Free Still Life with Husband by Lauren Fox Page B

hands?
    “I just really think we should get moving on this,” he says, waving his meaty fingers. “Get on the ball. Stop dawdling.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “I guess we better get on the ball.”
    He nods, satisfied by my apparent acquiescence. He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees, and then he just sits there, gazing slightly past me at the wall behind my head; I look down at my feet, at the off-white carpeting that needs to be vacuumed. For a minute we’re just sitting, silent, frozen, a portrait. Then suddenly Kevin says, “Hey! I’m starving. Have you given any thought to dinner tonight?”
    So I will keep my secret about David Keller, for now, and I will keep my thoughts to myself, and, without the need for discussion, we will order a mushroom and green-olive pizza from Alfredo’s, the way we always do.
     
    MEG LOOKS EDGY, HER FEATURES SHARP. IT’S ONLY BEEN A week, but she is a few pounds thinner, and I think, when I take my first look at her, that five pounds of happiness have been drained from her. She’s wearing nice charcoal gray pants, work pants—except that her work pants used to be paint-splattered jeans—and a lavender cashmere sweater set, which is very strange, since she told me on the phone that she’s barely left her house in a week and doesn’t have any plans to go anywhere. It’s like I’ve walked into Meg’s bizarro-world, where she’s an office manager at a medium-sized accounting firm instead of a grade-school art teacher on sabbatical. She’s wearing makeup, too, which is another flashing neon sign that things are not right. She seems somehow fragile but hard, breakable, like glass. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since her miscarriage, and, although she is my best friend and we’ve supported each other through romances and breakups and various disappointments from minor to major, we’ve never seen each other through grief. Therefore, I’ve baked chocolate chip cookies and brought them over to her house. I invited myself over this morning, after I finally realized that she wasn’t about to initiate a visit, that we weren’t just going to pick up our semiweekly breakfast dates quite yet. Which is actually okay by me. I’m not ready for my suddenly disparate, suddenly self-conscious worlds to collide.
    “How are you?” I ask, handing her the paper plate of cookies and bending to untie my shoes in the doorway. I picked out my approach on the drive over, like I was shopping for accessories: solicitous and tender, but also cheerful, at least until it became apparent that another mood was required. I thought I ought to be prepared, since I am out of my league here.
    “I’m okay,” Meg answers, rushing the words together so they sound like one, “Muhkay.” Their house smells, as usual, like cinnamon gum, although neither Meg nor Steve chews it. She bustles about, sets the cookies on the coffee table, takes my coat, tosses it over a chair, picks the cookies up, carries them into the kitchen. I follow in the wake of all of her swift, unnecessary movement. “Want something to drink?” she says, turning. “Tea? Or I could make sandwiches….”
    “Let’s just sit down and eat cookies,” I suggest, and pull out one of the solid kitchen-table chairs. “Pass them here.”
    “Thanks for bringing them,” she says, her voice flat, unrecognizable.
    I figure I should just wait for some kind of cue from her. “How’s Steve doing?”
    “Okay.” She begins to nibble on a cookie, so clearly uninterested in it, so obviously eating it for my benefit, my heart breaks a little.
    But I can’t wait. “And you? How are you, honestly?”
    Meg narrows her eyes and gazes into the space beyond me, past the kitchen doorway, at something that isn’t there. Against her newly pale face, her lips are red as blood. “Honestly?” she asks. “Half the time I’m all right and the other half I’m so mad I want to scream and break things and—really, Emmy, I see something solid