The Far End of Happy by Kathryn Craft Read Free Book Online Page B

pounding his fist against a front porch column, lips trembling, tears welling. And even though the dreaded words had scraped her throat like burnt toast, in the end, the emotional act of leaving Jeff had not required the Jaws of Life. It was more like separating two sticky notes. She had feared telling her children, though. Divorce would destroy their sense of family and home, even though they’d done nothing to cause it. Ronnie had lost enough fathers to know how that felt. But her sons had the right to prepare themselves as she had, so once she’d told Jeff, she hadn’t been able to sit with the knowledge for more than a day before she’d told them.
    To make sure Jeff wouldn’t overhear, she’d taken Andrew and Will out to the side yard, beneath the broad canopy of the mimosa tree. Its hearty trunk and low branching offered accessible footholds for young climbers—and their mom and barn cats as well, as several of Jeff’s photos had proven. Swallowtail butterflies and hummingbirds flitted among its fragrant, silky flowers while its leaves, like collections of green feathers stitched into an array of headdresses, caught the breeze. An invader from the south, the mimosa was nothing more than another beautiful weed. Its lifespan in Pennsylvania was typically short. But this one had been here for as long as Jeff had been, he’d said, and when she left the farm, she would miss this idyllic spot. They’d wedged the hammock’s stand between the tree’s shallow roots, and in rare moments of repose, it was a favorite place to curl up with a book.
    Ronnie sat the boys on the hammock before her. But that felt wrong. She needed to be talking with them, not at them. So she climbed into the hammock too, and each of them redistributed their weight to accommodate the new balance. The boys looked at her, the sun dappling their skin with gold expectation. In her rush to remove the barrier of hidden truth from between them, Ronnie had not thought ahead.
    When at last the words formed, they came out in a tumble: “I am going to divorce your father.”
    Ronnie braced for their shock. After all, she and Jeff rarely fought. To preserve the marriage this long, she had fluidly readjusted her expectations and diverted energy toward her and Jeff’s one great point of connection—the country lifestyle they shared. She looked around at pears hanging heavy on a nearby tree. Chickens clucked and scratched in the dirt, sun glinting off their iridescent neck feathers. The horses peeked out over their stall doors as if they too were listening to Ronnie’s news.
    “I suppose you are pretty surprised by this,” Ronnie said. She certainly was. Divorce, while repeatedly embraced by her mother, went against Ronnie’s beliefs. She was determined to do it better than she had. Give her kids the stability she’d never enjoyed.
    But there was no longer anything stable about Jeff.
    Will, Daddy’s little helper, arranged a blank face. Andrew answered, “Not really.”
    “Why not?”
    “You and Dad don’t even act like you’re in love.”
    Hmm. Ronnie had needed several sessions with a therapist to come to this awareness. She’d also plunked down twenty-four dollars for a book that told her that her marriage exemplified the predivorce state. She could have saved her money and asked her ten-year-old.
    “Explain what you mean,” Ronnie said.
    “You never spend time together.”
    He was right on that point. Ronnie was usually on the run with the boys, and Jeff rarely attended Andrew’s Tae Kwon Do events or Will’s soccer games. She’d ask other couples at these events: Do you always come together? How do you work that out with your employers? Jeff was never able to clear his schedule. Ronnie joked that when it came to sports, she was a single mom. Over time, it felt like less and less of a joke.
    “Plus,” Andrew had said, “you are way more creative than Dad is. He’ll never understand you the way I do.”
    No, Ronnie couldn’t hold