Free 13 1/2 by Nevada Barr

brother?”

    A smile deepened one corner of his well-cut lips. “We don’t exactly live together. We live in the same building: condos, one on top of the other. Separate beds and everything.”

    “And you never married?” She touched the back of his hand and whispered reassuringly, “First dates are for deciding if we wish to bother with a second.”

    “Fair enough. I never married. Now you know the worst: I’m an old maid. I didn’t have a date to the prom; never went steady with a cheer-leader. I almost got married once—can I get credit for that?”

    “All the credit in the world, my dear. I almost stayed married once so we are even.”

    “Why didn’t you? Stay married, I mean?”

    Polly eyed him narrowly. “Surely, you do not want to hear about all my husbands?” she said.

    “I thought we were clearing the decks for our second date. How many were there?”

    Since he sounded more concerned than amused, Polly chose the truth: “I was married once. He was a kind man, but not a good man; and, in the end that comes to be an oxymoron, doesn’t it? One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good. We were married for fifteen months.”

    She picked up her tea and took a slow sip to let any unasked questions pass unanswered. In the brief time between the lowering of her eyes and the lifting of her cup, the last night of her brief marriage played through her mind:

    Ten o’clock, and Gracie was standing in her crib, holding onto the bars. Soon, she would be walking. Polly kissed her round face and marveled that such perfection could be built out of such mundane things as milk and pureed carrots.

    “It’s the love, sweetheart. That’s what makes babies grow big and strong,” she whispered. “Sleep tight.”

    Turning out the light, she left the nursery. On her way to bed, she stopped by the small room—a closet really—that Carver called his office. The only light was the glow of the computer screen. Over his shoulder, she could read the words on the screen. Transfixed, she watched, as he exchanged sexually explicit notes simultaneously with three different women, one via e-mail and two through instant messaging. Backing out quietly, Polly went to the bedroom they’d shared for over a year.

    She sat on top of the bedcovers in her pajamas and stared at the familiar walls. So little of Carver was represented. Had his clothes not hung in the closet, it would have been as if he’d never existed.

    The house was hers; she’d bought it the first year she’d been tenured by the college. The bed was a sleigh bed she had found secondhand and refurbished. Framed photographs she had taken of her favorite places in New Orleans hung to either side of an antique dresser she’d bought on Magazine Street. All of it was from her mind, or from her heart, or from her work.

    All of it was clean, and decent, and honestly come by. Sordidness was anathema to her. Lies and foul language, violence—the gods of her mother—nauseated her. To have Carver spinning webs of petty filth in the darkness ten feet from Gracie’s nursery gave her that same sense of sickness.

    The next morning, she asked him to leave and to give her a divorce. He had refused until she offered him thirty thousand dollars, all of her savings. Three weeks later, she found out she was pregnant with Emma and knew she had gotten everything she wanted from marriage.

    “The marriage ended, dear heart, because I did not love him,” Polly said truthfully. For a while they sat in comfortable silence, sipping their tea. Like a schoolgirl on a date, Polly laid her hand on the tablecloth and was thrilled when, after rearranging his spoon, Marshall’s lingered near it.

    What Polly left unsaid was that, except for Emma and Gracie, she had never fallen in love with anyone. She enjoyed the company of men, but she didn’t fall in love. Like orgasm or the smell of lilacs, the sensation of falling could not be