Free Voices from the Moon by Andre Dubus

friends, then he said make it a round for the house, and he overtipped the bartender, as he always did. Once she had told him he tipped too much, from sixty to a hundred percent, and he had said he had the money and the bartenders needed it and worked for it, and if he wanted to save money he’d buy a six-pack or two and drink them at home.
    She watched his back; he still looked down at the water in the fountain, and it occurred to her that she had never watched him when he was oblivious of her. She had watched him when he pretended not to know she was, while he worked in his stores. But always she knew he felt her eyes on him. Perhaps he did now too. Though she did not think so, for he was a tired-looking man of forty-seven (forty-eight soon, in November) whose back and shoulders and lowered head showed weariness as a face does. Had he known she was watching, he would be standing tall now, and he would have crossed the lawn minutes earlier with quickened movements, for he was proud that she loved him. He had sculpted a style for himself, until he became that style, or most of him did, so he could take money from the world and hold onto enough of it to allow him to walk its streets with at least freedom from want and debt and servitude. On some nights, in her bed, when he had drunk enough, that style fell away like so much dust and he spoke softly to her, his eyes hiding from hers, and told her how happy he was that she loved him, how he woke each morning happy and incredulous that this lovely young woman loved him; told her that when he first saw it lighting her eyes, when he and Richie and she were eating dinners after the marriage, all of his thinking told him what he saw in her eyes could not be there, not for him; and his heart nearly broke in its insistence that he did see what he saw, and that he loved her too. And he said he would not blame her if she woke up one morning knowing it was all a mistake, that he was just someone she had needed for a while, and left him. Never, she said to him. Never.
    Nor did she know why. He was good to her, and he made her laugh. He liked to watch her dance. He had watched Larry, as a father will watch a son perform anything from elocution to baseball to spinning a top. But that was not why he liked to watch her. Nor was it the reason he understood what she was trying to do with her body, and the music, on a stage or here in her living room. His senses told him that. And he knew why she danced, and why she had to keep dancing, while other people—her parents in Buffalo, and her two older sisters whose marriages had taken one to Houston, and the other to Albuquerque, and some of her friends too, though not the close ones—did not understand why she worked so hard at something and was content to remain an amateur. But Greg did. He was neither surprised nor amused when she told him she taught dance to make a living, but she could not remember ever wanting to be a professional dancer, though she had to dance every day, whether she was working with a company or not. She had seen recognition in his eyes. He listened, and nodded his head, and stroked his cheek, then said: Some people have things like that, and they don’t have to make money at it. It’s something they have to do, or they’re not themselves anymore. If you take it away from them, they’ll still walk around, and you can touch them and talk to them. They’ll even answer. But they’re not there anymore. She said: Are you talking about yourself? His eyes shifted abruptly, toward hers, as if returning from a memory. Me? No. I was thinking what Richie would be like, if they shut down the stables, and Catholic churches, and banned cross-country skiing. He had been sitting on this couch, and she had been standing in front of him. Then she sat beside him. What’s yours? she said. I don’t have one, he said. My father did. He was a carpenter. She said: I thought he worked for the railroad. He smiled and touched her cheek. He