#4

I remember riding in his maroon Mercury Villager when he told me that things were going to be a little different around the house. I picked at my pink fingernail polish with unabashed habit, all while trying to discern what he could possibly mean. When he said "a little different", I had no idea how severely understated that would end up being. "A little different" to me, as a 7 year old, meant my friends would not be able to stay the night all the time anymore. Maybe it even meant that I would have to take more baths or go to bed earlier, which I was okay with, but again, my sentiments were completely and utterly false. I said okay to things being "a little different" around the house, not knowing what consequences it would have, and went on with my 7 year old ways.

I don't remember being talked to about it. I don't even remember him leaving. Maybe I blocked it out, with good reason I suppose. I only remember the things that followed; curling up in bed with my mom in a queen sized waterbed so she wouldn't be alone, crying tears of a rage that only a 7 year old girl with a broken heart could muster, wondering what I had done wrong to make my world shatter into the pieces I could never hold on to.

I remember waking up one Saturday morning, ready to eat Lucky Charms and watch Bewitched with my mom but she looked weak. She looked hurt, angry, alone. She told me he left to move in with a Mel, a new friend of his he had met at the University, and we had an all-girls house now, just the three of us girls. Wouldn't that be great?

I remember talking to that awful woman, Mel, on the phone when I couldn't sleep and I missed him. She always answered the phone. Always. Always told me I didn't need to be upset, and that everything would be okay. Evidently her daddy never left her in the middle of the night to wake up and put together the 1500 piece puzzle of a divorce.

That's the last conversation I remember having with him before things were entirely different at our house, not just "a little different."