Free Separate Flights by Andre Dubus Page B

said.
    Sean hugged me when I sat down.
    â€˜We got a good Daddy.’
    â€˜Now Mom’s watching a movie and we’re watching a movie,’ Natasha said.
    â€˜What movie did Momma go to?’
    â€˜I believe a Western.’
    â€˜You didn’t want to go?’
    â€˜Nope. I wanted to see this one. He’s going to hit that guy soon.’
    â€˜Which guy?’
    â€˜The fat mean one.’
    â€˜How do you know?’
    â€˜Because if he doesn’t hit him we won’t be happy.’
    When the movie was over, I tucked them in and kissed them and went downstairs to Tolstoy and the couch; as I read I kept glancing at my watch and at midnight I thought how she never uses the seat belt, no matter how many times and how graphically and ominously I tell her. I kept reading and I remembered though trying not to Leonard in Michigan: he had married young and outgrown his wife and he hated her. When he was drunk, he used to say Nobody hates his wife as much as I hate mine. And one night drinking beer—he was a big weight-lifting man and drank beer like no one I’ve ever known—he said I’ve thought of a way a man can kill his wife. You take her for a ride, you see, and you have a crash helmet with you and it’s just resting there on the seat between you, she wonders what it’s there for, but the dumb bitch won’t say anything, she won’t say anything about anything and the world can fall down and still she’ll just blink her Goddamn dumb eyes and stare and never let you know if there’s anything burning behind them, then you get out on some quiet straight country highway and put that son of a bitch on your head and unbuckle her seat belt and hold onto that son of a bitch and floorboard into a telephone pole and throw the crash helmet way the fuck out into the field—
    I wished the movie hadn’t ended and I was still upstairs watching it with the children; the TV room was a good room to be in, the cleanest in the house because it was nearly bare: a couch, two canvas deck chairs, the TV , and a coffee table. A beach ball and some toy trucks and cars were on the floor. The secret was not having much life in the room. It was living that defeated Terry: the rooms where we slept and ate and the living room and dishes and our clothes. The problem was a simple one which could be solved with money, but I would never make enough so that I could pay someone to do Terry’s work. So there was no solution. Two years ago Terry had pneumonia and was in the hospital for a week. Natasha and Sean and I did well. Everyone made his own bed and washed his own plate and glass and silver, and we took turns with the pots; every day I washed clothes, folded them as soon as they were dry, and put them away; twice that week I vacuumed the house. All this took little time and I never felt harried. When Terry came home, I turned over the house to her again, and the children stopped making their beds and washing their dishes, though I’d told her how good they had been. We could do that again now, and I could even have my own laundry bag and put my things in it every night, wash my clothes once a week and wash my own dishes and take turns with the pots, I could work in the house as though I lived with another man. But I wouldn’t do it. If Terry had always kept house and was keeping it now, then I could help her without losing and I would do it. But not the way she was now.
    In Michigan when I was in graduate school, she found us an old farmhouse in the country for a hundred a month, and for a while she was excited, I’d come home and find the furniture rearranged, and one afternoon she painted the bathroom orange. The landlord had paid for the paint, and for two buckets of yellow for the kitchen; he was an old farmer, he lived down the dirt road from us, he liked Terry, and he told her when she finished the kitchen he’d buy paint for the other rooms. Whatever colors