I avoided
Bryan all Saturday. He bore silent witness
to this until Sunday morning, when he joined me in the kitchen. “I just got
off the phone with Bob,” he said. “I have some bad news. He and
Shelly broke up.”
The apple
I’d been holding landed with a thud on the cutting board. “You’re kidding
me!”
“I’m
afraid not.”
“But
why?”
“You know
how Shelly has been in Chicago for the past couple of months?”
“Yeah. For
work, right?”
“Not quite.
She’s been seeing someone else there.”
“You mean
another guy?” I gasped. At Bryan's nod I said, “Is Bob sure about
that? Maybe he’s just being paranoid, because of Cathy.”
“Well,
considering the fact that Shelly was the one to tell him, he’s pretty damn
certain.”
“She told him?”
“She had
to. She and this other guy just moved in together.”
“Oh,
no…” I sank against the counter. First Cathy, and now Shelly.
The nightmare never ended. “Is he okay?”
“Not at
all, so I invited him over for dinner—I didn’t think you would mind. He
could use some cheering up.”
“That’s
fine with me,” I answered, but it was going to take a lot more than dinner with
sympathetic friends to right what Shelly had wronged. Bob was a
disaster. Not even Cathy dumping him for a stinky old college professor
had hurt him this much, I guess because he’d blamed it on his drinking.
Now that he was sober, and working his program with such earnestness, maybe his
worldview had changed. Maybe he had thought to himself, this time things will be different.
I couldn’t say. All I did know was that seeing Bob slumped in the dining
room chair, appearing aged and defeated, made me hate Shelly more than I’d ever
hated anyone in my life. “There will be someone else,” I told him. “Someone who will treasure all of the
wonderful things about you.”
Bob
smiled a little. He clearly did not believe me.
“It’s
true,” I insisted, but as his puppy dog brown eyes brimmed with tears I could
have sworn I heard his heart breaking. “I appreciate what you’re trying
to say, Rachel,” Bob answered. “I really do. But my whole life
I’ve been taken advantage of by the people I most want to trust. And the
scariest thing is, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to
change.”
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