Back In the Game

 

 

“A thoughtful novel.”
—
Shelf Awareness

 

“A great summer read.”
—
Fresh Fiction

 

“A novel rich in drama and insights into what factors bring
people together and, just as fatefully, tear them apart.”
—
The Portland Press Herald

 

“Explores questions about the meaning of home,
family dynamics, and tolerance.”
—
The Bangor Daily News

 

“A dramatic and moving portrait of several generations
of a family and each person's place within it.”
—
Booklist

 

“An enjoyable summer read, but it's more. It is a novel for all
seasons that adds to the enduring excitement of Ogunquit.”
—
The Maine Sunday Telegram

 

“It does the trick as a beach book and provides a
touristy taste of Maine's seasonal attractions.”
—
Publishers Weekly

 

“Witty, yet quietly introspective.”
—
RT Book Reviews

 

“Fans of
Sex in the City
will enjoy the women's romantic
escapades and appreciate the roundtable discussions these
gals have about the trials and tribulations singletons face.”
—
Booklist

Books by Holly Chamberlin

LIVING SINGLE

THE SUMMER OF US

BABYLAND

BACK IN THE GAME

THE FRIENDS WE KEEP

TUSCAN HOLIDAY

ONE WEEK IN DECEMBER

THE FAMILY BEACH HOUSE

SUMMER FRIENDS

LAST SUMMER

THE SUMMER EVERYTHING CHANGED

BEACH SEASON

(with Lisa Jackson, Cathy Lamb, and Rosalind Noonan)

 

 

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

Holly Chamberlin

Back in the Game

KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Julia Einstein and Judy Sowa for their help with various parts of this project.

To those who have provided inspiration this past year, I offer all my gratitude.

Finally, I would like to thank my editor and friend, John Scognamiglio, for his ceaseless support.

Chapter 1

H
e said I'd never loved him.

He was probably right.

“I don't know why you married me in the first place.”

“Matt,” I replied wearily, “we've been through this before.”

Matt laughed and it sounded bitter. “No, Jess, we haven't.”

He was right again. We hadn't talked through anything, but I'd been asking myself that very question—why did I marry Matt Fromer in the first place?—since the day I started the affair that ended my marriage.

I am Jess Marlowe and I am an adulteress. My crime is of Biblical proportions.

“I'm sorry, Matt.” I was. I still am. But I was tired and wanted Matt to hang up so that I could go to bed.

“I don't give a shit,” he spat. Matt was drunk. Matt rarely drank even a beer; his inebriated state was clear evidence of just how badly I'd hurt him.

If you didn't give a shit, I thought, you wouldn't have gotten drunk and called me. I said nothing. The divorce had been finalized that day. The papers to prove it lay next to the phone.

“What, you still have nothing to say?” he taunted. “I bet you had plenty to say to that kid, what's his name, Seth.”

Matt was right, again. I had had plenty to say to Seth; he'd had a lot to say to me. Seth was only twenty-five but he had the toned, brilliant mind of a seasoned scholar. That's what attracted me to him in the first place, the words that came out of his mouth. The physical part just flowed from that.

It was inevitable.

It was wrong.

“You're really a bitch, you know?”

I had wronged Matt. But I didn't have to take this abuse. He was no longer my husband.

“I'm hanging up, Matt,” I said. “I wish you the best.”

Before he could reply with a scathing remark, I ended the call. I went directly to bed but couldn't sleep.

Guilt is a very noisy companion.

Chapter 2

T
he day Richard and I got married it rained. Cats and dogs, my father said. The man loved a cliché.

The July sky opened up around three that afternoon and dumped rivers of rain on us until after midnight. When the reception was over, the rain finally stopped.

They say that rain on your wedding day is a good thing, a sign of luck, assurance of a blessed union.

For a little over twenty years our luck held, Richard's and mine. It held through good times and bad. It held through the birth of our two children, Clara, then two years later, Colin. It held through colds and chicken pox and scraped knees, through Richard's promotions and my ovarian cancer scare, and through the kids' graduations from high school. Our luck even held through the deaths of my parents in an awful car crash, and through Richard's mother's slow descent in Alzheimer's and then his father's fatal heart attack.

It held through the fabulous trip to Europe we took to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary.

But, as my father was fond of saying, all good things come to an end. Our union, blessed for so long, fell apart in a spectacular way the night I found evidence of Richard's affair—the night he admitted to being in love with someone else.

A man named Bob Landry.

My life as I knew it exploded that night. Almost a year later, I'm still finding bloody shards in unlikely places.

Like in the U.S. mail.

I'd spent most of the early spring afternoon walking, wandering really, with no goal in mind other than to eventually wind my way home. I was tired when I got back to the apartment but it was a good tired, the kind you feel in your bones. I hoped I would sleep well that night; since the divorce, sleep had been a hit or miss activity.

I shuffled through the mail I'd retrieved from the box in the lobby. A few bills. A letter from a colleague on the MFA's Annual Fund committee. A letter from my doctor, confirming what the technician at the hospital had already told me, that my mammogram was clean.

And then . . . I held the chunky envelope in fingers that were suddenly shaky.

Interestingly, some people still hadn't heard about Richard's emergence from a lifetime of secrecy and lies. Take, for example, the Smiths, a family who used to own an apartment in the building next door but who'd relocated to Connecticut five years earlier. Clearly they didn't know that Richard and I were no longer “man and wife” because there it was in my shaking hand, a wedding invitation addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Richard Allard.

Mrs. Richard Allard. The name mocked me; it mocked everything I had thought I had and was and would be until the end, until death parted Richard from me.

After the divorce I'd gone back to using my maiden name, Keats. Maiden name. An accurate term in my case as Richard was the first and only man I'd ever had sex with, and not really, not entirely, until after we were married. Until after the church sanctioned our union and we promised to love and cherish each other and to accept children willingly from God. Not until after we were made to listen to all that other crap Richard's Catholic church demanded we listen to.

Nell Keats. I am once again who I was a long, long time ago. Except that now, Nell Keats is a forty-two-year-old divorced woman, mother of twenty-year-old Clara and eighteen-year-old Colin, my children who still have their father's name, who in that way and more still belong to him. I could throw off the burden of Richard's name, the mark of his possession, but I couldn't ask my son and daughter to do the same.

Nell Keats. In what relation do I stand to those three Allards?

I tossed the wedding invitation from the Smiths on the hall table. It would have to be answered. I would have to explain yet again what I was so tired of explaining. And then would come the inevitable questions.

How are you feeling?

Like hell.

Are you okay?

No.

Did Richard at least take care of you financially?

Oh, yes.

A wild thought came to me then. Upon learning that Richard and I were no longer married, would the Smiths choose my ex-husband and his lover over me? Would Richard and Bob be invited to the Smiths' yearly Summer Splash pool party? Would I be left off the guest list?

Stranger things had happened to me since that eye-opening night when I found the scrap of paper in Richard's pants pocket as I sorted the laundry for clothes to be taken to the dry cleaners. I unfolded the scrap, thinking it might have been a receipt Richard might need to record, and instead found a note in a man's handwriting—I can always tell a man's from a woman's—and what it said exactly modesty forbids me to repeat.

I sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Richard wasn't home; he'd said he was working late. When Richard walked into the apartment at almost eleven, I was still sitting on the edge of our bed, numb. It never occurred to me, not for one moment, that the note was a piece of trash Richard had picked up from outside the building. Richard was always tidying up. Somehow, I just knew this note was evidence of something far more unpleasant than trash.

Richard came into the bedroom, smiled, opened his mouth to say, “Hi, Nellie.” But nothing came out of his mouth. He saw the look on my face, saw the note I held in my hand, and knew the game was over. Thankfully, he didn't deny his culpability.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. He looked ill, scared.

I said nothing that night, I couldn't, but oh, by the next night the words were flying out of my mouth, questions, insults, protestations, cries for mercy.

Mercy. I felt like a victim, powerless, confused. Why me?

Eleven months later and I was still asking, why me?

I stared down at the Smiths' wedding invitation on the hall table. Let Richard handle it, I thought. Let Richard do the explaining.

I'm through.