Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
When he isn’t at the breakfast table in the mornings, I tell myself he’s only busy. I make the coffee anyway, the good kind, from the machine with opinions. I set out two cups on the pale stone counter, and I drink mine standing up looking at the full untouched one across from me, and I narrate his morning to myself in cheerful detail, the early meeting, the call with the coast that had to start before dawn, the quarter that won’t go and close itself. I’ve gotten very, very good at reciting his schedule. I have never in my life been less sure of where he actually is. I butter a single slice of toast I don’t especially want and I tell the empty chair across the counter that he’ll be home for dinner, and some mornings I very nearly believe the chair believes me.
When there are nights he doesn’t come home at all, I tell myself he’s still just busy. Men like Trey keep impossible hours; my father did, and my father loved us to his last breath. A dark apartment and a cold half of a bed don’t have to mean anything at all. I lie in the farthest guest room, the small one at the end I never did move back out of, and I listen for a key in a lock that doesn’t turn, and I tell myself that an empty side of a bed is only an empty side of a bed and not a verdict handed down. I’ve gotten so practiced at the telling that I can almost manage it now without crying. Almost.
And when I’m standing in the kitchen one grey afternoon with the television murmuring to itself for company, and I glance up to find my husband’s face filling the screen, and beside his face a woman’s, some elegant dark-haired stranger caught coming out of the same restaurant he’d just come out of with the same car idling at the curb for them both, and underneath the two of them a caption with a question mark in it doing a truly enormous amount of ugly work, I tell myself it’s only gossip. The city invents these things for sport. The city once spun a whole fairy tale out of me and Troy from nothing but proximity and a good jawline, didn’t it, so surely it can conjure a woman for Trey out of one coincidence and a slow news day. Only an idiot believes gossip. I switch the television off and I tell myself, firmly, that I am not an idiot, and I make myself a cup of tea I then don’t drink, and I do not, I do not let myself stand there and wonder whether the considerate husband with the cough has been busy being considerate somewhere else these two months.
That is what it costs me to take it easy. I simply keep on lying to myself, one fresh lie laid down carefully over the last one before it has time to cool and set, an endless gentle mortar of untruth, because if the lies are the only wall left standing between my heart and the strain that could stop it for good, then I will build that wall just exactly as high as it needs to go, and I will live the rest of my life behind it if I have to.
She’ll keep lying to herself, the girl in the bathroom mirror, if lying to herself is the only way left to protect her heart.
And she does keep it up, right up until the morning the lying finally runs clean out of road, when Trey and I end up standing side by side in the cold quiet of that same bathroom, waiting in a tense ringing silence for a small plastic stick laid on the marble between us to decide something about the rest of my life.
He’s the one who picked it up when the little timer on his phone went off. He’s the one holding it now, turned away from me toward the window so I can’t see his face. I can’t take my eyes off the small white window in the plastic where the answer is slowly surfacing, and I’m doing the breathing Dr. Meyers taught me a lifetime ago, in for four, out for six, easy, easy, take it easy, while my whole future arranges itself one developing line at a time, and oh, oh, oh, the line—
“You’re not pregnant,” he says. He calls it out first, before I can read it for myself, and his voice gives away absolutely nothing.
I can’t look away from the test in his hand. “I guess I’m not.”
“If this keeps on,” he says, “perhaps I’ll have to find another woman to give me an heir after all.”
And then he’s gone, the way he’s always gone these two months, except this time he doesn’t even bother to leave quietly. He walks out, and the bathroom door slams shut behind him hard enough that I feel it come up through the marble into the soles of my feet, and the sound of it is the truest thing that’s passed between the two of us in two months.