Free The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

it when you’re mad at me!”
    “I’m not mad at you,” he said. He was still facing the high chair; he seemed to be addressing the baby.
    Pauline said, “You’re not?”
    “I’m just fed up with you. I’m disgusted. I’m sick to death of you and your nasty disposition. I never should have married you.”
    This time the silence was sharper—a sort of hole in the air of the kitchen.
    Then his mother’s footsteps came fumbling out of her bedroom. “Found them!” she called in a loud, carrying voice.
    She entered the kitchen holding aloft a blue cardboard pillbox from Sweda’s. Michael said, “Well, good,” and Pauline sat up straighter and asked, “You want something to take those with, Mother Anton?”
    “No, thank you, dear, I still have my water,” Michael’s mother said, and she lowered herself into her chair.
    Michael picked up his fork and resumed eating, but Pauline went on sitting motionless with her hands at either side of her plate.
    When the meal was finished, Michael’s mother said she would do the dishes. “You two just clear out of here and go relax together,” she told them. But Lindy was fussing by then, which meant she was nearing her bedtime; so Michael said, “I’ll make up her bottle.”
    “Oh, I can do that, dear. You two run along.”
    As if she hadn’t spoken, he went over to the rack of sterilized bottles on the counter. His mother offered no further argument.
    Pauline carried Lindy off to the bedroom to change her while Michael filled a bottle with milk and set it to heat in a pan of water on the stove. He stood with his arms folded and his feet planted wide apart and watched the water start to simmer. Behind him, his mother scraped plates and collected glasses. “Don’t let that get too hot,” she told him after a while, and he said, “Hmm? Oh,” and hastily plucked the bottle from the pan, burning his fingers. “Damn,” he said. For once, his mother didn’t comment on his language. He held the bottle under the sink tap while she stood back, and then he went off to the bedroom, shaking the bottle vigorously.
    Nobody was there.
    Lindy’s crib was empty. Her blanket hung crumpled over the railing. The rubber sheet that Pauline always spread on their bed before changing her was still folded on the bureau.
    He crossed the hall to the bathroom. Nobody there either. He even poked his head into his mother’s little room, but of course they wouldn’t be there.
    They must have used the outdoor stairs. Not the safe, sheltered indoor stairs at the rear but the rickety metal fire escape that ran down the Porter Street side of the building. Pauline must have climbed through the bedroom window onto the landing, which was an open grid, and carried a wet, hungry, sleepy six-month-old baby down the slick steps and into the cold winter night with a north wind blowing up and a promise of snow before morning.
    He went back into the kitchen and set the bottle on the drain board. His mother, swishing a handful of cutlery through the rinse water, sent him a questioning look.
    “I guess they’re taking a walk,” he said.
    She stopped swishing the cutlery.
    “Having a little stroll around the neighborhood before bedtime,” he said.
    She said, “Ah.”
    She placed the cutlery in the dish rack. Michael picked up a towel and began to dry the spoons, thoroughly polishing the bowl of each one before putting it away. When he got to the forks, he started humming under his breath in a jaunty, carefree manner. Then he noticed what the tune was: “People Will Say We’re in Love.” But it was too late to change it.
    Oh, and her inconsistency; had he included that fault on his list? Her fickle, irresponsible unpredictability. How would Lindy learn what a proper bedtime was, if she was carted off into the night whenever Pauline took the notion? By now it was almost nine o’clock; they’d been gone for more than two hours. Children needed schedules. They needed routines.
    Wandering back to