Free The Secrets She Keeps by Deb Caletti

sounded like a typhoon gust whipping through a room. “This, all of it.” His next word was tiny, which was funny for a word so big. The biggest: “Life.”
    Damn it, my heart flooded with feeling. Compassion. I wanted to cry, too. For him, and me, and for all of us poor, sorry human beings doing our best in this world. “Jesus, Mack. Maybe you should just buy a sports car.”

    I meant this to be light and caring, a gentle joke, but it was the wrong thing to say. The minute the words were out of my mouth, I knew it was the most wrong thing, but you’d think by then we could have seen each other’s good intentions.
    “And you wonder why I didn’t tell you? Of course you’d make it trivial! A bothersome setback you could sweep under the rug with all that you know —”
    He hated my emotional practicality. I hated it sometimes, too. “Thomas, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that! But isn’t this what happens ?”
    “To men of my age, you mean.”
    “To people who’ve…Your mother just died. The girls…”
    “A midlife crisis. A cliché .”
    “An understandable situation! A thing can be clichéd and still be just as devastating.”
    “Nice, Cal. Terrific.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with it! There’s nothing to be ashamed—”
    “How can you understand what a man feels? Really? You never even had a father .”
    I crooked the phone between my chin and shoulder. I opened my suitcase, then put the small stack of T-shirts in the musty dresser drawer. Here was another truth, I thought, as I stood in Taj, holding a bathing suit that had seen better days. Thomas didn’t fight fair, and I was tired of it. It was something no one would see from the outside or ever suspect. He’d go from zero to sixty on the anger scale, and then all the days of laundry-doing and lawn-mowing and hardworking goodness would be gone. No one would recognize that monster from the way he swept the garage and made chicken with dumplings. He’d fling my most raw failures at me, too, like the excellent weapons they were.

    I never liked big emotion. My mother’s was big enough during our childhood that high intensity resulted in the urge to flee to the safety of my room. At times like those, when Thomas stomped and fumed, I wanted to either leave home or slip a lethal powder into his chalice, but I’d handle him with distance instead. I’d shove a fat lot of it between us, so his raised voice and the lingering hurt from his words would have to climb a few barriers to reach me. The problem was, distance is a thing that can stack up. Over the years, bits of it gather like sedimentary layers in rock. The little ways you injure each other—they rise and harden.
    He barely paused for breath. “Is it any wonder I don’t feel heard? This isn’t about us, or you, or our family. It’s about me . Figuring out what I want. When do I ever think about what I want?”
    Oh, how fast that old jet plane was, the one that went from love to hate. This was just my familiar Thomas after all. The Poor Me Thomas, the I’m Last Thomas, the eater of cereal dust and burnt toast, who only needed to speak if he truly wanted to be heard. Frankly, I was sick of all his pointless self-denial. He may have thought it deserved some kind of medal, but I no longer saw anything admirable in it. There were so many ways you could go wrong in a marriage. Being selfish, not being selfish enough. Not being selfish enough and rubbing it in everyone’s face.
    “Maybe it’s good you left for a while,” he said. “You know what? I’m glad. I need some time.”
    I didn’t say a word. I bit the inside of my cheek so I’d stay silent. Dear husbands and wives. Sweet, loving people entwined in bed on a Sunday morning, turned to vicious bastards and bitches. The hardest part of being married—why don’t they tell you this?—is all the days you hate each other. We’d been together for twenty-two years. We had two daughters. Yet in an instant I could imagine my