.

“I know,” Scarlett Jo said. “Time sucker, right?”

Amanda raised a manicured hand to her blue-spandex-clad chest, her large diamond catching the fluorescent light above them. “Well, with preschoolers running around my feet, I can’t imagine adding anything else to my life.”

Scarlett Jo laughed and snorted. “Oh, honey, do I know that feeling. At one point I had four under the age of seven, and I’m telling you, I had sweet tea on an IV drip in those days. If someone had looked at me and told me to try couponing, I would have run down the street screaming like a crazy woman. But I’ve got to tell you, I have saved oodles. In fact, you want to hear something? I actually put this binder together with all my coupons while I was sitting in first class on my way to San Francisco.”

She saw Amanda’s hands shift slightly on the blue plastic handlebar of her cart.

“First class!” Scarlett Jo repeated. She punched Amanda’s arm and worried for a minute that she might have just broken her humerus or bruised her triceps. “That flight attendant looked at me kind of like you are, and I just told her, ‘Honey, it’s these coupons that got me up here in first class.’”

Amanda’s dark-brown eyes darted right and left as if the woman was seeking an escape, though she kept a fixed smile on her face. Scarlett Jo leaned in closer. She’d learned a long time ago that the people who resisted friendship were often the ones who needed it the most. “Want me to teach you?” she asked. “I’m great at it.”

Amanda backed up. Her lips pressed together. “Ah, no, I think I’m good for today. But thank you so much for the offer.” She edged her cart in the opposite direction down the aisle.

“Well, you just let me know if you ever want to.”

Amanda gave her a nod and didn’t even bother pushing her cart in as she made a beeline for the store’s exit—itemless.

“I’m here every Sunday afternoon,” Scarlett Jo called after her. “If you aren’t, the other couponers will take all the stuff and leave you waiting until Ted gets his next shipment on Thursday. They’re crazy women!” She raised her hand to wave good-bye. “Still would love to have you over for dinner!”

Scarlett Jo watched Amanda as she left. The woman’s black workout pants stretched tightly around her tiny rear end. Scarlett Jo had no idea how she had little ones and a body like that. The woman must jog to Memphis and back every day.

Scarlett Jo patted her own thighs and muttered, “I know, girls. I promise I won’t ever put you through that. Now, let’s go see what we can get in the chocolate aisle.”

“Tucker, go get the groceries out of the car for me,” Scarlett Jo said as she walked into the house.

His shoulders immediately slumped. “Aw, Mama. Seriously?”

“So serious,” she said, dropping her purse on the counter. “Where’s Dad?”

“In there.” He tossed a hand over his shoulder toward the screened-in porch as he headed for the garage door.

“Hey, Tuck,” she said, a slyness in her voice.

He turned his mop of dark curls toward her. “Yeah?”

“There’s chocolate in there. You bring the bags in, you can have two pieces.”

She wouldn’t have to ask twice. She walked out to the porch and was surprised to see Tim McAdams there. Tim and his wife,
Elise, were long-time friends. They’d taken the step of faith with Jackson and Scarlett Jo to start this new church and now served as music pastors. Elise led the singing while Tim played the keyboard and led the band.

“Well, I didn’t expect to see you today, Tim. Where’s Elise?”

He stood quickly. “Um, she should be at the house.”

“You don’t have to leave. Sit. I’ll make you something to drink. Apparently, Mr. Hospitality didn’t offer you anything.”

Jackson turned to Tim. “Want something to drink?”

Tim laughed. “No. I would have asked.”

“See, that’s what I tell her. But she thinks I should offer first.”

Scarlett Jo blew air out of her mouth.

“I’ll walk you out,” Jackson said to Tim before she could ask another question. Both men’s body language told her she didn’t need to offer anything else.