Free God is an Astronaut by Alyson Foster

be.
     
    Speaking of reading, Corinne and I are reading Little House on the Prairie. I haven’t read Laura Ingalls Wilder in years, and I’ve forgotten a lot of things about those books. Like how harrowing they are, for one. Wolves, poison gas in the wells, malaria. I was a little taken aback. For all the childish simplicity of the stories, the stakes are deadly high, and it’s not Laura I find myself wondering about, but Ma—Ma, the stoic, going along with all her husband’s gambles, but thinking God only knows what. We never find out either.
     
    Corinne seems unfazed by any of it. She breathes with her mouth open in a dreamy, blissed-out sort of way while she’s being read to, but once I reach the end of the chapter, when I clap the floppy old paperback shut for the night, she doesn’t seem to give any of these extraordinary near misses a second thought. I don’t think I did either when I was her age. Desperate times, desperate measures. To quote a certain New York Times reporter.
     
    We were stretched out hip-to-hip on Corinne’s tulip bedspread, reading, when Liam came home late last week. A prairie fire was menacing the Ingallses’ cabin, and Corinne and I were so intent on finding out what would happen that I failed to hear Tristan’s car pull into the driveway. I failed to hear Liam open the front door or come down the hall. I didn’t know he’d arrived until I looked up and saw him standing there in the doorway, and he lifted his right hand, his damaged thumb, and pressed it to his lips, a signal telling me—I took it as such—to carry on. I kept on reading, determined to give nothing away, but at the sight of the gesture, the words on the page trembled strangely and went swimming away. Corinne’s eyes were half closed; she was lost in her trance. She didn’t lift her head from my chest, but she stirred at the tremor and sighed in that guttural, troubled way dreaming people do.
     
    He had grown a beard in the time he’d been away. He was windburned and raggedy. He looked like an agate-eyed stranger as he stood there studying us. I feel like I’m expected to hew to a narrative cliché here, to remark on how the past few terrible weeks have aged my husband in some appreciable way. But that isn’t true, so I’ll spare you. If anything, it is the opposite. It would be more accurate to say that some youthful remnant of Liam has resurfaced, one dating back to the time we first met, back in the days when he was zealous and unshaven and arrogant. He has on that old embattled expression of his I had almost forgotten. He used to wear it out the door every morning. It came from having something to prove. You could see it in everything he did, no matter how offhand—in the way he signed his name at the top of his engineering papers, carving a groove with every flourish. Our old dining room table, a hulky pressed-wood monstrosity, was covered in “Liam Callahan” engravings, and by the time we stopped being poor and threw it away, you could run your hands across the surface and feel them all—it felt like topography, like the map of a world he was fearlessly making his impression upon. It was that absolute certainty that drew me in. Back in those days, I could spend five minutes standing in front of the rutabagas at the supermarket, turning them all over in my hands, weighing the merits of each one. OK, yes—I still do this on certain days, when I am running my errands alone, and time seems bent on getting away from me. And—as you have kindly pointed out—this indecision is a kind of cowardice, a kind of shrinking away, or faltering disguised as caution. But you, you of all people, should understand that it isn’t that simple.
     
    The sight of Liam after a trip always affects the kids like a sugar high: a giddy rush, followed by an inevitable crash. This time, though, they were even more ecstatic to see him than usual, especially Jack. He wrapped his arms around Liam, burrowing his flushed face