The Wife Next Door

By Sandra Lescoe

What’s a guy to do?

Dan Taylor is just a regular guy. He likes watching sports on TV. He’s in decent shape, and he’s got a job and friends, but he’s still waiting for the right girl to come along.

In the meantime, he’s passing time with Leslie.

The thing is...him and her – Dan and Leslie – they were never meant to go anywhere.

But when Leslie ends up accidentally pregnant, Dan does The "Right" Thing – he marries her – and ends up in the greatest mistake of his life. It doesn't take long before their unhappy marriage ends in divorce. Two years later, Dan has a new wife, Michelle, and things are good – hell, even great.

It seems like a familiar enough story. Marriage, divorce, remarriage. One might even call it mundane. That is, until Dan is killed in a freak accident.

What happens when the only link that ties two families together comes undone? Leslie and Michelle struggle to find the answer to that very question after Dan’s death. During that time, the two women – ex-wife and widow – undertake an emotional journey from mild animosity to the bonds of true friendship, creating their own definition of family. The Wife Next Door is an unconventional novel that challenges the standard view of love and life, family and forever, and ultimately creates an uncommon picture of the modern family that underscores the common bond of the human family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandra Lescoe
• Release date: Jul 22, 2012

Sandra Lescoe

Sandra Lescoe has three loves in life: her family (including three wild but precious children), writing, and ice cream. Mint chocolate chip. Originally from Texas, Sandra now calls Massachusetts home.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Dan. THE Husband.

Everything began when I met Leslie.

No, I don’t mean that in a magical fairytale kind of way, and not just because I don’t go for that kind of fluff. By everything, I mean this story – for whatever it’s worth – began then.

She and I met at a week-long sales training conference that my company put on at a local hotel.

Leslie was there because she was the event coordinator at the hotel and was handling our conference. She had a small work area set up right outside the conference room door, partly to make it easier to manage the conference logistics, but partly to make sure that no issues got out of hand.

I was only a low-level marketing manager at the time, but since one of my bosses had a charity golf tournament to attend that week, he sent me in his stead to sit through a bunch of boring presentations and occasionally make an equally boring one of my own. I was restless and overworked and bored at the same time, but it wasn’t just with my job that I felt unfulfilled. I didn’t know that at the time – the unfulfilled part. I just thought I was dealing with a tedious week.

I hated being stuck in a hotel ballroom all day, so I found any excuse to take a break outside. I didn’t care that my coworkers would tease me relentlessly – often in front of cute female hotel guests who walked by – about having venereal disease because I had to go to the bathroom every thirty minutes. Nor did I have a problem pretending that phone calls to my chiropractor were urgent business.

So given the number of trips I made into the hall, it would have been nearly impossible for me not to meet Leslie. After the first time we chatted – she had walked up to me to see if I needed anything, we talked every time after that. In a single day, I probably talked to her more than I talked to some of my coworkers.

After several exchanges, she started filling me in on the hotel gossip, like how at one of the conferences she had managed the year before, an attendee had demanded that the hotel provide him with a specially-engineered, orthopedic, three thousand dollar non-refundable chair for the two-day conference. When she told him that they didn’t have anything like that on the premises, he threatened to sue them for discrimination against the handicapped. The man was two-hundred pounds overweight and actually had disability status because of it, so she ended up buying him a $300 knockoff online to shut him up and he never knew the difference.

Anyway, so I ended up spending a lot of time in the hallway where she had a table and computer. And after a couple of days of seeing her around and talking more with her, I thought that she seemed pretty good at her job, despite the crazy requests and primadonnas that she had to deal with. Her easygoing personality was probably the main reason for her success in managing difficult people, since over time I saw that all the supplemental skills that were important to doing her job weren’t spectacular – they weren’t even particularly good. Organization, for one. Time management wasn’t one of her strong points, either.

But when I first met her, and on the surface, she seemed like a good fit for what she did, because Leslie isn’t extreme in any regard. Everything about her is non-offensive and cheerful in a generic sort of way, so it was easy to pass time chatting with her without getting too personal or feeling threatened by her. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, and she was pudgy, as though she had never lost her baby fat, so I wasn’t intimidated by her, either.

Not offended. Not threatened. Not intimidated. My feelings toward her didn’t amount to much more than that. Even so, at the end of the week, I found myself asking her out on a date. It surprised me a little, since I hadn’t thought about it until the moment that the words came out. We were talking about our respective commutes, and I had said to her that I always find it strange to hang out in a hotel in my own city. It makes me feel like I’m doing something shady, sort of like I’m cheating on my house.

And then, without warning, there they were, the words pushing themselves past my lips and into the unsuspecting air between us – Would you be up for hanging out next week in a more neutral place?

Her response was so fast and breathless that it felt almost like she had been waiting for me to ask her out. At the time, it sent an odd, zinging sensation up my back. And I don’t mean zinging in a good female-lead-in-a-romantic-comedy way. More like a hunter waiting for a buck to riddle with bullets. It should have been a sign.

Looking back on all the things that were wrong about that relationship, and if I trace our problems to their root, I just never should have asked her out. It was even before the first signs that she was too much of a flake for me, before the five post-date mediocre-to-lousy sex nights and definitely before we ended up getting married.

No, I should have ended it before I began, because I asked her out for all the wrong reasons and no truly right one.

But at that time, I was bored and restless. I had just gotten out of a long relationship with a woman I had known back in college, and I was feeling unmotivated to look for another girlfriend. Something in me probably felt like having an easy win under my belt after being unceremoniously dumped after two years of good times with a nice-looking girl who left me for a guy she had met at the gym.

So I asked out Leslie without any real intention, and she said yes like I knew she would, even though I hadn’t expected her answer to be as quick as it ended up being. But of course she wouldn’t have turned me down, because she was a little plump and otherwise ordinary-looking. Plump coupled with ordinary-looking makes a person unattractive, while really thin and ordinary-looking makes a person hotter than they really are. Everyone knows that.

And it also meant that I didn’t have to work too hard to impress her because it was likely that most decent-looking, employed guys didn’t even look twice at her. So for our first date, I asked Leslie to meet me near my apartment, and I took her to a restaurant a couple blocks away where I went at least once every week, and in short I basically was half-assed about everything from the beginning. I’ll admit it.

The thing is – well, one of the things, anyway – I found myself pleasantly surprised that our conversation didn’t completely bore me once we got together in a situation that was less formal, away from the hotel – where we were both supposedly somewhat different people because we were working. Overall, I ended up having an okay, and possibly what could qualify as a pretty nice, evening. I even gave her a dry kiss at the end, when we parted outside the restaurant.

On my walk home, I convinced myself that being pleasantly surprised was a great thing, and I never questioned why I had expected her to be less appealing once outside a place where we both had to put on professional behavior.

But even though that reasonably laid-back first date could have been considered a success, I hadn’t even planned to continue seeing her after that. It’s just that work got really busy all of a sudden and when I surfaced one Friday night after two straight weeks of twelve-hour days, Leslie didn’t mind when I asked her to make the trip from her suburban apartment into the city. She also didn’t mind when I told her that I couldn’t meet her until 10 p.m., even though I knew that was her usual bedtime.

I took her for granted even then, or maybe she truly never added value to my life even, then, but one thing I did know is that dating Leslie felt unobtrusive and easy, and back then I didn’t have time for drama.

But unobtrusive and easy is just enough to keep a man from looking for something else until it’s too late. At least, that’s what happened to me. One minute, I was just marking time with Leslie until something better came along. And the next – shit – Leslie got pregnant. It was a total accident, and to this day neither of us knows how it happened, because we always used condoms that hadn’t been in my wallet since high school.

It was one of those one-in-a-million chances, except it wasn’t any kind of lottery I had wanted to win with her.

I can never forget the day that she called me – just over two months after our first date – and for the first time asked me to meet her that evening, instead of waiting for me to ask her out. It wasn’t a good night for me. My boss had been on my ass all week about a project I was managing and I was sleeping four hours a night to get things done. I told her that I could only see her on the weekend, which was still a few days away.

That was the first time she actually yelled at me – an actual, wordless scream coming out of the phone’s earpiece, followed by ear-splitting yelling about how it couldn’t wait, that she had a serious issue to discuss with me.

That was the moment I decided to end it was best to end it with her right away. I considered telling her over the phone that I wasn’t ever going to meet her again after such psycho behavior, but I figured I could at least be man enough to do it in person. We agreed to meet at nine o’clock at a bar near my office.

But I never delivered the breakup speech that I had quickly composed on my walk over to our meeting place. Even from the doorway of the bar, once my eyes found her sitting halfway across the room, I could tell that she was crying, and her face had That Look about it. You know the one – it’s the look that you only see on the faces of family members waiting in the emergency room, or on kids who get picked last for baseball teams. I knew before I sat down that I was in for trouble, so I just sat there and waited to be hit with it.

It - the Pregnancy Bomb - turned out to pack more of a punch than I had imagined. The news was delivered in snippets, at random intervals between sobs, to the point where I almost didn’t get what she was saying at first because it took her about five minutes to get out, I took a test and I’m pregnant.

And when it finally registered – the words congealing into a repulsive glob somewhere in my intestinal tract – I swear that my heart stopped for a full minute. I could feel my feet under the table, trying to unmoor from the floor and run away. My hands itched to dial the nearest clinic right then to set up an appointment for an abortion. All of a sudden, there were tears of anger and frustration and disbelief trying to push out of my eyes, even though I hadn’t cried in over a decade. I wanted to drown every last person in that restaurant with my angry tears.

But I did none of those things.

Instead, when I found I could breathe and speak again, I did the right thing and asked Leslie to marry me. At a high top bar table at Point 9 Bistro, I proposed to Leslie with no ring, no flowers, and no desire.

And she said yes.

It felt like a death sentence. Hearing the word yes come out of her mouth triggered an internal recitation of that Wilbert – no, William? Wilmer? Whatever. Owen poem that I had to memorize in eleventh grade. From the year that I was seventeen until the moment that Leslie agreed to be my wife, I had forgotten that freakish poem, but with one tiny spark to ignite that flame of memory, all of a sudden there they were, the words…the blood come gargling forth from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer…

Anyway. To summarize, it was bad.

Again, looking back…the right thing was not really the right thing. If I had used my brain instead of some chivalrous acid trip that had been pounded into me from the time I was a boy, I would never have even uttered the words, Will you be my wife? Or I might even have left her at the altar. Now, that would have been really brutal, but it also would have been smart. A total jerk move, but one that would have saved both of us in the end. You get the picture.

Look, I know, I know. I would hate me, too, if I were meeting me this way. This secret-spilling, no-holds-barred-truth kind of way. But that’s just how it was, and what’s the point in pretending otherwise? I learned the hard way that sacrificing yourself to spare someone else’s feelings is for fools and cowards.

Chapter 2

Going to the Chapel

Leslie didn’t want to be visibly pregnant at her wedding, and she didn’t want to wait until after the baby was born before we got married. So over the course of the next eight weeks, we scrambled to put together the respective weddings that she and I had always wanted. I think those were the eight longest weeks of my life.

Call me a girl, but I actually had some hopes and thoughts about my someday-wedding, none of which Leslie was even willing to consider. She and I didn’t want a single thing to be the same, and we fought bitterly over every detail, from the vows we would recite (I wanted the repeat-after-me version and she wanted us to write our own) to the song for our first dance (who wants Lionel Richie for their first dance, are you kidding me?), right down to the color of the stupid bows that were going to hang on the end of the pews.

It would have probably been easier to plan two separate weddings and just have them back-to-back. With different people, too, because by the time our wedding actually arrived, neither of us wanted to marry the other anymore.

Well, I certainly didn’t want to marry her, anyway.

I met her parents the day before our wedding, waiting outside the church before our rehearsal. I almost fainted at the first sight of Leslie’s mother. I remembered staring in total shock as her mother emerged from the car that her parents had rented, one swollen ankle at a time, practically heaving herself onto the sidewalk. Until then, I hadn’t really thought much about my feelings about obese people, just like I hadn’t thought much of Leslie being slightly overweight – I preferred skinnier girls but it wasn’t the end of the world. At that moment, however, it was suddenly clear and personal – seeing Leslie’s mother was like peering into a disgusting future, and I hated it.

Despite her formidable size, Leslie’s mother still managed to leave Leslie’s father in the dust as she trundled directly up to me to say in an unnecessarily loud voice, So you’re the one who put the bun in my daughter’s oven! I glanced to my right, at Leslie, who was giggling. On my left, my mother and father had pulled their lips back from their teeth in a forced smile and were desperately pushing air out of their lungs in an attempt to mimic the sound of polite chuckling. It sounded like a pair of wounded old donkeys trying to pull a cart full of boulders up a steep hill.

Leslie’s father had exited the car by now, but was still some distance away, as though he were purposely moving slowly to avoid the awkwardness. Lucky son of a bitch, I thought to myself. I held out my hand and willed myself to remain calm and confident.

Mrs. Erikson, I’m so glad you’ve arrived. I’m Dan. It’s nice to meet you.

Leslie’s mother was practically crushing my hand in a death vise grip and pumping my arm up and down like she was trying to wrench it off my body when Leslie’s father was only halfway upon us.

What’s this with Mrs. Erikson? I’m Laura! We’re family now! Call me Laura! she boomed, and then tugged my hand forward so that I fell into her suffocating embrace. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my arms. Hug her back? Keep them hanging limply at my sides as I was currently doing? I peered over her shoulder. Was it just me, or had Mr. Erikson slowed his pace again? Luckily, she released me before I had to return the gesture, and I spun away from her feeling slightly nauseated.

I nodded. Thank you, uh, Laura.

Mrs. Erikson – Laura – laughed and a little spit came flying out of her mouth. She punched me on the shoulder like my uncle Gary used to do whenever he made a joke that only he thought was funny. Her personality was almost too exaggerated to be true. How could she possibly by the embodiment of everything I find repulsive? I thought, as I regained my composure.

Laura hugged Leslie next. Leslie seemed to enjoy being enveloped by her mother’s