Free Home Leave: A Novel by Brittani Sonnenberg

before, back in Indiana, were Tanya White, with buckteeth, and June Schiller, whose only distinguishing feature was her body’s uncanny square shape.
    Aside from Elise, the only other woman Chris has slept with—a nother fact he has kept to himself—was the only one who might have vied for Elise’s beauty: Twyla Lincoln, the little sister of his teammate Ben. After Chris and Twyla’s one-night stand, which began with a party on the edge of campus that got kind of wild and ended in Chris’s dorm room, Twyla never spoke to Chris again. Chris wasn’t sure if it was because he wasn’t cool enough or because he was white. Perhaps they were one and the same. Until Twyla, he hadn’t been aware that racism could work the other way, too. And though he’d felt disappointed and hurt when he saw her with Dontelle, another teammate, at the next party, he’d also felt a little relieved: his parents had never forgiven his younger sister, Beth, for attending school dances with John Young in high school, and he was just Catholic.
    Chris counts his career now as his third major slice of luck. The fact that he flies first-class and he’s under thirty-five. The trust his boss puts in him, how quickly Chris has risen in the ranks at Logan since he started six years ago. Of course, Chris knows it can go downhill just as quickly as it got good. That’s what happened at UGA: the team improved but Chris got worse, or maybe just stayed the same, until he was benching games as a senior that he would have played twenty-six minutes of as a freshman. And that was before the knee injury.
    But at least things with Elise feel steady, Chris tells himself, especially now, with their little girl, Leah. Chris loves the glint of his wedding ring; it calms him when he’s far away and gives him a noble, if not primal, feeling of protectiveness, as if traveling to meet customers in India were akin to hauling a boar back to the cave for his family’s sustenance. When he pictures Elise, he sees her rocking Leah in silvery moonlight, even though Leah, at fourteen months, is nearly too big to be rocked like that. Even back in Hamburg, when Leah was a newborn, Chris rarely saw Elise holding Leah at night, since they always went to her in shifts. He slept like a stone during Elise’s turns to comfort the crying. On his own shifts, too tall for the rocking chair, Chris’s sprawling, near-seven-foot body had felt feminine holding the baby, humming off-key. After the initial agony of waking, once Leah had drifted off to sleep, Chris had enjoyed those unearthly moments with his baby daughter. Sometimes, he had wished he could stay home with Leah the next day and send Elise to the office in his stead, urges he always dismissed with embarrassment in the morning light.
    These days, Chris wishes that Elise would display a little more gratitude for his breadwinning, or at least make some show of missing him when he has to travel for work. More like his mother, who heaves tragic, disapproving sighs over the phone whenever Chris announces an international trip, and who was horror-struck when he went south for college. Instead, Elise cheerfully waves good-bye, doesn’t even offer to pack his suitcase. It’s a recent development: in Hamburg she wept whenever he had to take overnight trips to the London office. But that was probably just pregnancy hormones, and it’s good that she’s independent, he chides himself, as the plane bounces onto the tarmac in Bombay; he’s lucky it’s not the other way around.
    *  *  *
    It’s true: Elise loves it when Chris travels. She knows this is a strange reaction; the other mothers in Leah’s playgroup always give Elise pitying looks when she says Chris is out of town. But Elise feels something in herself shake loose when he departs. She is relieved to be back in America; the loneliness that was a constant whisper to their ten months in Hamburg reasserts itself less frequently now and seems to strike when Chris is in town,