Hardwood - K.M. Neuhold Page 0,3
me helplessly, and I patiently explain it my way again. This time she gives in and tries it, and I can’t help being a little smug that my way worked better.
She’s nearly finished when the doorbell rings. She dutifully makes a neat stack of her homework and pushes it to the side so she has room to eat while I answer the door and then plate her dinner. It looks like I’m out of carrots, so I add a handful of fresh green beans instead and pray for the strength to deal with a possible meltdown over something green on her plate.
“Do you hate Jeff?” she asks casually as I set her plate down in front of her.
“What would give you that idea?” I think back over the past few minutes, trying to remember if anything I said might’ve implied I don’t like her mom’s boyfriend. I don’t know the guy well, but I trust Val’s judgment, and if she likes him, I’m sure he’s a great guy.
Livi shrugs. “My friend, Lacy, her dad and stepdad hate each other,” she explains. “She said her dad calls him a dickhead.”
I nearly choke on the bite of food in my mouth.
“Liv, that’s a bad word.”
“Mom said the only bad words are the ones that hurt people’s feelings,” she argues.
“Trust me, if you call someone that, their feelings will be hurt.”
“But she also said words for parts of the anatomy are never bad,” she continues, digging in her heels, determined to be right. Yup, she got that one from her mother for sure.
“I think she meant the scientific terms.”
“What’s the scientific word for dickhead?” She cocks her head with so much damn innocence on her face I almost lose the battle against laughter. I bite the inside of my cheek to hold it in.
“Penis,” I answer. “And I like Jeff just fine,” I assure her, hoping to steer the subject back around.
“Do you still love Mom?” she pries, poking one of the green beans and wrinkling her nose before taking the cheese off the top of one slice of pizza and shoving it into her mouth.
“Of course, I love your mom. Just because we aren’t married anymore doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.” I give her the same answer I’ve been giving her since she was old enough to start asking about this stuff. Val and I divorced when she was only three, so I don’t think Livi even remembers when we were together. I get that it’s natural for her to be curious about it though.
“If you love her, why aren’t you married?”
I’d love to know where the hell all this curiosity is coming from tonight, but I don’t let my irritation show, passing her a napkin as she drags a finger through the sauce of her de-cheesed pizza and then licks it off.
“Grown-up reasons,” I answer vaguely.
She rolls her eyes. “That’s what you always say.”
“That’s because it’s true.”
I have yet to come up with a kid-friendly way of answering that question. I’m sure as hell not about to tell her that we got divorced because our sex life was deader than disco and her mom started sleeping with someone else. Maybe I could go with something along the lines of we divorced because we both wanted to sleep with other men. She might get a kick out of that one someday, if I ever get around to coming out and…you know, actually sleeping with men.
I wasn’t surprised when Val sat me down and told me, sobbing on my shoulder and begging for forgiveness. We hadn’t had sex in years at that point; we weren’t even sharing a bedroom anymore. I could tell she felt guilty, but the truth was, it was a huge weight off.
I’d loved Val since we were teenagers, but after more than twenty years together, I started to wonder if I loved her the way I was supposed to. What kind of man doesn’t want to have sex with his wife? What kind of man literally comes up with any excuse in the world not to have sex with his wife until she gives up bothering to hint about it? I know exactly what kind of man, but I’ve never been able to admit it to anyone, not to her and not to myself. Although, sometimes I wonder if she already knows.
We finish dinner, and luckily Livi’s curiosity seems to be satisfied, because she stops asking about me and her mother. I help her wrap up her