Page 5 of Cruel Summer

Sam made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a whine and put her face in her hands.

“I think I do know that. I don’t… I have to ask him .

I have to ask him what all he means. I’m…

” She looked up. “I actually like to think I’m more open-minded than any of us were raised to be.

I read so many long-form articles, because writing about life is what I do.

I like reading about other peoples’ lives.

I read articles about…polyamory and think, ‘Good for them. Sounds like a lot of work, but good for them.’ But I’ve never, ever thought about what I would do in those situations, because I was so sure about what my situation was. ”

Whitney lifted a shoulder. “Have you considered that…it might be fun? I mean, if he gets to have sex with other people, so do you. Everything he said about his life applies to you. You’ve only been with him. Don’t you think it might be fun to…play around a little bit?”

She looked around the room and tried to imagine…any of that. There was a perfectly handsome, age-appropriate man sitting by the door. She could talk to him, find out if he wanted to go out…

She could get rejected.

It would be like being a teenager all over again, wondering if Will liked her liked her. But she’d be doing it at forty.

“I don’t… It doesn’t sound fun to me. Does it really sound fun to you?”

Whitney shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot of things sound more fun in theory than in practice. But I haven’t been with anyone other than Mark in fifteen years, so on some level…”

“Dating is terrible,” said Elysia. “ Especially when you don’t want to do it.”

“Why does it have to be dating , though?” Whitney asked. “Why can’t it just be sex? If you still have the husband, you don’t need…”

“This is not a hypothetical,” Sam said. “This is my life.”

Whitney looked immediately contrite. “I know. I’m sorry. I just… You have two choices, right? You tell him no, or you try to give him what he wants. You’ve clearly never thought about this before, so I’m just trying to get you to think about it.”

She looked at her cake. “No. I’ve never thought about it. I’ve never thought about being with anyone else.” She said it firmly, decisively.

She decided it was time to take another bite of cake. This time it tasted better, and she thought maybe the sugar would serve as a decent Band-Aid for this endless horror.

“Did you just want me to be outraged? Because I can do that too,” said Whitney.

She shook her head. “No, that isn’t what I want.

That’s what I’d want if I wanted to divorce him, and I don’t.

I just want to go back to before he said this.

I don’t want to think about all these changes.

I thought we were only into good changes, exciting changes.

Yeah, it’s bittersweet to have the kids move out, to have Ethan not even come back for the summer.

But I was all about it being a season of us. For us.”

“We don’t have to be fair,” Whitney pointed out. “We can do pistols at dawn. Pitchforks at midnight. Whatever you need, you know that’s what we’ll give you.”

She put her knuckles against her temples.

“I do. I do know that. It’s just… I don’t know what I want.

I don’t know what to ask for, and I was going on and on and around and around in my own head and I was sick of myself, so I need to come here and say some of it out loud.

But I don’t know. And I’m so resentful that I have to choose anything. ”

“You know, this is the problem,” Elysia said. “Honest or not, if your husband wants to make a life change, you have to react. You don’t want to, which I get. I wanted to just…ignore that my husband had an affair, because I didn’t want to get divorced. I didn’t ask for things to change.”

“That’s how I feel.”

“You have to figure out what you want and put him in the position of having to respond to that. I think he needs to really tell you, like on a granular level, why he feels this way and what he wants from it.” Her eyes got glossy then.

“If I could have made Jake do one thing, it would have been to tell me when it started. I don’t mean the first time he actually slept with another woman, I mean the first moment he knew he wasn’t satisfied.

What triggered it. What broke between the two of us that it seemed…

reasonable to lie to me about where he was, what he was doing. I want the story, the whole story.”

Sam nodded. “Yes. Yes, because this is what I can’t get past. I thought he and I wanted the same things and felt the same way. I thought we were the same kind of happy and…were we ever? Has he always been living in some quiet suburban desperation?”

“Until you know all that, I don’t know how you’re supposed to have any idea what you want,” Elysia said.

“After he gives you all that,” Whitney said, “pistols, pitchforks, a good lawyer or…upside-down pineapples. We’ll help with any and all.”

She looked down at her wedding ring. It seemed wildly unfamiliar right then.

“Okay. He had a house showing this morning at…” She looked at her phone.

“Well, now. Maybe I can go home and sit in the quiet and prepare. Or try the setting-all-his-shit-on-fire-on-the-lawn thing. That doesn’t sound unappealing.

” She laughed. “Seriously though, he wants an open marriage, I want him to get rid of his excessive collection of T-shirts he’s owned since high school.

Like since we’re putting cards on the table.

” That made her want to laugh. Helplessly.

All the little things she’d sat on in the name of harmony for years.

And her husband had come out with let’s see other people .

She really should have complained more.

“If you end up needing somewhere to stay, you know you’re welcome to stay with me,” said Elysia.

“Or me,” said Whitney, “but then, she doesn’t have a man hanging out, cluttering the place up.”

Sam tried to laugh. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

She walked back home, and she knew she had a little bit of time before Will would arrive. She showered and changed into something nice and told herself it wasn’t because she was trying to make him see that she was still pretty.

Except the whole time she dried her hair, put on moisturizer and eyeliner, and tweezed a couple errant eyebrow hairs, she was alternatively hyping herself up and nitpicking the decline of her beauty.

But when she was done, she thought she looked good. And like maybe if she wanted to agree to this thing, she could probably have some of the openness for herself.

She stared at herself in the mirror, and those features she’d just been examining seemed wholly unfamiliar all of a sudden. So did her whole body. So did every thought.

Whose life was this?

It wasn’t Samantha Parker’s.

Samantha Parker had a perfect life, and everyone knew it.

She’d done things a little out of order , as people liked to whisper, but then they’d done the right thing .

They’d gotten married. She and Will hadn’t gone to church for years, but that didn’t mean they’d let go of everything that had been instilled in them there.

More to the point, the culture of the town was… church-driven.

Whether it was Baptist, Catholic, nondenominational, Latter Day Saints or Jehovah’s Witnesses…people here often either came from a religious and traditional background, or were still part of one. Was Will right? Was she just…doing things because she’d been conditioned to do them that way?

Was she…indoctrinated?

Was her shame hers or was it…something someone had given to her?

Did she not actually want any of the things she had?

“I’m pretty sure I do,” she said back to the stranger in the mirror.

But still, she was starting to wonder if she was making a bigger deal out of this than she needed to. A whole Everest out of what could just be an annoying molehill.

He didn’t want to leave her. He wasn’t a liar. He didn’t have secret horrible porn on his computer.

She didn’t think .

The doorbell rang and she startled, then walked quickly to the kitchen and peered cautiously out the window by the sink, where she could always get a good look at who was there without them actually seeing her.

It was Logan .

Her husband’s best friend and the first person she’d blamed for his desire to experience bar hookups, considering Logan was a pro at those.

The problem with Logan, though, was that he was…

interesting. He did highly specialized restoration on classic cars for a living and drove them to their owners several times year, which Sam had always thought would make for an interesting article series because it was just…

cool. She’d even joked about wanting to pull up stakes and go on a trip with him.

Which of course she hadn’t actually done, because she knew that she couldn’t actually live his life.

Which Will didn’t seem to realize.

They’d known Logan since high school. But he was two years older than them, so it had been more casual awareness and interaction than anything else.

Logan had been that guy. Hot and kind of brooding, and all the girls had whispered when he’d walked through the halls.

He had a dad who drank too much, an old, loud muscle car and a chip on his shoulder. He’d seemed mythical and unapproachable.

Her friend group hadn’t really known his future wife, Becca, either, though not for the same reasons. She’d been in their grade, and Sam had shared two honors classes with her, but she hadn’t started going to school with them until ninth grade, so Sam’s friend group had been set already.

It was after high school, after Becca and Logan had gotten married, that she and Will had gotten to know them. Back then, Logan had been working for a local garage, and Will had taken their car in for an oil change, and they’d gotten to reminiscing about high school.