Chapter 21: Morning After

Relieved to see that her husband had arrived home safe and sound, Shirley stared at Daryl stunned by his haggard appearance. He was unshaved, his clothes were rumpled, and his eyes were bloodshot. She had never seen him look so bad in her entire life. She licked her lips nervously and asked, “Where were you?”

“I slept in my car behind the waffle house,” Daryl answered. His voice was dull and listless. He was tired and didn’t feel like arguing. He’d spent an hour in his car thinking about his life after being asked to leave work. He had wondered how he ended up getting sent home from his job.

“How did you end up there?”

“I drove around for a while and couldn’t think of any other place to go,” Daryl answered with a tired shrug of his shoulders.

“Oh.” There wasn’t too much for her to say. Daryl was basically a stay at home kind of man and didn’t wander off on his own very often.

Daryl went to the cupboard and retrieved a coffee cup wondering why she wasn’t asking him about why he had left. After pouring a cup of coffee, he went over to the table and sat down. After adding two spoons of sugar, he tasted the coffee and grimaced at the harsh bitterness of old coffee. He pushed the cup away rather than drink more of it.

At the sound of the lawn mower starting up outside, he said, “I guess we need to talk.”

“You were right,” Shirley said. It hurt her to admit that his get tough approach had found fertile ground with Ted.

“Really?” he asked wondering what had made her change her mind.

“Ted told me that what you were saying was what he needed to hear. He was rather upset that he didn’t listen to your advice earlier, though. He’s upset about not having finished the school year.”

Daryl shook his head while considering how Ted must feel about his failure to return to school. He said, “I’ll talk to him about that. I’ll let him know that there’s a difference between being a man and a superman. No one should strive to be a superman.”

“That would be good.” Shirley looked down at her cold cup of coffee. Getting up, she went over to the coffeemaker to brew a fresh pot. Daryl watched her work knowing that she was using the time to organize her thoughts. It took three minutes to set up the coffeemaker. Turning to face her husband, she said, “I thought I could trust you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You left last night and didn’t tell me where you were going,” Shirley answered. She felt as if he had betrayed her. He had left and there had been no way for her to re-establish contact. As far as she was concerned, she had to know where he was every minute of the day.

Daryl thought about how he had felt after leaving the house the previous night. It had been horrible giving up like that, but he had run out of things to say. He said, “I couldn’t stay here and listen to you accuse me of not caring anymore.”

“But you left me. I was sitting here worried that you were dead or dying somewhere and I’d never know,” she said. Her tears were threatening to flow once again. It was only her anger that was keeping the tears at bay.

The coffeemaker started gurgling as the last of the water was forced through it. Daryl shifted in his chair and stared at his wife. After seventeen years of marriage he knew when she was angry. He decided it was time to defuse the situation. Taking a deep breath, he asked, “Do you want to see a marriage counselor?”

“No, our marriage is fine,” she answered. Getting up, she went to the coffeemaker and returned to the table with the pot. She refilled her cup and topped his. What she really wanted to do was throw it at him and scream, but she knew that wouldn’t solve anything.

“We need to do something. My boss sent me home from work and told me to get my act together. Another night like last night and I’ll probably lose my job,” Daryl said.

The idea that he might lose his job was a devastating blow. She felt sick to her stomach. Everything they had worked for would be lost. There was no way they could make all of the payments if his paycheck were to disappear.

Clutching her stomach, she said, “You can’t be serious.”

“Very serious. Ever since Ted was attacked, I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep. I can’t concentrate and my work has suffered.”

“But you’ve worked there for nineteen years. They wouldn’t fire you because you came into work looking like hell one day.”

“Yes they would,” he said. One didn’t work in a place for that long without hearing horror stories about people getting fired because their boss lost confidence in them. Normally, they didn’t watch the clock, but if they wanted to get rid of him they’d mark down each time he was one minute late. They’d mark down if he left work early. It wouldn’t matter if he’d stayed late the night before. One day, he’d show up and be told that he was being let go for just cause.

He said, “I’ve already blown my raise for next year.”

“Really?” she asked while topping off his cup with fresh coffee.

“I’ll tell the truth, I can’t take another night of arguments. I’m doing the best I can with respect to this situation. I know you feel that it isn’t good enough, but it is all I’ve got,” he said while she carried the pot back to the coffeemaker.

He watched her return to her chair. He took a sip of his coffee and frowned. She had topped off the old coffee with just enough new coffee to heat it. It still tasted bad. He got up and dumped the contents of his cup out, refilled his cup, and returned to the table.

“They weren’t arguments. We were discussing his problem,” she said bristling slightly.

“You just don’t get it,” Daryl said while shaking his head. In a flat voice, he said, “You weren’t listening to me. You didn’t want to hear what I was saying. There wasn’t a discussion. It was a rant with me cast in the role of villain. I didn’t deserve that. I don’t deserve that.”

In light of Ted’s comments, Shirley knew that he had been doing the right things from her son’s perspective. It didn’t change the fact that she thought Ted needed more from him than he was giving.

She said, “I was worried about him and you weren’t acting like you cared.”

Daryl knew that if the situation with Ted had been more serious, then their marriage would have been over. There wouldn’t have been enough that he could have done to convince her that he was worried. If Ted had died, she would have said that he wasn’t grieving enough.

Taking a sip of his coffee, he looked at his wife realizing that the woman he was looking at was a different woman than the one he had known the day before. It wasn’t that she was any different; it was that he was seeing her differently.

Sighing he said, “I thought we had a good marriage. We talked about our days. We worked together to raise Ted. We even had sex once a week and it was okay. The past few weeks have made me look at our marriage differently. Last night, I decided that we don’t have a good marriage.”

“What do you mean?” Shirley asked with a sick feeling in her stomach.

“I mean, we didn’t discuss anything substantive about our lives. We haven’t discussed any plans for the future or things that we can do to be happier. We’ve been coasting through our life talking about the weather. Is that the foundation for a marriage? I don’t know, but I do know that I expected more from a marriage.

“Even raising Ted, we basically went through the motions on autopilot. We got him dressed and off to school without taking a deeper interest in his life. Why didn’t we notice that he didn’t have a girlfriend? A boy his age should be dating, but he isn’t. That boy, Harry, gave Ted more advice about women than I’ve given him his entire life. It is wrong and I don’t know what to do about it.

“Our sex has been pretty vanilla and without passion. How in the hell did we end up with Tuesday night being our night for sex? I mean, Tuesday night? When was the last time that you dressed up and tried to look sexy for me? I don’t remember when it was. Even our anniversaries are pretty tame. Dinner and then come home. We rub bodies for a while before going to sleep,” Daryl said. The disgust in his voice was obvious.

Shirley, feeling sick to her stomach, listened to Daryl knowing that every word he was saying was accurate. Their marriage had seemed good, but neither really looked at their marriage with respect to how fulfilling it was. It had never been tested with adversity. They had been coasting. Each of them had their roles and went through the motions of fulfilling them.

She stammered, “We don’t need to go to a marriage counselor.”

“Do you want a divorce?” Daryl asked thinking that if they didn’t address their problems they would end up divorced.

His question was too much for her to deal with. Ted had been attacked, his job had been put in jeopardy and now even their marriage was on the rocks. What had been a very secure life had become a very insecure life. Shirley didn’t like insecurity. She stood and raced to the bathroom. She made it just in time. Bent over the toilet, she voided the small breakfast that she had eaten. She couldn’t see because of the tears in her eyes.

In the kitchen, Daryl listened to the sounds of his wife retching in the bathroom. He rose and went in to make sure that she was all right. The only other sound was the low rumble from the lawn mower. In a way, he wished there was something to distract them from their problems, but there wasn’t.

Reaching the bathroom, he rubbed a hand along her back and held her hair out of the way. She looked pretty pathetic bent over the toilet bowl. It was not the reaction that he had wanted to achieve. He had wanted her to look at their marriage with the same kind of honesty with which he had examined it the previous night.

It took a few minutes for her to recover. Straightening up, she moved over to the sink to wash out her mouth and her face. She didn’t speak to Daryl; not even to thank him for his concern. She didn’t know what to say to him. Her entire life was spiraling out of control. The only thing she really had control over was her appearance. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she said, “Get out of the bathroom. I want to take a shower.”

Her words came out harsher than she had intended, but Daryl understood. The idea of taking a shower appealed to him as well. He turned to leave the bathroom while he said, “I’m going to take a shower upstairs.”