Free Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart

you thanking Mommy?” Mattie said, and then, when Nathan didn’t immediately respond, she said it again, louder.
    “Um,” he said, lifting his face. While I’d been watching the snow in our backyard, he’d clearly gone someplace too, a place from which it was a struggle to return. The thing about children, we’d often noted, is that they drag you relentlessly back to the here and now, which in our childless days Nathan and I had spent much of our lives escaping.
    Matttie started bouncing on the balls of her feet, chanting, “Ay-ay-ay,” in a robotic, unnatural voice. This was a tactic she used to get our attention, because, as much as we tried to hide it, she knew it drove us crazy.
    “Hey, Mattie,” Nathan said. He pushed off me, and squatted at her level.
    “Ay-ay-ay,” she said into his face, her teeth bared like a little animal’s.
    “What would you like to do today?”
    This question stopped her. She cocked her head. “Why are we not going to school today?”
    “Today is not a school day,” he said. “It’s Sunday.”
    “Why is it Sunday?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and went over to her play refrigerator, whispering to herself as she opened the door. Now that she had his attention, she felt free to wander away. In that we seemed to be alike.
    The baby ran out of the Cheerios he’d been happily eating and began to cry. Nathan scooped him out of the high chair and lifted him into the air. “Can you shake your head?” he said, demonstrating, and Binx shook his head wildly in return, laughing, showing his one hillbilly tooth. “So,” Nathan said without looking at me, “do you still want to go to that festival, or do you feel too sick? Because I could just take the kids if you want to nap or something.”
    For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I remembered—there was a street fair in Chapel Hill, the sort of thing Nathan hated and which, up until this moment, he’d been strenuously refusing to go to, leading to the sort of argument in which I said he was only thinking of himself and not of the children’s pleasure and he said I was stressing everyone out by insisting we do so-called fun things with the kids when they’d be just as happy at home. Now he was not only offering to go, but offering to take both kids by himself. I swear if a hair shirt had been available, he’d have donned it in an instant.
    “That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s all go.”
    “Mattie,” Nathan cried, “we’re going to a festival!” And she, who probably had no idea what a festival was, caught the excitement in his voice and began to do what we called her happy dance, her little feet flying, and Nathan swung the baby in circles, and the baby shouted, “Ah!” and Mattie and Nathan shouted it back, all three of them laughing. I realized I was holding onto the seat of my chair with bothhands, as if to keep myself in it. I looked at this delightful domestic scene—two children and their adoring father—and my heart broke and broke again. I thought, I’m a mother. A mother, a mother, a mother. I thought, Remember this. This is what you’re trying to keep.
     
    Funnel cakes and African dancers and bongos and beaded necklaces. Mattie was at her most delightful, dancing to the music and announcing to everyone that she was three and obsessed with party shoes, both of our children eliciting from strangers those high-wattage smiles you never see until you go out into the world toting a baby. Nathan pushed the stroller and I held Mattie’s hand, and every so often Nathan reached for my free hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it. The sun was out and the air was crisp. The fatty, greasy funnel cake had helped ease my hangover, and it was hard to remember why I’d ever held anything against anyone. We saw one of the other children from Mattie’s preschool, a sweet, shy blond boy who liked to tell Mattie he loved her and hug her tightly, attentions she seemed to accept