So take my advice: whatever you do,
Don’t blink.
—Meg Cabot
Trembling and rattled, I barely made it to the elevator. I hated waiting and especially right now when all I could think about was collapsing on my bed.
The mean words, the bickering, fights about money, stocks, vacations blurred my vision.
The elevator was stuck on the 43rd floor. “Hurry up”, I commanded with my inside voice.
Pictures of the deliveryman flashed in my mind.
I felt so foolish thinking he was approaching to hit on me—the way he walked right up to me as if he were waiting for me.
Our eyes met and his mouth started to move.
“Mary Beth Ryan?”
Instant confusion. How did he know me?
“Yes, but how….”
He held out a business envelope.
“You’ve been served,” he pronounced and turned and swiftly walked away.
I inhaled and stood there for what seemed an eternity with that awful frozen expression on my face.
I took a deep breath and cautiously opened the envelope to read the first line – The first pleading …a request to dissolve the marriage between Mary Beth Ryan and William Michael Ryan.
It finally happened—the moment I dreaded.
My mind went back to the first time we met—it was in the pet store and we had both put in bids to adopt the same rescue kitten—a feisty little tabby named Jack.
Jack had been abandoned on the Bruce Trail, left to fend for himself until he was found by a group of hikers.
Bill and I both thought the same thing when we saw him—he’s a survivor.
“This is impossible to resolve,” Bill groaned, “We seem to both love the little guy.”
I winced at his words. I didn’t want to go home to my empty apartment without the kitten.
“Maybe we can flip a coin,” Bill suggested.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t seem right. Somebody carelessly left him out in the wild. It’d be like abandoning him all over again.”
Bill nodded. “Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I guess I feel that way too. Why don’t we get a coffee and talk about this? I mean, we’re two reasonable adults—we should be able to come up with a solution.
I grimace as the images come flooding back—Bill and I sitting in McDonald’s for hours going back and forth until finally it was close to closing time at the pet store.
Thankfully, Bill broke the stalemate. “If I let you adopt Jack, will you allow me to drop by and see him now and then?”
I started out the day looking for a pet to relieve my loneliness and ended the day as a co-parent to Jack.
Fast-forward fifteen years and I’m once again going back to an empty apartment.
Jack died two months ago and now Bill has asked for a divorce.
I feel I’m in a time-skip—I blinked and fifteen years disappeared in an instant.
Now it’s not Jack abandoned in a wilderness but me.
Pets are better than us—they don’t ask for separations—and if they didn’t die, they’d never leave.
I need to be rescued—more than Jack needed me.
I need someone to commit to me.
https://goo.gl/images/d4gH5W, https://goo.gl/images/T2iV8C