Free Life Drawing by Robin Black

yes, I like her. I’m just not sure I like having someone so close.”
    I didn’t say anything beyond “Huh.” I couldn’t bring myself to agree and it seemed insulting to say I was glad for the company. “So, are you heading back out to work?” I asked.
    “You mean, to try and work?” He nodded. “Yes. I am.”
    “Excellent,” I said—just a little too brightly to sound genuine. “Don’t worry about the dishes. There’s not much and you did all the hunter-gathering stuff today.”
    “Hunted rotisserie chicken and gathered toilet paper,” he said.
    “My brave one,” I said. “Yes. You are definitely off dish duty tonight.”
    L ater, as I looked out our bedroom window toward the barn, I thought: maybe this is what a mother feels like at times. When she can’t help one of her children. When she has to just stand by and watch her daughter strike out on the softball field, watch herson fail at math despite whatever effort he may put in. This ache. This defining double bind of roaring, passionate protectiveness and its equal, weighty, leaden uselessness. And even the impatience with it all; and then the guilt about feeling impatient, about finding it a bit oppressive despite the immeasurable love. Maybe this is what mothering sometimes feels like, I thought.

6

    For the next week or so, as I made more rough sketches of scenes in the house, I didn’t cast them with specific soldiers—aside from Jackie Mayhew, who had emerged as a kind of emblematic figure. I left room only for the boys in the scenes. I wasn’t yet taking on the task of
humanizing
the figures, as I thought of it; I was just placing them there, these empty people-shaped placeholders, postponing the task about which I was most anxious.
    But the postponing itself wasn’t without its unsettling qualities. I fidgeted a lot through those workdays, taking frequent breaks, for walks, to weed patches of garden, to visit Alison, and to check my email—where one afternoon I again found Laine’s name, newly arrived.
    Hey, Augie, Do you remember you owe me a full report of your summer? I’m going to bug you until you send it. And you know I will be relentless. So consider yourself bugged. Also, I HAVE to tell you about the critique I had last night because I think it’s such a good example of how MORONIC people are when they think it’s their job to tell you how to do your own work. Especially boys who are convinced that they are the next great artistes of the world.…
    It went on like that for a good while, a full account of her long night of fools and pretenders.
But none of this is surprising, I suppose
, she wound up.
We both know that many people who paint are idiots. And there were also some decent points made, so all in all, for all my whining, I’m glad I’ve taken this class. But mostly I am sick of talking about myself and really you do owe me a better email than the last one. Please!
    A nd then:
    Looks like I’ll be back in Philly for the wedding at the end of October. I did tell you Dad’s marrying Miriam, right?
    I deleted it.
    I went into the trash folder and opened it again. Reread those words. Then closed it and restored it to my inbox. Then signed out of my email, shutting my laptop, keeping my hands pressed there, as though it might just pop open again.
    I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even known there was a woman in his life. Laine may have thought she’d mentioned it, but she had not.
    Miriam. Jewish presumably. Like me.
    But not me.
    Laine knew nothing, of course. Our affair had lasted just beyond the span of her first semester at NYU. Georgia never knew either. No one knew. No one ever would have known had I not told Owen in a fit of guilt that March, just over a month after I broke it off. Guilt. And also fear. Fear that it would start up again. That without making myself accountable to someone beside myself, I would run right back to Bill and accept what he could offer—which were moments. Moments that seemed apart from