Chapter 1

With ivory combs, my mother would brush her golden tresses, staring at my father with disdain through the mirror of her vanity table, her eyebrows arcing with each passing second as he fumbled with his bowtie. I’d sit on the bed, my toy soldiers and dinosaurs in hand, pretending to be interested in playing, but what I really wanted to do was watch her insult him.

The way she always did.

“Charles, you foolish idiot,” she said, and I smiled because those two words meant the same thing. She was doubling his stupidity. “Come here, I’ll do it.”

My father had the decency to look embarrassed. “Don’t speak to me like that in front of my son.”

This was where I learned to love witnessing women humiliate their husbands. The power she held, wielding it like dark magic, striking him right in the heart. I had always hoped that it would break him.

But my father was resilient, and he knew my mother well. He knew she would laugh, which she did.

“You insufferable bitch,” he muttered. “I’ll do it myself.”

Mother only raised an eyebrow and got to her feet. Like seawater that drowned a fisherman, I felt all the fear and all the excitement of witnessing a chaotic disaster. Pandemonium. A word I’d learn in the fifth grade, but would understand from a younger age thanks to Dear Mother.

“Ben,” she said, glancing at me, her blue eyes piercing me from across the room. “Run along, sweetheart.”

I got to my feet and exited the room slowly, hoping to catch the beginning of the end of a marriage. If I was being honest, I knew it had ended the moment I’d caught Mother fucking her boss’s son, a barely-legal fresh-faced Army private with limbs like an action figure.

Thanks for your service to our country, you bastard.

The funny thing is, Father knew about the Army private. He knew, but like a coward, he was too afraid to confront Mother. She was a great and terrible beauty, with influence in their social crowd, throwing her grand parties and making friends in high places. Should Father leave her, he’d just the same leave the entire life he’d built.

“You stupid fucking imbecile,” Mother said to my father as I closed their door behind me. I was only seven, but I understood by her tone that she’d slap me across the face if I ever repeated those words. I saved them for the future, for the days when I could be grown and out of her beloved home.

She loved that house, the white picket fence and swollen hydrangeas, freshly-cut grass, greener than every other yard in the upper-middle-class neighborhood we lived in. Her pool with the waterfall, the three-car garage that had her black Mercedes Benz G-class Wagon, her cute little white Audi coupe, and Father’s Subaru SUV, which she detested. She loved her antiques from estate sales, and she loved her decor, which she had redone every season.

That house was her pride, and I was her joy.

“My darling Benjie,” she’d call me. “Do well in school. Mommy will get you anything you could ever wish for.”

She kept her promise. Anything I wanted? Mine. All Mine.

And I never did learn to share.

That day was the day my father had enough. He hadn’t learned how to share either and had finally grown tired of it.

“I want a divorce.”

I think both Mother and I felt that rush of delight, like satisfaction was brimming in our hands, ready to overflow.

Yes, he was leaving her. She left it up to him.

But she was the spider that spun the web, and he was the stupid bug that had been lured into her trap.