Read To My Ex-Husband for Free Online Page A

wonderful, considering—as though I’d just had a gall bladder operation.
    Nina and I were talking this morning about how you know it’s the last time. You often don’t know it’s the last time for a lot of things. The last time you scare somebody to death with a rubber lizard. The last time you sneak a look at your Christmas presents before Christmas. The last time you make out in a parked car. The last time—am I putting too fine a point on this?—you make love to your husband.
    Nina says that, with Alec, she knew it was the last time. “He said, ‘Listen, honey, it’s the last time.’” She laughed. Of course, she wasn’t laughing at the time. She was twenty-seven, with two toddlers, and Alec was about to move in with Nicole.
    I wonder if what I remember is what you remember. Do we remember different things, or do we remember things differently? Where was it that we last made love, Nick? Maybe you think it was outside, under the clothesline at the house we rented last summer. You remember the way the legs of your khakis tickled your back as you rocked back and forth.
    It was not under the clothesline. It was in that funny bathtub on the first floor, the one that was made for midgets. You said, let’s try it, and so I wrapped my legs around you and you slid under me. But then we started moving and making waves. Bigger and bigger they were getting, until the water began sloshing over the side of the tub. I started laughing. I couldn’t stop. The more you moved, the more the water leapt out of the tub, and the harder I laughed. Tears ran down my cheeks. You got furious with me, and so it didn’t work. You grabbed your towel and stormed out of the bathroom, and I thought, it was funny. We could have at least had that together.

DECEMBER 12
    I need to talk to you about money. One reason is that the gas company sent me a maintenance contract for the heater. Do I want a maintenance contract? I know that one of your longstanding grievances with me is that I never paid any attention to these things. It strikes me we had a pretty good balance there; you never paid any attention to cleaning the house or what we were having for dinner or who needed to get picked up at the orthodontist. It’s interesting, isn’t it? That while I’m over here learning more than I want to know about maintenance contracts, you’ve probably figured out that if dinner isn’t any good, there’s only one person you can turn to. Separations are great for that. If nothing else, they teach us how to be whole.
    Now, about Annie. I’m worried about her. We’re into our third day of stony silence. She’s obviously angry and upset, but all she’ll say to me is, “I’m fine, Mom.” She also won’t let me do “Mommy things,” like smooth her hair back or fix her collar. She was probably never fond of “Mommy things”—what adolescent is?—but she usually indulged me.
    Somehow we could have handled this whole thing better. One of the problems is that, for Annie and Peter, there isn’t the relief that comes of a sudden cease-fire, the stunning quiet after the last plate crashes in the corner.
    There was no fire. Our yelling and shouting turned inward, slowly poisoning us, breaking us.
    To begin, it was a bad idea to tell them at dinner. We should have taken a lesson from the Maple family in Too Far To Go , which I’ve recently reread. Remember that scene when the eldest daughter comes home from France at the end of her semester, and they have this lobster and champagne dinner? The plan is to tell the children later, one at a time, but it doesn’t work out that way because one of the sons notices that his father has been silently crying all through dinner, and asks why. The son gets drunk and shouts, “What do you care about us? We’re just little things you had.” Then the boy stuffs his sister’s