A Nantucket Wedding(57)

“But I have to get to the airport two hours early for security check-in.”

“I know. But we both need to eat.”

She padded barefoot to the kitchen. Summer heat oozed over the city, and although she had turned on the central air-conditioning, it was still warm in the apartment. She went around the rooms, closing the blinds and the curtains against the light. In the kitchen, she set out a bowl and several eggs and butter and cheese. While the eggs were cooking and the bread was toasting, she halved oranges and made fresh juice.

“Breakfast is ready,” she called and laughed wryly to herself. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

Scott sat at the kitchen table across from Jane. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Oh, Lord, Jane thought, when had they become so formal with each other? Wait, she knew exactly when, sometime during last night after they had yelled at each other. Their silence as they ate was a kind of truce.

“I’ll clean the kitchen,” Scott said when they’d finished eating.

“That’s not necessary. You’ve got to finish packing.”

    “I’m almost done. You did the cooking. It’s only fair for me to wash up.”

Jane laughed, jaggedly, almost hysterically. “Scott, Scott, this is crazy. We’re acting like two strangers who will be, I don’t know—murdered—if we don’t do everything absolutely equally.”

“Fine,” Scott replied. He stood up. “You wash up. I’ve got some emails to answer.”

When he turned to leave the room, Jane had a savage urge to throw something at him. Not a knife, but maybe the saltshaker. Aiming not for his head, but for his back. Instead, she buried her face in her hands as her laughter turned into tears.

She blew her nose on a paper towel and set about rinsing the dishes and loading the dishwasher. She returned to their bedroom and leaned against the door, looking in. “Three weeks,” she said. “We haven’t been apart for three weeks since we were married.”

Scott was folding shirts carefully, exactly. He didn’t turn from his task. “True.”

“I’ll miss you.”

He kept his back to Jane and said in a neutral tone, “I’ll miss you.”

Scott’s back was long and muscular, and his hands were beautiful. She’d always loved his hands. She approached him and held him against her, wrapping her arms around him, stopping him. She felt his heart beat—steadily, how else would Scott’s heart beat?—and felt the rise and fall of his breathing.

“You might have an affair in Wales,” she said calmly.

“I doubt it. I’m sure I’ll be exhausted from hiking.”

“I might have an affair,” she said, just as calmly, thinking of Ethan.

“Well, if you get pregnant from your affair, we’ll get divorced. I’m not raising another man’s child.”

“Whoa.” Jane dropped her arms and stepped away from her husband. It was the first time the word divorce had been used. “So you’re thinking of divorce?”

“Aren’t you?” Scott turned to look at her. He folded his arms over his chest. “Be realistic, Jane. If you want children so fiercely, you’ll have to divorce me and marry another man.”

    “You would let that happen,” she said, heart pounding.

“If you make it happen,” Scott answered.

Jane took a deep breath. “I had hoped that this time away from each other, this break, might make you reconsider the whole having-children thing.”

“Jane, I’m doing what you and I have always done. I’m going hiking. I’m seeing a new world, a different land. I’ll be testing my own strength and stamina. Eating unusual food. All that. All that you and I have done together for years. Why would I want to spoil an exciting experience by rerunning our argument through my mind? I’m the same person I’ve always been, doing the same things I’ve always done, and I’ve said all that I have to say about your sudden bizarre need to have a child. When I go out the door, I won’t be considering the ‘whole having-children thing.’ And when I come back in the door, trust me, my thinking won’t have changed.”

“Scott, it’s as if you’ve become a stranger to me. I don’t know you. Has our love, our marriage, been nothing but an elaborate pretense?”

Scott sighed heavily. He walked away from her, around the bed, to stand next to the window facing out. Facing away from Jane.

“Maybe it has. On both our parts. How do I know that you haven’t been lying all along when you said you didn’t want children? How do I know that you weren’t only saying what you thought I wanted to hear?”

“Scott!”

“Wait. Hear me out. I told you I didn’t want children because I want to travel. That’s true. It’s also true that my family was nothing like yours.” He paused. He stood very still, keeping his back to Jane, clenching and unclenching his hands.

Jane waited.

“My mother was an alcoholic. My father was strict and unemotional. I suppose they cared for each other, in their own way. All my life, they repeated the same pattern. Mother would drink more and more, and become incapable of even tossing my clothes into the washing machine or cooking dinner—I’m talking about when I was six years old—so I had to scrounge around and make my own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. I often wore the same clothes to school for a week. My father would come home later and later until finally he couldn’t bear my mother’s drunkenness one more moment, and then…They would fight. Really fight. For hours. They would throw things. Sometimes they hit each other.”