Free Noah's Wife by Lindsay Starck Page B

disappointment. She has had four husbands, and all but one have been unfaithful. Each time she has loved and lost she has retreated into her bedroom and lain down with her bowed head at the foot and her stockinged feet at the head and she has stayed there for hours, inverted in this way, while the world flips and her stomach lurches and her small calico cat purrs into her shoulder and licks at the salt that runs dyed with mascara from the crinkled corners of her eyes to the painted line of her mouth. Mrs. McGinn may be a real warrior (in her own peaceful way, that is), she may be strong and bold and quick at dodging flying fruit, but she is not invincible. She is, in the end, a human being—as breakable as any other—and it is in these moments that she feels the most broken, that she wonders what it is about her, what she has done wrong, why it is that each and every husband has strayed.
    â€œAm I so unlovable?” she has asked the cat, time and again. “What is wrong with me?” She worries that her daughter, too, finds her unlovable and that her daughter sometimes asks herself: What is wrong with my mother?
    What she wants most in the world—besides the former glory of this town—is for her daughter’s marriage to be beautiful and painless and lasting. She does not know if such a thing is possible, but she refuses to give up hoping for it. She will not abandon ship so easily.
    â€œYou may not think so to look at me now,” she tells Noah’s wife upon returning to the dining room. “But I used to be very beautiful. See, that’s me, can you see how that’s me, years and years ago?” She jabs at the photograph in question.
    Noah’s wife looks, dutifully, and then looks again at Mrs. McGinn in order to evaluate the resemblance. She nods.
    â€œYou are very beautiful even now, you know,” she says kindly.
    And it is true that Mrs. McGinn is still striking, in her own way, even if she has lost the eyebrows that were once so distinctive (she has to draw them on now, with a brown clay pencil), even if her lips are closer to white than to red and even if her skin has begun to fold into small dark pouches below her eyes. It is true that she is still very proud and very pretty, even if she is not quite
as
beautiful as she was when she was twenty-five. But who is? she would like to know. Who is?
    â€œIt would have been nice,” Mrs. McGinn declares, “if that
weatherman
, or whatever he called himself, would have given us some kind of prediction.”
    â€œDidn’t he?” asks Noah’s wife in her gentle way.
    â€œA good one, I mean,” retorts Mrs. McGinn. “I’d like to know how long the rain will last so that I know exactly how long we need to postpone the wedding. It’s the uncertainty that drives me crazy. Those two have been engaged for two and a half years already, but I simply won’t have it raining on my only daughter’s wedding day. I’m not superstitious, but I know full well that marriage is a challenge. Every pair needs all the luck it can get.”
    â€œIt rained on my wedding day,” remarks Noah’s wife. “And everything was fine.”
    Mrs. McGinn ignores this. She flips the pages of one of the albums in quick succession until she lands on one of her daughter dressed as a flower girl, her lips pursed in a grimace.
    â€œAnyway,” continues Noah’s wife. “Couldn’t you hold the ceremony inside the church? You should see what Noah has done to the place: it’s gorgeous. And I know you haven’t heard him preach, but he’s very good. Really, he is.”
    Mrs. McGinn scowls down at her photo album. She doesn’t care how well spoken the minister may be; she has no interest in asking his God for anything. Although Mrs. McGinn truly does believe in a higher power (at least on her better days), she does not need to sit under a stranger’s vaulted roof in order to