Playing Jacks

iv. Life is Full of Regrets

Sophie beat the sun to the water.  Sinking her toes into the cold sand, she looks over the turbulent Atlantic and inhales the briny air.  White caps catch the moonlight.  Nothing but the water stirs.  It reaches for land, but brought-up short, it’s always forced back from where it came.

Sophie shivers, seeing the sad mockery of her life in the waves.

Bryce was a mistake.  She knew it even as he flattered her with his attentions; even as he lavished gifts on her that no other man had ever considered much less afford; even as he nimbly slithered past her defenses and assured her that the heart couldn’t lie.  “This is right, Soapy,” he’d crooned to her. “Can’t you just feel it?  The heart doesn’t lie.”

But the heart does lie- routinely.  Deceptive pound of flesh, it lurches and swells and flops around in her chest like an opinionated brat.  Inhaling the scent of salt and sand, Sophie reaches for calm; but like the water reaches for the beach, she’s always brought back to the turbulence in her chest. 

She lost friends over her relationship with Bryce and gained new ones that smiled in her company and whispered as soon as she turned.  She wasn’t unaware of their words.

Homewrecker: even she can’t deny that fact.  She had an affair with a married man and broke his marriage apart. 

But opportunistic?  Gold digger?  Sophie fought those accusations with separate bank accounts; separate financial lives and a pre-nuptial agreement that has left her with nothing.  Still people said them.

Easy?  Or, if the speaker is particularly cruel, whore: This one stings the most of all.  Sophie had always considered herself a good person.  Maybe she wasn’t the Virgin Mary but she’d had far fewer bedmates than her college roommate and only a couple of long-term relationships.  It wasn’t enough.  Her reputation was marred.  She had thought that certainly her marriage would have settled the rumor mill.  It hadn’t.

It shouldn’t matter, Sophie reminds herself. It shouldn’t matter what people say, what they think.  It shouldn’t matter the look women give her when she walks into a room, as if it were necessary to guard their husbands.  But the truth is that it does matter to soft Sophie.  It hurts.  And if she thought that living nearly two days away from the site of her transgressions would somehow erase the slate and give her the fresh start she needed, Jacks had proven her wrong. 

Well, it’s not as if he’s the only one.  Jeremy was the only member of the family that didn’t seem to need proof that Sophie wasn’t some kind of seductress.  JJ looks at her as if waiting for her to break out into a spontaneous strip-tease.  Savannah may smile, even laugh with Sophie, but she’s noticed her husband’s attention.  It took Cheryl weeks to stop stalking Sophie every time she entered the house, no doubt wondering when she would make a play for the brother.

No, the only difference is that Jacks said it out loud.  He was blunt about it.  Maybe that’s somehow better, but it feels worse.    

The inky blue sky greys with the coming dawn.  Descending into the pale sand, Sophie scoots until she’s comfortable.  Silencing the introspection, she once again considers peace- but she’s haunted.

It had been spring- the mountains blushing with redbud blooms- and Sophie had sat at the kitchen table as her mother meticulously stashed the last of the dishes they had washed. 

“But I love him, Mama,” she’d said, pleading for the rounder woman to accept this.

Her mother’s grey streaked head fell with heartache. “Soapy, you’re a grown woman now.  Can’t direct you as I’d like- not no more.  But you mind my words, little girl.  A man that cheats for you will cheat on you.”