Dear Wife(2)

I stop. Shake it off. No more complaining—it’s a promise I’ve made to myself. No more fighting.

I grab my suitcase from the trunk and head inside.

“Sabine?”

I stand completely still, listening for sounds upstairs. A shower, a hair dryer, music or TV, but there’s nothing. Only silence.

I toss my keys on the table next to a pile of mail three inches thick. “Sabine, you here?” I head farther into the house.

I think back to our phone conversation earlier this morning, trying to recall if she told me she’d be home late. Even on the best days, her schedule is a moving target, and Sabine doesn’t always remember to update our shared calendar.

She’d prattled on for ten endless minutes about the open house she’d just held for her latest listing, some newly constructed monstrosity on the north side of town. She went on and on about the generous millwork and slate-tile roof, the pocket doors and oak-plank flooring and a whole bunch of other features I couldn’t give a crap about because I was rushing through the Atlanta airport to make a tight connection, and it’s quite possible that by then I wasn’t really listening. Sabine’s rambling is something I found adorable when we first started dating, but lately sparks an urge to chuck my phone into the Arkansas River, just to cut off one of her eternal, run-on sentences. When I got to my gate and saw my plane was already boarding, I hung up.

I peek out the window into the garage. Sabine’s black Mercedes isn’t there. Looks like I beat her home.

I head into the kitchen, which is a disaster. A pile of dirty dishes crawling up the sink and onto the countertop. A week’s worth of newspapers spread across the table like a card trick. Dead, drooping roses marinating in a vase of murky green water. Sabine knows how much I hate coming home to a dirty kitchen. I pick up this morning’s cereal bowl, where the dregs of her breakfast have fused to the porcelain like nuclear waste, putrefied and solid. I fill it with water at the sink and fume.

The trash bins, the kitchen, not leaving me a note telling me where she is—it’s all punishment for something. Sabine’s passive-aggressive way of telling me she’s still pissed. I don’t even remember what we were arguing about. Something trivial, probably, like all the arguments seem to be these days. Crumbs on the couch, hairs in the drain, who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning or drank the last of the orange juice. Stupid stuff. Shit that shouldn’t matter, but in that hot, quicksilver moment, somehow always does.

I slide my cell phone from my pocket and scroll through our messages, dispatches of a mundane married life.

Did you remember to pay the light bill?
The microwave is on the fritz again.
I’m placing an order for office supplies, need anything?
I land on the last one to me and bingo, it’s the message I’m looking for.

Showing tonight. Be home by 9.
I spend the next half hour righting Sabine’s mess. What doesn’t go into the dishwasher I pitch in the trash, then toss the bags into the garbage bins I line up. And then I haul my suitcase upstairs.

The bed is unmade, Sabine’s side of the closet a pigsty. I try to ignore the chaos she left everywhere: kicked-off shoes and shirts with inside-out sleeves, shoved on lopsided hangers. Nothing like the neat, exacting lines on my side. How difficult is it to put things back where they belong? To line the clothes up by color?

Ten minutes later I’m in shorts and a T-shirt, sneakers pounding up the path in an angry sprint west along the river. The truth is, I am perfectly aware I’m not the easiest person to live with. Sabine has told me more times than I’d care to admit. I can’t help that I like things the way I like them—the cars washed, the house clean, dinner hot and waiting when I get home from work. Sabine is a great cook when she wants to be, when her job isn’t sucking up most of her day, which lately seems like all the time. I can’t remember the last night I came home to one of her home-cooked meals, the ones that take all day to prepare. Once upon a time, she would serve them to me in an apron and nothing else.

I’ve spent a lot of hours thinking about how to bring us back to the way we used to be. Easy. Sexy. Surprising. Before my job dead-ended at a human resources company that sells buggy, overpriced software nobody wants to buy. Before Sabine got her broker’s license, which I used to laugh off as a hobby. Now, on a good month, her salary is more than double mine. I’d tell her to quit, but honestly, we’ve gotten used to the money. It’s like moving into a house with extra closet space—you always use it up.

In our case, the money made us cocky, and we sank far too much of it into our house, a split-level eyesore with too-tiny windows and crumbling siding. The inside was even worse. Cheap paneling and shaggy carpet on the floors, climbing the walls, creeping up the staircase.

“You have got to be shitting me,” I said as she led me through the cramped, musty rooms. It looked like a seventies porn set. It looked like the destitute version of Hugh Hefner would be coming around the corner in his tattered bathrobe any second. No way were we going to live here.

But then she took me to the back porch and I got a load of the view, a sweeping panorama of the Arkansas River. She’d already done the math: a thirty-year mortgage based on the estimated value after a head-to-toe renovation, an amount that made my eyes bulge. We bought it on the spot.

So now we’re proud owners of a beautiful Craftsman-style bungalow on the river, even though as children of Pine Bluff, a working-class town wedged between farms and factories, we should have known better. The house is on the wrong side of town, a castle compared to the split-level shacks on either side of the street, and no renovation, no matter how extensive, could change the fact that there aren’t many people in town who can afford to buy the thing. Not that we’ll ever be able to sell. Our house doesn’t just overlook the river, it is on the river, the ropy currents so close they swell up the back steps every time there’s a sudden rain.