Free Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon Page A

it suggested layers of reality—what you thought was solid suddenly gave way, like a secret panel in a haunted house. “Maybe she thinks she loves him, too,” I said.
    â€œOh, I’m sure,” Susan said. She squinted, as if trying to see something far in the distance. “I’m sure that’s the line she’s feeding him, among others. ‘Kent I made a little mistake,’ ” she mimicked, in a soft breathy voice—nothing like Rhonda’s, I thought. Susan pouted her lips. “ ‘I’m so-o sorry,’ ” she purred.
    â€œWell . . . ,” I said hesitantly. “Maybe she did make a mistake.” I shrugged, and she peered at me, the corners of her mouth moving vaguely, a Mona Lisa smile.
    â€œThat’s not a mistake,” she said at last. “A mistake is when your account is overdrawn a few bucks at the bank. It isn’t a mistake when you leave your husband and baby daughter to run off with some pimp.” Her expression shifted again, but I couldn’t guess what she was thinking. “If I were to do something like that, is that what you’d call it? A mistake?”
    â€œI’d take you back,” I said.
    â€œNo, you wouldn’t,” she said. “You may think you would, but I know you. You wouldn’t.” I couldn’t help but flinch a little, pinned by that look. What did she see in me, or think she saw? She shook her head. “Besides,” she said. “I wouldn’t go back if you’d have me. I couldn’t respect you.” We stared at each other, and I couldn’t think of what to say next. The baby monitor crackled in the silence, humming with transistor noise. We waited. I saw her straighten, tensing like an animal seen briefly in a clearing before it bolts. “Oh, no,” she whispered, and Molly’s voice, that high, strange mechanical cry that infants have, began to unravel—soft at first, but gaining force.
    When Joan showed up a while later, I was walking the baby, trying to quiet her. Susan and Joan sat down at the kitchen table, and I could hear Susan going on in the same vein. “I’ve told Kent what my opinion is,” she was saying. I didn’t concentrate on the rest. The baby kept wailing, her cries shuddering in my ears. The radio was turned up, playing static in hopes that the white noise might calm her, as it sometimes did. But it was having the opposite effect on me: the radio and the crying baby and the bitter voices of the women in the next room layered over me, like heavy, stale air. I looked into the kitchen. I was surprised by the shudder of disgust that passed through me. I stared at them from the threshold, and I couldn’t help but think how primitive they seemed, like pictures of Russian peasant women I’d seen in books, with their hard, judgmental mouths and their drab clothes. At that moment, they seemed to represent everything that was small and compromised and unlovely about my life. I thought about the time I’d gotten into Joan’s car and found the radio tuned to a Muzak station; I thought about the scuffed terry-cloth houseslippers my wife had taken to wearing, even in the middle of the day. They should want to run off with dangerous men, I thought, they should want to do crazy drugs and wander through strange cities after midnight. I rocked Molly insistently, shushing her without much gentleness in my voice.
    â€œHas your mother heard about it?” Joan was saying. Susan was at the refrigerator, and I watched as she took out a single beer and poured it into two glasses. I thought sadly of those nights before we were married, walking her home after we’d been out drinking, Susan leaning against me, her lips pressed close to my ear. All that stuff, I thought, was behind us; now she couldn’t even manage to drink a whole beer by herself.
    â€œI pray to God she doesn’t,” Susan said. She offered Joan the