His Wife Asked If We Could Be "Just Friends"

When I stopped speaking to him, I constantly worried that I might run into him somewhere. I kept imagining scenarios where I'd be out to dinner with friends and look up to see Jack across the restaurant, or I'd be at a gas station and he'd pull up to the pump next to mine, or something. But as months went by without incident, the less I thought about it - it hadn't happened yet, so it wasn't likely to. We clearly had lives that were different enough, separate enough, that simply ending our connection was enough to cut off contact completely. Sometimes that made me sad, but mostly I figured it was a good thing. It saved me from unplanned interactions with Jack; I didn't know how those would go anymore.

It was almost three full years after I'd cut off contact that something happened. As it turned out, I was at the grocery store, and it wasn't Jack I ran into.

I was standing in the produce section, bagging a few apples, when I noticed a woman with long dark hair, a few years older than I was, watching me. Staring in that way that people stare but pretend they aren't. I could see that she was looking at me, but I figured that I was just in her way and she was awkwardly waiting for me to move. It didn't really occur to me that she was staring at me specifically, until I started to walk away and she spoke.

"Carrie?"

I froze. I couldn't tell you why, exactly; I think it just made me nervous that this woman I'd never seen before knew my name.

I turned, my face politely puzzled. "Yes?"

She came towards me, looking thoroughly embarrassed, her cheeks pink, as if she had just blurted out my name and then immediately regretted calling attention to herself. I knew the feeling. She was starting to look familiar, like I'd seen her somewhere before, but I couldn't place when or where.

"I'm sorry - I'm not crazy or anything," she started timidly, "I know you probably don't know me. I'm Theresa."

The name rang a distant bell in my head, as if I'd heard it before but forgot what it meant. I was still confused. "I'm sorry," I said slowly, "Do we….?"

"Theresa Peterson," she clarified, watching my face. "I'm - I'm Jack's wife."

I went suddenly and inexplicably cold. My skin felt stiff, like I'd been frozen in place. Not a single hair on my body moved. I wasn't actually sure if I was breathing, because I suddenly remembered where I'd seen her before.

In his wedding pictures.

Here she was. His wife. The woman I'd spent an embarrassing number of hours wondering about. The woman I'd stared at photos of, wondering what she had that I didn't. Wondering what it was about her that made it worth leaving me as abruptly as he had. Now that woman had called my name in a grocery store and I was suddenly, abruptly, dropped into conversation with a woman I never wanted or expected to meet. It was like being pushed into a pool someone had filled with ice water - startling, a shock to the system, and mostly unpleasant.

"Oh," I said unhelpfully. I heard the way it sounded, almost rude in its abruptness, and my manners kicked in. "Oh, right - of course, I'm sorry, I should have recognized you."

She couldn't possibly have expected me to recognize her, of course. We'd never met. As far as she knew, I didn't know her name or her face - I didn't have any reason to. But it was what you were supposed to say. The polite thing.

They were the only words I'd been able to push out of my constricted lungs, so they were going to have to be enough.

She looked at her feet. "It's just, um - can I ask you something?"

I couldn't even fathom where this was going. I wanted to run. I couldn't imagine what this woman would want of me. Couldn't imagine any answer that would help.

"Yeah, all right," I replied more calmly than I felt, feeling like it would be rude-bordering-on-ridiculous to refuse at this point.

"It's just - I think - " she paused and seemed to collect herself. She continued, more evenly this time: "I know you two stopped talking a long time ago."

A long time ago. Four years was a long time, I guess, to someone who hadn't spent the first half of it trying, with everything they had, not to contact the former love of their life. It still felt so recent to me. Like I'd gone a brief summer without him, and I was expected to have forgotten him already.

"And I just wondered," she continued, seeing that I wasn't going to respond, "Whether that was your idea or his."

It's a trap.

That was my first thought. Because, see, there's no good way to answer that question when it's the wife of the man you loved who's asking it. If I said it was his idea, she'd worry that I was still pining for him. If I told her the truth, she'd think that I was "the one who got away."

I wondered which of those was closer to the truth.

I sighed, giving myself a moment, and decided that the truth about Jack and I was probably complicated enough without adding lies on top of it. Answer, I thought to myself, with as little information as possible.

A complicated question with a complicated answer: whose idea had it been to stop speaking to each other? I took a breath. "Mine."

I didn't elaborate. I hoped she wouldn't ask.

"Can you - would you tell me what happened?" she asked.

Of course she asked. Any woman would ask, if she had the chance. I would have asked, if I'd been on the other side of this conversation. I didn't blame her for wanting to know.

That didn't make it easier. This was, again, a potential minefield. I'd still been so in love with him at the time. When he'd announced his engagement, I knew I wouldn't be able to stick around and watch him marry someone. But the night before he'd told me he was engaged, he had come to my house and curled up with me on my couch, and his mouth had been on mine and his hands had been everywhere, everywhere, and I could still smell his scent when I closed my eyes sometimes. But I couldn't tell her that, because I'd bet my life she didn't know about it, and I wasn't about to involve myself in their relationship simply because she'd caught me off-guard with an uncomfortable question.

I also really couldn't lie, at least not much. I didn't know how much Jack had told her. So I had to tell her as little as I could reasonably get away with, without contradicting anything Jack might have already shared.

Frankly, I was surprised there wasn't smoke coming out of my ears.

"It's….complicated," I replied quietly, buying time. It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea whether Jack had even told her how long he and I had been together, or if he'd just described me as a fling. Or a friend, for that matter. Layers upon layers of complication. It felt like all of the reasons I'd cut him out of my life were being tossed at me like grenades, and trying to dodge them was terrifying.

"He and I had a - complicated relationship," I finally answered, the words coming out stilted and awkward because of how much I'd weighed them in my head. "The short version is that I thought - well, cutting it off seemed like the best idea at the time. So we could have our own lives and….stop complicating each other's."

She was watching my face as I spoke, and I think she could see how careful I was being. Which hadn't been my intention; I didn't want her to think that Jack had anything to hide from her.

Except he did, of course: me.

Everything about me was something he'd hide from his wife, if I had to guess. His feelings, my feelings, all the things he and I had said and done; possibly even our relationship in its entirety. And here I was, carefully dancing around her question because I didn't want to land him in trouble. We hadn't spoken in four years, and somehow I was still the one making sure he covered his tracks. Still the one saying, Jack, take a step back, people can see us.

She hesitated, then asked, "Would you - do you think you'd ever talk to him again?"

That one I didn't have to think about, not for a second: "No."

She seemed surprised. "I wish you would," she admitted. "Don't you miss him?"

It was my turn to be surprised.

Of course I missed him. Missing him was practically part of my daily routine at this point. But I'd always thought that missing him was better than the alternative.

My eyebrows knitted together as I regarded her thoughtfully. Her response gave me some insight on how much Jack had told her. She obviously didn't know who I was, who I'd been, how he and I had left things. If he had told her everything, wishing me back into her husband's life would have been the last thing in the world she'd want.

"He and I have very different lives now," I told her carefully, dodging her actual question. "It's been over four years since we've spoken, and I think we're both perfectly fine. I don't really think we'd have much in common anymore, to be honest."

I was proud of how calm I sounded. It was a lie, but I wasn't about to stand here and discuss the merits of being friends with Jack. I didn't know if I was capable of just being friends with him. It was why I'd cut him off to begin with: because of her; because he was engaged to someone who wasn't me.

She smiled a little. "I think you'd be surprised," she replied, leaning a hip against the counter next to us. She seemed to be relaxing around me, which made me more anxious. She was slipping into girl-chat mode, and I couldn't possibly let my guard down and giggle about Jack - not with this woman, of all people. Not with his wife.

"Oh?" I asked noncommittally, already trying to think of a way to end the conversation. Get out, get out, get out, my brain was screaming. His wife was the last person on earth I could get friendly with. I couldn't cope with that. I certainly didn't want her trying to talk me into being friends with him again. I knew what I could handle, and letting Jack back into my life was most assuredly not on the list.

"He makes jokes sometimes," she told me, and I stopped searching for the nearest exit and dragged my eyes back to her face. "He says things every now and again - not often, but here and there - and I don't get them. And I'll say 'What do you mean?' and he gets this look on his face, this distant look, and says, 'I guess that's a Carrie joke.' And I just think he misses you sometimes, you know, like he makes those jokes whenever he wishes you were still around or something."

I wanted to sink through the floor. I wanted the ceiling to collapse on my head. I wished for a heart attack, or for the building to catch on fire. Anything to get me out of here, away from those kind brown eyes telling me that her husband still thought about me, that the man I'd spent almost four years loving and hating in almost equal measure still made jokes that only I would understand. Why would he say that to his wife? Why would he mention my name? Why didn't it piss her off? I felt like I was going to faint; I absolutely, positively did not want this conversation to continue. I didn't want to know that he thought about me, or how often. I wanted out.

Yet I found myself physically unable to walk away, pinned there by some desperate desire for even a small, secondhand connection to him, even after all this time.

So I asked. Of course I asked. I couldn't stop myself. "Jokes like what?"

I hated myself for the words as soon as I'd said them, but I couldn't take them back. I don't know if I would have even if I could.

She thought for a moment. "Well, the most recent one was last week, which is why I was so surprised to run into you here - what are the odds? But we were at home, and I was in the kitchen cutting vegetables, and he was sitting on the couch - "

I could see the scene she was painting. I knew every inch of his house - their house, now. He and I once had sex on the counter she'd been cutting vegetables on. We'd had sex on the couch Jack was sitting on. Hell, we'd had sex on the floor in between.

I wondered suddenly if she knew that I was the girl to "christen" his new house with him. Nearly every surface of every room. Including the basement, the deck, the shower….

"And there was some big noise in the backyard," she continued, reigning my thoughts back in; an image of Jack's vegetable garden, of which he was so proud, flashed to mind, "so I stuck my head out the back door to see what it was. I came back in and said, 'Oh, just a shovel falling over, no worries.' So he said, 'I wasn't worried,' in his fake-macho voice, you know?"

I did know. I could hear him saying it.

"And I said, 'Oh yeah? What would you have done if it was an axe-murderer or something out there?' And there was this pause, and he got that distant look, and then he laughed and said, 'I'd probably stay right here and just yell ALARM!'"

I laughed.

It surprised me, because I hadn't meant to. I hadn't thought at all about what my reaction to this story should be, and I'd reacted genuinely, without thinking. I had forgotten about that joke.

"You see," she said, pointing at the smile on my face. "You get the joke. And I don't."

I dropped the smile. "It's just a joke," I said dismissively, trying to squash the idea that it had any meaning for me. "An old joke, and a really stupid one. I'm sure you have plenty of jokes between you that I wouldn't understand. He doesn't need me around to make those jokes. He should just explain them to you."

"But I think that's why he's making them," she explained. "I think he misses you."

I didn't know what to say. I absolutely could not handle this woman asking me  - me -  to be friends with her husband. She didn't know what she was asking - of me, of him, of herself. She didn't know what that would do, what resuming our friendship would look like; I didn't either.

I had absolutely no intention of finding out.

Get out, get out, get out. My brain again. I should have listened the first time.

"Listen," I said with some finality. "It's just better for both of us if we stay apart. I really believe that. It's better if we just stay out of each other's lives. But I actually do have to get going, so - " I extended a hand, and she shook it after giving me a disappointed look, "It was nice to meet you."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I'm sorry if I've upset you at all," she said as I turned to go. "It was nice talking to you."

I simply raised a hand in farewell, unable to bring myself to respond to her unspoken question, and headed to the checkout lines at the front of the store.

I drove home as quickly as I could without getting pulled over, dropped my groceries on my kitchen floor, and flopped down on my couch, staring at the ceiling.

What the hell had just happened?