Chapter 3 - What My Mother SaidMy mother, Dorothy, opened her front door wearing slippers and her old green cardigan. She simply pulled the door wider open the instant she saw my red, swollen eyes. "Tea?" she asked simply.
I nodded. Five minutes later I sat at her kitchen table, both hands wrapped tight around a warm mug.
"Do you want me to actually tell you what to do here?" Mom asked gently.
"No."
"Good. Because honestly, I have absolutely no idea myself."
I very nearly smiled at that. Then I told her everything, start to finish. When I finally finished talking, she reached over and touched my wrist gently.
"You can genuinely love someone," she said, "and still be deeply unhappy with the actual life you're building together with them."
"What if he was actually right, though?"
"Right about what, exactly?"
"What if I only stayed because he genuinely needed me?"
Mom leaned back in her chair. "I genuinely can't answer that particular question for you, sweetheart."
I hated that answer, purely because it was so plainly honest.
Then she said, "You've been saying 'I've got it handled' since you were roughly twelve years old."
"I don't say that phrase quite that often."
She raised one skeptical eyebrow at me.
"Okay, fine. Maybe I actually do say it that much."
"Sometimes you say it so quickly that nobody else ever gets a real chance to say, 'Let me help you instead.'"
I stared down hard at my tea. "When somebody genuinely needs you, you run straight toward them," she continued. "You always have, ever since you were tiny."
My throat tightened hard. "The considerably harder question," she added, "is what you actually do when they genuinely don't need you anymore."
Driving home afterward, I finally admitted something genuinely ugly to myself. I had genuinely liked being needed by him. Before Xavier got sick, I never once truly knew exactly where I stood with him. During his treatment, though, I always knew precisely.
He called out for me whenever he felt sick. He reached for me whenever he felt afraid. For the first time in years, I finally felt genuinely essential to someone.
Need had started feeling dangerously close to actual love. Maybe, somehow, both things could genuinely be true at once.
When I got back home, Xavier's duffel bag still sat by our front door. "Where did you go?" he asked.
"My mother's place."
I pulled my own suitcase down from the bedroom closet. Xavier followed me in. "What exactly are you doing?"
"Packing enough for a few days away."
"I thought you actually wanted me to stay here."
I set the suitcase flat on the bed. "I did want that, initially. Then I spent an entire hour asking myself honestly why I wanted it."
His face tightened. "And? What did you conclude?"
"I genuinely don't know what I actually want anymore, Xavier."
He stepped further into the bedroom. "Monique, I didn't ask for this divorce because I stopped caring about you."
"No. You asked for it because you decided you understood my own feelings better than I actually did myself."
I folded a sweater carefully and placed it inside the case. "If you genuinely want this divorce, I won't stand in your way."
Xavier stared at me. "You're genuinely just going to walk away, just like that?"
"I'm stopping something I've actually been doing for years now."
"What exactly do you mean by that?"
"Trying to make myself useful enough that nobody ever actually leaves me."
He sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. I unzipped the side pocket of my suitcase. "You waited until Dr. Okafor gave you good news today," I said. "You decided that once you were finally healthy again, I could leave you without carrying any real guilt over it."
Xavier lowered his eyes to the floor. "When I was genuinely sick, I couldn't actually ask you something."
"Ask me what, exactly?"
"Whether you still actually wanted me, underneath all of it."
I stopped packing entirely. "You asked me to handle every single bill. You asked me to sit through every appointment with you. You asked me to stay awake beside you whenever you were scared. Why was that particular question the one thing you genuinely couldn't ask me directly?"
"Because I genuinely needed all those other things from you. If I'd asked whether you loved me, and you'd said yes, I would have never actually known whether you truly meant it, or whether you simply meant, 'I can't leave you like this, not now.'"
His words sat heavy in the air between us.
I closed the suitcase halfway. "So you waited until today, specifically."
"Today was genuinely the first day you could actually choose freely, without cancer choosing for you instead."
For the first time, I genuinely understood exactly what he'd been thinking this entire time. I still hated deeply what he'd actually done with that particular understanding, though.
"If you hadn't ever gotten sick," he asked quietly, "would the two of us still even be married right now?"
Months earlier, I would have automatically protected him from hearing the honest answer. "I genuinely don't know," I said instead.
Xavier looked away from me. "But you don't actually know either," I continued. "We were genuinely falling apart, well before the cancer ever arrived. Then you got sick, and suddenly we needed each other so desperately that neither one of us ever had to ask whether we were actually happy together underneath it all."
He looked back at me directly. "Do you still love me, Monique?"
"Yes. But I loved you back when I was genuinely miserable too, remember. I've learned now that love can keep you stuck somewhere, long after the actual life you're living there has already stopped working properly."
His eyes filled with fresh tears. "So what happens now, then?"
I shut the suitcase firmly. "I'm leaving tonight. Not because I've already decided on divorce. Because for once in my life, I genuinely need to make one real choice without being your nurse, your fixer, or the woman constantly terrified you'll fall completely apart without her there."
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"And us? What happens to us?"
I lifted the suitcase off the bed. "If there's still genuinely an us worth having, Xavier, we're going to have to find that out properly, once neither one of us is staying purely out of fear of actually leaving."
