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Abby can see he’s at a bar. It’s some pub near the apartment he got a few months ago, post-tearful discussions with Tanner and Penny that Daddy still loves them and Mommy very much, but that he needs his own place where they can decorate their own room – and yes, Tanner, we can get you a dinosaur bedspread – but Mommy and Daddy won’t be married anymore but he will still see them all the time.
Frank’s icon is hovering over the bar on Google Maps, a photo of him holding a month-old Penny in one arm with a squirming two-year old Tanner in the other. Abby thinks that’s the last time she remembers her husband Frank smiling that all-American college hockey star smile that made his eyes crinkle in her direction, the last time she and the little family they made could make him smile like that.
He had dropped the kids off around 1:00, and normally that’s when he’d switch off Find My Friends, but he must have forgotten. The drop off was simple, they had already eaten and Penny was ready for a nap, and Tanner begged Abby to please let him watch the newest Bluey episode because Daddy didn’t and it was so unfair. The rest of the day had passed uneventfully, with an early dinner of mac and cheese with peas mixed in, then scrubbing mashed peas out of Penny’s blonde curls, and tucking them in around seven with the Pippi Longstocking book Abby had grown up reading. Frank popped into her mind as she closed the door to the kids’ room and took a baby monitor with her. Without thinking, she opened her maps app like she would if they had fallen asleep at their dad’s, but no, he wasn’t at his apartment. She zoomed out until that reminder of what her life used to look like popped up, and he was at a pub.
Her husband ex-husband was sober, she thought, and she wanted to believe him when he said that, and when her lawyer said Frank was willing to “piss in any cup” (his words) to show her. Her chest grew tight at the idea that he was drinking and yes, he wasn’t a drunk but an addict is an addict and he had told her he was staying away from all addictions – yes even the betting boards at work. But then she remembers what Tanner said in between bites of neon orange mac and cheese, that “Mel’s birthday is today” but he had gesticulated so wildly, Abby had focused on cleaning the loose noodles that flung onto the floor.
Abby had met Mel, of course, at the barbeque Jack Abbot threw at his house over the summer because “If I don’t use this grill every six months, I’ll forget it’s here”. Frank and Abby were still trying at that point, but Abby was already fed up because they had just gotten out of the car and Penny was wiggly and fussy in her arms and Tanner refused to hold Frank’s hand to walk up the driveway and instead took off running into the backyard. Abby yelled for Tanner, and Frank did a little jog that always pissed her off, because he had always been so good at running, even though she was the college soccer player, but she tore her ACL a few months into dating and while he never tried to rub it in, god it felt like it sometimes.
Frank stopped his stupid jog, and Abby looked up to see her little boy reaching for a small blonde woman to pick him up. She put down the water bottle she was holding and lifted him, tickling him until he was a giggling mess in her arms. Abby caught up to Frank, and he turned to her, grabbing Penny from her grasp. “You remember that time you were on a work trip and my parents’ pipe burst? Mel is that coworker I mentioned who came over to look after the kids for a bit while I dealt with the plumber.”
Abby had remembered, and she had always filled in the word coworker with the names of people she already knew. Yolanda, Cassie, maybe Mateo who had babysat once and Tanner still mentioned constantly. Potentially Robby if Frank was feeling particularly desperate. But she had never considered that the coworker was the girl-next-door Mel.
If she hadn’t carried Tanner for nine months, Abby might’ve guessed Mel was his mother. Mel’s honey blonde hair was so similar to the hair she passed on to her kids, and her wide eyes looked at Abby’s children with such admiration and wonder in them. When Mel laughed, Abby could see the corners of Frank’s eyes crinkle.
So, Frank’s at a bar celebrating Mel’s birthday. He’s allowed to celebrate her birthday, they are adults. It’s not too far from the hospital, so it may even be a work sanctioned event, one where the day shift would loudly sing happy birthday and the bartender would pour her an extra shot in hopes for a larger tip from whoever would close out the tab. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking and staring at his icon, updated Just Now.
They hadn’t been great before the drug thing, and she didn’t miss the fights they had after he was suspended, but did he not miss her, now, in that pub? They went to bars all the time in college, the ones that were near campus that didn’t card. They’d come with a group of friends, but he’d always end up pressing her against the bar or a high top, whispering jokes into her ear that only they would find funny, and she’d throw her head back laughing like he was the funniest, most charming man in the world, because to twenty-year-old Abby Waldorf, he was. And now, twenty years later, he had some girl who was at least ten years their junior laughing against the bar, and his breath would haunt the shell of Mel’s ear just like it did hers, and she’d put her hand on his bicep, muscle he had developed all that time ago and could continue to hone, while Abby’s belly grew softer and her curves less defined.
The pub seems to attract an older crowd, Abby thinks after looking on the website, but then reminds herself that she is 42 now and that the older crowd isn't really that old at all. They're probably playing music from when Abby and Frank were kids, and god, does Mel even know it? Maybe it’s a song they grew up with. Back in college, Frank would borrow his mom’s car that still had a tape deck and they’d drive around at night, listening to a worn and wobbly Fleetwood Mac cassette. He’d reach across the console and put his strong hand in hers, and now that hand is on the lower back of the only blonde that can make him smile now, touching her like she’s so delicate he might break her, and that he knows he can’t make that mistake again.
Did he jump at the sparkling intro of Everywhere, remembering that he fell in love to that song but not remembering whose face he once held tenderly to it? I want to be with you everywhere, it was intertwined with their love, their marriage, and yet had become an old habit to him, the blonde replaceable in his daydreams.
They had carefully laid out their life, timing Tanner’s conception with Frank’s promotion for the stability it would add to their lives and her promotion to a senior role that would allow her to take six months of maternity leave. He had promised her to give her the life they wanted, but it must have only been what she dreamed of, because he took those pills and put his job and family and her love at risk for a high. She had believed him, when he said he loved their little family, that he wanted this, wanted her for the rest of their lives.
She stares at his smiling face, Just Now, over the bar, and wonders if he hates her. Was this all some cruel joke – to get a doting, loving wife who was trying her fucking best, and two beautiful rambunctious children who had their father’s eyes and easy-going laugh and toothy grin, who only took her blonde hair, hair that might one day turn brown as they age – that same blonde hair Mel so eerily imitates? How similar they look is the worst, Abby thinks, because Frank had a type and could slot anyone into the space she created in his life and no one would notice. She pledged and vowed to love him, and she thinks she still does, but her life feels like one large hazing, and everyone is in on the joke, and the one person she thought she’d have forever wakes up in a different bed now. Mel’s bed, she thinks, but pushes past it and the rising nausea deep in her stomach.
Abby had wanted to sell the house when Frank left. He, and her mother, insisted that some stability would be good for the kids as they dealt with Daddy being in rehab, then Daddy moving out, then Daddy and Mommy divorcing. But Abby hated this house. It was in a nice neighborhood with a good school district because the Langdons Abby and Frank were planners, but now it was a sentencing. She was meant to get pregnant at this house, water its flower beds, replace the dishwasher when it broke, take down Christmas lights in January. She had no choice. The house cages her to the memories of lying on the couch, Frank softly rubbing her stomach and talking to their baby, back when they didn’t know if Tanner would be a boy or a girl. She tried to move the furniture around so she wouldn’t expect to see Frank’s unmade side of their marital bed or see his and Tanner’s matching slippers near the door, but it was still the same house, the same mattress even, and his presence still lived there. She bought a whole new wardrobe when the divorce was finalized, and she took every sweater that Frank said matched her eyes and every old UNC shirt and shoved them into a trash bag that is still sitting on the floor of her closet because if she donates them, that’s 20 years of laughs and kisses and whispered I love you’s gone, there’d be no more witnesses to the memories, and she’d feel like the only person in the world that remembered that he once loved her.
Why'd he have to forget to turn it off? She wasn't in love with him anymore, she thinks, and probably hadn't been for some time. She almost hates him. But she still loves him, and there’s a sharp pain in her chest thinking about him moving on. Abby’s world ended and his kept spinning, yes they were together a long time, but she couldn’t help feeling like a trial run for the life he actually wanted, the secret wish he must’ve been hiding all this time. Abby had laid her heart and body bare, and she thinks she may never again. Not because the boy she loved for 20 years broke her heart, but that she was so easy to replace.