“Different how?” I’d ask. “Give me an example. Just one.”
“I don’t want to fight about this.”
“I’m not fighting! I’m asking!”
“I have to go.”
Click.
He found a little one-bedroom apartment across town above a dry cleaner.
He came by the house on a Saturday morning while I was at the store and took his clothes, his books, and his reading glasses off the nightstand.
He left his key on the kitchen counter, right where the envelope had been.
He didn’t take Biscuit. Biscuit sat by the back door for two days waiting for him.
So did I, if I’m being honest.
Everybody got the same explanation.
His brother-in-law. My sister.
Our friends from church.
The guys he played poker with on the first Friday of every month.
“We’ve grown apart. We’re too different now.”
Nobody believed it.
“Greg?” said my friend Patty, when I told her over coffee. “Greg Whitman? Claire, that man looks at you like you hung the moon. I’ve seen him do it at every single barbecue for twenty years.”
“I know.”
“Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong.”
“I know,” I said again.
The hardest phone call was to our daughter, Sophie.
She was a junior at the state university, three hours away.
She called me the night after Greg told her, sobbing so hard I couldn’t understand her at first.
“Mom, what is going on? Dad called me and said you guys are getting a divorce.
He said you grew apart. What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You were there!”
“I mean I don’t know,” I said, and my voice broke. “He won’t tell me either.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“He sounded weird, Mom,” she finally said. “On the phone.
He sounded really, really weird. Like he was reading off a card.”
I lay awake every single night trying to figure it out.
I went through his old emails on the family computer. Nothing.
I went through our bank statements for the last two years, line by line, with a highlighter.
No strange charges. No hotel rooms.
No jewelry I’d never received. No dinners for two at restaurants I’d never been to.
I even called his office and asked his secretary, Denise, if anything had been going on at work. She sounded as confused as I was.
“He’s been a little quiet lately,” she said. “And he took a few personal days this summer. But Claire, he talks about you all the time. Every day. I don’t understand this at all.”
Personal days. I didn’t remember any personal days.
I started going back over everything in my head.
Every conversation.
Every night. Every little thing he’d said or done in the last year.
There were things, I realized. Little things.
Things I’d brushed off at the time.
He had gotten short-tempered. Not mean, just snappy, in a way he’d never been before.
He’d yelled at a waiter once over a cold plate of eggs, and then he’d sat in the car afterward with his head on the steering wheel for ten minutes, apologizing over and over.
He’d dropped things.
A coffee mug in July.
A glass of wine at our anniversary dinner. His car keys, constantly.
He’d started fidgeting. Tapping his fingers on the table.
Bouncing his knee. I’d put my hand on his knee once at church to make him stop, and he’d looked at me with the strangest expression. Almost like he was scared.
I had thought he was stressed about work.
I had thought he was getting older. I had thought a lot of things.
But I never thought he was leaving.
“You’re going on a cruise.”
My sister Lynn said it like a doctor announcing a diagnosis.
She was standing in my living room with her purse on her shoulder and her car keys still in her hand. She’d let herself in with her spare key, which she does whenever she’s decided I’m not answering the phone on purpose.