“How long?” I asked.
“Since autumn,” he said quietly.
Since autumn. That is, since October. When I was with my mother in the hospital after she broke her hip. When I drove to see her every day after work and collapsed onto the bed in the evening, exhausted. When I asked him to look in on her sometimes, and he said he had overtime.
“Who is she?”
“Jola, it doesn't matter…”
“It does. Who?”
A woman from his company. A dispatcher. Forty-two. Divorced, one child. They met at the company Christmas party. Banal. Absurdly banal.
I went home alone. Krzysztof came back two hours later. I sat in the kitchen at the table, at the same counter where a few weeks earlier I had seen that cursed calendar entry. I wasn't crying. The crying had come earlier, in the car in front of the building in Czuby. Now I was calm – with that icy calm that comes when you already know the worst has happened.
“Pack your things,” I said. “Today.”
“Jola, let's talk…”
“We talked for twenty-eight years. Now I speak and you listen. Pack your things and go.”
I didn't shout. I didn't throw plates. There was no scene like in a movie. There was silence, the smell of coffee cooling in the mug, and the sound of drawers opening and closing in the bedroom.
He packed two bags. At the door he turned and said:
“I'm sorry.”
I didn't answer. I locked the door and leaned my back against it. I stood like that for a very long time, listening to his footsteps fade away in the stairwell.
Ania called the next day. Apparently her father had warned her.
“Mom, maybe don't make any rash decisions…”
“Sweetheart, the only rash decision I made in my life was marrying your father three months after we got engaged. This decision I'm making after twenty-eight years, and it's well thought out.”
Bartek reacted differently. He was silent for a minute, and then said: “Hang in there, Mom. I'm coming this weekend.”
Three weeks passed. Krzysztof is living with a colleague from work, not with her – at least that's what he says. He calls every day. I don't answer. He sends texts. I don't read them. Once he came to the house, stood in front of the building like that first time in front of hers, only now it was he who was waiting. I saw him from the window. I didn't go down.
Basia from work says I should give him a chance. That men are like that, that it meant nothing, that twenty-eight years isn't something you throw away. Maybe she's right. But I keep seeing the same thing: his wet hair, his unzipped jacket, and that sentence – “it's not what you think.” As if in twenty-eight years he hadn't learned that I always think exactly what is.
My mother asked if I was sad. I said no. That I feel empty. That in the evenings I sit in the kitchen and drink tea and look at his chair on the other side of the table, and I don't miss him – I miss who I thought he was. And those are two different things.
Yesterday I took our old wedding photo out of the drawer. Me in a white dress, him in a borrowed suit, both of us terrified and happy. I looked at that girl and that boy and thought: poor things, they don't know yet.
I put the photo back. I didn't throw it away. But I don't know if I'll ever look at it again.
