Free An Ornithologist's Guide to Life by Ann Hood Page B

reminded him as he packed his car. “You love me.”
    Zane stopped rearranging boxes long enough to shrug. “I’m having second thoughts, Beth,” he said.
    â€œSecond thoughts?” I said. “About us?” My mind was shouting instructions at me: Remind him how the two of you wrote your own wedding vows! Say the line that makes you both cry—“We were born together, and together we shall be forevermore.” Show him the sonogram pictures!
    Since I got pregnant, I did everything slower. Think, move, react. So that before I could say anything, Zane was telling me, “Second thoughts about Alice. Not us.”
    â€œAlice?” I said, aware that I was repeating everything he said.
    Alice was a piano teacher. Everything about her was long—fingers, hair, even her face. “Horsey,” Aurora used to say. “She looks horsey.” Then Aurora would whinny. I used to think Alice was a funny name, the name of someone’s old maiden aunt. But in the autumn air, coming out of Zane’s mouth like that, it sounded sexy.
    â€œThis,” Zane said, looking sadly around him, at me in my new maternity jeans and our old rented farmhouse and our pumpkin patch bursting with fat bright-orange pumpkins, “it all happened too fast.” He was cradling the television set. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    It was October, one of those glorious autumn days that make a person glad to be alive—blue sky, leaves on fire with color, cornstalks and jack-o’-lanterns on doorsteps. Just the day before, Zane and I had walked through the woods that stretched behind our land, had thrown ourselves down on the fallen pine needles and gazed up at the setting sun. Zane had rested his hand on my stomach. Now, standing on our doorstep, hugging myself, I wondered if even then he knew he was leaving.
    I watched him close the trunk, check for his car keys, then move toward the driver’s seat. I had watched him do these small tasks countless times, mornings as we both went off to work and weekend afternoons when he left to run errands. But all those times I knew he would be back.
    He got in the car and adjusted the rearview mirror.
    â€œZane!” I called. I willed my legs to run after him, but they remained frozen in place.
    He rolled down the passenger window and leaned toward it.
    Having his attention like that, I couldn’t think of anything to say. But as he began to put the car in gear, I yelled, “Together we shall be forevermore! Remember?”
    But it was too late. He was already driving away.

    Z ANE AND A LICE had been together for almost nine years. When they broke up, Alice got the Volvo, their split-level ranch in the suburbs, and their old dog, Bud. Zane got a 1982 Subaru with body rot and a pale-pink-and-mint-green-flowered sofa bed. Alice liked pastels and small floral patterns. Colorless, Aurora called her. Then she’d say, “She’s ecru, she’s taupe. You, Beth, are purple. Bright purple.”
    When Zane left me, he left the sofa bed behind. Like most things since I got pregnant, it made me feel nauseous. I hated that sofa bed. I hated pink, except in extreme cases like Pepto-Bismol. When I first went back inside after Zane drove off, I tried sitting in the family room. But that sofa bed glared at me, mocking. Upstairs, our bed with its happy rumpled sheets made me feel like crying. So I went back outside and stretched out on our front lawn. I stayed there, not thinking, until it got dark and the Milky Way appeared above me.
    Then I went inside and called Aurora. It wasn’t until I heard her casual “Hello” that I started to cry.
    A LL THE BAKING had begun with those pumpkins in our yard. Whenever I tried to carve happy faces on them, I ended up with jack-o’-lanterns that looked like the Elephant Man. Finally, I threw out the ghoulish shells and tried to figure out what to do with all the leftover pumpkin flesh. Pies ,