Sever

sever
verb, transitive. To put or keep apart; to divide; to part by violence, as by cutting.
verb, intransitive. To become separated.

Ted almost turned and left when no one came to the door for five minutes after he pressed the doorbell button. He could hear the bell through the apartment door, so he didn’t bother to knock. He pressed the button again and was rewarded by the click of the deadbolt before the door opened a couple of inches.

“Oh, hi!” Clare looked surprised to see him, but not displeased. After half a breath, she smiled and opened the door wider. “Come in. It’s good to see you.”

Once inside, Ted surveyed the living room. It was sparsely furnished with comfortable-looking chairs. In contrast to the surroundings where he had last seen her, the room was tidy; the carpet recently vacuumed.

“I was visiting Jack and Kate this morning,” he began. At the disappearance of her smile, he paused. He had suspected that something had gone wrong in the relationship Clare had with the couple, but this was the first evidence of it he had seen. “I didn’t know that you had moved out.”

She nodded by way of confirming that, then motioned him toward a chair. “Can I get you some coffee?”

He shook his head. “I can’t stay long. I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Better than I was,” she stated, “and better every day.”

“Better because...?”

“Because we broke up the household of hell!”

Ted mused, “I had no idea you and Mike were unhappy, living with them. When did that start?”

She thought for a moment. “About six weeks after we moved in together. I did the unthinkable. I stopped at the store on my way home from work, then was told--at the top of Jack’s lungs--that I should have consulted him and Kate before I did something that concerned the entire household. Do you believe that? They wanted to have a group meeting for every decision. All I bought was a gallon of milk!”

“That does sound unreasonable. Did anything else happen?”

“Oh, yeah. That was only the beginning. It was always Jack finding fault, and if I tried with all my might to behave according to his rules after one of his tirades, the rules would change, somehow. Over time, it became more and more clear that I couldn’t do anything right and neither could Mike: not for the group, not for the kids--even ours--nothing. Anything one of us did was an excuse for him to pick a fight.”

“What did Kate do? Was this happening when she was at work?”

“No. It usually happened when she was at home. She almost invariably backed him up. I have a nickname for her now: ‘Enabler-in-Chief.’”

Ted shook his head sadly. “I feel bad, Clare. I encouraged you to consent to moving in with them, then I had to work so much that I couldn’t come by very often. Maybe I could have helped.”

“No, you couldn’t have.” Her expression had grown sorrowful. “We might have been able to find a way of getting along with them in time, but when they began to belittle Mike Junior, we decided that we had to sever the relationship.”

He was surprised. “Sever? You mean that you never see them any more?”

“That’s right. It took some doing, let me tell you: going for long drives in late afternoon or evening; weekend camping trips.... A couple of times, we just pretended we weren’t here. After awhile, they stopped trying to drop in.” She scoffed. “The few times they did catch us at home, all they did was ask for money. We kept saying ‘No.’ We’ve subsidized them enough for one lifetime.”

Ted sat back and regarded Clare sardonically. “That explains it. This morning, Jack told me that you two aren’t doing well at all.”

She threw back her head and guffawed. Her delight was so intense that Ted began to smile in concert with her laughter. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Ted,” she finally stated. “And I know that you will let it go no further than these walls.” She gestured at the boundaries of the room. “We realized that it’s in our best interests not to let Jack and Kate know how well we’re doing.”

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.