The Marriage Intervention (24 page)

“Now is your chance,” Josie said. “She’s been threatening to tell the school board Scott and I had a fling. Even though it was years ago.”
 

“How does she know?” Summer said.
 

“She saw him groping me outside the auditorium one time.”
 

Summer rolled her eyes. “Juvenile.”
 

“I know. She’s awful,” Josie said.

“I meant you and Scott.”
 

Josie felt herself blush. “Right. Anyway. So I was hoping you could get some photos of her.”
 

“Why?” Delaney asked. “Then we have permanent record of her being an ugly witch. I don’t want that on paper. Or disk. Or anywhere.”
 

“She’s having an affair with Scott.”
 

Summer and Delaney looked at each other.
 

“What?” Josie said.
 

“Josie,” Summer said, in her mom voice. “Is this about Blair, or about Scott?”
 

Josie looked at the floor. “It’s about Blair,” she mumbled.
 

“Hm. So you want photos of her and Scott in the act,” Summer said.
 

“Stop using your mommy voice on me,” Josie said to Summer. “You sound so disapproving. She thinks that if I lose the principal position, she’ll get it. She came out second on the list. But if I have proof that she is having an affair with Scott, she’ll have the same disqualifying factor. It will be pointless for her to rat me out because I can turn around and do the same to her.”
 

Delaney laughed. “We’ll do it. I can’t wait to get back at that awful woman.”
 

Summer shook her head. “We’ll do it, but I don’t believe this is really about Blair. Just for the record.”
 

“Thanks, guys,” Josie said. “It means a lot.”
 

They stood there in silence for a moment.
 

“So, where’s Paul?” Summer and Delaney said in unison.

There was no point in putting off the inevitable for any longer than she already had.

“Paul moved out.”
 

“I knew it!” Delaney said, almost triumphantly.
 

“I thought so,” Summer said.
 

Wow. This is going so much differently than I imagined it would. Where’s the surprise? Where’s the pity?
 

“You guys don’t sound surprised.”
 

“You’ve got to hit rock bottom,” Summer said. She shrugged one shoulder, and Delaney nodded.
 

“Oh,” Josie said. “Well. So. Obviously this stupid Marriage Intervention thing isn’t working out. I quit.”
 

Summer and Delaney responded to Josie’s declaration of withdrawal from The Marriage Intervention with uncharacteristic nonchalance, nodding as if she were crazy and they had to indulge her, while helping themselves to the brownies on the counter.

They made small talk for an hour, and Josie noticed Summer avoided talking about phone calls or news of any sort.
 

Josie knew she could play dirty and bring up the mysterious phone call while Delaney was here, just to get information out of Summer. But something about the expression on Summer’s face when she turned away from Josie at Rowdy’s stopped her. She looked stricken and pale. Her lips drew tight, just like they did that lunchtime sophomore year when she sought out Josie and Delaney to tell them her grandmother had died.

Summer would tell them in time. So Josie went along with the idle chitchat about the windy weather, Sarah’s science fair project and Delaney’s disgust at having to drain an abscess on a horse’s rib cage the week before.
 

“It was so juicy. I mean, sooo juicy! I had to wear goggles. And I should have worn one of those plastic parka thingies.”
 

Josie wasn’t fooled into thinking they planned to let her off the hook with The Marriage Intervention. They were just biding their time.
 

But you take what you can get.

After they left, Josie spent the rest of Saturday grading papers and planning lessons. And thinking about a personal trainer.

A personal trainer was simply someone else—some muscle-bound teeny bopper, more than likely—telling her what she was doing wrong.
 

“I don’t know if I can hang with that,” she said to herself several times throughout the day. “Nope, probably not,” her self answered, each time providing reasons that kind of relationship wouldn’t work. First of all, she was predisposed to dislike anyone who tried to encourage her to work out (i.e. break a sweat). Second, she didn’t really have time to add another weekly meeting to her schedule. Third, she hated people who liked working out. And didn’t all trainers like working out? They were gluttons for punishment. They liked that feeling of their muscles burning. They liked sweating, breathing hard and feeling terrible.
 

It made absolutely no sense.

Therefore, hooking Josie up with one of these crazy people was a waste of Summer and Delaney’s money. Just before she fell asleep, she resolved to call and cancel first thing Monday morning.

***

Josie woke up Sunday morning to a text from Paul:
Lunch tomorrow?
 

“Tomorrow” really meant today, she realized when the sleep fog cleared from her brain. He’d texted last night after she fell asleep. She felt her stomach lurch and butterfly wings flapped wildly inside it.
 

Why did he want to have lunch with her? Did he plan to give her even more bad news? To ask for a divorce? To tell her he’d found someone else? Maybe he’d decided he loved the bachelor life. Maybe he’d decided he wanted to move in with Terry, to escape the piles of mail and papers Josie stacked at various places all over the house.
 

She texted him back:
Sure. Where do you want to go?
 

Paul:
Sand Witch?
 

Josie:
No, Delaney says the owner wipes the sweat off his forehead with the same towel he uses to dry the glasses.
 

Paul:
Ha. Okay. How about that pizza place?
 

Josie:
Pizza Palace?
 

Paul:
Yeah.
 

Josie:
Okay. Noon?
 

Paul:
Sure.
 

She wanted to add so many other messages:
I miss you, I love you, Please come home, pretty please with sugar on top.
But she didn’t.
 

Josie spent an entire hour and a half preparing for their lunch date. She exfoliated her legs and put on Paul’s favorite vanilla-and-lemon-scented lotion. It was still too early to leave for lunch, and she felt lonely, so she indulged herself with a batch of chocolate chip cookies and felt only slightly ashamed when she set them on the counter next to the plate of brownies.
 

No one ever had to know. She’d eat it all before she had any more guests. Including her husband.
 

Is he a guest now?

She wondered what Paul had done last night.
 

Probably played poker with Terry Schmidt. Or watched a UFC fight. Or went out to Rowdy’s to scope out women.
 

Finally, Josie pulled on a pair of dark skinny jeans and a peach sweater, and spent way longer than necessary searching for her black and white infinity scarf, which she eventually found under the bed.
 

Once she’d positioned it carefully around her neck and applied her mascara, she felt pretty good.
 

Lunch would go well. She could feel it.
 

***

Josie and Paul always joked about how fun it would be to show up at a bar, separately, and pretend they weren’t married. They’d leave their wedding rings in their cars and pretend one of them was picking up the other, asking if that seat was taken and sitting down to make flirtatious small talk.
 

When their marriage was going well, the scenario sounded fun and romantic. But now, when they met for lunch at The Pizza Palace, Josie felt like they were actually strangers. Not in a good way. Paul waited for her in a corner booth. Of course he showed up early. He sat there, sipping his Dr. Pepper (he never ordered anything else) and perusing the menu as if he didn’t know he’d order sausage and pineapple like he always did.
 

She was relieved to see his expression soften when he saw her. Maybe there was still hope. She sat down across from him as she had a million times. This time, it felt different. Maybe because they arrived separately. Or maybe because she had no idea whether he was really drinking Dr. Pepper. He always ordered it, but what if he’d changed his mind about soda, just like he’d changed his mind about living with her?
 

She forced a smile. “Hey.”
 

“Hey,” he said. “I already ordered. I hope that’s okay.”
 

“Pineapple and sausage?”
 

“Yeah. And breadsticks.”
 

 
Okay, some things did remain the same.
 

“Perfect,” she said. She felt a goofy but authentic smile spreading across her face and for once, didn’t try to stop it, to play it cool.

“I miss you,” Paul said.

Josie surveyed him carefully. The stitches stood out against his skin, and the bruising all over his face had dulled to a gray-blue color. She wanted, more than anything, to hold his head against her chest, to offer him comfort, to run her fingertips along his injuries. But of course, she couldn’t. Not now.
 

Instead, she stretched her arm out so their fingertips touched and said, “I miss you, too.”
 

The waiter came then, to ask if Josie wanted anything, and Josie pulled her hand away, as if she’d been caught doing something illicit.
 

When he left, Josie said, “Why don’t you come home?”
 

Paul smiled. It wasn’t a condescending smile like she expected. Rather, it was a kind, apologetic smile that broke her heart one single beat at a time.
 

“Josie,” he said. “It hasn’t even been three full days since I moved out. I really think we need a bit of time away from each other. Time to think, time to breathe. You know?”
 

Josie knew, all right.
 

“I get it. I understand,” she said. “I just don’t like it.”
 

Paul sighed. The waiter brought their pizza.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said, separating a slice off the pie for each of them, the cheese stretching from the tray to each plate. “I don’t like either, but I think it’ll do us some good. Okay?”
 

“Okay. I’m just afraid you won’t want to come back.”

She wasn’t going to go. If Josie had been smarter, one step ahead of the game, she would have ignored Summer’s text on Tuesday afternoon, pretended she never got it. But lately it seemed like life was always one step ahead of her, dancing to a slightly faster song than she was.
 

And so, she responded to Summer’s
Your personal training appointment is at 5 p.m. Call me after
with something stupid like
What? Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about.
 

If she had been smarter, she would have gotten caught up in something at work, like grading papers or erasing that day’s lesson on bees and honey off the whiteboard. Or scraping gum off the bottoms of her students’ desks with the edge of a ruler.
 

But out of some need to please Summer and Delaney, especially after seeing the closed-off look on Summer’s face the past few times they’d been together, she put on some of the new leggings she hadn’t ripped and a matching tank top and went to the gym. On time.
 

She could just cancel after this initial appointment. Blame it on the trainer.

The girl at the front desk didn’t look exactly like a gym rat. She looked almost manly with her short, gel-spiked hair and her broad shoulders. Big muscles, though, accentuated by a tight light blue t-shirt tucked into a pair of shiny black gym shorts.
 

Not the look I’d go for, but whatever.
 

Josie felt only slightly intimidated, less than she would if the receptionist had been a skinny tan girl in a leather catsuit.
 

“You must be Josie,” she said when the embarrassingly loud electronic doorbell signaled Josie’s entrance. “I’m Ronnie. I’m going to get you started. Your personal trainer’s—uh, running a little late. New guy.”
 

Oh, great. She was getting the new guy. Just what she needed.
 

Ronnie laughed then, a “heh, heh, heh” sound Josie always associated with video game designers in a dark room. “And then have the giant dragon come out from behind that building and attack the protagonist. Heh heh heh,” or, “Ooh, what if we fill that river with invisible boiling lava that burns the guy’s feet, only he can’t actually SEE it? Heh heh heh.”
 

“First we’re going to do a body fat analysis,” Ronnie said. She chuckled when Josie grimaced.
 

“Don’t worry,” Ronnie said. “It’s painless. I promise. It’s just to give you a baseline, a starting point. So you can see your improvement.”
 

Josie snorted.
 

Ronnie laughed again. “We’re going to get along just fine. When I first started coming to the gym two years ago, I had an attitude similar to yours. I was definitely put off by the body fat analysis.” She shook her head as she remembered it. “I snorted exactly like you just did. But I’ve seen myself make big strides, and it feels really good. Let’s go.”
 

Josie followed Ronnie to a little room just off the weights area. Fortunately, it had a door, which gave Josie privacy as Ronnie used a caliper to measure the fat on her stomach, her triceps and her thighs.