You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone by Kevin O'Brien Page A

it? Well, it was all on account of some guy who dumped her. Evelyn was always the one doing the dumping, never the dumpee. Anyway, after he left her, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. They had to pump her stomach. She was a total wreck. She never told you? The guy’s name was Josh. In fact, he looked a lot like you. Her mother made her see a shrink. Her father was dead by that time. She saw this doctor for about two months—and then claimed she was just fine, and quit.”
    Luke was stunned at how much he still didn’t know about his wife—after fourteen years of marriage.
    By this time, Damon was developing his OCD tics. Luke got him to a psychiatrist, despite Evelyn’s protests. He didn’t tell her how much he knew about her time in therapy during college. He guessed she had an aversion to it, because her analyst had probably picked up on a lot of issues she wasn’t ready to acknowledge.
    Unfortunately, Damon was his mother’s child—and not very cooperative with the doctors. Evelyn had a toxic influence on their son. She’d even managed to pit Damon against him. Luke found himself on the receiving end of a lot of eye-rolling and backtalk. He figured this came with the territory when raising an adolescent. But his kid radiated utter contempt for him. By the time Damon was in high school, he’d become an arrogant, snobby mama’s boy.
    Luke still loved his son, but he didn’t like him very much.
    Ten months ago, Evelyn had started having an affair with a narcissistic, lowlife actor named Troy Slattery. He’d recently been fired from the cast of one of Luke’s plays. It was as if she’d picked the most repugnant person she could as her new lover. And she wasn’t discreet about it either. Luke figured she was hoping he’d get jealous and rescue her from this sick relationship—then fall in love with her all over again.
    Instead, he moved out.
    He told Evelyn he wouldn’t fight her for custody of Damon. He knew his son wouldn’t want to live with him anyway.
    As he sat there on the terrace in the front row, listening to “Mole Face” talk about Evelyn’s wonderful, infectious laugh, Luke told himself that he should have known it all would come to this. He wondered if things would have been different if he’d stayed.
    He hadn’t totally given up on Damon. They actually had some nice weekends together—at least, Luke thought so.
    Apparently, Evelyn’s affair with Troy Slattery lasted only a few weeks. After that, whenever Luke dropped Damon off at the house on Garfield, he’d find Evelyn out there, waiting for them. She’d always have an excuse for talking with Luke or asking him inside: “I still don’t know how to operate that thermostat” or “The kitchen light is out, and you’re the only one who knows how to take the shade off to change the bulb . . .” She’d always look gorgeous—and just a little sad.
    But Luke wasn’t interested. By that time, he was comfortably set up in his town house, finishing up a new play, and had already met Andrea.
    Still, Evelyn kept up the same routine of subtly flirting with him whenever he dropped off Damon from their alternate weekends together. He was also seeing Evelyn at the school—for impromptu conferences with Damon’s principal over the bullying. After these meetings, she’d coyly ask how he was doing. And she’d ask about Amber or Amanda . She seemed to have a mental block on Andrea’s name—like Endora never getting Darrin’s name right on Bewitched .
    Luke had come to see through Evelyn’s melancholy vamp act. He also couldn’t help wondering if she’d been the one behind Andrea’s apartment being vandalized and broken into. Maybe Evelyn had hired someone to do it—or manipulated poor Damon into carrying out her dirty work for her. Luke had confronted her about it. Acting