Rose with Thorns Novel – Rose Ilearned long ago not to wait up for Gray. So, it was a fool-me-ten-thousand-times situation when I did so on a Friday night, our twentieth wedding anniversary. I’d hoped all day for a bouquet, a dinner invitation, a text message saying: Happy Anniversary, babe. Followed by some flavor of: I’ll make it up to you. There had been nothing. I didn’t make a big fuss over anniversaries or birthdays because I’d learned early on that it would only lead to disappointment. Gray had forgotten a few of my birthdays, and there were times when he’d grabbed flowers from a gas station for me. It hadn’t felt quite so bad when the kids were home but the twins had left when they turned eighteen two years ago.
Jude was earning a degree in architecture like his daddy at Duke, and Willow was pursuing pre-med at NYU. So here I was, rattling around in a big house in Historic Brookhaven, one of the poshest areas in Buckhead, Atlanta, surrounded by every luxury I could’ve ever dreamed of growing up dirt poor in a trailer park in West End. Gray had never been anything but wealthy. He grew up comfortable with an enormous amount of old family money; and a decade ago, he had inherited Rutherford Architects from his daddy. Oh, he’d grown it to the size it was through hard work and sheer will—but he didn’t know what it meant to be hungry or worry about where to sleep. I poured another glass of champagne, the last of the nice Perrier-Jouët I’d chilled for our anniversary. So, what if he forgot?I told myself. It didn’t matter.
I remembered, and we’d toast, and maybe even if he were late, we’d have intercourse—go back to a time when I wasn’t quite so lonely in my marriage. The clock struck midnight, and I knew it was time for Cinderella to turn into a pumpkin. The door opened right then, and I heard him enter the house, laughing at something. I didn’t need to look to see if he was on his phone. He was. “Of course, darlin’. I’ll see you at work tomorrow. I know, we have that meeting at seven.” That darlin’ would be his executive assistant. She’d come into our lives three years ago. Beautiful and smart (she had a business degree from the University of Texas, Austin), Aimee Graham had moved to Atlanta from Dallas. She was Aimee, with one I and two Es and no Y. She was in her mid-twenties to Gray’s forty-two. I wondered sometimes if he was having an affair.
But it didn’t sit right with me. Not Gray. Maybe every wife whose husband cheated on her thought the same thing: no, not my husband. The doubts came because we weren’t having a lot of intercourse. Aimee, without a Y, was blonde, beautiful, and young. She didn’t have gray hair to hide or dark spots to blend with a concealer. She hadn’t spent a lifetime sitting at home raising children and keeping house—she had a career. When friends of ours, the Jamesons, got divorced because Kevin had been nailing his physical therapist (what a cliché), Gray had said, “Kevin outgrew Leah. While he was climbing the ladder, she was at home, not growing as a person, so he found someone young and thin to bang.” He didn’t realize he was talking about me as well as Leah.
Like my friend, I had put on weight you try having children, lose your metabolism as you grow old, and not do that. Unlike me, Leah used to practice law, which she gave up to keep home because Kevin of the Jameson & Jameson law firm could not be bothered to raise his own children. After their marriage ended, she went back to work—a hard slog for a woman who’d been out of the workforce for over fifteen years. Now Leah had a career that she’d built up in the past five years since the divorce. She lost her daughter to Kevin in the divorce (she blamed Leah) and her son to her daughter-in-law-to-be (she didn’t like Leah). Kevin and Leah had had a tight prenuptial agreement—but I knew Leah was happy to take nothing from Kevin. “It’s dirty money, Rose,” she told me. “It’s covered with my broken heart’s blood.” Gray and I had a prenuptial agreement.
He was the one with family wealth, and I was the trailer-trash girl who’d gotten knocked up. Mama Rutherford had hated me with a passion until she took her last breath a year ago. After years of marriage, she still called me a gold digger and started many a conversation with Gray saying, “You made a mistake with her, son.” “Why don’t you say something?” I’d asked when I was younger, and Gray had shrugged it away. “Just don’t pay any attention to her. I married you, didn’t I? So, what’s the problem?” When I was eighteen years old, pregnant with twins—and married way beyond my station, it hadn’t been easy. For all her flaws, Gray’s mother had done everything she could to polish me up and make me presentable.
I learned how to keep house, how to dress, how to buy the right flowers and gifts, how to throw a party—how to be a good Atlanta-society wife. I worked out to lose weight after the babies—and kept myself busy with the kids, charity work, throwing parties, and taking care of the house. I worked hard to be the wife Gray deserved. I hadn’t wanted to let my darling Gray down. After all that, my husband of twenty years had forgotten our anniversary and was flirting with his young executive assistant in our living room while I’d just emptied a three-hundred bottle of champagne. Well, at least I had the bubbly. “Hey, babe, you’re still awake.” He ended the call and came to me. He smooched my forehead absently as he went through his phone.
Then he stopped to look at the ice bucket and table setting, the flowers, and the wrapped gift at the head of the table. He looked confused for a moment, and then it clicked for him. I saw it happen. The disbelief that he’d forgotten. The irritation with himself for forgetting and at me for not reminding him. And then the need to make it right. My darling Gray, always wanting to do the right thing, ever since the pregnancy test I bought from Walgreens turned blue. “Babe, I’m so sorry.” I rose and straightened, my muscles screaming in protest. “It’s okay, Gray. Have you eaten?” Look, Mama Rutherford, I’m such a good wife. My husband forgot our anniversary, and I’m asking if he’s eaten. The thing was that I was past anger. Past hurt. Past grief. It wasn’t like I was waiting for Gray to suddenly become the all-American husband. Oh no! I’d tried to tell him several times that he needed to make room for me—that I needed a husband and a father for my children.
But I don’t think my message had gotten through. As a father, Gray was flawless. He never missed a school event. He was always there when the twins needed him. The three of them were close, and as the kids had grown up, I’d somehow become the outsider in my own family. I knew they looked down on me because I wasn’t as smart or educated as they were. My book club’s latest book was a romantic thriller by Nora Roberts while Gray and the children discussed some French guy called Derrida. They all were getting or had gotten degrees from fine universities—while I’d dropped out of community college when I became pregnant. I’d never gone back to complete what I’d started. As Gray’s mother told me, “You’ve fallen into a pot of gold by getting knocked up, girl; you don’t need to work a day in your life.” Well, the old bimbo was wrong.
I’d worked every day of my life. I’d worked hard. “Rose, babe, I’m really—” I smiled at him. I was adept now at showing him whatever he wanted to see. “It’s okay.” “We had a crisis and—” I went on tiptoe and smooched his cheek. I used to love that he was a foot taller than me—now, it just made him more unreachable. Aimee, without a Y, was five foot nine, like a model to my five foot five. “I’m going to go to bed. Goodnight, honey.” He smooched my forehead again. He didn’t smooch my mouth as he used to. Maybe he was cheating on me. When was the last time we’d had intercourse? Three…no four months ago? Or was it five? When you couldn’t even remember, you knew your marriage was in trouble. Like Maggie’s mother-in-law said in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, “When a marriage is on the rocks, the rocks are in the bed.” “I wish I could join you, but I have to get through a few things for a meeting we have in the morning with the city,” he apologized politely.
“That’s okay. You get it all done and get some rest.” Gray would work late in his office and then sleep in the guestroom. His excuse would be, “I didn’t want to wake you, babe.” He’d also be gone before I woke up. Yeah, he probably was banging his assistant. Talk about a cliché! I got into bed and made the decision I knew I had to make, the one I wished I’d made two years ago, right after the kids left. I texted Marie-Louise, my childhood friend from my trailer park days, who’d worked her tail off and now ran a bed-and-breakfast. I visited her often, more in the past years since she’d been diagnosed with cancer.
Malou didn’t have children, and the last loser she’d had the misfortune of hooking up with (her words, not mine) died in a car accident, leaving her the home she now lived in. I’d been with her through her chemo and celebrated when she’d come through. Now, two years later, the cancer was back, and the doctors gave her months, maybe a year, on the off chance. Once she told me that a few months ago, the plan for my future began to brew.