Free Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart Page A

with a certain amount of perplexity. His parents were about our age, and they had a baby girl about Binx’s age, and we stood together chatting in a pleased mirror reflection of each other while the preschoolers ran circles around us. Binx demanded to be picked up, so I held him near the other baby. They smiled at each other and touched hands, and then Binx put both his hands on her shoulders, leaned in, and gave her the gentlest of kisses on the mouth.
    “Oh, so you love her, and her brother loves your sister,” the father said. “This is going to work out well.”
    The mother laughed. “Boys start early, don’t they?” she said.
    “And they never stop,” the father said. I laughed, but this more-or-less innocent moment gave me a pang, and for a little while my throat closed up again, and I had to watch the babies intensely because I couldn’t look at anyone else, tears behind my eyes. Look at those babies, though. A moment I could live in, watching little fingers meet and part, the joy of those gummy smiles.
    When I could join in the conversation again, I looked up at the parents and thought how happy they looked together, noting the fond glances, the casual touches, the way she leaned against him when he made a joke. Hadn’t I heard that they’d had problems in the past? That at one point they’d come close to divorcing? Or was I making the whole thing up? I didn’t know, but I decided to see them as survivors of a near-catastrophe, now firmly bonded together in the way Nathan and I were from here on out to be. When we walked away from them, in search of the balloon-animal maker they’d told us about, I took Nathan’s hand. He had to push the stroller with one hand and hold mine with the other, which made for awkward maneuvering, but he held on anyway, until Mattie spotted our target and ran ahead, and I had to let go.

CHAPTER FIVE
    I knew my husband. I was confident of that. No matter what, I knew him. I knew that he didn’t like tomatoes until he was twenty-five. I knew that after we saw The Matrix he cried out, “Keanu!” in his sleep, and then insisted that I’d misheard. I knew that his voice softened and his jokes grew sillier in the presence of cute girls, and I knew that this was less true now than when I first met him, so that no one but me might detect the change. There was no undoing my knowledge of him. Mattie would be sure to tell me, when she was sixteen or so, “You don’t know me!” and she’d be wrong, because I’d always know how her voice sounded—weirdly authoritative despite its high pitch—when she was three and said, “From now on when I’m naughty I want to decide my punishment.” And maybe I’d say to Nathan, ten years after our divorce, if we got one, that he didn’t know me anymore, and I’d be wrong, because he’d always know what animal sounds I made in labor, he’d always know I was ticklish only in the arches of my feet. We want to be known when we do, and we want to be unknown when we don’t,just like we want someone to touch us and kiss us until we don’t anymore. We make our bodies off-limits again, but still that other person did touch us, he ran his fingers down our inner thighs, he slipped his tongue inside our mouth.
    Nathan, my Nathan. He was so careful, even self-righteous, about what we owe to others, the sort to overpay when it came to splitting the bill, rather than risk shorting someone, or, perhaps even worse, risk confronting them about their own stingy inclination to put in two dollars less than they owed. He’d once refused to eat a thirty-dollar roast he’d accidentally overcooked because he said he’d ruined it. He’d made what should have been rare and tender into something tough and common, he said, and he threw the meat thermometer into the garbage, claiming it had betrayed him, and it was only my intervention that stopped him from tossing the roast in after it. Finally, after much discussion, he agreed to cut it up and use it for