I was lonely knocking around a too large house sparsely furnished with everything I’d fought so hard to keep. I was on summer break, a time I usually looked forward to during the school year with a craven intensity, but that summer, my first one as a free woman in decades, I was adrift. When my daughter, Lauren, moved home after college, she kept me company and gave me something I needed.
I was embarrassed to be lonely after so many declarations of independence. I had tried the dating apps, inviting complete strangers to pester me for “pics,” especially “recent, full body ones,” but was mortified by the app’s geo-locators which fetched men for my perusal that I might bump into in my neighborhood. I recognized three of them from St. Francis Xavier. Exposed and guilt-ridden, I was still going to Mass despite my divorce. Three fellow churchgoers who had messaged me on the apps regarded me speculatively in the communion line and slyly flashed me the sign of peace. I ignored their knowing smiles but peeked to see if they were wearing wedding rings. Two of them were, one of whom attended with what appeared to be his wife.
Lauren had just broken up with her long-term boyfriend, Kelvin, or rather he had broken up with her.
“He went full on MAGA,” she told me, rolling her eyes even though I could tell she was crushed.
“You knew he was a Republican? Or at least conservative?” I found that if I framed things as questions, Lauren took less offense.
“Yeah, not that we talked about it much. But this is way, way worse.”
“In what way?”
“He wants a trad wife. He doesn’t want a wife who wants a job. He wants a wife who will raise his kids.”
I didn’t like the way Lauren put it — focusing on what Kelvin wanted and needed rather than on what she did.
“Oh my,” I clucked sympathetically.
“He even implied that he wanted a virgin, which obviously I am not.”
I didn’t take the bait and tell her that was too much information. Lauren would either kick up a fuss or not speak to me for days. She vacillated between opposition and withdrawal, having learned those coping mechanisms from me.
Since puberty, Lauren had tried on several personalities and sexual orientations. My ex-husband Darren and I disagreed on how to handle it. I said we should butt out of her business but Darren said it was our God-given right and responsibility to police our daughter’s morals. He wasn’t MAGA, but he was adamant about his parental prerogatives. When Lauren squabbled with him, deliberately flinging her life choices in his face, I silently cheered her on.
Our other child, Jeremy, was forged in Darren’s image. They had both graduated from West Point. Jeremy was stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany where he balked at the boredom of noncombatant life. I loved that child with all my heart, but I never understood him. Even as a young boy, he assumed a caretaking role where I was concerned. At the end of the day, when Darren came home, Jeremy handed me over like a priest with a sacred chalice. It was flattering but unnecessary. I could take care of myself. I was concerned he couldn’t see that.
Unlike his sister, Jeremy grew up straight and narrow as an iron rod, and just as unyielding. Unwittingly, I had colluded to deprive him of a childhood, conveying him into adulthood before his emotional development could catch up. That was yet another area of conflict between me and Darren, not that we needed to look for them. They sprouted up among us like dandelions, spreading unchecked until we couldn’t agree on what fat percentage of milk to buy or whether it was cold outside. The Big Things, forget about it. We couldn’t talk about those at all.
When I finally had enough, I asked Darren for a divorce. He turned me down. It was only then that I realized I didn’t need his consent. It was the first big decision I had made in our marriage on my own. Even if Darren was deployed in a war-torn country, I was expected to consult him before moving forward with a major purchase or a decision affecting the kids.
My attorney, a steely, no-nonsense young woman with a crew cut and heavy-framed glasses, called our parting a “gray divorce.” She said they had become much more common and were in fact a leading demographic in family law. It depressed me to think my attempts at freedom were part of a trend.
My spirits were further dampened by thinking of myself as on the market. I looked good for my age, with wheat blond hair with a handful of silver strands that could pass for highlights, and I didn’t have many wrinkles. But my body had redistributed itself, moving the padding in my cheeks to my stomach as if I was carrying around a lifesaving ring. Darren remained attractive, lean, and hard bodied, a Ninja Turtle with his shirt off, something I failed to fully appreciate until I got on the dating apps and saw the grizzled, worn-out faces and bodies of most men our age. Many of them confessed to their baggage upfront. It made it no more appealing and I was reluctant to do the same. Nobody needed to know how I’d failed.
After she moved in, Lauren set up in her old room and spent an ungodly amount of time there. She said she didn’t intend to get a job right away. She was journaling and might start her own podcast. She said she didn’t need to see her friends or even speak to them on the phone because social media kept them close.
Lauren and I seemed to be on parallel tracks, one of us pulling the other along in her slipstream. It wasn’t the first time.
Lauren started dating Kelvin at Vanderbilt when he was assigned as her lab partner in a biology class he was taking for a second time. He played varsity football and had briefly considered going pro. Soon after they met, Lauren removed her tattoos, took out her piercings, and let her dyed black hair return to its natural honey blond. Although she wasn’t a cheerleader in college, she might as well have been. All she could talk about was Kelvin and his sport.
I was one to talk. An only child raised in the rural south, I went from my parents’ home to a sorority at an all-girls college in New Rochelle, New York. My house mother watched “her” girls like a hawk. Her husband, a pervy guy with a droopy porn-stache who once confided to me that he felt like his ass had landed in a sugar bowl, checked out our dates. Both sets of parents approved of Darren. Why wouldn’t they?
On our second date, Darren declared we would marry. From then on, he told me what to do. I followed his dictates, protesting on occasion, but easily overcome and receding into silence — not sulking, not sullen, but accommodating — so that we were soon back in sync. One week after graduation, I marched down the aisle with him. My parents seemed only too content to hand me over to him. They said they knew Darren would take good care of me and treat me as his own. I was happy because they were happy. I was happy because Darren was happy. I didn’t ask whether I was happy. Nobody was happy with me now.
Because Darren was career Army, we lived in a lot of places. He was gone for long stretches of time, flying Black Hawks in Iraq and Somalia, and participating in other conflagrations with a zeal that was more frightening than inspiring. He could fly anything. He’d taken me up with him numerous times, but I didn’t love it the way he did. Flying a small plane through the arc of a rainbow over the Serengeti, all I could think of was getting down on the ground and into the villages where the people were. All Darren could see was the sky and clouds ahead. When he was loaned out to the Navy to train fighter pilots how to land at night on an aircraft carrier in high seas, I didn’t see why he had to do it. It was a dangerous business.
“You could turn it down,” I pointed out. “Your commanding officer said you wouldn’t lose rank.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” he admitted. “It’s just a loaner agreement. I’m a rental car to them.”
He laughed. I didn’t.
“So why do it?”
“I wouldn’t lose rank, I’d lose my self-respect.”
His face twisted in disgust as if I’d asked him to do something dirty. He forged ahead, leaving me home with two teenagers for the better part of three years. I knew better than to complain. He was serving our country. Patriotism and sacrifice. I was expected to do my part, which I did.
After Darren retired from the Army, we settled in the Boston area where he’d grown up. I got a teaching job in Dorchester and then a principal’s post in Roxbury. Darren worked long hours, mainly from home, as a consultant to Boeing. He took a lot of business trips. I wasn’t lonely as long as the children were home. Once they left the nest, I was devastated.
Our divorce was finalized in May. I didn’t miss Darren but I missed the rhythms and patterns of our intertwined lives. It left me bereft, like an amputation had taken place. Darren recovered just fine from his lost limb. He had a new girlfriend, Tricia, who was in her late thirties, and the mother of two young sons. Despite pledging to win me back, Darren started dating her during our divorce which, to my mind, wasn’t exactly conducive to reconciliation. I was secretly grateful. It made the process much easier for me. Rubbing his hands together, Darren gleefully announced he was getting Trish and her boys into shipshape. He was always happiest when he was bossing people around. I tried to be happy for him. Sometimes I was.
I met Tricia only once. A perky and petite blond, she served as the paralegal for Darren’s divorce attorney, a spry and hectic man in his seventies who declared unprompted that he would never retire. Tricia showed me to the conference room where I would be deposed as well as the law firm’s ladies’ room. When I sat down at the table next to my lawyer, she sat down across from me next to Darren who sat next to his lawyer. I felt outnumbered. My attorney seemed to feel the same because she offered me a pained smile as if we shared an affliction.
Watching me intently as I testified in response to the questions posed by Darren’s attorney, Tricia occasionally took notes, cribbing her hand to conceal them and then forgetting what she was doing and leaving them uncovered. I was insulted that she thought I had nothing better to do than to spy on her while I was trying to explain my side of a lengthy, difficult marriage. Little did Tricia know, after years of teaching, I could read upside down. I saw stray phrases including “likeable but not credible,” “didn’t work for many years,” and “communication impossible” as she scribbled away.
That summer, Boston vacillated between an oppressive heat dome and torrential downpours. Once Lauren understood I wasn’t trying to be her best friend, that I wasn’t trying to counsel her, I saw her more often. Most days, we got up early and went for a run along the Charles River. When we ran side by side, our strides matching, I felt close to her. She seemed to feel the connection as well. That ability to fall into step with another human being, that affinity, had always been my greatest gift and biggest downfall. It allowed me to get right up next to someone, but it blinded me to their faults. The affinity inevitably perverted into a dogged, misguided loyalty that stayed me stuck in a souring marriage and caused me to retain a teacher who should have been sent packing. With my children, the affinity went into overdrive. I lived through them and for them. Although I encouraged them to be themselves — a true parental gift — I didn’t offer them enough ballast. They were chameleons, blending in and taking on the appearance of whomever was nearest and most powerful. Darren hadn’t helped. His will trampled ours, rampaging through the household, demanding compliance, and getting it.
By the time we got home from a run, Lauren and I were usually soaked with sweat or rain. In our ample free time, we joined the sea of protests that swelled with the summer heat. I tried to make a new sign for each one, championing a cause important to my school. Lauren always carried the same sign: Hey MAGA, Get out of my You 2 R U.S.! The text was contained in a conversation bubble emanating from an anatomically correct uterus giving the middle finger. People stopped in front of her sign, puzzling it out. Lauren seemed to enjoy the attention. She met a group of young people at the protests and started hanging out with them.
“There’s not a twat among them,” she said.
“How wonderful,” I said, although I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. In my day, a twat was a dim-witted girl who was easy. I was disappointed to hear the term still in circulation. I was dismayed we’d only come so far.
“And get this, Mom,” Lauren continued. “They all vote, or at least they will in the next election.”
“That’s terrific,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.
I didn’t have to worry about whether Jeremy and Lauren voted. Darren would flay them alive if they didn’t. Every state and national election (he gave them a pass on the locals), they had to take a selfie of themselves either at a voting station or in Jeremy’s case with his mail-in ballot at the post office box assigned to his barracks. Darren said he didn’t care how they voted (I doubted this), but he hadn’t fought wars around the world preserving American values so they could squander their rights.
When Lauren and I weren’t out running or protesting, we tried to keep out of each other’s way. You could tell when we spent too much time together. We started finishing each other’s sentences and confiding too much, which embarrassed and confused us both.
Darren stopped by once a week to check on Lauren. He was a devoted father who would gladly kill for his children. I think they found that comforting. But they refrained from telling him things that might upset him, something else they undoubtedly learned from me. For that reason, Lauren didn’t tell Darren that Kelvin had broken up with her. She said if she did, her father would strangle Kelvin in his sleep. I didn’t disagree.
If Lauren was out when Darren popped in, he cornered me in my kitchen. Regaling me with his exploits, he made random comments about our marriage that were hard to ignore:
“Sukie, I should have never let you get a job.”
“We should have had a third and fourth child, maybe even a fifth, why not?”
“I shudder to think of how you would have fared in Qatar without me driving you around in my jeep like a royal princess.”
“You’d think by now we would have nailed down the rules of engagement. But no, we had to fight like children. And over what? Nothing. Not a goddarn thing.”
His questions didn’t seek answers. We both understood that. I let him natter on, trying unsuccessfully not to judge him as I recalled how desperate I’d become before I wiggled myself free. Even though I kept my feelings to myself, Darren was an expert at reading body language. He said it was a skill he’d developed to stay safe. If I formed an opinion, he would ferret it out, often without me saying a thing. As a result, around him, I tried not to think or feel.
It had been a sheer delight to walk back into the marital house, knowing that it was mine. You’d never know it by the way Darren swaggered around during his visits. The only time I stopped him from holding forth was when he started to talk about Tricia and her kids.
“Enough,” I would say, holding up my hand like a stop sign.
He had the good grace to look contrite. Like a dog with his tail tucked between his legs, he skedaddled.
In July, I began to date Matthew, a man I met at the Boston Public Library. I’d found him sitting at a table in the stacks reading Alice Munro. He was some years older than me but smart and gentlemanly. Tall and reedy with wispy gray hair and mild features, it was like a heron had sidled up to me. I was happy enough to take what he offered. I was looking for healing kindness, not true romance. My mind was still scripting conversations with Darren, telling him what he’d done to me, blaming him for taking my sovereignty, for controlling me and the children. It was always about what he had done, how he had wronged me — it was never about what I had done to myself. Because Matthew was a widower who bore no similar recriminations toward his sainted late wife, I felt churlish spewing about Darren who was still very much alive.
On a hot and hazy evening in August, Matthew and I had just come from a free concert on the Common when I saw a woman with light hair and a slim build that I thought was Lauren walking in the direction of our house. She was holding the hand of a tall, broad-shouldered man with rounded buttocks and curly brown hair who I could have sworn was Kelvin. I put my hand on Matthew’s forearm, signaling for him to stop so that I could make sure. The couple rounded a corner, and disappeared from sight. Matthew and I continued our stroll homeward but I quickened my pace. We kissed on my doorstep as I bid him farewell. As soon as I got inside, I checked Lauren’s bedroom and found it empty. I convinced myself that it was not her I’d seen.
As the summer trickled to a conclusion, there seemed to be fewer protests. It was as if the whole community had run out of steam, consuming its stockpile of outrage, no longer capable of being shocked which was probably the point. Matthew and I continued to date. I didn’t let him stay over with Lauren in the house, but sometimes I stayed at his place. It was a quiet shingled bungalow on a dead-end street in Somerville, cluttered, but filled with books.
Darren came by less often because Lauren was almost never home. He’d discovered I was seeing someone, which put his nose out of joint. I felt less confused, more myself, when I didn’t see him.
One morning, I was preparing materials for the school year when I walked into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. I found Kelvin there drinking almond milk out of the carton with the refrigerator door open. He was wearing only a towel. From the waist up, his rippled body looked like Darren’s, or like Jeremy’s for that matter. There was a hardness, a plasticity, as if the skin had been sprayed onto the carcass.
“This isn’t half bad,” he said, hefting the carton with one hand before putting it back in the refrigerator and shutting the door.
“Kelvin,” I said, not sure what else to say.
“That’s me,” he replied with a cocky grin before heading upstairs to Lauren’s bedroom.
I hid from them when they came downstairs. I didn’t see Kelvin leave. I, however, bumped into Lauren as she was getting ready for an au pair job she’d just picked up.
“Kelvin?” I asked, trying to keep the judgment from my voice.
She regarded me steadily, trying to gauge my mood, before nodding.
“Are you two seeing each other again?”
Lauren paused and nodded again. Darren had taught our children never to lie. He said it was the worst sin of all. I wasn’t too sure about that. I thought killing people trumped a lie, but Darren said it was sometimes justified to take a life. In any event, Darren’s mandate that our children “start with the truth” certainly made parenting easier.
“Is it serious?” I asked.
She shrugged, holding my gaze a long time before she spoke. I felt her testing me like a well digger sticking a pole into what looked like soft-soiled pasture to check for ledge.
“He was dating another girl for a while. He said it made him realize I was the one.”
“What about all the MAGA stuff?”
“It’s way down. He took Elon Musk’s side in the spat. He plays video games with him. He thinks he’s a genius.”
Lauren was confusing me. Who was the genius? Certainly not Kelvin. Was Kelvin playing video games with Elon Musk? How was that possible? What did that have to do with Lauren and Kelvin getting back together? I sensed she would turn on me if I pressed too hard.
“What about you?” I asked as gently as I could. “Is he the one for you?”
Lauren shrugged again.
“I gotta get married sometime, don’t I?”
It was my turn to pause. All I could think was: Did I do that to you? Did I put that there? I scrubbed my expression as I struggled with emotions I could neither tame nor control. Lauren needed to learn her own lessons, make her own way. Wasn’t that what I had done?
I offered her a weak smile. Her returned smile was faint, grim. In her resigned gaze, I saw myself at her age.
“No?” I said.
Christina Reiss is a fiction writer concentrating in short stories. She was shortlisted for the 2025 Bridport Prize and was the first runner-up in the 2023 Writers District Prize. She has been a finalist or semi-finalist in The New Ohio Review, Scribes Publishing, Howard Frank Mosher, Able Muse, Tiferet, Kallisto Gaia Press/San Fedele Press’s American Writers in Review, Tucson Book Festival, and Great Midwest Writing short story contests, and was an honorable mention for the Hal Prize. She has published short stories in the San Antonio Review, Scribes Anthology, Fail Better, Watershed, Midway Journal, Rumen, San Fedele Press, and other journals. She lives and works in Vermont.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 