Things We Didn't Say - By Kristina Riggle Page 0,74

back then.

I decide to save the heavy stuff for later, when we’ve both slept. When I’ve had time to think. First things first: a logical consequence, and a safety precaution in case he goes temporarily insane and decides to try this shit again.

“I don’t want you contacting that girl.”

He shrugs. “Sh-sh-she wasn’t what I thought, anyway.”

I know that feeling.

Dylan falls asleep at once in the backseat. I’m so relieved I’m feeling sleepy again, too, though each time I close my eyes, my stomach roils. Lousy fast food.

I send Kate a text so she can tell everyone at work that I’ve got Dylan and he’s fine.

Then I call the house. Mallory answers.

“Oh, thank God,” she gushes. “Can I talk to him?”

“He’s sleeping.”

“Sure, poor kid.”

“Poor kid nothing. He did this himself, don’t forget.”

“You’re such a hard-ass.”

“Let me talk to Casey, please.”

“Hi,” Casey says, and her voice makes me smile in spite of the evening. I tell her we’ve got Dylan unscathed, the storm has stopped, and we’re on our way back.

“Good,” she says, and there’s something funny about her voice I can’t place.

“You okay?”

“Just really, really, really tired.”

“Everything okay with Mallory?”

“Sure!” She sounds almost chirpy. “We’re getting along famously.”

I don’t detect any sarcasm, which confuses me so much I wonder if I’m dreaming. “Well, great. Good. Why don’t you get some rest, it will be a long time yet before we’re home.”

“Sure, you bet.”

Mallory and Casey getting along?

I try to remember Mallory at her best, and imagine for the thousandth time what it would be like if she could stay that way. She was most calm immediately after delivering a baby, that baby euphoria carrying her like a wave over whatever rocks and cliffs lay under her surface. Most dads I know groused about those months. The grumpy wives, lack of sex, colicky kids keeping them up even if the wives were the ones rocking and feeding.

Not me. Three times, I had hope for a future with my wife.

And it wasn’t awful in the early days, either. Not immediately.

In college, during those months we dated, before she got pregnant, she was wild and passionate, but back then it came off as impulsive and freewheeling. If she was quick to anger, she was also quick to forget, like a water droplet on a griddle that would sizzle away: hot for one second, but gone the next.

Her jealousy flattered me. To think that any other girl would look my way. Not after Heather, anyway. Who was supposed to be “the one.” My parents loved her. My roommate thought she was awesome. Heather was the perfect easygoing girlfriend, I thought, until she went easy with my roommate.

I still remember Tom going, “Dude, there was a hat on the doorknob,” as if the fact that I’d barged in on sex—with my girlfriend!—was the bigger sin.

Then I went to that party, trying to drown my sorrows in beer—I couldn’t stand the dorm room, every time I glanced at the other bunk I remembered him screwing Heather—and that’s when Mallory swooped in on me.

Her smile was bright, her eyes narrowed like she was sizing me up, which of course she was.

My thought process—such as it was—ran something like, Take that, Heather.

And what Mallory and I did had nothing to compare with the boring missionary sex I’d had with Heather. We slammed up against walls, she hung from the towel bar, we got rug burns every which way, not that we noticed until much later, comparing our scars gleefully like prizefighters.

I have to stop thinking about this, or I’m going to get a hard-on right here in the SUV.

So instead I think of the day she threw a mug at me and sliced my face open.

My dad thinks I married her to be a rebel. My mother thinks I did it out of love and a sense of old-fashioned responsibility.

They’re both wrong.

Actually I did it for Angel, before Angel even had a name, or discernible gender. Because one day I came home to the apartment—we’d moved in together by then, assisted by my dad’s bank account—to find her glassy-eyed and giggly, her belly poking up under one of my old shirts, empty food wrappers all around. She’d gotten high.

She can’t do this, I thought. She’s not ready.

But ready or not, the baby was coming. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t leave her.

For our whole marriage I insisted to all doubters that I loved my wife, right from the beginning and right up to the end. It’s what a