Free The Instant When Everything is Perfect by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

having an affair with his secretary, a secret he imagines he’s kept from Susan, but she digs through his dirty laundry, smells his briefs, finds long red hairs on the inside of his button-down shirts.
     
    In one terrible scene where Susan clutches the hair and the shirt, she begs Rafael to go to counseling and he refuses, slams the bedroom door, drives off to his mistress, though only the reader and not Susan knows this.
     
    Robert can’t go this far, but he wonders, hopes really, that Susan is Mia. Mia has just all right married sex and wants more.
     
    “Okay. She’s done.” He takes off his gloves and mask.
     
    He’s not finished with the novel yet, but he feels Mia’s themes in his head, even if he doesn’t understand them completely. Love cannot be sliced up into tidy pieces or be contained by rules or god or culture. It flows over the lines, drenches everything. Love is more important than anything, and once you have love, everything is better. The worst mistake a person can make is to deny love, to push it away, to let the feelings float into the air like so much carbon dioxide.
     
    “Amazing work,” a new resident says, and Robert shrugs, rinses his hands, thinking of how all his girlfriends finally left his house, one by one, their backs to him as they walked down the front path toward their cars. He never followed them, not one, not ever. He wouldn’t know how. He doesn’t know how to get what he wants. He’s always stayed inside the lines. For everything. Except once.
     

Four
     
     
     
    Mia
     
     
     
    Mia, her sisters Katherine and Dahlia, and Ford sit in the Inland waiting room reserved for friends and families of surgical patients. Sally’s neighbor Nydia Nuñez has come and gone, leaving a basket of chocolate chip cookies. Kenzie has just left as well, promising to call later in the day. Before she stood up, she turned and whispered in Mia’s ear,
     
    “I’ve found a source for some pot. For, when your mother does chemo. It makes the nausea go away. Just let me know.”
     
    Mia laughs, thinking how strange it will be to welcome that resiny plant back into her life, when just a short time ago, she spent all her energy trying to keep it away. Where are all those boys that used to come home with Lucien, slightly dazed and clearly—at least in hindsight—high? She could just call one of them, say, “It’s Lucien’s mom. And look, don’t bother lying to me now. I need some smoke.”
     
    No, Kenzie is right. Someone else should supply them now.
     
    Her mother will need it, sick as a dog from chemo, probably happy to take anything that will make her feel better. Mia can’t believe it’s come to this, sitting in another hospital waiting room, stuck in a chair until someone comes to give them all news. Mia knows what she wants to hear, that the surgery has been a complete success, the cancer is small, contained, a breeze to handle. “I am certain she won’t need chemo,” Cindy Jacobs says in this fantasy. “It’s a miracle.”
     
    Mia knows that doctors never say things like this, don’t wander around shouting, “She’s been cured!”
     
    But Sally has to be okay. Mia knows that. She looks at Katherine and Dahlia and sees from their faces that they feel the same way, too.
     
    Ford stands up and walks to the water fountain, and Mia watches his tight slim form under his wool work pants, the muscles in his back under his cotton shirt. From the moment she met him, Mia always appreciated Ford’s body, his smooth, tight muscles, his flat stomach. But in the past two years, he’d seemed to work harder at it, going to the gym every morning before work or sometimes, coming home late, smelling like shampoo. Why was he working out more lately? For her? To stave off middle age? To find himself in muscles that he was beginning to forget? A basic fear of death?
     
    “Had to get in a workout,” he’d say, dropping his duffel bag in the hallway. “Time stops for no