well, she knew, she knew, that he was thinking about money.
“What about the girls?” He tried to take her hand again. “You want to do that to them?”
She jerked her hand away. He’d gone right for her weakness. Of course he had. He knew what he was doing. But after Veronica left for school, it would be just the two of them in the house. And what did it matter to him if they were more or less roommates? He had his work. He’d always had his work. She’d had the girls. Next year, he would still have his work, and she would have nothing.
“They’ll come home for holidays,” he said. “What? You want them to have to go to different houses? Thanksgiving with me? Christmas with you? You want that for them?”
She shook her head, looking away. She knew she was crying now.
“I am dedicated to the marriage,” he said, and the way he said it surprised her so much that she turned back to look at him. He was sitting up straight, his face solemn. “I have never been unfaithful. I will never be unfaithful.” He sounded very tired, as if recalling years of great sacrifice. “And I love our family. I love the girls. We have a comfortable home. If we just stay steady now,” he made his hands into blades and pointed them down the length of the table, “we can get through this bad time and still have a decent retirement.”
It took her a moment to understand that when he said “this bad time,” he meant the way they were stretched financially from Elise’s wedding and tuitions and the nursing homes and the falling stocks, and not “this bad time” in their marriage, which apparently, for him, didn’t seem all that bad.
And then, a moment later, she did a curious thing—she pretended, even to herself, that she had not understood this at all. She pretended that she had heard a promise of improvement, of a future full of conversations in which he actually looked at her when she was talking and seemed interested in what she had to say. She pretended all of this because then it did not seem so strange for them both to get up and put the rest of the groceries away, and for him to go to work on his laptop, and for her to take Bowzer for a walk. Because really, what else was she going to do?
She had to be pragmatic.
The next time she went to the grocery store, she found herself gazing at the tabloids in the checkout line; she felt superior only for a moment. Celebrities got divorced and remarried all the time, she realized, not necessarily because they were shallow, or fickle, or quick to throw in the towel.
They got divorced because they could afford it.
Who knows how long she might have gone on like that if it hadn’t been for Greg Liddiard? An entire year passed between the morning of that grim conversation with Dan and the day work commenced on the roof. And for a week after that, Greg Liddiard and another man had sawed and hammered and thrown down shingles without much attention from her. It was summer, so she wasn’t subbing, and she hadn’t gotten many hours at DeBeck’s. So she was mostly at the house, paying bills, working in the garden. She went through the girls’ old clothes to see what she could donate. She played a Neil Young CD one afternoon, and later, when she was going out to check the mail, the older, shorter of the two roofers, the one who would turn out to be Greg Liddiard, called down to thank her for the music, saying he could hear it up on the roof and that he liked her taste; but she’d only nodded and smiled. She wasn’t looking for trouble.
The next day, both men said they needed to come in to check the buttresses in the attic, and to get there, they’d had to walk by the bookcase at the end of the hall. The other man walked right past it to the narrow stairs Natalie had just pulled down, but Greg Liddiard stopped to ask her about the books. He’d been a lit major in college, he said. He had a master’s even. He’d done a thesis on Nabokov. Did she like Nabokov? She was wearing one of her tank tops from Strength Camp, and as she looked at him while he was looking at