The New Neighbor by Leah Stewart

They might not have, if she’d told them about the affairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell, because that would expose her weakness as well as his.
    The third—or fourth?—time she found out that Tommy had slept with another woman, he’d left his email open on their shared desktop—something he never did—and curiosity had made her read it. It was curiosity of the kind that comes with a shiver of nausea, because you know you don’t want to know what you’re about to find out. She printed the email out, as calm as a secretary. When he got home that night—late, he’d had drinks after work, of course he had—she was sitting at the dining room table waiting with the email in front of her. He said, “Hey, babe,” and bent to offer her a kiss that was sharp with whiskey, and she pushed the email over so he could read it. “What the fuck, Tommy,” she said. “What the fuck .” It was all she could think of to say, so she kept saying it, a hundred times, slamming down the word that described both her outrage and the thing he’d done. She went around the house saying it, picking up his things and throwing them, while he followed, alternately pleading and shouting at her to stop. Finally he grabbed her hands, and she threw him off with such force that he stumbled backward, and she took a step in his direction and hit him as hard as she could in the face.
    “Stop it!” Zoe screamed. She was eleven, or twelve. She was supposed to be in bed, but she’d come downstairs, and they hadn’t seen her. Before her guilt rushed in, Jennifer felt a flash of anger toward Zoe, her daddy’s girl of a daughter, who couldn’t even allow her the fleeting triumph of hitting him, the satisfying pain of their failures colliding.
    “It’s okay,” Tommy said to Zoe, who had her arms around him, who was trembling, who glared at her mother like she wanted to do her harm. “It’s okay, honey. I deserved it.”
    “Oh God,” Jennifer said. She was moving toward the garage door before she knew her own intent. “Can’t you let me have anything ?”
    Tommy followed her into the garage. She wrenched the car door open. “What do you mean?” he said as she slammed it shut. He rapped on the window, the garage door slowly opening at her back. She could hear him through the glass. “What do you want me to let you have? Whatever it is you can have it.”
    She rolled the window down. “I’m tired of forgiving you,” she said. “Just once I want to be the one in the wrong.” She threw the car in reverse and he stepped away, then followed the car as she backed down the driveway. Zoe stood behind him, framed in the doorway to the house, crying, calling, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, come back,” as her mother drove away.
    They were right, the people who talked about her. He did love her. She was always mad at him. She was mean. Time after time a sharp word from her left him quiet and wounded, looking at her with his sorrowful eyes. In those moments she was almost on the side of the people who disliked her for wounding him, and her dislike of herself was one of the many things she’d held against him.
    Zoe’s preference for him—that was another one. She’d loved her father—who so openly admired her brains and beauty, who told her about problems at work and listened seriously to her advice, who engaged her in long, confessional discussions of his troubled childhood and her romantic travails—much more than her matter-of-fact mother, who bought her shoes and got her to school on time. It wasn’t just Jennifer’s opinion that Zoe had loved Tommy more. Zoe herself frequently said that. Even before Tommy died Zoe had treated her like an evil stepmother whose only purpose in the story was to cause misery.
    If Zoe had known about the affairs, she might not have cared. Maybe no one would have cared, would have cut Jennifer slack for her sharp tongue in the face of Tommy’s charm. It occurs to her now that she’s been telling