The Second Mrs. Roberts

I am the second Mrs. Roberts. At the time that was what I became it had felt special. Now, as I sit at the dimly lit bar across Mrs. Roberts number eight, I realize that I was probably just the beginning of a destructive pattern that I had little to no control over. Pensive, I pat Mrs. Roberts number eight’s shoulder. I gesture to the bartender to cut her off. I don’t know where she lives. She’s of course not going to remain Mrs. Roberts for long now. Neither am I, though I admit it took longer than it should have in my case. I have always had a hard time letting things go. From what I understand, she was once a Hill, and to Hill she will return. Just like the one before, and the one before, and so on. That’s how I explained it to the friends that took my side, when I went back to Gregory. I’ve been a Gregory ever since. It’s never the same, I find. To me, being Mrs. Roberts was a horrifying, suffocating weight on my shoulder that kept me in bed in the mornings and out of it in the evenings. It wasn’t the usual things that get jotted down in the surveys about divorces either. Neither of us was violent or had substance abuse problems. Not before the divorce anyway. The soon-to-be Hill is telling me about the flower garden in their front yard while crying into her gin. I find, he has this effect on people. No, with me it had been the sickly sweet hue that had coloured all our moments together in retrospect. It hadn’t bothered me in the beginning. It was like a thin coat of honey on the tongue. It was a welcome change of pace to the sour and bitter taste of working a desk job in the big city, quietly craving for companionship, but tragically bouncing off the apps and the websites that were ostensibly built for sating that need. So I embraced it. I partook of the honey on the tongue and returned the taste through kisses. I played the role that I thought I wanted as I had sat behind that desk in cold neon lights, staring at an even colder neon lights, staring down the glacial realities of unhappy people, only finding solace in the fact that at the end of the day, I would earn money from their desperate situations. The second Mrs. Roberts didn’t quit that job. After all, the second Mrs. Roberts was “happy”. About as happy as I imagine every Mrs. Roberts was. Of course I have no way of knowing. Not just because I never got to meet Mrs. Roberts five and seven, but because I know for myself how hard it can be to describe how happy or not one is exactly, let alone justify it. Mr. Roberts had always been “happy” as well, and as long as the Mrs. Roberts at the time was about the same, there was no problem. Number eight was also mostly happy, at least that’s what she says in between sobs and blowing her nose into a paper tissue that’s already starting to look wet. Like number three, four and six, I never really learned her first name. I might see her again once, or twice, but beyond that I’m almost certain we will go our separate ways. Number three and I had tried to keep contact, but we didn’t have enough in common, paradoxically, considering both of us claimed that Mr. Roberts probably had too much in common with both of us. Number one, at the time, shared the sentiment. I haven’t seen number one for a while now as well. The last I knew she was about to go from Barnes to Walker. Become the third Mrs. Walker. Both of us had joked, at the time, that it felt like a demotion. Knowing number three, I probably wouldn’t make that joke now.

I call a taxi for number eight. She looks a lot better now, though she could probably not have put on makeup earlier in the day. It has left multicolour stains on the white collar of her shirt. She thanks both the bartender and me, for entirely different services. My part wasn’t nearly as important as that of bartender though. Second place. Again. I have a short commute home. It’s why I’m usually the one to help Mrs. Roberts to sort herself out on the way to going back to whoever she was before she became Mrs. Roberts. I wonder how they always manage to find me, too. Mr. Roberts must still have my contact information in that little black note book. I remember writing it down in the flap of the little black cover, right opposite the small pocket of where he stores his contact cards. I signed it as well. The songbird from last night. I want to turn into soup every time I think about it. Over the short time I was Mrs. Roberts, I saw him get new pages for the book ever two months or so, when the sketches of faces and people around him had filled them entirely. My number stayed though. Maybe I should consider giving number nine a new sleeve for the note books. Her face is doubtlessly already filling the remaining pages of the book. A dream captured on paper, a dream of a Mrs. Roberts that could have been. Could be, I suppose. Except of course the woman on the page is never Mrs. Roberts. They are a Hill, a Barnes, a Gregory, never a Roberts. I am the second Mrs. Roberts, and yet, that Mrs. Roberts only ever existed on paper.