Chapter 4 - The Driveway at Midnight
The headlights of the Subaru swept across the front of our semi-detached house in East York just after eleven o'clock.
The street was dark. Most of the houses on our block had their porch lights off, their driveways full of cars that had returned hours ago from family dinners. Our house was black, save for the single yellow bulb over the side door where the babysitter usually left her bicycle.
Graham’s car was already in the drive.
He hadn't parked in his usual spot on the left side near the garage; he’d pulled straight in, crooked, his rear bumper hanging over the sidewalk. He had left the porch light off.
I sat in the idling car for three minutes, watching the upstairs bedroom window. A pale blue rectangle of light flickered against the blinds—the television. He was watching sports highlights with the sound muted, the way he always did when he was waiting up to have an argument he had spent four hours rehearsing.
I turned off the ignition, stepped out into the freezing drizzle, and went to the passenger side to get Theo’s overnight bag and the plastic container of turkey carcass my mother had insisted on packing into a grocery bag.
The front door unlocked before my key hit the brass plate.
Graham stood in the hallway, wearing his gray sweatpants and the navy crewneck sweater he’d worn to his parents’ house, but he had taken off his socks. His hair was messy, sticking up on one side where he’d been lying on the couch.
“Theo’s asleep,” he said. His voice was flat, devoid of the heat from our phone call, but tight with the kind of controlled exhaustion that usually signaled a long night. “The sitter put him down at eight. She said he asked why we weren't home for dinner.”
“I told her we’d be late,” I said, setting the plastic container down on the small table in the entryway.
He looked at the bag. He recognized the red plastic handles from the grocery store near my mother’s building.
“You really took it there,” he said. He shook his head once, a slow, incredulous twitch of his neck. “I thought maybe you just drove around the block to cool off. I thought you’d come back once you realized how insane you looked.”
“I didn't look insane, Graham. I looked like someone who had had enough.”
I unzipped my boots, kicked them into the rubber tray by the door, and hung my coat on the hook. My shoulders were stiff, knotted with the tension of two hours on the highway and five hours of roasting meat, but my head was clear. Dangerously clear.
He followed me into the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe while I put the container into the refrigerator.
“My mother cried,” he said.
I paused with my hand on the refrigerator door. “Brenda doesn't cry.”
“She did tonight,” he insisted, his voice rising, trying to find an edge of moral authority to lean on. “After everyone left. Renee had to stay behind to help her clean up because she was so shaken. She kept asking what she’d done to make you hate her so much.”
I turned around, leaning back against the cool steel of the fridge, and looked at him.
I looked at his clean-shaven jaw, the slight cleft in his chin that Theo had inherited, the straight, handsome nose that had never been broken or out of place. He was an associate partner at a commercial appraisal firm; he spent his days evaluating square footage and structural integrity, calculating the depreciation of physical assets down to the penny.
Yet he stood in our kitchen looking at me as if I were a stranger who had walked in off the street and overturned his furniture for sport.
“She doesn't think she did anything, Graham,” I said softly. “That’s the whole point. To her, treating me like a hired girl who brought the wrong brand of flour is just the natural order of things. And to you, watching her do it was just the price of admission.”
“I have always defended you!”
“Name one time.”
He blinked. His mouth opened, stayed open for a second, and closed.
“Name one time, Graham,” I repeated, not moving an inch. “In seven years. Name one time you told your mother that she couldn't speak to me the way she does. Name one time you told Renee to stop rolling her eyes when I talked about my patients. Just one.”
He looked away, his eyes darting toward the sink, toward the calendar on the wall, toward the tile floor.
“I talk to them privately,” he muttered.
May you like
“No, you don't,” I said. “You tell me in the car that they don't mean it, and then you tell them in the kitchen that I’m just stressed from work. You manage me, Graham. You don't defend me.”
He didn't answer. The grandfather clock in the dining room—a wedding gift from his uncle that had never kept proper time—chimed twelve times, the dull metal strikes counting out the end of the holiday while we stood three feet apart, separated by seven years of quiet, accumulated cowardice.
