Heartbroken by Lisa Unger Page A

and she mistook it for love at first sight. Of course, that was before she knew the truth about love and marriage, about life.
    “I ’ve had a call from Teddy,” said Joe. He poured her a cup of coffee, stirred in the perfect amount of half-and-half. He always knew how to make her coffee just right. “He’s not coming.” Joe tried to sound light, but she could tell he was angry.
    He hadn’t shaved, she noticed. When they were younger, she used to think he looked so sexy in the morning, before he was all combed and pressed. She hadn’t had those kinds of thoughts about her husband in a very long time.
    “Oh?” She felt something grow heavy and sad inside her. When she’d talked to Teddy last week, she’d had a feeling he might cancel. He’d hinted twice about work being hectic.
    “Busy with work, can’t get away,” said Joe. “You’d think he had a real job, the way he carries on.”
    Teddy owned his own company, a consulting firm—whatever that meant.
    “Oh, Joe. You know he has a real job,” she said. “He’s very successful.”
    Her husband issued an unkind grunt.
    “What is it he does now?” she asked. Teddy had told her about his business. But Birdie honestly didn’t understand what he was talking about—systems and infrastructures.
    Joe shrugged, peering down at his phone. He was always staring at the thing as if whatever he saw there was much more interesting than anything going on around him. “Something with computers.”
    Birdie believed that Joe knew exactly what Teddy’s company did. He simply, for some mean personal reason, pretended not to. Joe and Teddy had never really gotten along. Even when Teddy was small, Joe seemed to have trouble connecting with his son. As Teddy grew, the boy seemed so delicate, so frail—so different in every way from the thick and powerful Burke men. Teddy was slender and more careful, creative and quiet, like the men on Birdie’s side of the family. Whatever early attempts Joe had made with Teddy—catch, ball games, fishing, golf—had generally ended with Teddy weeping in Birdie’s lap. Why do you have to be so hard, Joe? Birdie had asked him a thousand times. Joe would rage: What’s wrong with that boy? He’s like a china doll .
    Joe had worked as an aeronautical engineer for the entirety of his career. He understood meticulous design that led to the creation of a tangible object, preferably something made out of steel, something that defied the laws of nature. To her husband, if labor did not result in a physical product, no work had been done. Teddy couldn’t show his father a solid result of his work, so Joe pretended not to get it. Was it coding or programming? Something like that. It had been lucrative for Teddy, she knew. He was successful. Of course, it wasn’t really about Teddy’s work, was it?
    Kate had accomplished almost nothing, and Joe had only praise and words of affection for their daughter. Oh, our Kate’s so lovely, such a good mother, always stays in touch —blah, blah, blah. Maybe because Kate was a girl, Joe had expected less from her and, unlike Birdie, wasn’t disappointed or surprised when she never made anything of her life.
    “It’s just as well,” said Birdie, though she didn’t mean it. “He’s always very distracted when he’s here.”
    The truth was that he was always distracted, even when he wasn’t here. That wasn’t the right word. It was more that he was distant, disconnected. On the phone, he sounded like he was doing or thinking about something else, certainly not interested in anything Birdie had to say. When they were together, she found herself trying to catch his eye. He was forever looking away from her.
    “He doesn’t like the island, never has,” said Joe.
    “It’s not for everyone.”
    She’d said that many times about a lot of different people. Not everyone had the constitution for this place, this lifestyle. It took some real grit to get by on Heart Island. Birdie had the fortitude