Read Online For Life by L.E. Chamberlin - Free Book Online

he’s been affected in an entirely different way and he hides it better, his grief is as raw beneath the surface as Renée’s and Donna’s is.
    Renée talks a lot about when she and Carl first dated. How she was a wild girl who’d never even been in love, and how Carl told her on their first date he wanted to settle down and nearly scared her away forever. How he proposed to her, how he cried when each of their children was born, how they agreed about everything but fought like cats and dogs about music and could never listen to the radio together in the car.
    I know a lot of the stories, but it seems to help her to tell them again, as if in the re-telling she’s holding him close to her. I learn new things, too. Secret things she wants to get off her chest, like how she was on a date with one of his friends when she realized it was Carl she actually wanted and faked sick so she could go home and call him. The terror she experienced when she was first pregnant with Addie, sure that all her youthful indiscretions would somehow make her baby have problems. She confides in me how tough it was when she was first pregnant with Sophie, harder than any of her other pregnancies because she was more hormonal and sick, and how Carl accommodated all her craziness.
    “He was so good to me, Cass," she marvels on afternoon as we're talking. "I’ve never known such a good man. We’ve got the best two men in all the world.”
    And then she tenses as she realizes what she’s said. “Sorry — I wasn’t thinking.”
    “No, it’s okay,” I reassure her. “Grady is a good man. I’d debate whether he was ever as good a husband as Carl, but he was young. We both were.”
    “I wish you two had worked it out somehow,” she says with a sigh. “You were so in love. You made such a beautiful couple.”
    I brush off her comments with a wave. “We were in love. Not sure we were a beautiful couple, but for a while there… Yeah, it was good. Really, really good.”
    The understatement of the century.
    “Do you ever wonder what might’ve happened if you guys had just…” she pauses.
    “If we’d stuck it out? I can’t imagine. That would’ve been a train wreck. I hid a lot from you guys toward the end. I was so unhappy... I was dying in that marriage. It was too much.”
    She nods thoughtfully.
    “But he’s a good man, like I said. And I’m sure next time around he’ll be a much better husband to some lucky lady.”
    “Nope," she says, shaking her head. "There’s not going to be a next time for Grady. He’s a one-woman man.”
    “There was Yveta.”
    She shakes her head again. “We all knew that was just him trying to get over you. She was such a nice girl, too, and I felt bad for her, but as soon as she got out here, she realized why he’d been holding back with her. She was smart enough to figure it out, although I think for a minute there she thought she might be able to change things. But Grad's heart was never going to be fully hers."
    “What do you mean? They were together for a long time.”
    Renée studies me for a moment. “You know that wall at Donna’s? The wedding wall?”
    I know the wall she means. Our wedding pictures are there — mine and Grady’s, Renée and Carl’s, Grady’s parents, and the wedding portraits of both sets of his grandparents. Happy couples in chronological order of their wedding dates. It’s never bothered me that Donna kept our picture there, because I’ve always felt it was good for the kids to see photos of Grady and me. I have an album at home, which Chloe can’t get enough of, that’s full of pictures of Grady and me all the way from high school until the last week of our marriage.
    “But surely she wasn’t upset about that… She knows he’s been married before.”
    Renée’s lips curl up at the corners and I’m shocked at her hint of a smile. “So you haven’t seen him do it, then.”
    “Do what?”
    She shakes her head again. “I forget you haven’t really