Free The Good Sister by Drusilla Campbell

wonderful as
     that.
    They did not say much about Chicago as they waited for the formal job offer they were sure would come. But as days became
     weeks and no word arrived, the subject became a tender spot, a pinched nerve they favored by avoidance. When the call finally
     came from a biologist who would have been Ty’s colleague and who had been particularly supportive of his candidacy, it took
     less than three minutes to lift up their life and drop it down in a new direction.
    Ty put down the phone, went into the kitchen, and poured himself a tall glass of ice water from the refrigerator. Roxanne
     stayed where she was in the living room, folding laundry, biting the inside of her lip.
    “They gave it to a guy from Harvard.” He stood in the arch between the two rooms, his expression unreadable. “Edgar Lessing.”
    “Ty, I’m so sorry.” She had never wanted to go to Chicago, but equally as much she wanted Ty to be valued by the world as
     he deserved to be.
    “I know him. He’s a good man. Probably a smart choice.”
    “They should have given it to you.” She threw a T-shirt into the basket unfolded. “Were there any reasons?”
    “They didn’t think my heart was in it.”
    “Your heart?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I think it’s a way of saying something and nothing at the same time.”
    A look of puzzled disappointment flickered across his expression and was gone, like the shadow of a moth by candlelight. Then,
     as she watched, his expression reshaped itself into a mask of neutrality. She understood and didn’t blame him for not wanting
     to deconstruct his time in Chicago, for not wanting to analyze the interviews or parse the conversations. Roxanne knew the
     kind of thing that might have been said in public twenty years ago:
If a man’s heart was in the job, where was the wife? Why wasn’t she there to support him?
Probably the same thing was said now in private and unofficially.
    Days passed and Ty had almost nothing to say beyond the smallest of small talk, which was somehow worse than if he had not
     spoken at all. It seemed to Roxanne that either the house had shrunk around them, or they had grown large and clumsy as they
     hadn’t been before. They stepped around each other carefully, were excessively polite, and apologized for things that didn’t
     matter—mail left in the box out front, a single unwashed glassabandoned on the kitchen counter. She had no idea if this was how Ty normally processed disappointment or if he was angry
     with her or, as she thought more likely, a combination of the two ate at him. His thoughts had voices. She heard him accusing
     and regretting her. Finally she could stand it no longer.
    “You’re disappointed, Ty. I know. I feel like it’s my fault. If I had gone with you…”
    “It’s over, Roxanne. Let it go.”
    “Please, talk to me.”
    “There’s no point, Roxanne.”
    His curt responses infuriated her and she began to harden against him. Conversations were like rooms, she realized. She had
     opened the door but it was up to him to walk through, and when he wouldn’t she felt as insulted as if he’d looked in, seen
     nothing of interest or importance, and walked away.
    Roxanne began spending more time with Simone just to get out of the house, and although she knew she was moving backward,
     that the distance between her and Ty grew in relation to the hours she spent with Simone, she did it anyway.
    She wasn’t going to beg.
    One day at the end of August Roxanne was getting ready to go home after spending the afternoon with her sister while Nanny
     Franny took the children to SeaWorld. As she was leaving she met Johnny coming into thekitchen from the garage. He opened his arms wide, enveloping her.
    “Rox, what’re you doing here?”
    “I took the twins to the dentist. Nanny Franny took them to SeaWorld for a reward. No cavities.”
    “That girl makes them brush morning and night.”
    “I made an appointment for Simone. I