The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,36

cheese-and-asparagus omelet as if it had landed from a flying saucer.

“It’s your favorite omelet.” I said it so brightly the syllables bounced like springs.

“Yes, it is, how novel.”

“It’s hardly novel, Theo, when you’ve eaten it for years.”

“How novel to have it for dinner, I mean.”

He smiled at me, but I didn’t smile back. The baby will learn eventually: it doesn’t always work.

I ate my eggs in large bites, the same way Theo had eaten skirt steak the night before, and lamb chops the night before that. I wanted to scream that even Julia Child said it wasn’t easy to make a perfect omelet, that he was lucky he had warm food—Betsy had made liverwurst and pickle sandwiches for her family last week! He ate a few bites, politely, then pushed away from the table. When he stood up, the scoot of his antique chair sounded like kindling snapping.

I sat there trying to remember the last time someone had rejected something I had made with my own two hands, and the only person I could name was Emma, and she was a child. Even the misshapen cupcakes and slightly burned cookies I’d made in high school for the Langley bake sale had been greedily gobbled up by Peter and his friends.

Theo had always been particular; it was a trait architects were prone to, if you listened to the other wives at his firm. When we first started dating, I found it charming: he’d always arrive in a freshly washed car, and when we walked into a restaurant, he’d never settle for an ill-placed table. One time he came to my mother’s carriage house with steel wool and a tin of green stain, and repainted her peeling wooden mailbox for her. I thought this was a sign that he’d be good around the house, that he’d do what needed to be done.

The true surprise of the last few years is how different he is as a parent than a husband. He may do what’s asked, but doesn’t think of anything on his own, like an unmotivated employee. Surely he could not have always been that way. Betsy once said his eyes were so beautiful, his gaze was like a gift. Did Theo know this, too? That if push came to shove, he could just look at someone instead of doing or saying the right thing? Was that how he enchanted his clients, by warming them with the fire of his eyes?

It seemed the closer Theo moved toward opening that shopping mall, the later he worked, the more he focused on his own needs, the light in his eyes seemed further and further away. I wonder if, instead of being a couple who grows closer, knowing each other more intimately, we are going in reverse, on our way back to being strangers again.

July 8, 1967

THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO CALL with the biopsy results today, but didn’t.

In the afternoon, to pass the time more than anything else, I popped popcorn for Emma, and she seemed fascinated with the process, how I moved the pan across the stove, how the kernels sprang to life with a metallic ping. A little too fascinated, I thought. I’d have to be careful she wasn’t left alone with the stove; she was just the kind of child who would turn it on when you weren’t looking. In the afternoon, when I kissed her before her nap, her chin and cheeks were still buttery. It reminded me of that first high school baseball game with Peter, when we shared a tub of popcorn and he kissed me at the short end of the bleachers. Our lips were slick, and traces of salt lingered at the corners of his mouth. Ah, the things you remember. Little things. Sweet things.

I went into the drawer with my hose and bras and burrowed around, digging up my journal from last year, looking to see what I’d written about Peter after our high school reunion. Just wanting to remember, to savor a few details. But when I turned to May, there was no entry that day. I didn’t write every day, just on the particularly bad or particularly good days, it seemed. I thought I’d written something about the reunion, though. A discreet little something, surely. I’d come home so energized, inspired and alive, not even feeling the numbing of the glasses of punch. The next morning, however, I had that unique combination of headache and regret. Is that why I neglected to write a