To Save This Child. Darlene Graham
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cookies were verboten. So was the wine for that matter. Kendal always struggled with a teeny, tiny weight problem that her best friend Sarah insisted on calling “voluptuousness.” But today was her birthday, Kendal told herself. And Valentine’s Day. She reached for another cookie. She deserved a little celebration. But as she drained the last of the wine, she knew she wasn’t celebrating.
She started to cry.
At first her weeping was gentle, controlled, like a character in a soap opera trying not to wreck a mask of makeup. But before long she broke down, sobbing, hiccuping, letting the tears run down her face as she sank lower into the scented water. Finally, she had scooted so low that her lips skimmed the surface. Another inch, she thought, blubbering, and I could just go ahead and drown myself.
She rolled her eyes at such a ridiculous thought. But in this past year she had not let herself have one single pity party. And by Jove, she was going to have herself a doozie tonight.
In this past year, she had been brave, trying to show everyone that she was okay. Somehow she’d been strong this whole long, lonely year since Phillip had dumped her. Dumped was such a brutal, ugly word, but nonetheless a true one, and Kendal was all about truth these days. The ugly, unvarnished truth. She was fat. And childless. And Phillip had dumped her.
“It’s not working anymore,” Phillip had announced on the night of the fifth anniversary of their so-called relationship, which was also the date of her birthday. Which was also Valentine’s Day. Which was also this exact hateful date.
“I’m sorry. It’s just not.” His big brown eyes had looked pained as he’d said it. As if the breakup was something totally beyond his control and he was so sad, so powerless, about the whole thing.
Kendal had asked the usual questions that sputter out of the shocked and bereaved—the dumped.
What do you mean? Are you saying it’s over? Just like that? Are you moving out?
But of course he was moving out. Phillip was already packing his bags, right there in front of her eyes. And he was consulting one of his never-ending lists while he did it. He’d apparently given this considerable thought. But then, Phillip gave considerable thought to taking a poot. That’s why Kendal had never expected this kind of rash act from him.
Kendal had wanted to scream. You can’t just walk out like this! It’s our anniversary! And it’s Valentine’s Day! And it’s my thirtieth birthday, for crying out loud! Instead she forced herself to remain calm, adult, as she followed Phillip around the bedroom.
She argued that they’d built a life here. That they’d even bought this town house together.
“I’ll need my equity back,” he said flatly as he meticulously stacked underwear into his suitcase.
“You know I can’t come up with that kind of money!” Her false veneer of calm cracked as reality slammed into her. Phillip was leaving. And on the heels of that realization came another. This lifestyle they’d built had become rather expensive. “And you know I can’t come close to affording this place on my own.” The two of them had been on the rise in their careers, and Kendal had been foolish enough to assume their live-in relationship would eventually lead to marriage. Though she certainly had no intention of mentioning the M-word now, not while Phillip was packing his suitcase like some felon on the run.
Phillip carefully arranged the last of his socks in a zipper pocket. “This place was your choice, not mine. Let’s face it. We are not a good match in so many ways.”
“How did you suddenly come to that conclusion?” Kendal demanded. “Did you make another one of your damned lists or something?” Phillip was the ultimate anal-retentive pharmaceutical rep. He lived by lists. Elaborate, extensive, three-tiered lists. That was one of the things Kendal had found so comforting about him. With Phillip, nothing was ever left to chance. Once, back when their relationship had drifted into the doldrums and he couldn’t quite make up his mind to walk down the aisle, he had actually come to her with a pro and con list, suggesting that she make one of her own.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” he admitted now, “right before I made my final choice.”
“Your final choice?” Kendal echoed.
But he turned away. “Let’s face it,” he repeated. “This relationship is just not working.”
Why did he keep saying that? By the time he faced her at the front door with one last parting look of regret and one last “I’m sorry,” Kendal was reduced to mumbling, “I understand.” Though she really, really did not understand. She’d only said that because she couldn’t endure the sight of his guilt-stricken eyes for another single second.
But two weeks later, she’d wanted to scratch those big brown eyes out when she learned that dear Phillip was involved in a new relationship—one that worked, a woman who fit his list, Kendal supposed. The woman, Kendal suspected, who had been at the root of their troubles all along—Stephanie Robinson. The snotty little drug rep who pulled down stellar sales for Merrill Jackson’s chief competitor, McMayer. The woman who now had Phillip cozily moved into her condo.
Kendal had seen Phillip only once after he’d moved out, when both of them were in Dallas for a Merrill Jackson sales meeting. He was coming down an escalator at the enormous Galleria mall and there was that hated woman, glued to his side. That hideously tall stick-figure blonde had actually spotted Kendal, grabbed Phillip’s arm and steered him in the opposite direction.
Kendal had suffered a very bad moment then. Really suffered.
She’d staggered into a nearby soup shop. Sank into a booth. Blindly ordered French onion, extra cheese. Normally she would have dived into the melted topping with gusto. But that afternoon she had stared at the bowl without so much as lifting the spoon, wondering why, why, why?
All their friends, the other pharmaceutical reps at Merrill Jackson, had sided with Kendal after the breakup, labeling Phillip the L.M.B.—List-making Bastard—and labeling Stephanie Robinson an anorectic bimbo. Which seemed like a bit of an oxymoron to Kendal but she enjoyed the sound of it anyway. She tested the words out loud against the bubbles, “Anorectic bimbo.”
But her friends’ anger on her behalf hadn’t really helped. In the long run, she had ended up missing Phillip and their tidy upscale life. Missing him with a strangely hollow pain that surprised her in fresh waves every few weeks.
As the year dragged by, Kendal’s long, lonely nights seemed to only get longer, lonelier, while she watched another of her girlfriends get married and another have a baby. And when she’d heard a few months ago that Phillip and Stephanie had also gotten married, the pain had solidified into a heavy, solid thing, squeezing like a vise around her heart. Kendal thought she had succeeded in sealing away the hurt where she wouldn’t have to feel it. Except that now, on her thirty-first birthday, here she was, with her tears pouring down into her fancy bathtub.
And fast on heels of the hurt came the fear.
Kendal had to admit that she had some major fears. Her future, without Phillip, looked a little shaky, a little scary. Too scary to contemplate after a hefty glass of merlot. Thoughts of her looming mortgage payment made her wish she hadn’t wasted money on a manicure. She raised a hand out of the sudsy water and examined her perfect French nails through the haze of tears. She’d had them done in anticipation of the girls’ night out that her friends had cooked up for her birthday. Knowing this was now the worst night of her life, they’d made a big deal out of celebrating “the one-year anniversary of Kendal Collins’s emancipation.”
She supposed the whole exercise was meant to be therapeutic, and she loved her friends dearly for trying, but she found she simply didn’t have the heart for a party.
After a hard day on the road with her boss—he seemed to be insisting on spending field days in the car with Kendal more frequently—the idea of getting all fixed up and oozing false cheer in some trendy bar seemed more like drudgery than fun. She’d called Sarah and begged off. She just could not do it, she told her protesting friend. Not tonight.
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