The Party He Threw To Celebrate Our Divorce

My husband raised his glass before the busboy had even cleared our old plates from the table, and he did it loud enough that half of Baker Street Grill turned to look.

Todd, I mean.

“To new beginnings,” he said, and Sierra laughed like it was the funniest thing anyone had ever toasted to, and around them sat his parents, three of his coworkers from the dealership, and our thirteen year old son, who was staring at his water glass like it owed him an explanation.

I want to be honest about how I got there, because I know how it looks from the outside. A wife walking into the party her almost ex husband threw to celebrate leaving her. People assume there is only one reason a woman does that, and it is not the reason I had.

I did not come to beg. I came because Owen asked me to.

My name is Megan Ferris, and until six weeks before that dinner I would have told anyone in Ashford, Ohio that my marriage was ordinary and fine, the way you describe a house you have lived in so long you stop seeing the cracks in the ceiling. Todd and I met at Ohio State, in a study group for a statistics class neither of us particularly cared about, and what I remember most from those years is how easy he was to be around, how he could walk into a room of strangers and leave twenty minutes later with three new friends and somebody’s phone number for a job lead. I mistook that ease, for a long time, for kindness. They are not always the same thing, though it took me fifteen years to learn the difference.

We married two years after graduation, in a small ceremony at my parents’ church outside Dayton, and settled in Ashford, forty minutes from where Todd grew up, because his father had a line on a manager job at the Ford dealership in town and Todd never once considered turning it down. I understood that. Ashford was a good place to raise a family, the kind of town where the diner on Main Street knows your coffee order and the football stadium fills up on Friday nights whether the team is any good or not. We bought the brick ranch house on Cardinal Lane in our third year of marriage, and Todd put up the basketball hoop over the garage himself, crooked the first time, fixed on the second try after I teased him about it for a week. Owen was born four years into the marriage, and for a long time after that, our life together felt less like a marriage and more like a small, well run operation, two people managing a household and a childhood with a shared sense of purpose.