On the day of my 35th birthday, I decided to divorce my husband. I didn’t wake with the thought, but sitting around the kitchen table that night, I knew. David sat across from me, his fingers curled around his fourth Bud Lite. Two wrapped gifts sat on the table, a new Fossil chestnut colored purse and a matching belt. I knew because I bought them myself. We had little to no money that year—David was the associate head of maintenance at Embry Riddle and I was in the middle of looking for a better job—but I decided to treat myself anyway. I knew I was the only one that would.
After clocking out of my night shift at McDonald’s the morning before my birthday, I shoved the few cents in tips we shared at the ends of shifts into my purse and watched them fall out the bottom. I heard the clatter and bent to pick up my change. I lifted my purse up to the light and noticed the dime-sized holes in the bottom. That’s when I decided to drive to Bealls to buy myself something nice.
It didn’t take long to pick out what I wanted. I flipped through the newspaper ads every Sunday, marking things even though I knew I couldn’t afford them, window shopping from the comfort of my kitchen nook. I’d been eyeing a brown leather belt with a brushed alloy buckle for a couple of weeks. The fact that Bealls was still carrying it the day I went made it seem like it was meant to end up around my waist. I grabbed the purse and matching belt and made the $42.00 purchase.
I stopped at Publix on the way home and picked up a small Carvel ice-cream cake with confetti sprinkles. My youngest daughter D.J. would like the colors, the pastel pinks, blues, and yellows.
The next night Amber ran up to me with a folded piece of pink construction paper, the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMY spelled out in blue bubbly letters. On the inside, she drew a picture of the four of us—herself, D.J., David, and me—at the beach, holding hands. Palm trees sprouted every few feet from the beige sand. An orange sun with a smiley face hung in the top left corner. Amber wrote a small note at the bottom and signed her name in loopy cursive that looked more like a wavelength than it did letters of the alphabet. Ever since she’d been learning cursive at her Catholic school, she autographed any blank piece of paper she could get her hands on. In the bottom right corner, D.J. had drawn one of her signature stick figure smiley faces, an uneven circle with protruding lines meant to be arms and legs. I smiled at Amber. “It’s beautiful, honey.”
“Let’s do gifts now!” Amber sat down at the kitchen table. I laid out the two gifts and stuck candles into the cake. Amber helped me light them while D.J. watched, the flicker of each flame illuminated in her eyes. I grabbed David from our bedroom and told him the girls wanted to do birthday presents.
“Presents?” he asked, his eyes still trained on a rerun of The Three Stooges.
“Just come, please,” I said.
We sat around the table. David looked at the gifts and said, “Hey, where’s my present?” He looked at the girls—his audience—and they giggled back. I picked up the black and white striped gift bag that held the purse. I opened it and did my best “ooh’s” and “ahh’s” which were becoming more believable each Christmas when I opened gifts labeled from Santa. I did the same with the belt.
“Dad did so good, Mom!” Amber looked at me through watery eyes. She brought her clasped hands to her chest. The way she squeezed until her knuckles turned white seemed to say, this is the life I want someday. D.J., who was only three at the time, sat in one of the chairs and blew into a sparkly kazoo between eating forkfuls of cake. Chocolate stains smeared her chin.
It was that sentence that struck me: “Dad did so good!”
I’d bought the gifts for myself. What did I think was going to happen? I fed into the illusion, so why did it only strike me as insincere and shifty, now?
I recalled one time when I’d played hide and seek with Amber and D.J., who had just turned two. Explaining the rules to her was like telling a newborn baby to please stop crying. She hid where she wanted to, which most times was right in plain sight: under the coffee table, in the bathtub, the shower curtain barely drawn. Halfway through the game, I told Amber we needed to pretend we couldn’t see D.J. so that the game might last longer. Amber didn’t want to hear it. She was upset because, as the older sister, she was used to winning at everything. With her nose stuck high into the air, she said she would never play dumb for anyone. She marched up to her little sister wedged between the coffee table and the bookcase and yelled, “HA! I caught you.”
If I stayed with David, it would be a life of pretending, of playing hide and seek with someone who didn’t even want to participate in the game.
“Aren’t you going to give him a smooch?” Amber said. I looked at her. She smiled at me and then at her father.
I wanted to take Amber by the shoulders and shake her, try to find the sense I knew she had. Can’t you see, Amber? Your father didn’t do shit.
David set down his beer, stood up, and came around to my side of the table. He leaned down and wrapped his arms around me, his chest to my back. I could smell the wheat from his beer mixed with Old Spice deodorant. We stayed like this for a minute. Amber smiled, watching us.
“Finish your cake, sweetheart,” I said to her.
David knew what I was doing. Over the years, we’d learned to distract the girls from our arguments, to play make believe. It’s one of my favorite things about him. He wants to protect them as much as I do. While Amber fingered the frosting on her plate, David nuzzled his chin into my neck. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I looked up at him through moist eyes and smiled. I didn’t want to ruin this for them—Amber’s idea of a fairy tale prince and D.J.’s enthusiasm for chocolate crunchies and noise makers. This was their night as much as it was mine.
That was more than twenty years ago. I eventually divorced David. My girls grew up. This is all to say that when Amber brought home James, her boyfriend of several weeks at the time, and we hugged and made small talk, I saw no traces of Amber’s father in him. But now, seven years later, I see David in James, in the way he sits and stares off in another direction during conversation. The way that when he and Amber visit, he volunteers to clean up around my house, but expects a reward in return. The way that on Amber’s birthday, she buys her own cake.
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Miranda Campbell recently graduated with an MFA degree from Georgia College and State University. She works as freelance editor for Triplicity Publishing. Her work appears in The Laurel Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, littledeathlit, The Helix Magazine, among others.
Photo: Chris Jarvis
