Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 26

The bakery is open. It has to be. New Year’s is coming and people want their cakes and their cookie trays, and Priya and Angelica and Cameron and Jolene are all back from the holiday.

To my irritation, they’re all walking on eggshells around me. God forbid any one of them slip up and say the words “slideshow” or “Connor.” I’m mostly getting a lot of heartfelt sighs and pats on the shoulder.

I do my best to stay busy. I work the front until the morning rush thins out. Then I go into the office, shut the door, and sit down to sort through the boxes.

It immediately makes me want to jump off a bridge.

Nobody tells you that the aftermath of your life exploding is so clerical.

I’ve got the statements in one pile, a legal pad on my left, a highlighter in my right hand, and a Big Gulp full of pure espresso within reach. The way Skye explained it, my job is to go line by line and pull out anything that doesn’t belong. Hotels I didn’t stay at, restaurants I’ve never been to, flowers I never got, jewelry I never wore, airline tickets for trips I didn’t take.

An hour in, I want to cry.

I thought going through the wreckage of my marriage would feel like something. Big and cinematic, like the slideshow felt.

Instead, it’s cramming for the final exam of a class I mostly slept through all semester. I’m cramping up in my neck and writing hand using all these muscles that haven’t gotten a workout since twelfth grade.

My eyes feel like pool balls in their sockets. I’m two seconds away from popping them out with a spoon so I can bathe them in doughnut frosting until they aren’t so dry and aching.

Meanwhile, the list goes on.

DUANE READE.

STOP & SHOP.

GAS.

GAS.

AUTOZONE.

I highlight nothing on the first page. Nothing on the second. Third, fourth, fifth, sixth…

My God, this is going to be the rest of my life, isn’t it? They’ll find my body here, nothing but a dried-out husk, with a hundred pages left to go.

On page nineteen, though, I strike gold.

It’s a charge for two hundred and eighteen dollars at a steakhouse in Bay Ridge on a Thursday. I have to sit for a while and remember: Did we go to a steakhouse in Bay Ridge on a Thursday?

I don’t think we did.

I highlight it, write the date on the legal pad, and keep going.

Backwards through time. The statements are organized from most recent to oldest, so every few pages now, I hit on something I already knew that still hurts anyway.

October, September, August, we get a repeat offender:

MARRIOTT BKLYN BRIDGE NY

I keep going. July, June, May, nada.

April, and a Marriott charge on the 11th.

February 7th comes up and I take it on the chin like someone just slugged me in a boxing match.

“Oof,” I say out loud, like that’ll lessen the blow.

I was crying over a grave that day.

A few hours later, my sister was f*****g my husband, and then they were hand-feeding each other steak-frites and ice cream.

But that’s surely gonna be the worst of it. It’s just getting poked in a wound that still hasn’t healed. Now that I’m through that, everything else will be fine.

… Right?

I make it through the first year and a half in a couple of hours, pausing only for interruptions whenever customers ring the bell by the register.

Fifty-three bucks for the girl who wanted a smash cake with a dinosaur on it, a tray of lemon squares for a wake, a woman who spent an eternity debating the merits of poppy seed versus everything bagels.

Then I open the second box and start on the older years.

Then something happens that I don’t understand.

On a statement from more than two years back—I have to check the header several times to make sure I’ve got the right one—there it is again.

MARRIOTT BKLYN BRIDGE NY

Three hundred and eighty-one dollars.

I put down the highlighter.

The text thread I found on the iPad starts then. I guess I kinda just forgot that the affair could have predated the messages?

Or maybe I just fooled myself into believing it. A method of mental damage control.

I’ve been walking around for almost a week with a number in my head. Just over a year. Fourteen months. Four hundred and something days. If I was good at math, I’d figure out how many hours.

Don’t get me wrong: Fourteen months is still bad. Frankly, it’s a horror show.

But it’s something I can wrap my head around.

This…

This, I’m not so sure I can.

I look at the date on the statement. Twenty-six months.

Could that possibly be true?

I open the bottom drawer of my desk.

There’s a rubber-banded stack of old vendor invoices in there, a broken thermometer, a tin of Altoids from another era, and underneath all of it, my father’s desk planner.

I took it out of his office after we buried him. Just the planner. It’s the black leather kind with a week to a page and a red ribbon marker to keep your place. His handwriting is all over it, that cramped block printing he did, all capitals.

He kept his whole life in here. Doctor appointments. Chemo. Birthdays.

And every family holiday.

On January 1st every year, rain or shine, cancer or no, he sat down at his desk and sketched out his whole year in pen.

EASTER—OUR PLACE @ 1 P.M.

4TH—DEE & CONNOR CATSKILLS (+ V?).

THANKSGIVING—OUR PLACE—DEE BRINGS PIES.

XMAS EVE—OUR PLACE—SLIDESHOW.

He didn’t live to see a single one of those.

I look at that for a while. Then I get a black pen out of my cup, open the planner flat on the desk next to the statements, and start putting X’s in it.

Every time I find a suspicious charge, I mark the corresponding date with a big, bold, black, unmissable X.

The first X goes on February 14th. Valentine’s Day.

X.

The next one goes on Easter. I was working furiously in the kitchen all weekend to be ready. I made ham and potatoes, plus a coconut cake with a nest of jelly beans on top for my cousin’s kids. We all went to church, and then to my parents’ house afterward. It felt weird not to have Dad there, I remember.

Vivian came late and left early, like always. But wasn’t there a window of time when I was running the egg hunt in the backyard with the young ones? There was, wasn’t there?

Connor came out a while later with his hair mussed. He’d said he was helping my mom get something from the basement.

X.

Fourth of July. The Catskills. Connor and Vivian took a trip to get ice. They took forever, and when they came back, they said the first two places were closed.

X.

I draw it hard enough that the pen goes through to the next page.

Thanksgiving. I did indeed bring pies. I left Connor at home to “finish up some work stuff” while I went to my mom’s to help set up.

X.

From there…

X.

X.

X.

X.

2024? X’s on every holiday.

2023? The same.

2022. 2021.

My.

Fucking.

God.

They’ve been doing this for years.

It hurts so f*****g badly that I can’t even find the words to express it. “Oof” won’t cut it anymore.

But why, I’m wondering? Nothing on these statements tells me anything I didn’t already know about who my husband is and who my sister is.

What it tells me is where I was.

Because every single one of those charges has me standing sadly on the other side of it. While they were busy frantically rutting in a closet or a hotel room or my own bed, I was carving turkeys and hauling folding chairs up and down some creaky stairs.

Fourteen months wounded me, but I thought I would recover.

Turns out the wound goes much deeper than that.

I feel like I’m being hurt all over again. Reading this stuff now, it’s like they went back and dug into the good days, burrowing like parasites into the ones I’d have listed if you’d asked me to name a nice day.

If I was simply sad, there’d be a process that I could go through. Cry, eat something, sleep it off, power through.

But this is so much worse than sadness. This is my whole world being destabilized. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

It’s the nauseous lurch you get when you miss a step.

And it happens once for each little X.

Over and over, for two hours, on every good day I own. Gone. Gone. Gone.

I close the planner and put my hand flat on the cover like it’ll help me commune with the afterlife.

“Sorry, Dad,” I say to it. “I wrecked your calendar.”

I finish the statements at half-past four on Wednesday. All told, I find forty-one hotel charges and another twenty-eight suspicious charges that seem likely to coincide with an episode of the affair.

My life is ruined, but hey, at least Skye will be pleased.

What this doesn’t solve is anything that has to do with the bakery.

That’s still coming. January 15th is sixteen days away, and everything Skye said in that crooked little office is still true.