Free If You Lived Here by Dana Sachs

that he hasn’t even taken the time to go through our adoption referral packet. “I’ll look at it later,” he tells me, but he doesn’t. Meanwhile, he has ample time to deal with the funeral home driveways, which, though they’ve been cracked for three years, he insists on repaving this week. Even at home, he has become businesslike and distant, staying up late at night to go over our accounts and leaving for the office early in the morning. Sometimes, he hardly notices me, and acts as if we’re bound only by the tattered professional connection we have at the office. I know we have a problem here, but I’m scared to bring it up. I don’t want to make things worse.
    “I’m sorry,” I mumble.
    “Can you try,” he says, “to get things right in the future?” I’m too surprised by his tone to answer. And then, before I can say anything at all, he rolls up his window, pulls out, and drives away.
    I should rush inside, but I can’t move. My head falls back against the headrest. When I feel hurt, it starts in my shoulders, then moves up my neck to my head and settles, hot and throbbing, just behind my ears. Does the person in pain inside the building mean more to Martin than the person in pain inside this car? I remember the night, not long after we got married, when the phone rang while we were making love. It was my mother. We paused, staring at each other like teenagers caught on the couch.
    “Shelley?” Answering machines were fairly new then. I felt a momen-tary panic at the sound of her voice, suddenly soaring, unannounced, across our bedroom.
    Martin burrowed his face in my curls, the weight of his body keeping me from leaping out of bed. His voice was quiet, steady, speaking to my mother in the air. “We’re not home right now, Margot.”
    “I thought you’d be home by now.” “We’re not,” he insisted.
    “Where could you be?” my mother continued, thinking aloud. “We’re at the beach. At the mall. We flew to the moon. We’re in
    Africa . . .” Martin’s voice was soft and ticklish, a murmur in my ear. I felt his hand move down, firm and persistent, between my legs. “Scaling Mount Everest. We have a meeting with the president. Shelley’s hosting Saturday Night Live . She’s become a matador.”
    “Maybe you’re at the mall,” my mother mused.
    “Please hang up.” I was fairly begging now.
    She seemed to ponder the possibilities for a while. “Well, call me later,” she finally said. I heard the phone click off, the brief buzz of the dial tone, then silence. Martin pushed inside me. I laughed and moaned at the same time. I felt Martin’s lips against my neck. His hand skimmed beneath the covers, searching for mine. We kept making love. And then, afterward, our skin damp with sweat, he whispered, “I don’t want to miss a single day with you.”
    I had been in the funeral business only a year or so. I had a lot to learn still, but I had learned the most important thing already. This business makes you grateful for the things you have, and grateful to be grateful, too, as if it’s some proprietary knowledge that only those of us who see death daily share. How can Martin and I, of all people, have forgotten about that?

    It’s two-thirty when I get inside the building. Rita hands me a couple of message slips. “York called again for the urn order. Your sister wants you to pick up Keely from school tomorrow so she can get ready for the birthday party. Mr. Sloane’s waiting for you in the front receiving room.”
    “Can you stick this in the fridge?” I set the bamboo shoots on her desk. “What is that?” she asks. We eye the bag together. I think of Mai, standing in front of the Vietnamese market women, getting an early and
    utterly baffling lesson in sex.
    “Penises,” I want to tell her. Instead, I say, “Dinner,” then head down the hall.
    At this hour, the reception rooms look like yards of empty carpet, devoid of any practical function. We finish all our other