Amanda hadn’t changed out of her daytime clothes as she usually did once the girls were asleep. She hadn’t even slipped off her shoes, choosing to receive Mike’s announcement with formality.
He said he was leaving. She nodded, of course, and slid into a phase of life she may have always expected. The change affected her as both a revelation and as a given.
To her, the marriage ended in a ceremony as traditional as the one that had started it. So that just as she had answered Yes to the question Do you Amanda take this man…she now asked him, “Mike, are you sure?”
“Nadia wants me to.” This strayed from the script but not so much as to nullify the ritual.
[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]
He packed a bag and two suits, saying he’d get the rest of his stuff that weekend. As orchestrated as these minutes felt, Amanda experienced them as utterly surreal.
“Joint custody,” she said. “Please, tell me you’re not giving up being their father.”
Mike spun around slowly, having gathered things from the bathroom. “My God, Amanda, how can you ask me that?”
“It’s important.”
They were downstairs now, and he moved as if being pulled into the living room. “I never questioned…Evie and DeeDee.” Mike sank into the couch and bent forward, hands covering his face. “I’ll come over Saturday morning. We’ll talk over the details. Make arrangements.”
His cell phone rang and he pulled it from his jacket. “No. It’s fine. Really. It’s fine; I’m about to…Why? You mean, now?” He looked up and Amanda unfolded her arms. She was drifting, suspended in the dim-lit room. “Nadia wants to meet you,” Mike said. “She wants to know if she can come in.”
“Where is she?”
“Outside. In the car.”
Nadia Hinton, a compact woman the same age as Amanda or maybe older, maybe thirty, wore pink dance-workout clothes under a puffy, white down vest. Glittery eyes, small nose, prominent chin. Standing too close, she shook Amanda’s hand too vigorously.
“So,” she said, her voice abrasive but bright, “I’m Mike’s Gyrotronics coach. And, he’s in love with me.”
Amanda hesitated, not allowing herself to smile for fear of smirking.
“Did he tell you about the Gyro program? We use spiral sequences, free-form and on machines to build core strength.”
“Nadia, please,” Mike said, rubbing his forehead. “She’s not interested.”
“How do you know?” Nadia’s blonde pony tail squished back and forth.
“We should go,” he said, rising from the couch.
“Sit down a minute.” Nadia sat crossed-legged in front of the coffee table and opened her over-sized, shiny black satchel. “Let me do an instant reading.” She pulled a stack of cards from her purse and arranged four face down.
Mike returned to the couch, sighing. But Amanda was hesitating again. She preferred to stand.
“Sit down,” Nadia said. “Pick a card and turn it over.”
Amanda refused to allow any questions from any quarter regarding why she might insist on standing. So she tucked her shins under her thighs and rested her butt on her heels. She had supposed herself calm but her fingers trembled as she turned over the outer left card.
Nadia’s breath whistled with gleeful approval. “No shit, the Tower. It means crisis and disillusionment. That’s accurate; I mean, well, yeah.” She held the card in Amanda’s face, and pointed at the man and woman falling out of the tower’s windows. “In opposite directions. See that?”
When they left, Amanda turned out the lights and ran a hot bath. She lay in the tub so the water covered her neck. Almost ten years ago she had married Mike because he understood people. He had understood the world. But now he was obeying a gym teacher with psychic powers. So that ended that.
(Click here to read the next episode.)
