Where There’s Smoke

Photo by Adam Parrott/Flickr

By Matt Jones

This is a couples’ vacation. Just the four of us.

In New Orleans.

In August.

The drive coming from Tuscaloosa should only take four and a half hours, but Jess and I are arguing because she thinks she forgot her birth control back at the house. Forgot is the wrong word, though. The problem is that I rush her. This is my thing when we travel: I hurry her out of the house at a speed beyond her comfort level. I pace up and down the hall and stand hawkishly over her shoulder wondering just what on earth could be taking so long.

She tells me that procrastination is her form of rebellion. She discovered this through self-motivated psychoanalysis, by reflecting upon memory after memory of family road trips in which her father woke her when it was still dark out and insisted they be on the road before the sun was up. Now, at twenty-seven, she says she dawdles as a form of dissent. Ambles in revolt. Climbing into the car and then needing to get out to use the bathroom just one more time is all part of the revolution.

We’re halfway to Louisiana, coming up on Hattiesburg, Mississippi, when I pull off the highway into an empty truck stop and Jess rummages through our luggage.

“It’s not here,” she calls, annoyed, from the back of the car.

“You forgot it?”

“You rushed me,” she says.

We’re in love. This is not in question. What is, however, is whether or not we want to risk bringing a child into the world. The risk is small, of course, but Jess and I are in our last year of graduate school. We have many reservations, so on the side of the road in southern Mississippi, we do the math.

We had sex the night before.
She didn’t take her birth control then.
It’s August, more precisely, mid-August. If she were to get pregnant, then the baby would gestate for nine months inside her body and enter the world in June.

“We’ll have our degrees by then,” I say.

“But no jobs,” she says.

We both nod.

We’ve talked about children many times before this. We love the freedom of just each other. We’re worried about the state of the world, about the climate, rising seas, violent conflicts. Our general consensus is that we will not procreate intentionally, though this, in the here and now of rural Mississippi, would be one of those unintentional times.

“Would you hate it if we drove back to the house to get it?”

“No,” I say.

“What if we just drive home and don’t go? Would that be so bad?”

I smile. We are both iffy when it comes to couple’s vacations. They’re traumatic. The only other one we’ve been on together took place three years earlier on Lookout Mountain in the Northeastern reaches of Alabama where Jess shared a room with her then-husband, and my then-girlfriend and I took the bedroom upstairs. At one point during a long night in which the University of Alabama football team barely eked out a win over LSU, we all took our clothes off and climbed into a hot tub that faced a sea of moonlit pines.

The thing about being in love with a married woman is that you can never rush her. There is so much waiting involved. So much patience. If I perform that same level of self-motivated psychoanalysis on myself that Jess is so adept at, then I determine that this is why I rush her out of the house now. I’m sick of waiting. I have waited. I was patient. I don’t like to think about the first couples’ trip we took, when Jess was married to someone else, though there is a moment from that night after her husband and my girlfriend stumbled out of the hot tub and back into the house when Jess reached her bare foot through the water and parted my knees and then we just sat there staring at each other through the steam while sweat gathered on the back of my neck.

And so now, sitting on the side of the road in Mississippi trying to decide whether or not we are okay with having a child in nine months, it’s best not to hurry important decisions. Take it slow. Painfully slow if necessary. Turn the car around. Drive back. Pick up the birth control. Turn a four-and-a-half-hour car ride into ten. When she parts your knees in the dead of night, don’t move. Don’t even breathe. Just be still and know there is still yet a great distance to travel before you arrive anywhere.

•••

We meet Rex and Kelly in New Orleans. Rex is a friend of mine from college and Kelly is his girlfriend. For my birthday, Rex has rented us a duplex in the lower ninth. Down the street, there’s an urban kale farm and chickens running loose and houses with the letter X still spray-painted across the siding.

On our first morning, Rex and I walk through sticky heat to the nearest coffeeshop and he tells me about wanting to become a firefighter. The year before it is a muay thai fighter and a year later it will be a carpenter, but for now it’s a firefighter.

He’s in the midst of crisis of masculinity. I suspect he doesn’t love Kelly, and if he does, it is a love I am unfamiliar with. For as long as I have known him, Rex has tried to exhibit the calm coolness of James Dean or maybe even a young Steve McQueen or Robert Mitchum and he can often manage the performance for a short amount of time. But then he cracks. The cracking is inevitable. I expect this trip of ours is built upon the foundation of a crack.

Over the years I’ve determined that it doesn’t matter if I am conciliatory or confrontational—either way, Rex will do what Rex does—so once we get to the coffeeshop, I just come right out and ask, “So you’re not applying to graduate school?”

And here we go with the firefighter talk again. Rex has spent the last six months telling me over the phone in hushed tones while Kelly is in the other room that he is going to pursue a graduate degree, that he is going to devote his energies to writing. At the coffee shop, we pick up drinks for “the girls.” Already, I don’t like this, this couples’ trip lingo of “girls” and “guys.” There’s too much performativity involved in the couple’s trip. There are the things Rex reveals to me man-to-man and then there is the man he reveals in the company of “the girls,” and I think why must we have these moments of tenderness and intimacy followed by such emphatic exaggeration and denial and deflection? Don’t you know I can’t handle this kind of dynamic? Don’t you know I have couples’ vacation trauma? But of course he doesn’t.

Rex tells me that becoming a fireman will put him on the sure path to a nice home, a better body, kids, a family, a red Corvette.

“A red Corvette?” I say. “Who are you, my uncle?”

He tells me firemen have a lot of downtime to do bench press in front of the firehouse.

I nod. My shirt sticks to my body. The coffee is too hot. Just holding the cup makes my hand sweat. I wait for Rex to ask about my life. Not just a question meant to segue into something he is dying to talk about, but a real inquiry into the quality of my being. It won’t come. That is fine. I’m practiced in the art of waiting and nodding along.

Our conversation reminds of talking to Jess’s husband, how the morning after the hot tub, he and I drove down the mountain and into town to buy breakfast and he said, “Jess doesn’t really know what she wants. She likes to think she does sometimes. Things will get better once we leave Alabama. Once we go somewhere else.”

Nod, nod. Right, right.

When I first met Jess’s husband, he said we should open up a mobile dog grooming studio together. He said maybe he’d go to law school. When I first met Jess she told me, “He said things would get better when we came to Alabama.”

Sometimes I want to grab Rex by the scruff of his shirt and slap him. The world is full of violent conflict anyway. What is all this firefighter business? This obsession with muay thai? I thought you were trying to write? I know the answer, of course. I suspect Rex does too. I think he knows, but he won’t say. Can’t relationships go on forever in the cramped space of what is known but goes unsaid? Who wants to live in that space? I could never go back there, back in that incommodious box. Neither could Jess. We have spent countless hours talking about that space. For her, it was a marriage, for me an affair, a long weekend in a North Alabama rental cabin.

“I think I could get a lot of writing done at the firehouse. They’ve got a lot of downtime, firefighters.”

“Good, good,” I say. I am conciliatory in the heat of August. I don’t have the energy for argument. I haven’t had a sip of my coffee yet. I’m spent from the ten-hour drive that should have only been four and a half.

When we get back to the house we’ve rented for the weekend, Rex pushes open the front door and says, “Let’s see what the girls are up to.”

They’re in the kitchen sitting across from each other at a small table beneath a spice rack. The whole trip is deja vu already. I think of the cabin just outside of Fort Payne, Alabama. Lookout Mountain. The changing of the November leaves. Of my then-girlfriend and Jess sitting there talking to each other while me and her husband unload groceries. All of us together in this incommodious box.

In New Orleans, I’m only happy that there’s no hot tub. There is no need for one. The duplex itself is feverish, built shotgun style so there the four of us will stay trapped in the barrel for two whole days.

•••

Late afternoon we all head over to the French Quarter. Rex and Kelly drink more gin and tonics than I can count. I have never had a beignet but everyone else has and they tell me I’m not missing out on much. So amongst other things, this weekend will also be a beignet-less one. Again, it is fine. I can deal with the lacking.

In our alone time, Jess and I laugh about the birth control incident that took place on the highway. It’s already funny. The two of us in the tight confines of my little hatchback, debating in the span of a few minutes whether or not we want to alter our family planning. We’re good at those kinds of situations. Maybe good is the wrong word. Practiced, though. In my car. In her car. The library stairwell. The graveyard behind the football stadium at midnight. Empty classrooms on the third floor of the English building. The kitchens of rented country cabins while our significant others are asleep down the hall and up the stairs. Give us a cramped space and something impossibly large to discuss and we’ll work it out. We’ll tiptoe around it. We’ll attack it head on. We’ve got a trophy room full of “should I leave my husband,” “do you love me,” “quick describe our future together while he is in the bathroom.” When other couples come over for dinner or drinks, they see the heads on the wall, the furs on the floor. Our house has a kind of enigmatic funk to it.

But then again, whose doesn’t? The New Orleans rental, after a full day of drinking and sweating and stale cigarettes, gets kind of fetid. There’s brooding in the air. Rex is about two drinks past young Steve McQueen and heading into old Marlon Brando territory. And Kelly, you can tell she’s got things on her mind. Things she wants to say. What better way to do it than with a game of Scrabble?

We all sit down at the tiny kitchen table and spread the board out, set ourselves up with a set of seven letters each. I love words, but I don’t care for Scrabble, for the limitations. Back on Lookout Mountain, the four of us played Taboo. Jess was on a team with my girlfriend. Us versus Them. Tensions were high not because anyone cared about winning but because the whole weekend was Taboo. The entire couples’ trip was guessing what someone was trying to say without them actually saying it.

While we play Scrabble, Jess and I lock ankles under the table. I’m in last place and Jess is in third so the real contest is between Rex and Kelly. Rex has always wanted to be a writer. This game means everything to him. I can see it in his eyes. And if it doesn’t mean everything, then it means next to everything, whatever is adjacent to it. And for Kelly, I can tell that winning is important, not winning in its own right, but Rex letting her win. Jess and I tap this out in morse code on each others’ thighs under the table. We are far past words. Masters of secret communication, we are. Of the coy glance. Of the hand brush. We used to text each other in acronyms that all began with the same three letters: RTR. Roll Tide Roll. The rallying cry for the Alabama football team.

RTRIWYSBRN (Roll Tide Roll I Want You So Bad Right Now)

RTRIWTFU (Roll Tide Roll I Want to Fuck You)

RTRIWYIM (Roll Tide Roll I Want You Inside Me)

Rex wins the game. The board is a collage of nonsense we’ve all had a part in creating. Kelly grabs her wine glass and storms off either because she does not like losing or because she does not like Rex winning. Then a literal storm rolls in. Rain patters the tin roof and fills the duplex with white noise. Jess and I climb into bed, and because we are renting a shotgun house, Rex regularly marches through our room and out the front door and onto the porch where he chain smokes.

“What is he doing out there?” Jess asks.

Lightning flashes. We can see Rex’s silhouette. Rain pelts his face and the front half of his body. His hair drips. His cigarette glows. In the shadow of the porch, in the right light that is, he does sort of look like Steve McQueen a la The Towering Inferno, at least a little bit, perched there as he is, exhausted, grim, both drenched and aflame. Yeah, I think, you go on and fight your fires.

•••

On Sunday morning Rex and Kelly are out of money. Out of gas. Jess and I pack our things while Kelly makes calls to her mother’s boyfriend to see if they can have some cash wired over. Until then, they are literally stuck.

I load our things into the car, then we pace awkwardly up and down the sidewalk while Rex and Kelly take turns calling different people, explaining the situation, and snapping at each other.

Jess pulls me off to the side.

“Do you think they want us to give them the money?”

“Maybe,” I say.

Maybe we’re back to the performance. Maybe they’re too embarrassed to ask us directly. They should just ask, though. They should just come right out with it. I have stood in front of Jess on a cloudless night with tears welling in my eyes pleading, “Pick me. Please, pick me.”

In the darkness of my room I have begged her, “Just divorce him. Don’t wait. Just do it.”

In the hot tub on the back porch of a house that didn’t belong to us, I let her part my knees and then just look at me.

I shouldn’t judge Rex and Kelly, but I do. If they need help, I want them just to come right out and say it. But I also understand not being able to.

“You guys can head out,” Rex says. “We’ve got it worked out.”

Nod, nod. Right, right.

So Jess and I climb into the car and pull away. We wave through the window. The rain follows us out of the city but stops by the time we cross Lake Pontchartrain.

Jess says, “You remember Rex last night? Smoking his cigarette in the rain?”

We both laugh.

The drive back doesn’t take long. The road we’re on is well traveled. We’re used to it by now, and before we know it, the weekend is behind us, so too is the storm, the sticky heat, the brooding, the performance, the cramped box. All of that, behind us now.

•••

MATT JONES is a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA program. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Atlantic, Post Road, Ruminate, The Journal, and various other publications. More of his work can be found at www.mattjonesfiction.com.

The House That Lies Built

Photo by Gina Easley www.ginaeasley.com

By Gina Frangello

My three children slept on mattresses on the floor, in the office adjacent to the master bath, pretending not to hear their father sobbing and pounding on the shower walls. This had become a morning ritual. How long had it been going on—two weeks, three?—on the morning when one of our twins woke to find a beetle in her ear. She’d become so inured to this strange new life of ours that she, who had once wept theatrically upon any insect sighting, simply flicked it across the room and slept on, later to see it on her brother’s mattress.

Sometimes, after the weeping, there would be shouting behind the closed door of their father’s and my master bedroom. Sometime near the end of that period of weeping and shouting, my son would come to my husband and me and beg us to “stop crying, stop yelling, stop closing the door to have talks.” My heart flipped and cracked and shredded itself apart with guilt. Even though it was my husband emitting the noises, my body pulsed with I did this. I did this.

We were confined, all five of us, to the upstairs of our two-level home, one proper bed between us all, extra furniture heaped in piles around our emotional chaos. Downstairs, the first floor of our apartment was gutted, everything draped in plastic. We were in the early stages of an extensive home renovation project we had been planning for a year—the first in fifteen years for our hundred-plus-year-old house. The renovation was, as such things always do, going more slowly than intended.

In the sixth week, my husband finally packed his bags for a solo trip to Colorado and informed me, while this time I wept hysterically on the floor of his closet, that I was to have had all his things moved to an apartment we co-owned with friends by the time he returned, and that he would never spend another night with me in our house. He had to walk past the children on their mattresses, to get to the stairs that would lead him out. Our fourteen-year-old twin daughters pretended to sleep and ignored him, but our nine-year-old son leapt up and rushed to the closet where I was howling like an animal and took me in his arms saying, “It’s okay, Mommy.” I had never, to my recollection, cried in front of my children before, even mildly. My son kissed my face and I tried to calm myself down, to not be That Mother, whose children have to parent her, the way my own mother, depressed in a back bedroom, had often been. Now, however, I was a broken thing with no control of the noises coming out of my body. I had wanted to be so many other things, but instead I was this: a bad memory my children would never be able to get out of their heads.

•••

Don’t feel sorry for me, hysterical on a closet floor, a woman left behind. It isn’t like that, some Elena Ferrante Days of Abandonment descent into rejected grief and madness. I am the Asshole in this story. What they never tell you is how much being the asshole hurts too.

•••

Three days into a home renovation my husband of twenty-two years and I were planning for our duplexed apartment, where we lived with our three children—my elderly parents in a separate downstairs unit—I confessed that I had been having an affair on and off (but mostly on…say it clearly: mostly on) for nearly three and a half years.

My husband and our children and I were in the Wisconsin Dells when I told him, at a horrible water park resort, in exile of the most invasive stage of the renovations: things being demolished, air thick with dust. My husband and I had left our teen twins in charge of our son and gone to dinner at the swanky restaurant inside the hotel, where we had several cocktails each. Though I’d never been a big drinker, lately—by which I mean at least the past two and a half years—I had more or less required a couple of drinks in order to have what passed as a fun time with my husband, to whom even saying “hello” had become a guilty lie.

I was stewing in a toxic, complex brew of my own guilt and duplicity, combined with longstanding marital resentments, anxieties, and almost unbearable boredom. That night, however, was a good night. It was a night—the first in at least a year—in which I could see the glimmers of why I had once fallen intensely in love with my husband and how we had ended up married to begin with. I felt moved by the way his smile was higher and more creased at one end; I could remember how once upon a time he had made me laugh, had been the confidante with whom I casually shared inside jokes that meant nothing to anyone Not Us. Even though he had told me several months prior, at a friend’s wedding, that he knew I didn’t “love him anymore” and that he feared I was just waiting for the children to go to college and then we would become “a clichéd empty nester divorce,” I could see he was still trying—that he wanted to fix whatever it was that had been broken for years before my affair. He still believed in me, even if it seemed years since we had made each other happy. He trusted me, even though it had been years since I’d been worthy of trust.

Was it my ability to glimpse our former love, that night at dinner, that allowed me to finally see—really see—how grotesquely entitled I had been, thinking it was in any way acceptable for me to lie so blatantly? To confuse kindness and tact with cowardice and manipulation—to tell myself stories about how “the Europeans” don’t make a “big deal” about infidelity, as though all I was guilty of was some vague Francophilia?

During the long night of wandering the resort in search of private spaces, my husband and I sobbed and fought, bargained and despaired, in the wake of my announcement. He kept saying, “It’s him or me” and telling me I could never speak to my lover again if I wanted to stay in our marriage. I knew what the Right Answer to such a demand—when you have three children together and elderly parents in the unit downstairs and nearly a quarter century as a couple under your belt—was supposed to be, but I couldn’t give it. I couldn’t promise to cut out of my life the man I had fallen passionately in love with and “rededicate myself to the marriage,” and I realized all at once that if I had been able to do such a thing, which my husband had every right to demand, I would never have had an affair in the first place. I had walked away from other flirtations or borderline-emotional-affairs with a fair amount of ease over the years, knowing they were not worth the risk, knowing where I wanted to be at the end of my story, and not to mess that up for some momentary rush.

The second I actually started my affair, the decision had already been made.

I had withheld that decision—from both my husband and myself—for more than three years.

I had no Right Answers anymore.

•••

This is not about whether I had a “right” to leave my marriage. Of course I had a right. The fact that my husband never cheated on me or that he was a good provider or that he didn’t abuse drugs or alcohol or didn’t beat me has nothing to do with whether or not I was obligated to stay. No one is obligated to stay. We live in a society in which women are no longer chattel, in which we are permitted to choose our relationships, in which divorce is painful but common and legal. My guilt isn’t for knowing that I was never going to love my husband the way I needed to again—the way I believe people should love each other if they are going to use up all the days of their fleeting lives on each other. I don’t feel guilty for the fact that I could already glimpse the picture on the other side of our full-throttle “parenting years”—our children busy with their own lives, heading off to college and out-of-state jobs, our retirement years alone together—and knew I could not stay stagnant inside that frame. This is not about whether or not my husband also made his share of mistakes in our marriage or what they may have been. My leaving my husband was not retribution for any fault of his, but rather—and I believe this in every core of my being—that we each have the right to choose what ships to go down with versus when to get into a lifeboat and save ourselves emotionally. Promises made at the age of twenty-five can feel like words uttered by someone else entirely by the time we are forty-six. There is no one who doesn’t have the right to leave a consensual relationship between adults: no marital atrocities required.

Rather, this is about living, quite literally, inside the toxicity of a lie that had the power to knock down walls. If I did not owe my husband an Until Death Do We Part I no longer believed in, I still owed him a common decency and truth that I did not deliver. Our demolished house became a too-obvious metaphor for the ways I had literally blown our house down. How had I even become a person who would commit to an extensive and costly home renovation, paid for by my husband’s salary, when I was desperately in love with another man? After I shocked myself by confessing, I still held fast that my husband and I could live together “as friends” in our home and raise our children together, each having our freedom—I believed this so completely that I nearly convinced him of it, as he rushed out on a dozen Match and eHarmony dates, then came home either sexually keyed up while I hid awkwardly in the bathroom, or tearful in his grief. This was the livable solution I was selling? How do we become so blind to ourselves? How do we come to believe we have the right to know more about the narrative of someone else’s life than they do, to manipulate that narrative behind the scenes for years, and then believe they actually owe us a friendship?

By “how do we,” I mean of course “how did I?”

“…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes,” wrote Joan Didion. “If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties.” I was trying to force my husband to forgive me, to still think well of me somehow, to avoid having to look at myself. I no longer wanted to be married to him, but after twenty-five years together, I was selfishly unready to surrender using his eyes as a mirror for my own vanities.

To say he was furious about the timing of my confession would be an understatement. But likely it was my very guilt about the renovation—about all that money spent—that finally drove me, after years of Sphinx-like secrecy, to leave hints that night at dinner until my husband at last asked me point blank, “Have you had sex with him? Are you in love with him?” Ultimately, it was the astronomical renovation costs that shook me out of my three-year era of spectacular rationalizations and made me understand that the only thing I had left to give him anymore was the truth.

•••

I still live in the building my husband and I once shared. Within six months of our separation, he had already come to find being in our home unbearable, even when he was alone with our children—he had moved in with another woman and her three children and had no desire, by the time of our finalized divorce, to ever set foot in our house again. He made moves in our divorce proceedings to try to sell the house, but with three children who have lived here their entire lives, and my elderly parents who were too sick to move anywhere else besides assisted living, selling the home would have punished all the wrong people. I was determined to keep our physical home intact, choosing it above the far more lucrative “permanent maintenance” to which every attorney and every friend told me I was entitled after twenty-three years of marriage, even though at the time of my divorce I had just finished chemotherapy for breast cancer and had no reliable income. “Divorce law is not about atonement,” my fatherly attorney kept telling me anxiously, but in my mind, if somehow I could keep the kids and my parents safely in their longstanding home, I could contain, at least to some small degree, the wreckage I had wrought.

During the weeks of our marital cleaving, our shattered and tarp-strewn house was a painfully literal metaphor for so many things gone wrong. Now, the beautifully restored home in which I live with my children and my widowed mother, where the man I love writes at an orange desk in the spot where my children’s floor-mattresses were strewn during those terrible weeks, where our three cats curl up with us and we have dinner parties and Game of Thrones marathons with friends…now this place carries enormous contradictions. It is a less volatile, more fun, and more transparent place than it was. Yet this space is also a constant reminder of my worst regrets and shame. Though my once double life is now whole, the dark wood floors of my dining room and restored vintage door (thicker and more soundproof than the flimsy former one) on my bedroom still remind me daily of the casual cruelty of which I was capable and of the privileges—even with my tax return only a couple thousand above the poverty level the year of my divorce—my ex-husband provided in buying and paying off this home he expected to grow old in. Here in what should have been a safe and sacred space, but instead became a site of violation, I wake up every day trying to live authentically, with truth and ethics, trying to be better than I was.

This is about and not about regret. It is possible to both not be sorry that a marriage is over, yet to be grotesquely sorry for the ways in which I ended it. It is possible to be incredibly more myself now, and yet to understand that other people paid far too high a price for my pursuit of freedom and happiness. I love my house, and I do not feel deserving of my house, even though I am trying to be, in the way I parent, the way I daughter, the way I hold to honesty in my new relationship; in the ways I work to care for and manage this household, responsible myself now for its bills and upkeep. Someday, maybe I will sell this beautiful shell that contains so much history, both luminous and sad. Until then, it is a walk-in model of my heart, capable of ruin and beauty, of pain and reinvention. I don’t know if these walls would ever forgive me, but I am trying, every day, to forgive myself.

•••

GINA FRANGELLO’s fourth book of fiction, Every Kind of Wanting, was released on Counterpoint in September 2016, has been optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver & Delilah, and was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including in Chicago Magazine and The Chicago Review of Books. Her last novel, A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), was selected for the Target Emerging Authors series, was also optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver & Delilah, and was a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the author of two other books of fiction: Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006). She has nearly twenty years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the Executive Editor for Other Voices magazine, and the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, Dame, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, Role Reboot, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post and in many other magazines and anthologies. www.ginafrangello.org

Making Do

By Elizabeth H. Boquet

“I’m fifty,” I imagine saying to my mom. “Can you believe it?”

“No,” she would say back to me. “No, I cannot.”

I used to call her every year on my birthday. It became a funny thing, me thanking her for having me. I would have already gotten her card—she always mailed it early—and sometimes a little gift, though not every time. I know if I had waited long enough, she would have called me, but I was an hour ahead of her and up early to go to work. She was retired and a night owl. I would call her first thing, and she would still be in bed. I would remind her what she doing however many years ago on that day and she would always say she didn’t remember much, mercifully. Because that is how they did it in those days. My friends and I were some of the first babies born in the hospital in our town. Our mothers went in pregnant and came out not. What happened in between was for someone else to say.

She remembered enough to tell me she thought the hospital sent her home with someone else’s child; I know that. And for a long time I wondered whether she believed it. I had been big—almost ten pounds. Enough to warrant forceps, one tong clamped to the right side of my forehead, which left me with what she used to call a horn. “What do you mean a horn?” I would ask.

“A horn,” she would say, as if it were self-evident.

When I pressed for more details, she would never describe it exactly, would just say it was so big my christening cap didn’t fit and so unsightly that she heard my grandfather, leaning over my crib, say to one of his brothers, “Look at that, Camille. What the hell you think about that.” A lament. I was lamentable.

“When they brought you to me,” she would say, “you were so ugly. I was just sure you were the wrong baby. And I told them that, too. I said, that’s the wrong baby. But they kept insisting you were mine so what was I gonna do. I took you home.”

Those were also the days when babies spent most of their time in the nursery, bottle-fed, so the new moms could get some rest. “Well, my room was right down the hall,” she would say, “and there was one baby in there that cried all night long. I mean, all night long. I remember feeling so sorry for the poor momma that was gonna take that one home. Little did I know, that one was you! And that poor momma was me!”

The stories would spill out from there of her new-mother all-nighters, of the local TV stations going off at midnight and of her having to rock and sing or bounce and hum to me into the wee hours. Of me sleeping all day, through every visitor who came by wanting to meet me and my horn. “We would wipe your face with an ice cold washrag to try to wake you up,” she would say. “Even that didn’t work. You were out. But come ten o’clock—poomp!—your little eyes would pop open and you would be ready to play. All night. I would just get you to sleep, and then it would be time to get your brother up for school. I’m telling you, I thought I was gonna die.”

My mom loved babies, the littler the better, but she was not sentimental about them. She could sit content with a newborn in her arms all afternoon and talk about how hard they were, every once in a while catching the baby’s eyes with a coo and a smile and a high-pitched “Isn’t that right? Yes, it is. Yes it is,” until she got a rolling giggle in response.

It never occurred to me to wonder whether she wanted me. If pressed, I would have said I assumed she did. By the time I came along, my brother was eight. My mom and dad had been married eleven years, and she had had at least two “misses,” as she used to call them. Maybe more. “In those days, we didn’t count.” My mom would have said she was not of a generation that thought about kids as something you wanted or didn’t, or of a generation of kids who thought about whether they were wanted.

She loved the story of the time she told her nephew, my cousin Todd, that he was an accident. “He was so upset,” she used to say. “Now, why would you be upset by that?” she wondered. “I mean, I was an accident too. You think I care? By the time you’re number three or four or five, I hate to tell you: You’re an accident.”

When my husband asked what I wanted to do for my fiftieth birthday, I told him I wanted to talk to my mom. He knows I only ever most want what is impossible and that, if he waits a beat or two, I will get to something that is more possible, which I did. So I told him I wanted to spend it with my brother—my first best friend—and his family. I told him he was in charge of arrangements. All I wanted to have to do was pack.

I threw my clothes in a bag the night before—it’s my brother, it’s Florida, there’s not much that needs to happen. But the jewelry required some thought. I have pieces I love, pieces I travel with and pieces I don’t. Like most things in my life, my jewelry is poorly organized. The necklaces are tangled and often need polishing, the earrings are separated, left from right, backless, and sometimes bent. As I dug, I unearthed a cardboard box with a peacock on it. I was looking for one pair of earrings in particular, brushed metal with tiny blown-glass cornflowers on them. They’re more delicate than most of the others and I halfway expected to find them broken beneath a large pewter lily seedpod pin that only comes out during the winter. I unfolded the lid on the box and discovered a note from my dad atop the mess of chains and buttons and assorted cleaning cloths. “Nothing is lost as long as someone remembers,” he wrote.

I remember. I remember this is the note that accompanied the last birthday present from my parents, the last birthday for which my mom was still alive. It was not long after they moved from Louisiana to live near us in Connecticut. The note is written in my dad’s certain left-slanting print on an index-card-sized piece of plain white typing paper. The edges are frayed, so he must have folded it and torn it along the kitchen counter, as was his habit. I’m a leftie too. Scissors are no good. I turn the paper over. “Senoir citizen’s make do,” he wrote on the back side. My dad can’t spell, can’t punctuate. He knows what he does is wrong by someone else’s standards and he doesn’t care.

I remember the gift. A costume chainlink bracelet with a gold-and-silver heart. I wonder who it belonged to first, or who he bought it for and when. “Senoir citizen’s make do” means he didn’t buy it for this occasion, and there’s no way in hell it belonged to my mom. In Connecticut they have no money, no car, and he has not yet figured out the bus. No—he brought this bauble up with him from Louisiana.

“Do you like it?” my mom asked.

“Oh, I do.”

“Oh, good. When your dad showed it to me, I wasn’t sure.”

She was right not to be sure, about this and so many other things. But still, after fifty-some-odd years of marriage, in the end she trusted him. Because what else could she do? The bracelet is not the sort of thing I would ever wear. It slides around the bottom of the peacock box. I found the earring I was searching for tangled in one of its links and wrested it loose.

After my mom died, sympathy cards slipped through our mail slot for weeks. Most people wrote about how kind she was, how much they knew we would miss her, how she would always be in our hearts. But one I remember most of all, a note from Miss Lorraine, one of my mom’s oldest friends, who I hadn’t seen in years and years. I remember her especially from a vacation our families took when I was about eight to a state park in Mississippi, where we rented cabins and skied in the lake and made homemade ice cream and root beer at night. We did that only one year and never again.

I’ve wondered whether my parents couldn’t afford it—it was hard for them to leave their small business for a week at a time—but I also wonder whether all their friends knew. Knew what I knew, even then. That my dad was cheating on my mom. That everyone had to look away all the time. Had to pretend it wasn’t happening. Whether my mom’s friends would worry that their own husbands would get ideas. Whether the husbands worried that my dad, always and still a handsome man, would make a move on their wives. Infidelity is contagious in that way.

“I remember,” Miss Lorraine wrote, “going to visit your mom in the hospital when she had you. She was so happy to finally have her little girl.”

By the time I arrived, eleven years into her marriage, my mom was already protecting me, protecting herself, from the disappointments of being women who love too easily, too hard, too unselfconsciously. By eleven years into her marriage, I wonder whether she knew how many others my dad had already had, whether she hadn’t dared to believe, after so many misses, that this one was really hers. A unicorn. A fantastical creature.

Can you believe it? I’m here, Mom. I’m still here.

•••

ELIZABETH H. BOQUET is a writer and educator whose work explores themes of violence, suffering, and peace-making through writing. Originally from southwest Louisiana, she now lives and works in southwest Connecticut. Her most recent work, Nowhere Near the Line, was published in 2016 by Utah State University Press.

The First Time a Man Cheats

By A. Sandosharaj

1. The first time a man cheats on you—to your knowledge—you are old for a young woman: thirty. He is several years younger.

You do not leave him.

But it ends.

Briefly.

Your ego churns—who could she be? After all, your hair is unmatched, your jokes are funny. You’re often the most well read person in a room. What must she be like?

When you find out about the cheating, it’s weeks before September, when things will surely feel new, as they always do in the fall, a lucky byproduct from you never having really left school.

For now it is the driest part of summer, when he is with who you think is a new girlfriend, but is in fact an old girlfriend, but old only in the sense of previous because, at twenty-one, she is ten years your junior. Her age jerks in your throat. What have you accomplished with your ten-year head start?

2. Next you find out she is divine. Wholly, remarkably, indisputably divine. Her every attribute is your opposite: pillow pale to your teddy bear brown, sleek to your curves, commanding to your petite. You’ve piled up toothless degrees, and she? She quit high school.

It is no comfort. She has years—ten!—to return to her education, your only trump, to find Foucault or graphic design, whereas you know, outside of amassing useless suffixes, you’ve so far been a stall. There are no more degrees left.

3. When you finally see him again in September—in the bursting fall of the eastern seaboard—it’s football that brings you together, chatter about sports as talismanic as Christmas time, Christmas, when he will leave you again for her (this will be just before your winter birthday, which always falls near the Super Bowl, when you will not hear from him, not even a happy birthday text).

For now it is September. He has returned from her to you, arrived at his right mind, you hope. There is football every Sunday and classes have started on the campus where you feel a little more than the graduate student you once were. It is, as always, at least a new semester. The university life is still yours, as is he; his treachery was, you are growing more sure, a forgivable lapse.

You are weeks from sneaking into his phone, doubting her absence.

4. That will be December. December, when you meet in a cafe with her (stunningly beautiful) to listen to her (more divine than imagined) conjure a man you do not know: a boyfriend who plots surprise parties and selects lingerie, cooks breakfast and stays in. A boyfriend who chauffeurs. Who cares to argue. Who meets parents. Who adores. Gazing at her lovely face, you realize he has never once, on his ever-present phone, taken your picture.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him cry,” she starts one story, and you wince, unable to keep listening. Really? That granite cries? Tears?

You are both polite, both victims, both too smart for this shit, and when he arrives, having discovered your meeting, he leaves with her.

But this is all long after September, when the cold stretch of the holiday break advances, when all you can remember is him helping her with her elegant coat.

5. For now it’s September and the prodigal is home. You’re in the pink gloom of five a.m., considering the colorful townhouses across the street as the September sun slips over their scalloped peaks. The wide shutters are lowered like the lids of tipped dolls, peeking. He is drowsily telling a story about his father who has just died after a year of cancer. He stops to play music from his phone. He will sleep for hours more; for you, it’s time to wake up.

The music he plays is, as with everything that is a matter of taste, undeniably good. It sounds like all the best music you’ve ever heard in your life, only… current. You will always admire this. His spare motorcycle, his handsome dog, his custom everything. He doesn’t just wear clothing, you know. He wears everything. Maybe even you.

As you dress for class you wonder, does he, too, feel the fresh start of September? The rising out of summer for new books, new clothes, empty grade sheets? Is it an annual blank slate for him, too? Does he too have this same feeling, you wonder, does he too know its promise? Or does it only belong to children and academics? You want to know.

•••

A.SANDOSHARAJ’s work appears or is forthcoming in cool places like The Rumpus, The Millions, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Southeast Review, Massachusetts Review, Crab Orchard Review, River City, American Literary Review, Subcontinental, Racialicious, Addicted to Race, and Fiction is First. She teaches writing at Howard University in Washington DC.