Chapter 3-The routine

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Chapter 3

Anita

The coffee machine made its noise at six forty-seven.

I didn’t move to pour until it finished. I stood at the counter with my hands wrapped around nothing and listened to it run. That sound. The only sound in the whole house. The specific quiet that exists when you are the only one awake and have not slept and are trying very hard not to think about why.

I had watched the ceiling go from black to grey to the pale white of a morning that does not care what the night before contained.

I poured. Held the mug with both hands. Looked out at the garden, where the hedges stood in perfect rows the gardener trimmed every Thursday without ever asking what I wanted, because nobody asked what I wanted about the garden. Or the kitchen. Or the dress.

Nothing in this kitchen was mine.

Upstairs, the wardrobe. Hangers. The drawer that always stuck. Then his shoes on the floor, steady and unhurried, a man who had already decided exactly what every minute of his day would contain.

He appeared in the doorway already suited.

“Have you seen my…” He opened a drawer. Closed it.

“Counter by the toaster,” I said. “Left side.”

He found it. Something in his face settled.

“Right.” He pocketed the cable.

“There’s coffee.”

“I have a seven o’clock.”

He picked up his briefcase without looking at the coffee, or the garden, or me for more than the second it took to confirm I was present and accounted for.

The front door opened and closed.

I stood in the kitchen long after his car faded. Holding my mug. Turning the same four words over.

How are you, Anita. Actually. How are you.

I put the mug down.

Showered. Dressed. Came back down. Put the phone in my bag without answering it.

At 2:17 I was at the kitchen table with a tea that had gone cold, and my thumb moved before I finished deciding.

Me: Different brand. I switched.

Three words. I had spent the whole morning telling myself I would not. Then I did.

The reply came in four minutes.

I was reaching for the cold tea when the phone buzzed against the table, and the sound of it moved through the wood and into my hand and I set the cup back down without drinking.

Kelvin: Different how.

I could hear exactly how he said it.

I put the phone down.

Got up.

Wiped a counter that did not need wiping, because the kitchen was always clean, because somewhere in the second year I had started cleaning things that did not need it, straightening drawers that were already straight.

From the outside it looked like a woman who took care of things.

It was not that.

The phone buzzed again at 3:40.

I felt it from across the room this time, a small hard sound in the quiet, and I crossed to it before I had decided to.

Kelvin: You don’t have to answer that.

I sat back down.

Me: Then why ask.

Kelvin: Because I wanted to know. And because you deserve someone asking.

I read it three times.

Then I put the phone face down and pressed both hands flat on the table.

I turned it back over.

Me: I’m fine, Kelvin.

Kelvin: I know you are.

Then, after a pause long enough that I had almost put the phone down:

Kelvin: That wasn’t what I asked.

I sat with that.

I want to be honest about what those four words did, because everything that came after came out of them. That wasn’t what I asked. Not the answer. Not the performance. He had reached past the version of me that said I’m fine the way you say good morning, and asked for the one underneath, and nobody had reached for that one in so long I had half forgotten it was still there.

I did not answer him.

I left it sitting in the thread, unanswered, which was its own kind of answer.

Donald came home at half past seven.

“Smells good,” he said, already moving toward the stairs before he finished saying it. Already somewhere else in his head before he had fully walked through the door.

I had checked the phone at six. Six twenty. Seven.

Nothing new.

That wasn’t what I asked, still sitting there at the bottom of the thread.

He came back down in a light grey shirt.

We sat. We ate.

He talked about the Westfield acquisition and I watched his hands cut the chicken and heard his voice without the words, and the line from the thread sat under all of it, asking the thing he had never once asked me.

He did not know what brand I smoked.

The thought arrived clean and flat while I was lifting my fork.

Four years and I could not remember a single time he had looked at what I was lighting.

He looked at figures.

Calendar entries.

The cable by the toaster.

Everything that needed to be in its right place.

I was one of those things.

“The Aldermans want to do a dinner,” Donald said. “I told Margaret we’d confirm by Friday.”

“Fine.”

He nodded. Already moved on.

After dinner he went to his study and I cleared the plates and stood at the sink with warm water running over my hands.

That wasn’t what I asked.

The thing he had reached for, that Donald never would, while six feet away the man I had married sat behind a door talking to someone who was not me.

And then, from behind the study door, his voice. Low. Then a laugh.

That same warm, easy laugh I had heard him aim through the glass at the gala. Private. Unguarded. The laugh he kept for rooms I was not in.

I stood very still at the sink, and the laugh did the thing it always did, which was reach into the same place Kelvin’s four words had opened and press on it from the other side.

My hand found the phone on the counter before I told it to.

Me: I don’t smoke on terraces anymore. That was the old version.

I pressed send before I could think about it harder.

Kelvin: The old version knew exactly what she wanted.

My throat closed.

From the study, clearly:

“I’ll be there. Don’t worry about it.”

The phone buzzed against the counter, the sound going up my wrist.

Kelvin: Forget that.

Two messages.

The laugh behind one door and the line in my hand, and I did not know what to do with either of them, and underneath both of them the same four words still sitting unanswered, still asking, still the only thing in the whole day that had reached for the real me.

Then I heard it.

Donald’s study door.

His footsteps in the hall.

Steady. Unhurried.

I did not turn the phone over.

I did not stand.

I did not move at all.

I just stood at the sink with the water running and the phone warm in my hand and understood, before he had even reached the kitchen, that I was already somewhere he could not follow.

Coming toward the kitchen.