My Lovely Wife(14)

I don’t tell her because it will create more questions than I can answer.

It has been just two weeks since I spent the night with Petra. I think about her only in the middle of the night, when I am already awake and can’t go back to sleep. That’s when I wonder what I did to give myself away. What made her ask if I was really deaf? Did I react to a sound, did I look at her eyes instead of her mouth when she was talking, or did I pay too much attention to the sounds she made in bed? I don’t know. I don’t know if I will ever act deaf again, but this still keeps me up at night. It has become a loose thread I have to pull.

Rory’s blackmail is the same. Another mistake. Like I’d slipped and should not have let my son figure out I was sneaking out at night. Millicent would not like that.

So I don’t say anything. Rory and Petra are both secrets that I do not tell my wife. Maybe because she has her own, more than I thought she did. Rory and Petra are also both risks, each in their own way, and still my mouth stays shut.

I do not want her to know how badly I’ve screwed up.





Nine




It didn’t start out as something bad. I still believe that.

Three years ago, late one Saturday afternoon in October, I was in the front yard with Rory and Jenna. They were still young enough to be around me without getting embarrassed, and the three of us were putting up Halloween decorations. The holiday was almost their favorite, second only to Christmas, and every year we blanketed the house in cobwebs, spiders, skeletons, and witches. If we could have afforded animatronics, we would have used those as well.

Millicent came home from showing a house. Dressed in her work clothes, she stood on the front walk and smiled, admiring our work. The kids said they were hungry. With a big, overdramatic roll of her eyes, Millicent said she would go put some sandwiches together. She was smiling when she said that. I think we all were.

Things weren’t perfect, however. The house we were decorating was new to us—we had been living there only six months—and the mortgage was huge. Millicent was under a lot of pressure to sell more houses. I was under the same pressure; at times, I even thought about getting a second job.

We also had ongoing issues with Millicent’s mother. Her father had passed away two years earlier. Then her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had begun the long slow decline that came with it. We had spent a long time looking for a live-in nurse. The first two didn’t work out, because neither met Millicent’s standards. The third one was working out, at least so far.

Our family had its problems—lots of them—but on that day, we were all smiling, right up until Millicent screamed.

I ran inside, the kids right at my heels. I made it to the kitchen just in time to see Millicent throw her phone across the room. It crashed against the wall, breaking into pieces, making a mark. She buried her face in her hands and started to cry.

Jenna screamed.

Rory picked up the pieces of the broken phone.

I put my arms around Millicent as her body shook with sobs.

The two most horrific things went through my mind.

Someone was dead. Maybe her mother. Maybe a friend.

Or someone was dying. A terminal disease. Maybe it was one of the kids. Maybe it was my wife.

It had to be one of the two. Nothing else warranted this kind of response. Not money or a job or even the loss of pet we didn’t even have. Someone had to be dead or soon would be.

It came as a shock to learn it was neither. No one was dead, no one was dying. In fact, it was the opposite.



* * *



? ? ?

A few months after we started dating, Millicent and I had what we called Trivia Night. We bought pizza and wine and brought it to her tiny apartment. The living room was so small she just had a love seat and a coffee table, so we sat on the floor. She lit some candles, arranged the pepperoni slices on real dishes, and poured the wine into champagne glasses, because that was all she had.

We spent the whole night asking questions. No boundaries, nothing was off-limits—we’d planned it that way. The first questions were pretty tame; we were still too sober to talk about sex, so we talked about everything else. Movies, music, favorite foods, favorite colors. I even asked if she had any allergies. She does. Eye drops.

“Eye drops?” I said.

She nodded, taking another sip of wine. “The kind that get rid of the redness. They make my eyes swell up until I can hardly see.”

“Like Rocky.”

“Exactly like Rocky. I figured it out when I was sixteen and got stoned. Tried to hide it from my parents and ended up at the hospital.”

“Aha,” I said. “So you were a bad girl?”

She shrugged. “What about you? Any allergies?”

“Only to women not named Millicent.”

I winked to show her I was kidding. She kicked my foot and rolled her eyes. Eventually, we became intoxicated enough to ask the good questions. Most revolved around sex and old relationships.

I grew tired of hearing about her ex-boyfriend, so I asked about her family. I knew where she was from and that her parents were still married, but that was about it. She had never mentioned siblings.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

We were pretty intoxicated by then, or at least I was, and I kept playing with the wax that had dripped off the candle in front of us. It had pooled onto the little dish below, and I squished it between my fingers, rolling it into a ball and then flattening it out again. Millicent watched me instead of answering my question.