Hey! How was your month? I had an eventful June. My daughter graduated high school and my parents visited for the first time since before the Covid-19 pandemic. We had a wonderful time.

This month in Chapter 4 of Rom-Com Rehab, Tabby recalls how she and Nate met and calls her mother, the indomitable Liz Cassidy.

You can read Chapter 1 here.
You can read Chapters 2 and 3 here.

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And now, back to our story. But first, our standard disclaimer: While based on some things that happened to me in real life, this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

CHAPTER 4

We didn’t run the board. Instead, I sat at my desk and made a list of all the things I needed to do, divorce-related and Nate-moving-out-related and telling-people-related, while Trish sat in my guest chair and fielded calls. She told everyone I wasn’t available to talk, that I was traveling, but that I’d ring back after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Nate called a little after 11:30am, and Trish was polite with him before handing the phone to me. She started to get up, but I gestured frantically for her to stay.

“Hello?” I said hoarsely.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“Fine.”

There was a thick clot of silence.

I was15 and Nate was 16 when we met at an audition for a community theatre production of Anything Goes (he got cast as Moonface Martin, I was one of Reno’s Angels). We had never crossed paths before, because I lived in Bardo, a hilly, woody town in northern Westchester, and he lived about 15 miles away in Putnam County. We started talking while waiting to be called onstage to sing our 16 bars, and never stopped. Some people fit together like puzzle pieces, but that’s not how it was with Nate and me. We weren’t a yin and yang, but two yangs, or two yins, magnets with the same polarity. We had everything in common, but most of all we shared a fanatical love for the theatre and a cellular belief that anything could be risked, should be risked, because it would always turn out fine in the end. The show must go on. It simply must. There was no other option.

We were a perfect storm of raging creative energy, dramatic ego, and competitiveness. We adored each other, and how we were with each other, so clever and sparkly, so full of ideas, so theatrical. We could talk each other into anything, and in the summer of 1986, when I was 17 and he was 18, sick of being in other people’s shows, we convinced ourselves that we’d be amazing at running our own summer theatre.

I still don’t know why we thought anyone would let us do such a thing. I was about to start my senior year of high school, Nate would be leaving in the fall for his freshman year of college, and between us we had almost no experience outside of school and community theatre productions. Nevertheless, we sat down together at my typewriter and composed a letter that highlighted our qualifications, such as they were, along with the tremendous value a local theatre company added to a community. This nervy missive was sent to all the neighboring towns that didn’t already have a troupe to call their own. We received many kind rejections, and a single invitation to come have a meeting, from the town of Cameo.

That meeting is my favorite memory of the two of us, more than our wedding day, more than anything that came before or after. We met with Mark Wilco, head of Cameo’s Recreation & Conservation Department, a trim, bespectacled, relaxed guy in his mid-30s. He listened to our pitch, asked surprisingly knowledgeable questions, and then told us he wanted to back us. He loved musicals, he said, had done all the plays in high school. He’d work with us during the coming year to get us funded and set up. Nate would call in from college and I’d do the legwork in Cameo. Our premiere season would be the following summer, the summer of ‘87. Sound good? asked Mark.

Sounds great! we said.

We played it cool as we walked out of the building and around the corner, where no one could see us, and then completely lost it, hugging, jumping up and down, dancing, making up some bizarre handshake that involved rubbing our butts together. And then Nate laid a kiss on me that bent me over backward. It surprised the hell out of both of us, because while we were always flirting and teasing and making dirty jokes, snuggling up to each other, we’d never crossed the line of our friendship before.

We laughed it off, but it did make a girl think.

We ran Cameo Players from the summer of ‘87 to the summer of ‘90, and everyone in our lives got in on the act. Nate’s father played in the pit orchestra, his mom sewed costumes, and his younger brother and sister were in all the shows. My parents opened our house for rehearsals, set building, cast parties, production meetings. Our friends were all either in the cast or on the crew. My boyfriend ran our box office and performed a million acts of kindness, surprising us with late night donuts and an endless supply of coffee, racing to pick up costumes before the shop closed, hammering sets together, hanging lights. That first year we did Godspell. Then we sang, danced and bluffed our way through You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, Bye Bye Birdie, and Barnum. The second year, we added a straight play to our season. Nate directed me as Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker in ’88 and Dr. Livingstone in Agnes of God in ’89. Our final season, I directed him in Our Town. He played the Stage Manager.

Cameo Players was all consuming. It was our home, our baby, our family. It was also a battlefield, where Nate and I were constantly jockeying for position, challenging each other, vengefully knocking each other down and tenderly picking each other up. We started it as friends and by the time it was over, we didn’t know how to do anything without each other.

I missed him, that ambitious, charming, fearless boy who sat next to me in Mark Wilco’s office and spun a story of kids who could put on a show, with or without a barn. I wanted nothing more than to put this husband person on hold and call my friend, my partner, my producer — to call Nate, the real Nate, Nate who loved me, Nate whom I loved, Nate who got all my Sondheim jokes — to call him on the other line and tell him that this horrible person I was married to wanted me to meet him at the bank, and would he come with me because I didn’t want to face my terrible husband who was leaving me by myself.

“So, the bank,” he said.

“Of course. The bank. I can be there at 3. Does that work?”

“Could you do any earlier? Noon maybe?”

“Now, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I could have, of course. I could have stood up, put on my jacket, and hauled ass uptown to our bank. I also could have thrown myself off the Woodsy balcony, eight stories above Times Square, which sounded like a much better idea. “I really can’t,” I said. “But I’ll see you at 3.”

“Fine. See you then,” he said. And then he hung up. I put my head down on the desk, still gripping the phone. Trish gently extracted the receiver from my fist.

“You all right?” she asked quietly.

“Ducky,” I answered. I picked up my head and looked at her. “You know what? I need a little time by myself. I need to call my mother.”

“Let me know if I can get you anything,” she said, standing to leave. “Open or closed?” she asked from the doorway.

“Closed. Thank you so much, Trish.”

She smiled at me. “Anytime, doll.”

I slipped on my headset, dialed Liz Cassidy at her office, and spun my chair around so my back was to the fishbowl hallway window and I was facing Times Square. I propped my feet up on the air conditioning unit while I exchanged pleasantries with my mother’s secretary, and then she put me through.

“Hello, my darling girl.” This is how she always greets me.

“Hi.” I chewed off a chunk of cuticle from my left thumb, which immediately started bleeding. I wanted a cigarette desperately. “Something terrible has happened, but before I tell you what it is you have to promise me that you’ll still go on vacation.” My mother, Ben, and I had been spending Thanksgiving with the Alexanders since Nate and I announced our engagement. Some years we’d go to them, some years they’d come to our house. This year, my mother and Ben had decided to break with tradition and spend the holiday at a swanky resort on Aruba. They were scheduled to fly out early Wednesday morning and come home Monday. Nate and I had planned to stay at their house and look after their dog.

“Tabitha, I can’t possibly make such a promise until you tell me what it is.”

I walked her through it, from coming home in the rain the night before to telling Michelle, Nancy and Trish this morning. “And now I have to go meet him at the bank, and I don’t want to,” I finished in sad little warble.

“Tabitha, I need to ask you a serious question,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“Is he gay? Tell me the truth. Did he really leave you for another man? I’ll go with you to take an HIV test.“

“Mom! What the hell? No, he’s not gay. He left me for a 24-year-old costume mistress.”

“Costume mistress? How apt. He always seemed so effeminate to me.”

“He’s just effusive.”

“He has a very high voice. I dislike that in in man.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“You should not give him any money,” she said, getting down to business. “You should not meet him and you should not give him any money. You should leave the office right now. First go to the bank, withdraw everything from all of your accounts, close those accounts and open new ones in your name only, and then deposit the money into those accounts. Then go home, change the locks, and call a lawyer.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“I think that’s very foolish. American Express is a good start, but you also need to call every credit card company where you have joint cards and alert them to the situation, so he can’t continue to charge anything on them.”

“We don’t have any cards together. I have cards. He has cards. We didn’t even have the American Express Card together. It was my Card and he was an authorized user on it.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because we were married?”

“Oh Tabitha.” She sounded so disappointed. “Let me ask you something. Do you have a secret account?” Before Nate and I had gotten married, my mother and my grandmother had sat me down and explained the facts of life to me. This wasn’t a sex talk, it was a financial one. And the upshot was, have your own money. Open an account in your own name, at a different bank from the one where you and your husband did your banking, and quietly build a nest egg. Because you never know.

“No,” I admitted.

She sighed. “You should put all your utilities and your lease in your name only. Make sure you change the beneficiary for your life insurance and your 401k. At least you didn’t change your name, so you don’t have to worry about your license or passport.”

“I’ll handle it, mom. I’ll handle all of it.

“I’m so sorry, Tabitha. My poor sweet girl. What a shit he is.” Maybe other mothers would have started here, with the tenderness, rather than going all field general on my ass. But other mothers didn’t spend a decade married to Carl Cassidy.

“Just promise me you’ll still go on vacation,” I implored.

“Why in the world would I do that? Of course I’m not going to do that.”

“You have to. I won’t be able to handle it if you cancel your trip and stay home so you can watch me cry. Go. I’ll be fine, I promise. I’ll volunteer at a homeless shelter or I’ll go to Elaine’s with Lily. Just, please Mom, don’t stay home.”

“Let me talk to Ben, and I’ll call you later.”

“Okay. You can tell him, but don’t tell Grandma. I want to call her myself.”

“That ought to be interesting. So now what?”

“Now I’m going to go eat a chicken potpie. And then I’m going to the bank.” Actually, I was going to go smoke until I felt dizzy, and then I was going to eat two chicken potpies.

“You know what you should do? You should have a drink. You should drink tequila.”

“Tequila?

“Yes. Doesn’t tequila seem like the kind of thing you should be drinking now? Drink some tequila. You’ll feel better.”

“Whatever you say, Mom.”

She asked me a few more questions before we hung up, about how Michelle and Nancy were taking the news (supportive, kind), if I had heard from anyone in Nate’s family, his parents, his brother or sister (no). She told me she loved me, that I was made of tough stuff, that everything was going to be fine, better than fine, she promised.

“We’ll see,” I said, and I hung up. Still, I added “Buy tequila” to my to-do list before heading downstairs for the pleasures of hazy smoke and buttery crust.