Page 29 of Heavy Petting

“Apparently it’s the talk of the town that I’m staying with you,” I told him.

Joshua winced. “Oh yeah, I should have warned you about that. If you didn’t realize it yet, this town loves its gossip.”

“Especially about the town’s silver fox bachelor vet?” I asked.

“What?”

I laughed at the look of distaste on his face.

“I’m just reporting what I heard.”

Breakfast came quickly, chicken and waffles for me and an egg white omelet for Joshua. I’d taken about two bites of my breakfast when my dining companion asked, “Tell me about your divorce.”

I looked up in surprise. “What?”

“I’m curious about you and your ex,” he said. “I mean, if you feel comfortable talking about it. If not, don’t worry.”

I considered his words. “I’m okay to share it’s just…”

“What?”

“I’m going to sound like an idiot,” I said softly, “for putting up with his behavior.”

Joshua shrugged. “Every one of us can look back and past relationships and see things we should have known sooner or done differently, or red flags we didn’t recognize until it was too late.”

His pragmatic words made me feel a bit better.

“I met Stephen when I was twenty-eight,” I said. “My mother actually engineered an ‘accidental’ meeting.” I used air quotes. “She invited me to lunch one day and he showed up, and my mother made a big deal of acting surprised and inviting him to join us. By the time lunch was over, I’d agreed to go on a date with him. My mother was over the moon.”

“Did you like him?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I didn’t have as good of self-esteem as I do now. I liked him okay I guess. He was good looking and charming. But honestly, looking back now I think I was more swayed by the fact that there was someone who liked me. I know I’ve never been the thinnest or the prettiest --.”

“You look fine just the way you are,” he interrupted.

I nodded in acknowledgement and deep in my chest, my heart swelled with happiness.

“But I didn’t believe that back then. So suddenly there’s this handsome lawyer sweeping me off my feet and even though I knew I didn’t really love him, and I never believed he loved me, I thought we were a good match and that seemed good enough.”

“Were you really a good match? Back then I mean?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, not really. I think he liked the idea of me, you know? And maybe that was true for me too. I wanted to be married. I knew that my years were dwindling if I wanted to have a child and while I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a mom, I didn’t want to wake up someday and realize that I’d missed the opportunity. So when he asked me to marry him, I figured Stephen was the best I could get. And he had this attitude like someone like me should be grateful that someone like him wanted to marry me.”

I winced, knowing how pathetic that sounded.

“Once we were married he started buying me clothes, appointments with stylists and manicurists, that kind of thing. At first I thought it was because he thought that’s what I wanted, but eventually I realized that it was really about the fact that he didn’t like the way I looked. He wanted me to dress differently, talk differently, wear make-up, have fancy hair… he basically wanted to mold me into his perfect idealized woman, a little Stepford wife.”

I paused to chew a bite of waffle. It was drenched in syrup, just the way I liked it. I noticed that Joshua didn’t make any comments about my syrup usage.

“Anyway, Stephen insisted that I give up my writing clients and forget about being a fantasy author. ‘You need to get your head out of the clouds and have a real job’, he told me, so I gave all that up and started working for him and his father at their law firm even though I really had no interest in being an office manager.”

“That sucks,” he said.

“Yeah, and then like almost every woman over thirty I gained some weight. Not a lot, but enough that Stephen noticed. That’s when the policing of my food started. He hired a personal chef to prepare lower calorie meals and then he insisted that I work with a personal trainer that he personally selected. He made it sound like he was worried about my health, but eventually I realized that it was really about him controlling me.”

“That’s when you decided to divorce him?” he asked.

“No, I’m sorry to say that came later. One day I was out for a run – which I really hated, but my trainer insisted on me doing as cardio -- and I passed the humane society shelter. I don’t know why, but I was compelled to go inside to look at the dogs, and there she was. Esmerelda.”