Free Every Day by Elizabeth Richards

“So?”
    I still have the book in my lap. I close it, put it and my notebook and pen aside. This is what I summon from the miserable depths:
    “On Saturday, Fowler called me. As you know, I’d had some warning of this. I met him in town. We had drinks, no food. He told me he has a year to live.”
    “Why doesn’t that move me,” my husband says evenly.
    “I don’t expect it to,” I say, in the same tone. “I’m telling you what you’ve asked to hear.” He can’t be the only strong one here.
    “Go on.”
    “We went to his apartment.”
    “Even better.” He gets up, walks to the fireplace, puts a hand briefly on the mantelpiece. “I hope you’ll spare me the description of the apartment. Is there any particular reason you’ve done this? You still haven’t made a stab at an explanation.”
    What comes to me now isn’t remorse, shame, or a desire to be someone else, in some other century. What comes to me instead is rage, rage at marriage, at what our love has done to us, at how people who begin as lovers become friends who can be enemies at the same time. What I’ve done seems predictable, reasonable, given what little attention we’ve been able to give to ourselves, each other, while we’ve devoted every breathing moment to the children.
    “I don’t know,” I say shakily. Then, with more steam, “I guess I wanted to.”
    We wait.
    “What are your plans?” he asks. Like a bullet out of nowhere.
    I thought I would have to narrate the sex. I thought he’d want to know, in that way people want to know the most gruesome details of murders.
    “I haven’t made any.”
    “You should.”
    He rips a sheet of paper out of my spiral notebook, takes a pen to it, and scribbles. He holds it out to me, clenching it.
    “This is where I’ll be for the remainder of the week, in case the children want to call. By the weekend I’ll expect some notice from you as to what arrangements you’ve made. I cannot live with a liar.”
    He goes upstairs and is back, prepacked overnight bag in hand, before I’ve read the scrawl. He pockets wallet and keys and is gone. I hear the healthy igniting of our decent car, and listen to it until I can’t hear it anymore over the softer noises of night.
    Essex House, the paper says. Where we went for two nights after we were married. Both of us had to work the week following the ceremony. We had our honeymoon there. Salt in the wound I’ve brought on our house.
    I have railed in my heart against his foresight, his belief that all can be at the ready. And now I’ve punished him for it. And he’s punished me for that. Still, scores cannot be settled. I go in search of food. I eat cold noodles, on the kitchen floor, with my hands. They’re wonderful, pasty and filling. I need them. I can’t get enough of them. Even when I hear my son’s heavy tred, sense his approach, feel him standing above me, I eat. Endlessly, it seems, I eat.
    “Mom,” he says, his cracking voice my home, “what are you doing?”
    I douse him with assurance that I’m all right, that Simon’s all right, that sometimes people just need some space so they go somewhere for a while or they get incredibly hungry sothey eat like pigs, which is what has happened to the two of us, respectively.
    “It’s not something with Grandma Jean, is it?” Isaac hedges.
    I almost laugh, his concern is so darling, so unearned. Jean is a horse. She blares into our life twice a year from Florida and once weekly by phone. She’s always “up to her ears” in something, visitors, bills, classes, game plans for vacations, hers and ours. She’s the least absent absentee member of our family. The idea of anything taking her before she’d good and ready is totally absurd.
    “No, duck. It’s nothing like that.”
    “Okay. Good. I’ll see you in the morning. Wake me up, okay?”
    “Of course.” I breathe. I won’t be able to put this off. Tomorrow morning I’ll have to say something.
    I go up and run myself yet