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 might have always expected.
The change felt like a given and yet came as a revelation. In the next several minutes, Amanda accepted the end of her marriage and to her mind, ended it 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?”
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“Nadia wants me to.” This strayed from the script but not so much as to nullify the ritual.
He packed a bag and two suits, saying he’d get the rest of his stuff that weekend. As orchestrated as these minutes seemed to be, Amanda experienced them as surreal.
“Joint custody,” she said. “Please, tell me you’ll still be 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 Vanessa are mine. Even if you say otherwise, I love them; they are my daughters.” 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 somewhat older than Amanda, maybe even thirty, sidled inside. Glittery eyes, small nose, prominent chin, Nadia stood too close to Amanda and shook her hand too vigorously. She wore pink dance-workout clothes under a puffy white down vest. So, I’m Mike’s Gyrotronics coach.” Her voice was abrasive but bright. “And, like I said on the phone, he’s in love with me.”
Amanda hesitated and kept her eyes lowered, careful not to mock them—no eye rolling. Because, Mike had to be kidding, although she had known for awhile he wasn’t. The Mike Morrison she had married seven years ago, when she was eighteen, had morphed into someone she felt sorry for. How had that happened?
“Did he tell you about the Gyro program? We use spiral sequences, both free-form and on machines. To double core strength.”
“Nadia, please,” Mike rubbed his forehead. “She’s not interested.
“How do you know?” Nadia’s blonde pony tail squished back and forth against her white vest.
“We should go,” he said, rising from the couch.
“Just a second, Mike.” Nadia sat crossed-legged in front of the coffee table and opened her over-sized, shiny black satchel. “Let me do a mini-reading.”
She pulled a stack of cards from her purse and arranged four face down. Mike returned to the couch and slumped into the cushions. But Amanda remained standing.
“Sit down,” Nadia said. “Pick a card and turn it over.” To avoid questions as to why she preferred standing, Amanda squatted, tucking her shins under her thighs and resting her butt on her heels. It wasn’t much of a compromise but she wanted them out, and hoped this would go fast.
Her fingers trembled—anger, impatience, what did it matter? 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 finally left, Amanda turned out the lights and ran a hot bath. She lay in the tub so the water covered her neck. She had married Mike because he understood people; he understood life at large. But now he was obeying a gym teacher with psychic powers.
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