Free The Solomon Sisters Wise Up by Melissa Senate Page B

few dust bunnies, last month’s issue of WowWoman and the current Vanity Fair: one pair of black thong panties, size small (I was a medium).
    In his office, on his desk: countless bar tab and restaurant receipts in the high hundreds.
    His shirts smelled of perfume I never wore. The Armani sweater I bought him “just because” had a fuschsia lipstick stain on the hem.
    For a second I considered grabbing everything Andrew owned (or at least what I could lift), stuffing it into his precious Jaguar (which was in the garage because it was raining), and burning it all up the way Angela Bassett had in Waiting to Exhale.
    And then I remembered a case my law firm had won a few years ago, Arnock v. Arnock, in which Mrs. Arnock had done exactly that to the belongings of Mr. Arnock. The replacement value came out of her settlement. Maybe I wasn’t a fool, after all.
    Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit! I was the biggest fool of them all. Trust me, Kris, if Andrew were even thinking of cheating on me, I’d know it. We’ve been married for eleven years, and we dated for two years before then. I know the man.
    I shook my head and dropped down onto my bed. My husband had been making a fool out of me for years. And no one had told me.
    “Who would tell you?” Marnie had asked when I’d gone to her house this morning to confront her.
    Oh, you bet I had.
    Not right away, though. Turned out that when you caught your husband of eleven years cheating on you in front of your eyes, in your own house, in the hammock he bought for you for Mother’s Day the first year you were married because “One day you’ll lie with our children in the hammock, reading them Dr. Seuss,” something other than anger could take over, like pain.
    Last night, after I slapped Andrew and ran out the door with Mary Jane, I drove to a hotel near LaGuardia Airport, checked in under the name Polly Smith, paid a clerk to run out and get me a few cans of Alpo and then flung a lamp across my generic, ugly room. In five seconds I received a phone call from the front desk asking if everything was all right, to which I’d replied that it most certainly was not, that my husband was a fucking cheating bastard, before I slammed the phone down.
    And then I’d stared at the phone and picked up the receiver, needing to call someone, and I put it back down and slid to my butt on the side of the bed and cried.
    Who was I going to call?
    My mother was gone. My father would probably take Andrew’s side, since he was a serial adulterer himself. My sister Sarah had her own problems, and besides, I wasn’t about to tell Sarah that my life was falling apart.
    I wasn’t about to tell anyone that my life was falling apart. Especially not my girlfriends, who were really just women I knew from the country club, women whose husbands Andrew played golf with. And I couldn’t tell Kristina. We were work friends and reasonably close, but I couldn’t handle the thought of being a “told you so,” lumped into the categories of cheating she’d been talking about this afternoon.
    And so I sat on the floor of the hotel, against the bed, clutching Mary Jane to my chest, and stared into space for a few minutes. And then the tears came.
    After an hour or so, I picked myself up off the floor and lay down on the bed and finally slept. I slept until six this morning, then ordered two pots of coffee and looked out the window for a few hours at planes taking off and landing. And then I decided to drive home and confront the bastard.
    But instead of making a left off the exit, I made a right, toward Marnie’s condo complex, where I’d gone many times for private Pilates and yoga lessons. I didn’t think, didn’t form questions. I just drove. I had a feeling that Marnie could provide me with more answers than Andrew could. Truthful answers, at least.
    I left Mary Jane in the car with the window cracked and her favorite car bone, rang Marnie’s doorbell and seconds later saw her peek out the bay window and