Live Through This by Debra Gwartney

what was to become of her and her sisters after I ended this marriage for good. Whether we could keep surviving collisions and mishaps and all the dangerous things that might sneak in while I was too busy to notice. I wanted to tell her we were going to be fine without her dad, maybe even better than before, but I managed, for once, not to say anything.

    A few days before the accident Amanda had announced that she finally understood the play. At least in the rock-opera version of the story, Judas was fed up with Jesus. They'd made a plan together that Jesus wasn't sticking to. Jesus had bigger ideas and wanted to do his own thing. Judas insisted that Jesus rein himself in and get back to business, but Jesus refused. That's why Judas had gone to the church leaders, a self-serving lot, and unwittingly created a disaster. As Amanda told me about the meaning she'd gleaned from the big drama that now included her, she scrutinized my face. I stepped back from her. What was going on here? Had she already cast me in one of those roles? If so, was I the one desperate to keep the plan in place or the one who'd blown the plan apart?
    Why'd you let the things you did get so out of hand?

    The night of the accident, I left the little girls in their room playing and Stephanie with Amanda and found my husband on the front
steps drinking a beer he'd pulled from the refrigerator. I sat next to him, the porch firing up the ache in my bruised body.
    He reached over and took my hand in both of his and gazed at me like he used to when we were young, not yet able to imagine the love and despair we would take on because of the four girls in the house behind us. "Doesn't this prove to you how important it is to stay together?" he said. "Everything can change in one second and all we have is each other."
    I might have given him a different response if I'd been able to see the ways in which my daughters would be torn apart in the years to come because of the battle between their parents, two people who didn't belong in a marriage together but who couldn't manage to find a decent way to split up. If I could have imagined, even, Amanda on a park bench gouging a boy's initials into her skin with a paper clip. If I'd been smarter then, I might have asked Tom if we could find a way, both of us, to cloak our daughters from pain and confusion while we pulled this thing apart and found our way to be done with each other. I might have said that I couldn't stay married to him, but I'd try—try—to be his friend.
    But instead I said this: "I need more time."
    He sighed and got to his feet and set the beer bottle on the porch. "I'm going home," he said, which surprised and relieved me at the same moment.
    At the bottom of the steps he turned and said the words that confirmed for me once again that I was finished with the marriage, with our house in need of repair, the unruly cactus garden planted in front, and with the way we'd been with each other since we were teenagers. I thought then that the reason I could walk away from Tom was that he was still, in so many ways, a boy. What I couldn't see was how I was still, in my own way, a girl, one who didn't understand how deeply my daughters needed me to keep them at the center, to make them the focus of everything, while I unwound my life from their father's.
    "I would have seen that car coming," Tom said. "I would have swerved out of the way."
    "How can you say that? You weren't there."
    "Listen," he said. "I know you and I know myself. If I'd been the driver, there wouldn't have been an accident."
    He ignored the sidewalk and walked instead across the grass, still wet from watering, leaving a line of dark footprints between my porch and his car. He got in and sat for a while without starting the engine. A few seconds later Mary and Mollie came to the door and asked me if we could go for a swim. I told them to get their suits and I'd get mine. "Mom's going swimming!" one of them called out as they ran into