doubt and nuance that could not be battered into line with bluster and positive thinking. After Next that hesitant young man with his boyish awkwardness disappeared. I waited and waited for him to return, for the android stranger who’d claimed his body to release him back to me. But it didn’t happen then, and, aside from that iridescent flash a moment ago, it clearly isn’t going to happen now.
He stops to pet Pretzels. I’m hoping she’ll give him the tennis-ball-in-the-garbage-disposal growl. Maybe a feeble attempt at a bite. But the traitor wags her tail and follows Martin to the porch. When he sees her struggling to climb the stairs, he stops to lift her hindquarters and help her up. As he draws closer, I see that his white dress shirt is speckled with smears of ketchup and mustard, a spritz of soy sauce.
Before he sets foot on the porch, before he can get the first shot in, I go on the offensive. “You changed the trust. You changed it without consulting me.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I thought I needed to address that enturbulation in person.”
“Could you not talk to me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like with those bogus words made up by …” I can’t bring myself to say, “Next.” Next is the name of the other woman who stole my husband. But that isn’t right. No metaphor is exactly right, except maybe the one involving body snatching; it was confusing when he left that his body was not either dead or in the possession of another woman. And it is confusing now that the body of the man I loved more than any on earth—though now with a few wrinkles, a loud voice, and a strutting walk, yet still, essentially, the same body—stands before me.
“No, you’re right. Sorry. I’m trying to talk like a normal person again, but I lose track of what words come from what world.”
I think of Dori’s article about rekindled romance. There is clearly no rekindling going on here; still, Martin’s voice, even the altered Next voice, is worming into someplace in my brain beyond my conscious control and making synapses I’d thought were long dead sputter back to frantic life, and that annoys the shit out of me.
“You gave a girl you haven’t seen in sixteen years thirty thousand dollars. What kind of a pea-brained numbskull does a thing like that?”
“A panicked pea-brained numbskull. I panicked. Aubrey called and said there was an emergency. She needed to pay her tuition immediately and you were out of the country.”
“What?”
“Clearly you were not out of the country.”
“Jesus. Did it ever occur to you to check with me?”
“I wanted to, but …”
I watch as he decides what to tell me. Aubrey inherited Martin’s dark lashes and the soulful shape of his eyes, tugged down a bit on the outer corners like Paul McCartney’s. Her nose, with its teardrop-shaped nostrils, is his in miniature. These similarities confuse me.
He shakes his head, overwhelmed at the impossibility of making me understand. Another similarity with Aubrey. “Cam, so much was happening. Things got crazy. I had to act fast.”
“You didn’t have time to make one phone call?”
“Yes, actually, at that moment, I literally did not have time to make one phone call.”
“So? What? You amend the trust, then just hop in the old Bentley and cruise on down? That’s a two-thousand-mile drive.”
“Yeah. I’ve been on the road nonstop since I faxed in the codicil. And, just for the record, the car belongs to the church.”
I note that, although adrenaline, shock, and anger are keeping my mind fairly coherent, the beer has worked its malty magic on my legs. Refusing to falter in front of Martin, I ease back down onto the rattan rocker. Martin takes a seat on the glider, the same glider that he assembled from a kit we bought together at Home Depot. It creaks beneath his weight. I hope he doesn’t notice how new and unworn it is. I hope he imagines Aubrey and me gliding through sixteen summers of happy, firefly-lit evenings and mourns for all that he missed.
As he settles in, his shoulders slump the tiniest bit, and just that minute shift causes the hidden iridescence to emerge, transforming him back into the Martin I lost, and I remember the last time he was in this house.
He’d already moved out by that time, but still came over to take care of Aubrey. I’d given up on nursing and, after my own bad experience with breast-feeding,