Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 70779 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 354(@200wpm)___ 283(@250wpm)___ 236(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70779 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 354(@200wpm)___ 283(@250wpm)___ 236(@300wpm)
And then I’d seen him nudge his partner with an elbow and grin as I stared through the crack in the door.
“Yeah, well…just don’t push her into a fucking grave.” Josh had looked uneasy. “That would be going too far.”
But apparently shoving me down the steps and punching me in the face wasn’t going too far. I saw Josh giving me sidelong glances throughout the meal, but he never said anything else—and never tried to help me either.
So much for “to protect and to serve.”
That moment in our marriage was a kind of wake-up call for me. I began to open my eyes—which had been swollen shut too often from Carlo’s punches—and realize that what was happening wasn’t right. At long last, I began to think about getting away from my husband.
The problem was, Carlo wasn’t about to let me go.
When I tried to bring it up—pointing out that I had never been able to give him children and he deserved to be with someone who could—he shut me down, hard.
“You’re never leaving me, babe—you understand?” He had me by the shoulders, his fingers digging into my arms and his face shoved right into mine, our foreheads touching. His breath smelled like stale beer and the cigars he and his partner liked to smoke to relax. “Fucking never. You try and I’ll hunt you down and drag you back home—and you won’t like what happens next, I promise you that!”
So that was my life. I had just about given up all hope of ever getting away from him when suddenly, for no apparent reason, he just seemed to start losing interest.
He stopped calling me all the time to check on my location. Our whole marriage I hadn’t been allowed to have a job because he wanted me at home where he could keep tabs on me—that way he said, he didn’t have to worry about “other men sniffing around,” as he put it. But all of a sudden, when my Grandfather asked if I could help him at the shop, Carlo agreed, though he had refused to give me permission for years.
That was just the start. Gradually, my husband’s grip on me loosened. He began to stay out late with his friends and go to bars with the guys instead of coming straight home, where I had better have supper waiting for him if I didn’t want a twisted wrist or a fat lip. He even stopped looking through my phone on a daily basis to make sure I hadn’t been “flirting” with strange men. (I never would have dared. The one time a male friend from high school tried to contact me on Facebook, Carlo put my arm in a cast.)
At the time, it felt like a kind of miracle. Slowly but surely the noose that had been around my neck ever since I was stupid enough to say, “I do,” began to loosen. Sometimes Carlo would stay out all night and when he finally came home, he seemed surprised to see me there—it was as though he had forgotten all about me. As though he’d forgotten he even had a wife.
I knew he was seeing other women at this time—I didn’t give a damn. I was just happy and relieved to know that he was finally loosening his grip on me. From high school on, he had been obsessed with me—completely fixated on everything I did and said—and somehow everything was always wrong.
Now, he stopped hitting me if the kitchen table had some crumbs on it. He no longer went into a furious rage if dinner wasn’t exactly what he wanted and ready the minute he walked in the door. Because half the time, he didn’t even show up for dinner, leaving me in peace.
At the same time this was happening, Pop-pop started getting thinner and looking his age—which he never had before. His thick black hair finally turned silver and then started to thin and his booming voice got softer.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t put two and two together—I just thought Pop-pop was aging. It wasn’t until later that I suspected there was a link between my Grandfather’s gradual illness and my husband’s loss of interest in me. I was too busy trying to get free of my awful marriage to consider why Carlo was slowly loosening his stranglehold on my life.
Finally, I dared to present him with divorce papers. With Pop-pop’s encouragement, I had gone to a lawyer he knew of who specialized in no-fault divorces. All I needed was Carlo’s signature and I would be free.
I really expected him to lose the strange calm that had come over him and beat me when I showed the paperwork to him. Instead, to my incredulous relief, he signed—actually signed and let me go!
That very night I moved back in with my Pop-pop, who continued to get thinner and weaker. I had never heard from Carlo again…