Twenty Four Weeks - Episode 12 - "Twenty Three" (PG) by James David Denisson
Twenty Four Weeks – Episode 12 – “Twenty Three”
Written by J.D.Denisson.
A sequel to the movie “This is Where I Leave You”.
Characters and back story based on the novel “This is Where I Leave You” by Jonathan Tropper.
Copyright 2016 J.D.Denisson.
Previously…
...I go and see Wade who’s impatiently waiting for me.
“What is it?” he asks me.
“Free your weekend,” I tell him.
“What? Why?”
“You and Chloe are coming with us to a marriage workshop.”
“What?” he says, looking confused.
I explain things a little. I leave out Grant’s assignment.
“Hey, man, this is not my thing,” he says quickly.
“It’s not my thing either, but it’s kind of important. You’ll understand that, believe me.”
…
The first day was full of the same words and feelings of our sessions, perhaps a little less tailored to our own personal problems. Chloe listened intently but Wade looked like he wanted to be anywhere other than there. Still, he was keeping up a brave face and maybe is new bride didn’t notice or didn’t know how he looked when he was bored or uncomfortable. I did, and maybe Quinn did too. I didn’t ask her, and I wasn’t going to.
Vows, they said, were the links – the bonds – between us. They keep us together when everything else is insecure. For better or worse. Keeping them when times are good was easy, they said, and in a way those times mean little when hard times come and you choose to keep those vows anyway, that’s when they matter. I felt Quinn’s hand close on mine and squeeze, like she was in great pain. Her eyes were closed as they said those things and I knew that she was in anguish over how she had broken hers with me. I forgive her again. I hope she is starting to forgive herself too.
After the first session Grant saw us and approached, spoke our names. He looks at Wade and I don’t know if he’s aware who he is. If he does he keeps it from his face.
“This is my friend, Wade,” I say, “and his wife, Chloe.”
“Ah,” Grant says with a smile. “Glad you could come. How are you finding it?”
“Very informative,” Wade says in that way of his that communicates the opposite without you being aware of it. I’ve heard it a million times.
But Chloe is more genuine. “I’m so glad to be here,” she says. “All these wonderful people.”
“How long have you been married?”
Chloe takes Wade’s arm and giggles a little. “Three weeks.”
…
“...I made promises to you and I broke them so easily.”
“I don’t think it was easy for you. I think you fought against it as long as you could.”
“Maybe. But I could have been stronger.”
“If I’d given a damn about you then you would have been.”
“But I still broke them.”
I stop and hold her by the shoulders. I look into her eyes. “What about now?”
She smiles, perhaps a little sadly, but there is some determination in her eyes. “You give a damn now, don’t you?” she asks me.
“You know I do.”
“Then I can be strong. I won’t break those vows again. I promise you.”
…
“I think it’s about time you tell us about your affair,” Mary says quietly.
I let her go and she sighs. “I guess we had to come to that sooner or later.”
She hesitates and Mary sees this. Quinn’s counsellor leans forward and takes Quinn’s hand.
“I don’t know what to say,” my struggling wife confesses. “I mean, I’ve told Judd this story, but not everything. I don’t want to hurt him again by reliving all of this. So what do I say?”
Mary smiles reassuringly – a well-practiced and effective gesture. “You know, we only have one rule here?”
“Honesty,” Quinn says with a sad little nod.
“Honesty,” Mary repeats.
“Honesty it is then,” Quinn says and takes a deep breath.
…
“Do you mind...” She takes a deep breath. “Do you mind if I sleep alone tonight?”
“No,” I say quietly.
“I know it seems like a step back, but it isn’t.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry. I just have something on my mind and I need to think it through.”
“Is it anything I need to worry about?” And I am worried because she’s asked me to stay out of our bed like I’m in some sort of trouble.
She shakes her head.
“And you’re not ready to share it with me?”
“No. Sorry. It’s my thing though. It’s not you. You have to know that.”
Twenty Three
Monday
Quinn and I are dancing on ice. Not thin, solid, but slippery in places, wet in others. Our feet don’t wear skates. We move in unison on normal shoes and our feet slip and turn. Sometimes we are steady, sometimes, more often than not it seems, we slide and lose our footing, stumble. That’s our life now.
I haven’t been back in our bed, and I think that I’m okay with it, though sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that there is something irrevocably wrong with us, like before, and we’re ignoring the symptoms again. She says that she’s thinking through some issues, and I believe her, because I am too. I’m mulling over the story of her infidelity, over and over again. I’m getting stuck on parts, words that she’s said, words that sting, even now.
She’s right to some extent – I am angry at her. I wished she’d been stronger, I wished she loved me more, held me in more regard. But she didn’t. She ran off to Wade every chance she could, unheeding of the consequences, uncaring of how I would be hurt if and when I found out. And there I was, oblivious to it all. I cared so little about her that I ignored all of the signs that had to be piling up around her.
I’m at work. Wade is acting strangely, not himself. Some days I don’t know what I’m going to get with him, but when the show starts he goes into asshole mode and we’re back where we left off, before I found out he was the one that look my life from me. I haven’t asked him what he thought of that weekend and maybe that’s what got him all moody and distracted.
The show kicks off as usual and I’ve lined up the callers in a neat row. He’s knee deep in the usual crap when I send a caller his way and the ass on the other end is complaining that his woman is trying to control him. He’s complaining that she wants him to stop seeing his buddies on the weekend, cut his drinking, his smoking and his gambling. She wants him home to look after the kids. But he thinks he keeps bread on the table and pays the bills and the mortgage and that gives him the god-given-right to let off some steam.
“Don’t be a wuss,” Wade says, adding his catch phrase. “You gotta be a man. And the man calls the shots. You wanna drink like a man, smoke and bet like a man then don’t let your woman tell you how you should live.”
He’s not saying anything new and normally I wouldn’t be worried, but I know where he’s been recently. The listeners don’t.
“Take my friend. Now he takes me to some marriage thing...”
I’m going cold and red in the face all at once.
“They’re telling me how to make my woman happy and it’s all about emasculating yourself. I mean, damn...”
My finger is on the mute button and it’s shaking.
“My friend, he lets his woman call the shots. You gotta go to this thing, you gotta change for me. And he just goes there and listens hands her all his power...”
“What the hell, Wade!” I yell.
The problem is I’ve not pushed the mute button and this is all on air. This is live to the city right now. Our differences are now being broadcast in over ten states.
My fist hits his mouth, splits his lip, dislodges a tooth. There is blood running down his face. At the same time he crosses with his right into the side of my face. My whole head jars at the impact and I’m instantly dizzy and I fall to my knees.
“Son of a... !” Wade yells. “You broke a tooth.”
“You ass!” I yell back as the room spins around me.
We don’t get much further because one of the technicians has leapt into the booth and stopped the fight going any further. Another has hit the mute switch and crossed to the news a little prematurely.
Stewart yells at us in his office and sends us home to cool down. We’ll be back later where I’ll probably get fired.
Quinn is less than impressed, more so when the papers sport a headline that is sensational and true. It’s not front page news fortunately, but it did get a spot on page three before some bombings in Turkey that killed quite a few people, so it was at least more important than that.
Later that week I learn that a reporter has been snooping around and has learned from an ‘unnamed source’ that Wade had slept with my wife and that was the start of all this mess. The article, now on page five, mentions me by name but leaves out Quinn. But you don’t have to be a genius to link her to me, especially if you already know we’re married like Quinn’s bosses do.