Free Shy Charlotte’s Brand New Juju (Romantic Comedy) by Bethany Bloom

Electrified and empowered and a mite bit unstoppable. When had
she stopped spending time by herself? With helping Caleb during the day and all
the errands and noise of family life, she had forgotten how much she loved her
time alone.  
    Caleb understood this. He was probably the only person she
could have married, especially so young, because he was even more introverted than
her.  And yet, there were the fantasies, which she could never tell anyone
about. That, one day, there would be a firm rap at the door and when she opened
it, a uniformed man with a pinched face would say, “I am very sorry to tell you
that your husband has disappeared,” and, after she grieved for a time, she
would be able to start again.
    That probably wasn’t a good sign.
    But, while alarming, she had always chalked up this fantasy
to being a natural side effect of marrying so young. Of marrying the only man
she had ever slept with. Of course she wondered what else was out there. Who else was out there.
    Besides, it wasn’t like it was a wish. It was just a
fleeting thought she had now and then. All married mothers probably had it from
time to time, but it wasn’t something you shared over coffee cake at your
friend’s house. Do you ever dream that your husband would somehow vanish, so
you could start over? But when she had walked in on Caleb and that woman, a
small and private part of her had said, resoundingly: “Free. Free at last.”
    Charlotte’s chest lifted as she crossed the street. She
wondered where she might go next. She felt like she was fifteen again, starting
over. She could work at a flower shop or a bakery or a travel agency. She could
storm into the corporate world, all pencil skirts and high, clicky heels. Or
she could be a cheery barista, handing over steaming paper cups and a day’s
worth of exuberance.
    She could start dating slick underwear models who worked the
front desk at health clubs. She could do anything, anything at all for the next
ninety days. There was no trace or tie to her past here, beyond Fiona and the
tales she had spun. And Fiona’s friends wanted to help her. They were on her
side. She could trust them.
    Trust. The word brought to mind a seminar she had
taken with Caleb.  A marriage retreat, deep in the Adirondacks. They had
arrived two days before the seminar began, and they had made crazy love by a
stream smack in the middle of a hike. But then the seminar began and they began
to argue like they never had before. It was as though the seminar exposed
things that were wrong with their marriage, which neither had ever considered a
problem before.
    One of the first exercises had been a game of faith and trust,
in which you were to fall backward, into the arms of the person behind you. All
you had to do was to let yourself go. Caleb went stiff as a board and, whoof,
dropped straight backward into Charlotte’s embrace. But, when it was her turn, she
found she couldn’t do it. At just the last moment, she would step her right leg
back to catch herself, every time.
    The facilitator had been a bearded man with a breathy way of
speaking. He had a petite wife who came across as fairly well medicated, and he
had made Charlotte try again and again. Each time, Caleb would mutter, “You
trust me. I know you do. Just let yourself fall.” And the facilitator (she
secretly called him Hairy McNabbit) and his wife (the Stoned Little Rabbit)
looked back and forth and shared knowing smiles as if to say that they had seen
their kind hundreds of times.
    By the end, Caleb was yelling at her under his breath, his
eyes large and rimmed with red. Finally, he simply pretended that she had done it, so the rest of the couples would stop watching them. So they could
move on. But he hadn’t even looked at her for the rest of the evening. And she
realized then, and perhaps so did Caleb, that the only person Charlotte
trusted, the only person she felt she could always fall back on, was herself. It
wasn’t Caleb’s fault. It