Free Live Through This by Debra Gwartney Page B

was damp and muddy, and the girls slid over the slick Douglas fir tree roots that rose from the black ground like miniature whale backs. Mollie, who hung on tight to her dad's neck with one hand, picked strands of gray-green moss off the trees with the other to make a wig for Tom's head. She was, she called out to me, turning him into a troll; she stuck twigs behind his ears for horns. When I got around one corner, Amanda, Steph, and Mary ahead of us on the path, I turned to look at the man I was once married to, surprised in that instant that he was there and that I was tolerating the heft of him around us again—the sound of his voice, the weight of his footsteps, the way he'd left a scattering of his whiskers in the bathroom sink that morning as if planting seeds. He lowered Mollie to the ground, putting an end to the game. She scampered off toward her sisters while he shook off the long shreds of moss-hair, brushing his shoulders and the front of his jacket. He looked up and saw me watching; he smiled, showing those same brown squiggles on his front teeth, and pulled at a few last sprigs stuck in his short, graying hair. I whipped around fast, calling for the girls to slow up and wait for me, keeping a distance from the person behind me I'd now firmly relegated to the past.
    After dinner and pie and cleanup that night, Tom and I got the girls to bed as we had in the old days—reading stories, watching over teeth-brushing—then sat in my living room to talk. The week before, my guts had churned every time I'd thought of him in my town and in my house, but things had gone okay the first night. He was leaving Saturday, so we only had one more full day to get through. My shoulders relaxed a little. I pitched off my slippers and tucked my stocking feet under my legs. I remembered the old days in a way I hadn't for a long time—the two of us as young parents with barely enough money, lying side by side on our living room carpet while Amanda and Stephanie galloped My Little
Ponies down our legs and across our chests, baby Mary napping between us. The train-hopping hard drinker from college had become someone else—a man trying to make an ordinary life, with a job and a house and a family. He'd get fed up with the tedium of that life and would quit his job or get a speeding ticket or empty our savings account for some insane purchase—or build another tree house or bonfire to terrify me—but in those early years, I had to admit now, he mostly tried to keep it together.
    I drank a mug of tea on the sofa, nearly forgiving him for not becoming the man I'd wanted as a husband and almost forgiving myself for not being the right wife for him, realizing again that the marriage between us was simply a bad idea from the start, and I let down my guard. He began to tell me about a new woman in his life, Ellen. They'd met at work. She'd kept making excuses to come by his office and had scheduled meetings that included him. They started having lunch together. He met her kids. "She thinks I'm wonderful," he said, grinning into his own cup.
    A weight I hadn't even known was strapped across my back lifted when he said that.
She thinks I'm wonderful.
The first sentence having to do with his emotional life or mine that wasn't some kind of ammunition.
My God,
I remember thinking,
we might actually be able to do this.
We might be able to be divorced and not hate each other.
    Yet that moment of hope crumbled soon after his Thanksgiving visit as we fought endlessly on the phone about our differences and our objections over the raising of our daughters, and it was now utterly gone. In Linda's crowded office, I lifted my arm to block Tom's pointed finger. "Why would she want to be with you?" I said. "What she did means she can't wait to get away from you."
    "What she did—" Tom began, leaning harder, nearly poking my chest. When he tipped in I noticed how much he'd aged since I'd last seen him. At thirty-eight, he was no