When I got inside my house, I dropped my purse and the bag with my ribs onto the living-room coffee table. I made a beeline for the kitchen and poured myself a large glass of the strongest whiskey we had in the house.

I returned to the living room, kicked off my shoes, and stretched out on the couch. I gulped down half of my drink in one pull. I couldn’t relax because my mind was all over the place. I wasn’t just angry with Odell, I was so mad with myself I wanted to kick my own behind. How had I been so naïve and stupid? Was I so blindly in love with that devil I couldn’t see what other women would have seen with their eyes closed? What woman in her right mind would have believed he was spending so much time with his daddy and not checked it out? Was it because I was not in my right mind? On top of everything else, now I was worried about my mental state. The wonderful life I’d had until a few hours ago was over. Without Odell and no children, what did I have to look forward to now? The answer to that question came to me right away. I still had my parents, my job, my health, and some good friends. What I was going through was enough to drive any woman insane. But I had too much to lose to end up drooling and spewing gibberish in the state asylum. I was determined to stay well-grounded and focused for as long as I could.

“Joyce, be strong. You’ll get through this. The situation could be a lot worse,” I told myself out loud. I had to laugh to keep from crying some more because I couldn’t think of any situation that could be worse.

More disturbing thoughts entered my mind. Odell had taken up with a woman so beautiful, I wondered what he thought each time he made love to a plain Jane like me. And those kids. Lord have mercy. I hadn’t been able to give him even one, and he’d found a woman, a younger one at that, who had given him three. I wondered why he hadn’t divorced me and married Betty Jean so he wouldn’t have had to lie and sneak around. I answered that question myself, too: money. Without his job, he’d be as poor as a church mouse.